When Life Throws Three Major Transitions at Once: Why High-Achieving Women Are Hitting the Wall
It Feels like You're Losing Your Edge. But You're Just Carrying WAY Too Much
When you've always been the one who could handle it all, the one who delivered under pressure, exceeded expectations, and made it look effortless. Been the good girl, the worker bee then this can be a really tough time. Your ambition and grit has taken you far. And you've built a career, proven yourself so many times, and created a life that looks successful from the outside.
So why does it now feel like you're operating at half capacity? Why is the drive that once fueled you now feeling like it's running on fumes?
There's a pattern emerging in my work with ambitious professional women that I can’t unsee. And it's not that you've suddenly become less capable, resilient or driven than you used to be. It's that you're navigating not one, not two, but three profound life transitions simultaneously. And each one of these is significant enough to require its own support system, time, and space to process.
I call it the midlife Threshold Trifecta. And if you're in it, I need you to know that this is not a personal failing. This is not evidence that you've "lost it." or are “past it”. This is a societal, cultural and structural problem masquerading as an individual performance issue.
TheThree Transitions That Collide at the peak of your Career
1. Matrescence: The Unbecoming and Becoming of Motherhood
Matrescence is the process of becoming a mother, and it's so much more than the single moment of birth that our culture acknowledges. This is a threshold that can take years to cross (sometimes a lifetime). It's a complete transformation of identity, body, relationships, and sense of self.
For ambitious women, this can feel really harsh. You've worked hard and built your professional identity on competence, achievement, and the ability to deliver results. Now you're undergoing a deep metamorphosis that temporarily disrupts all of those capabilities and you're expected to pretend it's not happening. Talk about societal gaslighting.
Modern workplaces often don't value this process. Instead, motherhood is treated as a switch that flips on delivery day. You're expected to instantly embody whatever version of "good mother" has been projected onto you, gearing up to returning after maternity leave and maintaining your professional performance as if nothing has fundamentally changed about your capacity, focus, energy and who you are now.
But the reality is you're undergoing one of the most significant identity transformations of your life. You're unbecoming who you were and at the same time becoming someone new. And you're doing it without the village support, the elder wisdom, or the cultural acknowledgment that this process has historically required and deserved.
For women who've built their sense of self on professional achievement, the cognitive dissonance is exhausting. You're constantly trying to prove you're still "that woman" while also trying to be present for this enormous transition. Neither gets your full attention, and you end up feeling like you're failing at both.
2. Perimenopause and Menopause: When Your Brain feels at odds with Your Ambition
After decades of menopause being treated as taboo and invisible, we've now swung to the other extreme. The message has become: if you don't do all the things, take all the supplements, follow all the protocols, you're basically inviting Alzheimer's and osteoporosis to your door. Jeez it’s a lot.
What gets lost in all that noise is that menopause isn't a one-day event or even a medical problem to be solved. It's another threshold moment, a process unfolding over years, where what's no longer working in your life becomes glaringly, undeniably obvious. Your body is asking you to step across into the next phase of your life.
For ambitious professional women, this transition when we are not prepared can hit really hard. You're at the peak of your career where you have the experience, the expertise and the strategic thinking that comes from two decades in your field. You should be stepping into your most powerful professional phase.
Instead, you're forgetting words mid-presentation. You're losing track of details that you'd never have missed before. You're waking at 3 AM with your mind racing about everything you need to do, then arriving at work exhausted and wondering if everyone can tell. The brain fog that’s joked about in memes has a far more difficult reality. It feels like a threat to the professional identity you've spent decades building.
This is no easy feat when you're also contending with societal projections about what a midlife woman is "supposed" to be, beauty standards that refuse to acknowledge aging as natural, and the fear that admitting cognitive changes will be seen as professional decline.
The menopausal transition asks for (forces us maybe) reflection, acceptance, and integration. But instead, most of us are given fear-mongering, a to-do list, more diet rules and the expectation that we'll just push through without missing a beat in our careers.
3. Neurodivergence Discovery and Unmasking: When the Old Strategies Stop Working
This one is less of a lifestage threshold and more of a forced reckoning. In an ideal world, your unique way of seeing and processing the world would have been recognised, accepted, and nurtured since childhood. You would have grown up knowing your flow, your strengths, and your limits even while navigating an ableist world.
But instead, you spent decades masking, compensating, and working twice as hard to achieve what seemed to come easily to others. Your ambition wasn't just about success, it was partly about proving that you could keep up, that you could perform "normal" convincingly enough that no one would notice the monumental effort it required.
For many high-achieving women, their ADHD, autism, or other neurodivergence was precisely what made them successful in certain ways. Hyperfocus became their superpower in deadline mode. Pattern recognition gave them strategic advantages. The need to systematise everything made them exceptional project managers.
But when this discovery happens alongside matrescence and perimenopause, it becomes unbearable for some. What feels like almost overnight, the compensatory strategies that got you this far are suddenly not working anymore. The masking is draining what little energy you have left. And you're being asked to rewrite your entire understanding of who you've always been at the exact moment when your professional reputation feels most vulnerable.
The unmasking process requires energy, support, and space to grieve what could have been different. It requires you to stop performing neurotypicality at the exact moment when you have the least capacity to perform anything and when your career success has always depended on that performance.
Your Own Version of the Trifecta
Maybe your three aren't these exact three. Perhaps you're also navigating caring for aging parents while managing a team, processing grief while leading a major project, managing chronic illness while trying to prove you deserve that promotion, or dealing with an autoimmune diagnosis while everyone at work still sees you as the reliable one who never drops the ball.
The specific combination doesn't matter as much as the cumulative weight and the professional stakes. When you've built a career on being the capable one, admitting that you're drowning feels like professional sabotage.
In an ideal world, each of these major life transitions would get its own dedicated time and space. Each would be held, witnessed, and supported by community, which unfortunately doesn’t happen much in many of our countries. For so many ambitious women, these experiences are happening simultaneously at the exact moment when you should be hitting your professional stride. It's like trying to juggle three burning torches while everyone around you insists you should just be able to manage and also hit those Q4 targets.
Why High Achievers Blame Themselves Hardest
Here's what breaks my heart: the women navigating this trifecta are often the ones who blame themselves most viciously. The thought process being- you've succeeded at everything else through sheer determination and strategic thinking, well surely you should be able to "figure this out" too.
You wonder why you can't just push through like you used to. You compare yourself to the version of you who could run on five hours of sleep and still deliver brilliant work. You look at other women who seem to be managing it all and assume you're uniquely failing.
Let me be clear: powering through is not in fashion anymore. And it never should have been - especially not now.
The old model of professional success was built on the bodies and burnout of women who had no other choice. You've been taught that admitting you need support is the same as admitting you can't handle the role. That taking time to process major life transitions is a luxury that serious professionals can't afford.
This is not the truth and it's keeping you stuck, exhausted, and operating at a fraction of your actual capacity.
What Professional Women Actually Need
Each of these transitions requires:
Support from others who understand what you're going through
Permission to operate at a different pace temporarily without it defining your entire career trajectory
Witnessing someone to tell you that you're not losing your professional edge, you're navigating unprecedented human complexity
Acknowledgment that these are natural thresholds of life, not evidence of declining capability
Space to integrate these experiences rather than compartmentalise them away from your professional identity
You aren’t failing or past it, the weakness lies in the workplaces and professional cultures that insist these experiences should remain hidden, that expect you to perform as if major life transitions can be handled entirely outside of business hours.
This Is Too Much - And Admitting It Is Strategic
The first step toward getting through this isn't developing a better morning routine or optimising your productivity system. It's accepting that this is a lot. More than a lot. It's too much to happen at once while also maintaining the professional performance standards you've always held yourself to.
You are not weak for struggling under this weight. You are not failing for feeling overwhelmed. You are not losing your edge because you can't perform at 2019 levels during three major life transitions that are beautiful and should be honoured and not hidden in the shadows.
You are a high-achieving professional facing multiple profound transitions without adequate support or even acknowledgement, and the fact that you're still showing up, still delivering, still holding it together enough that most people don't even know you're struggling - that's testament to your capability, not evidence that this isn't really that hard.
The Myth of the Effortless High Achiever
We've been sold a story about professional success that's fundamentally flawed. That truly capable women can handle anything that comes their way. They make it look easy. If you need support, if you're visibly struggling, you're not senior leadership material.
This is nonsense. And it's particularly insidious nonsense because it keeps ambitious women isolated, ashamed, and operating at diminished capacity precisely when they could be stepping into their most powerful professional phase.
The reality is that the women who look like they're effortlessly managing everything are either lying (consciously or unconsciously), have significantly more support than they're admitting (or even realise), or are heading for a dark night of the soul that they're just better at hiding for now.
Humans are not designed to navigate major life transitions in isolation. We are wired for connection, for community support, for witnessing and being witnessed. Every culture throughout history has recognised that thresholds require collective holding - except modern corporate culture, apparently.
Expecting yourself to navigate all of this alone while also maintaining peak professional performance isn't ambitious. It's just being mean to yourself and you deserve better.
What Agency Actually Looks Like for Ambitious Women
True agency doesn't mean white-knuckling your way through impossible circumstances while keeping your ‘professional’ face on at work. It means recognising when you need support and having the courage to reach out for it. Even when it feels professionally vulnerable.
Agency is saying: "This is too much for me to carry alone”, and admitting that “It doesn't make me less capable."
Agency is acknowledging: "I need support to navigate this”, and “needing support doesn't disqualify me from the leadership role I have my eye on."
Agency is choosing: "I'm going to stop pretending I can do this unsupported and start building the support I actually need to not just survive but actually thrive through this."
I want to be clear that this isn't giving up on your ambitions. This is getting strategic about what it actually takes to protect them. You can't serve your long-term career goals by burning yourself out trying to maintain an impossible standard through multiple major life transitions.
You Don't Have to Choose Between Ambition and Support
If you're in the middle of your own trifecta, whatever combination of major transitions you're navigating while also trying to maintain or advance your career, please hear this: you are not supposed to be able to do this alone. The fact that it feels impossibly hard is not a reflection of your inadequacy. It's a reflection of how much you're actually facing.
Your ambition is not the problem and your drive is not what needs to be fixed. What needs to change is the isolation, the lack of support, and the narrative that truly capable women should be able to handle all of this without breaking stride professionally.
You deserve support. You deserve space to process. You deserve to be witnessed in your struggle without having to perform that you're fine without fearing that admitting difficulty will derail your career trajectory.
Reaching out for help isn't a last resort when you've truly failed. It's the intelligent, strategic response to recognising that you're human, that humans need support through major transitions, and that getting that support now will actually protect your long-term professional capacity.
Moving Forward Without Burning Out
The second step, after accepting that this is too much, is getting the support you need. That might look like:
Working with someone who understands the intersection of professional ambition and these life transitions
Finding community with other high-achieving women who are navigating similar experiences
Creating space in your life to actually feel and process what's happening, not just strategy around it
Challenging the narrative that admitting you're struggling is the same as admitting professional inadequacy
Allowing yourself to be seen in your struggle, not just your strength and perhaps discovering that this doesn't actually derail your career the way you feared it would
Building support systems that allow you to navigate these transitions without sacrificing the ambitions you've worked so hard to achieve
You've been strong enough for long enough. You've proven yourself capable repeatedly. Now it's time to be strategic about getting the support that will actually allow you to sustain your ambition through this season, rather than burning out trying to prove you don't need any.
The Career You Want Is on the Other Side of This
Here's what I know from working with ambitious women through their trifectas: the professional women who get support through this don't just survive. They often emerge more effective, more strategic, and more aligned with what they actually want from their careers than they were before.
But the ones who try to power through alone? They burn out. They leave careers they loved and they wake up five years later wondering how they ended up so far from where they wanted to be.
Your ambition deserves better than that. You deserve better than that.
If you're navigating your own trifecta while trying to protect and advance your career, I'm here to help. You don't have to choose between your ambition and getting the support you need. Let's talk about what sustainable high achievement actually looks like during this season of your life.
