324 | What If the Career You've Been Chasing Is No Longer the One You Actually Want?

What If the Career You've Been Chasing Is No Longer the One You Actually Want?

Are you showing up every day to a career you worked incredibly hard to build, yet something quietly feels off? 

Are you a mid-career woman who has ticked every box on the success checklist, only to find yourself wondering whether this is really it? 

Have you been carrying a definition of success that your younger self set, but haven't stopped to ask whether it still fits who you are today?

In this episode, Janine opens with a surprisingly moving story about dropping her son off for his first school trip abroad. He ran off to join his friends without a backward glance, and in that moment she realised how much had shifted without her fully noticing. It became a powerful mirror for what so many mid-career women experience: we change, quietly and gradually, but we rarely give ourselves permission to let our careers change with us.

Yet so many mid-career women never give themselves permission to move into what comes next. We keep showing up to a version of our careers that no longer fits, waiting for the fulfilment to return rather than recognising that the season has already shifted. 

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Ambition doesn't disappear, it matures. For mid-career women, ambition often becomes more specific, more personal, and more aligned with who you actually are now rather than who you were told to be. If your career feels hollow despite your success, it is not a sign that you have failed. It is a sign that you have grown beyond the version of yourself who set those original goals.
• The high achiever's trap. Your discipline and commitment are genuine strengths, but they can quietly become a cage. When you are someone who always follows through, it becomes hard to pause and ask whether the thing you committed to still deserves your commitment. Staying on a path out of habit is not ambition; it is rigidity dressed up as strength. This is the exact moment to separate direction from discipline.
• You do not have to burn it all down. Evolving your ambition is not about walking away from everything you have built or starting from zero. It is about recognising that a new season calls for a different way of showing up. The most fulfilled mid-career women are not those who abandoned their careers, but those who leveraged their years of expertise to move in a direction that fits who they are now, whether that is a lateral move, a portfolio career, or simply a long-overdue recommitment to a path they actually want to be on.

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Connect with me!

Website: careerchangemakers.com
Email: podcast@careerchangemakers.com

LinkedIn:  Janine Esbrand

Instagram: @careerchangemakerspodcast

Career Change Makers on Apple Podcasts