What if your most powerful career years are still ahead of you?

I recently joined Denise Mokadsi for one of her FeelGood Conversations, where she brings together different perspectives on what helps women feel good, live aligned and create a life they love.

Given Denise’s work with women navigating midlife, our conversation naturally found its way into career, identity, purpose, relationships and ambition, and the question I hear surprisingly often from successful women:

What do I want to be when I grow up?

It sounds funny when you’ve already built a successful career. You’ve led teams, delivered results, navigated restructures, built businesses, raised families and managed complex stakeholders. You’ve made other people look good.

Surely by now you’re supposed to have it all figured out?

Except many women don’t. Instead, they reach this stage of their career with a growing sense that there is something else in them, something they haven’t done yet.

A bigger role. A different industry. A portfolio career. Consulting. Boards. Their own business. More influence, more freedom, more purpose.

Or perhaps they can’t name it yet. They simply know that what worked before doesn’t feel quite right anymore.

That became one of the strongest themes of my conversation with Denise.

This may not be a winding-down phase at all

We talked about the conventional narrative that mid-career is a time to become more conservative: be grateful for what you have, protect what you’ve built, perhaps even start thinking about slowing down.

But that doesn’t match what I see in many of the women I work with. Sometimes their partner is starting to talk about retirement while they are thinking, hang on, I feel like I’m only just getting going.

They haven’t had the impact they want to have yet. They haven’t done the big thing. They’ve spent decades developing experience, judgement, relationships and leadership capability, and suddenly they can see the possibility of bringing all of that together in a different way.

For some women, these may actually become their most powerful career years. Not because ageism doesn’t exist, it does, and not because there are no structural barriers, there are. But because by this stage we often have things we simply didn’t possess at 30: greater confidence, better judgement, more perspective, a much stronger understanding of what we’re good at, and perhaps most importantly, far less appetite for wasting time doing work that no longer matters to us.

Maybe you were a late bloomer

This part of our conversation felt particularly personal for me because I was a late bloomer too. I didn’t have one of those beautifully linear careers where every move made obvious sense from the outside.

In my early 30s I took three years out and travelled. A wonderful life decision, and not particularly impressive on the traditional corporate career ladder after a slow start anyway. It took me time to regain momentum afterwards, and for years I had a sense that I hadn’t quite lived into my potential, which is one reason I have such a soft spot for late bloomers.

Maybe your career slowed because you had kids. Maybe caring responsibilities took priority. Maybe you followed your partner’s career for a while. Maybe you were doing excellent work but weren’t particularly strategic about your own advancement. Maybe nobody tapped you on the shoulder early enough. Or perhaps you simply took longer to work out where your particular brilliance belonged.

None of that means you have missed your moment. The runway may be longer than you think.

Be careful whose fear you borrow

Denise and I also talked about what happens when women start imagining something different: other people can become nervous. Sometimes the limiting beliefs we carry aren’t even ours. They come from workplace cultures, social expectations, family, colleagues and occasionally the people who love us most.

I shared a story from the Global Financial Crisis, when I was ready to leave a role. A recruiter friend advised me against it, the economy was dreadful. My husband understandably thought hanging on to a secure job might be sensible too.

So naturally, I went in the next day and resigned with nothing to go to.

I’m not recommending that as a universal career strategy, but for me it became an important turning point. It put a firecracker under me. I became extremely deliberate about networking, conversations and where I wanted to go next. I didn’t want another version of the same job. If I was going to make the move, I wanted to level up.

And I did.

The lesson wasn’t “resign without a job.” The lesson was this: sometimes people who care deeply about you will advise you from their appetite for risk rather than yours.

Listen to wise counsel. Look at the evidence. Understand the risks. But make sure the life you end up creating is actually yours.

Find evidence that your next move is possible

Another theme Denise and I explored was the power of seeing other women do what you are contemplating. One of the patterns I’ve noticed in my coaching work is that women often find it easier to imagine a possibility once they’ve seen another woman do it, and that matters.

If you want to reach the executive level, find women who have done it. If you want to leave corporate and build a consultancy, learn from women who have built successful consulting businesses. If you’re considering a portfolio career, find women combining consulting, fractional work, boards, speaking or advisory work. If you want to reinvent yourself professionally at 55, stop taking your inspiration from people who believe reinvention finishes at 40.

Read their books. Listen to their interviews. Talk to them. Study how they made the transition.

You are not trying to replicate somebody else’s career. You are gathering evidence, because sometimes seeing another woman do something expands our idea of what is possible for us. And occasionally, of course, you get to be the woman who goes first.

Your career doesn’t have to look like it used to

We also talked about how much the shape of a career has changed. For a long time, senior career progression looked relatively predictable: climb the hierarchy, reach executive level, perhaps add a few board roles towards the end, retire.

That model is becoming much more fluid. I’m talking to more women who are considering careers made up of several different elements: consulting, fractional executive work, boards, advisory roles, speaking, their own business, or a senior role combined with other interests.

There is no rule saying the next decade needs to resemble the previous three. The better question may be: what combination of work, contribution, income, flexibility and impact would make this next phase genuinely satisfying?

That is a much more interesting career strategy conversation.

Visibility still matters. But strategy matters more.

Towards the end of our conversation, we came back to something I talk about often: you cannot sell a secret. The exhausted executive doing brilliant work quietly in the background is rarely the first person considered when the exciting opportunity appears. Out of sight really can become out of mind.

That doesn’t mean spending your life performing on LinkedIn. Visibility without strategy can become another exhausting job.

The real work is understanding who needs to know what you are capable of, what you want to be known for, which relationships matter, where you need to be visible, what evidence supports the positioning you want to create, and what conversations you should be having now.

That’s the difference between randomly “putting yourself out there” and strategically shaping what comes next.

Start with what matters to you

What I enjoyed about Denise’s perspective is that she naturally brought the conversation back to alignment. Career decisions in this phase rarely exist in isolation. Your health matters. Relationships matter. Financial security matters. Caring responsibilities matter. Purpose matters. Lifestyle matters.

One person may want to work intensely for the next decade while their partner is dreaming about spending six months of every year overseas. Neither dream is wrong. The question becomes: what matters most to you, and how might you creatively design around it?

When we get underneath the job titles and start talking about values, the pathway often becomes much clearer.

You don’t necessarily need the whole answer today, but you do need to start asking better questions. What do I want more of? What am I ready to leave behind? What am I still curious about? Where am I underusing myself? What would I regret not exploring? Who is already doing something that intrigues me? And if I gave myself permission to imagine the next ten years differently, what might become possible?

Don’t dismiss the inkling

This was where Denise and I ended the conversation, and it’s probably the message I most want women to take away.

If there’s a little inkling inside you that says there’s something else, don’t immediately talk yourself out of it. You don’t have to resign tomorrow. You don’t have to launch a business. You don’t have to know exactly what the next chapter looks like.

But give the inkling some airtime. Explore it. Have conversations. Gather information. Meet people doing interesting things. Test ideas. Follow your curiosity.

Because mid-career does not have to be the beginning of becoming less relevant. It can be the point where you become far more intentional about how you want to work, lead and live.

And your next career phase? It might just be your best one yet.