This was supposed to be the decade things went right.

Being made redundant at any age is hard.

Being made redundant in your 50s can feel like the ground has disappeared beneath you, especially when this was supposed to be the decade everything went right.

For many executive women, this should be the decade when years of experience finally begin compounding in your favour. Your authority widens. Your negotiating power comes from a track record rather than potential. Board and executive opportunities start opening up. The calibre of work coming your way should be better than ever.

Then comes the quake.

A restructure. A redundancy. Burnout. A toxic workplace you can no longer stomach. A leadership change that quietly pushes you out. A role that simply disappears.

And suddenly the question is no longer simply, “What do I do next?”

It can become, “Who am I now?”

When a career quake becomes an identity quake

For decades, your career may have been woven into the way you see yourself.

You are the person people come to. The leader with the answers. The one with the title, the team, the credibility, the diary full of meetings and the hard-earned seat at the table.

Then, sometimes in the space of a single conversation, most of that disappears.

The email stops. The meetings stop. The phone goes quiet.

And even when you know intellectually that a restructure is not a verdict on your ability, it can feel like exactly that. Like something has been said about your worth, out loud, in front of everyone who mattered.

The private questions nobody sees

This is why a career quake is rarely just about finding another job. It shows up as a pile-up of feelings you did not expect and probably would not admit to most people.

There can be shame. Should I have seen this coming?

Guilt, especially if you are the one who has to tell your family the plan has changed. Why couldn’t I make it work?

Fear. What if nobody wants me now?

Ego, if you’re honest about it. The quiet horror of going from the person with the answers to the person who does not know what happens next.

And underneath all of it, for a lot of women, real financial fear. Not vague, background-noise money stress. Specific, keep-you-up-at-3am fear. If you are the primary or sole income earner in your household, a redundancy is not just a career setback, it is a genuine threat to everything that depends on that income. 

And if you have spent years catching up on superannuation after time out of the workforce or lower-paid early years, watching a stable salary disappear at 50-something hits differently than it would have at 30. You are not just worried about the next job. You are doing the maths on retirement.

These are not small questions, and pretending otherwise does women a disservice.

Because you are accomplished, there is often another layer on top of all this. You feel like you should know how to handle it. You have navigated crises, led teams through uncertainty, advised executives and made hard calls for years. Yet here you are, lying awake wondering whether your best years might already be behind you, and whether you have left it too late, become too senior, too expensive, or simply missed your moment.

The cruel irony of midlife

This was supposed to be the decade things went right, not wrong.

You had done the hard yards. You had earned the seat, the salary, the standing.

And it is precisely when everything should be compounding in your favour that the ground gives way.

A midlife career quake can make you feel least valuable at exactly the moment you have the most value to leverage.

Because by your late 40s and early 50s, you bring far more than a job title.

You bring judgement, pattern recognition, commercial nous, relationships, reputation, political intelligence and leadership maturity.

You know what matters, and just as importantly, what does not.

This is where your Power Span™ matters

That accumulated value is your Power Span™.

Your career span is how long you work. Your Power Span is the period when everything you have built across those years compounds into greater influence, authority, opportunity and impact.

And this distinction matters enormously when your career has been shaken.

• Your title can disappear.
• Your role can be made redundant.
• An organisation can decide it no longer needs your position.

None of those things erase the value you have accumulated over decades.

A career quake can interrupt your career. It does not have to end your Power Span.

But it may require you to separate who you are from the role you have just lost, and start asking different questions. 

What do I want this next decade to be for?

Where is my experience most valuable now?

What am I no longer willing to tolerate?

And what would it look like to build the next chapter around the woman I am now, rather than trying to recreate the career I had twenty years ago?

Dreadful and full of possibility can both be true

I would never tell someone in the middle of redundancy or a career crisis that it is a gift.

Sometimes it is simply dreadful.

Sometimes you are angry. Sometimes embarrassed. Sometimes frightened, especially about money, and that fear is not something to talk yourself out of. It is real and it deserves a proper plan, not just a pep talk.

And sometimes it takes far longer than you hoped to find your feet again.

But difficult and full of possibility can still be true at the same time.

You can lose a role without losing your relevance.

You can have your confidence shaken without losing your capability. 

You can be furious about how it happened, frightened about what it means financially, and still become deeply intentional about what happens next. None of those things cancel each other out.

Perhaps that is the real opportunity in a career quake at this stage.

Not to rush out and prove that you are still employable.

But to remember that your value was never contained in the title on your business card in the first place.

If you are somewhere in this messy middle right now, still working out who you are without the old role and what you want next, my Define Your Next Act retreat has been created for exactly this moment. 

It is four days away from the noise, with a small group of senior women asking similar questions, and the space and structure to think through what your next decade is for.

The next one is 11-14 November 2026 back in Palm Cove at the beautiful Villa by the C.

If this sounds like the space you need right now, I would love to talk.