Midlife has become a word women flinch at.
A sales mentor told me recently that I should stop using it. Women don’t like the word, she said.

I sat with that for a moment.

Because I am a woman in midlife. And I don’t want to run away from it.

Not because everything about it is easy. The physical shifts, the emotional reckoning, the relationships that change shape — I feel all of that.

But underneath it, I feel more myself than I ever have. More clear. More intentional. More willing to question what no longer fits.

So if the women I hope to work with are running from the word “midlife”, I wanted to understand why.

Perhaps part of the answer is that we have been given a story about what midlife is supposed to mean.
Decline. Restlessness. Regret. A crisis.

But where did that story come from? It turns out, part of it can be traced back to 1965.

That year, Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques published a paper called Death and the Mid-Life Crisis.  He had been studying creative men and noticed that some experienced a period of disruption as they reached their thirties and beyond.

He believed that, at some point in midlife, men began to think differently about their lives. They started to question what they had achieved and what they still wanted from life.

Women weren’t part of his research in the same way. In fact, Jaques saw menopause as something that complicated the picture of midlife.

But the idea soon became much bigger than his research.
“Midlife crisis” became a familiar story. You reach a certain age, look back at your life, and start wondering if you’ve missed your chance.

Women inherited that story too. No wonder the word makes some of us uncomfortable.

But there is another part of the story that gets less attention.
What about the people whose most meaningful work came later?

If you think of artists, writers, designers and entrepreneurs whose creativity didn’t disappear with age — it deepened.

At 40, Vera Wang defied the belief that it was too late to begin again, designing her first wedding dress and laying the foundation for a global fashion empire.

Louise Bourgeois achieved significant recognition for her work later in life. Her decades of experience didn’t make her less creative. They gave her more to draw from.

Time doesn’t make us less resourceful. It gives us more material to create from.

I understand what that mentor was pointing to.

The word “midlife” carries decades of cultural baggage. The idea came from a very different time and a very different view of midlife. But over the years, “midlife crisis” became a stereotype.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”

And that is exactly the problem with the midlife crisis story. It tells us one possible experience of midlife — but not the whole story.

But I don’t think the answer is to abandon the word. The answer is to reclaim it.

Because the women I work with are not experiencing midlife as a crisis. They are experiencing it as a moment to reconsider.

To reassess what they want.

To recognise what no longer fits.

To question choices that once made perfect sense.

And, when they have the right support, they can design their careers with a clarity they may not have had at thirty.

That isn’t a crisis. That’s maturity in action.

There is a principle from NLP that I come back to often: the language we use to tell our story doesn’t just reflect our past. It dictates how we experience our present.
Think about what happens in your body when you hear the phrase: Midlife crisis.

The words themselves carry a lot of weight. Crisis. Decline. Regret. They suggest that something is going wrong — that this is a stage to get through rather than a stage to grow into.

Now try this instead:

Same stage of life. A completely different possibility.

This isn’t about pretending the challenges aren’t real. They are. Changing the words doesn’t change the reality. But the words we use can influence what we believe that reality means — and therefore what we believe is possible within it.
When we stop bracing for a crisis and start recognising a transition, we create space for a different conversation. And sometimes that shift in language is where the transformation begins.

Not because everything becomes easier. But because we can finally have enough experience to see ourselves — and our choices — differently.

We arrive at a point where we know more about what gives us energy, what drains us, what matters to us and what we are no longer willing to compromise.

We can begin making choices that are genuinely ours.
Not shaped only by who we thought we should be.
Not dictated by what was expected of us.
Not kept in place simply because we have already invested so much time in them.

For me, the physical and emotional challenges of midlife weren’t just difficult things to get through. They were signals.
They made it harder to ignore the gap between the life I had built and the life that actually fitted who I was becoming.

Learning to read those signals rather than simply resist them was the beginning of designing a life that felt more like mine. And that is why I don’t want to hide from the word midlife. I want to change what it means.

You are not starting over. You are starting from everything you have already built — with experience, perspective and values that have been earned, not inherited.

We have been handed a singular story about midlife: that it is a crisis to be managed or survived.

But the discomfort you might feel during this transition is not a crisis at all.

Instead, look at the transition through a different lens: What if your discomfort isn’t a sign that something is wrong, but rather a piece of information?

If this perspective is lingering in the background of your life, I’d love to know how you are answering it.

There is more to midlife than the rigid stereotype we’ve been given. There is questioning. There is change. And there is the possibility of choosing differently because you know yourself differently now.

That is the shift—and it is a story that deserves to be told.