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Create Value

There is a particular promise many women of my generation grew up with. Work hard. Get educated. Raise a family. Become excellent. Build experience. Take responsibility. Then you become valuable. When younger, this was exhausting, yet sounded compelling as the route to security. But for many of us, it is now beginning to look rather unreliable. A recent article in The Times describes high-earning women in their forties and fifties struggling to find work despite decades of experience and seniority.

It caught my attention because I hear versions of this story in my consulting room from women who have careers, expertise, judgement and responsibility. Then something changes. A redundancy. A restructure. A divorce. Children leaving. A parent who needs care. A body that no longer quietly accommodates. Or – the realisation that the career they spent twenty-five years building no longer fits the woman they have become.

Nilanjana Bhowmick, writing in The Guardian, says that at the age of 48, highly experienced and productive, she found it increasingly difficult to become employed. She uses the term menopenalisation to describe what happens when menopause and discrimination at work collide. Sure! Menopause matters. Employers need to understand it better. Women should not be professionally penalised for a normal stage of female biology. But I don’t think menopause explains the whole phenomenon. Something much larger happens to women in the middle of life.

An existential shift knocks on our door

For decades, many of us become extraordinarily good at being useful. We become the go-to person who knows how things work. We are the ones who are available – always. We become so good at being useful that we can mistake usefulness for value. You, who have spent decades becoming valuable, find yourself asking a much more unsettling question:

Am I valuable, and if yes – to whom?

This is where my work with women often starts. Being useful and being valued are not the same thing. That difference can become painfully clear when the structures to which we have been useful begin to change. And all of a sudden we are in an unknown space.

The Messy Middle

It is the period when an old version of life has stopped working but the next one has not yet properly formed. It is profoundly uncomfortable because we prefer coherence. The Messy Middle interrupts this. And there you are. Experienced, capable, intelligent and without the map you expected to have by this age.

Who are you?

If your sense of value has been reinforced for decades by salary, title, seniority, expertise or being indispensable, losing those things isn’t only a professional problem. It can become an identity problem. Of course, we need to challenge systems that underestimate experienced women. But we also need to take responsibility for refusing to let those systems remain the creators of our value. And this is where the Messy Middle gets even more interesting. We have spent decades doing what we understood mattered: building careers, raising families, earning money, being useful and so on. But somewhere in all that doing, we might have forgotten to enquire: What do I actually value about living?

This is different from what should matter. What is allowed to matter. What used to matter. It is the much more difficult question: What makes my life matter to me – now? The Messy Middle is the space to make our values explicit. Because when the old has stopped working, we need to know how we want to live our life.

What I want women to know

This is where Dear Daughter, a project I am proud to be part of, comes in: supporting women through the Messy Middle and helping the next generation understand earlier what many of us learned later. Ladies, your careers matter. Become excellent in whatever you do. Earn your money. Develop expertise. Build your unique authority. Understand and use power. Moreover:

Know! Your! Worth!

But never outsource your entire sense of value to the positive regard of others. We have lived through changes in our employers, industries, relationships, bodies and the economy. And we had to acknowledge that what we burned for at 20 might simply not be so hot any longer at 50. To women younger and older: Build a career. Of course. And build life pathways alongside it. Look after your finances and your friendships. Stay curious. And please, for the love of your sensuality – stay in touch with it. Do things that fascinate you and have absolutely nothing to do with whether they make you useful to others. Look after your body. There isn’t a spare one in the closet. Have people in your life who don’t care about your job. And retain the right to reposition yourself in life so that you are living a life that is valued – by you.