So many women I work with have spent decades with this enormous sense of duty. To their children, their partners, their parents, their work, their businesses, their friends. They’ve become incredibly capable at managing life, being there for people and doing what needs to be done. There’s often a really high expectation of themselves too. They don’t want to let people down, they don’t want to be difficult, they don’t want to make a fuss and, above all, they should be able to cope.

And the problem with being very good at coping is that you can live like that for a very long time without ever really questioning the cost of it.

Until something starts to change.

It might not even be something you can put your finger on. Life hasn’t necessarily gone wrong. In fact, that’s often what makes it so confusing. You can look around at everything you have and know that you should feel happy. You might have a lovely home, people you love, a successful career or business, friendships, holidays, freedom — all the things you thought would make life feel full.

But somehow, it doesn’t.

There can be a strange emptiness to it. A sense of going through the motions, of feeling disconnected from a life you know you should be enjoying. And because you’ve spent your life being capable, you don’t necessarily recognise that as something you might need help with. You’re not falling apart. You’re functioning perfectly well. You just don’t feel very much like you anymore.

And then, of course, you judge yourself for that too.

You tell yourself you should be grateful. That other people have much bigger problems. That perhaps you’re expecting too much from life. You wonder whether you’ve become selfish or difficult, or whether this is simply what getting older feels like.

So you try to understand it.

You read the books, listen to the podcasts, follow people online. You learn about boundaries, people pleasing, attachment, trauma, nervous systems, childhood patterns. You become incredibly good at understanding why you are the way you are.

And yet understanding it doesn’t necessarily stop you doing it.

You can know exactly why you struggle to say no and still hear yourself saying yes. You can understand why you put everybody else first and still feel guilty when you choose yourself. You can recognise a pattern while you’re actually repeating it.

That can leave you wondering, I know all this, so why do I still feel like this?

Maybe that’s because this isn’t simply about understanding yourself better.

Maybe you’ve reached a point in your life where the woman you became in order to manage everything, achieve everything and be everything to everybody else doesn’t quite fit anymore.

That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with her. She’s probably served you incredibly well.

But perhaps you don’t want to spend the next twenty or thirty years living from the same expectations that shaped the last twenty or thirty.

And that opens up a very different conversation.

Not what’s wrong with me?

But who am I now, and what do I actually want from the rest of my life?