Does your life still fit the woman you’ve become?
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In a few short weeks, summer will arrive.
As December approaches, many of us naturally find ourselves taking stock. We reflect on where we’ve been, what we’ve achieved, and whether the life we’re building still feels aligned with what we truly desire. Without even realising it, we begin asking ourselves questions like:
Am I where I planned to be?
Does my life look like I hoped it would?
Was all the energy and time I invested this year worth it?
Have I successfully achieved my goals?
Yet, beneath all of those questions sits a quieter one. A more honest one.
Am I happy?
Or perhaps more accurately:
Does the life I’ve built still fit the woman I’ve become?
As we move into summer, nature enters a season of visible expansion. The days stretch longer, the plants accelerate their growth, and what has been quietly developing beneath the surface begins to reveal itself. And perhaps this is why this season can feel unexpectedly confronting.
Because summer has a way of illuminating the places where we’ve outgrown our lives. Not because we’ve failed. But because growth changes us. And sometimes the very things we once worked so hard to create are no longer the things that will carry us into our next season. Maybe you’ve felt it too. On paper, everything looks fine. Your career is progressing. You meet your responsibilities. You show up for the people who depend on you and you’re proud to have built a life that many would consider to be successful. Yet, there is a subtle, niggling doubt that seems to surface whenever life becomes still enough to hear it.
And underneath it all, your energy is waning.
As you review the year that’s been, you notice a growing mental, emotional and physical fatigue sitting beneath your sense of accomplishment. So, you find yourself wondering if there’s an easier way to live. Questioning whether the life you’ve worked so hard to create and maintain, still reflects what matters most to you now. Because something no longer feels fully aligned. What once felt like a wholehearted yes, no longer evokes the same energy or conviction. And while you can’t exactly explain why – you have a deep knowing that the version of yourself who made certain decisions five, ten or twenty years ago, isn’t quite the same woman sitting here now.
For many women, particularly those who have spent years being capable, responsible and committed to the people and causes they care about, this feeling can be deeply unsettling. Because we’re used to solving problems. We’re used to having a plan. And we’re used to knowing exactly what comes next.
But life’s most important transitions rarely arrive with a roadmap. Instead, they often arrive as a quiet restlessness and a growing sense that something needs to change – accompanied by the realisation that the way you’ve always approached life is no longer working the same as it once was.
You find that no matter how many books you read, podcasts you listen to or goals you set, the answers for a deeper sense of fulfilment remain frustratingly out of reach.
If this resonates, I understand completely. Because a number of years ago, it was me.
At the time, I was the youngest member of the executive leadership team within my area of the NSW Public Service. From the outside, I was successful, ambitious and respected, winning awards and moving quickly through my career. On paper, everything suggested I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Yet, behind the scenes, I was navigating significant health challenges while my husband supported his father through a terminal illness in New Zealand. As my career continued to accelerate, there was a quieter part of me asking questions I didn’t yet know how to answer.
Eventually, despite being offered multiple opportunities for advancement, I made the intentional decision to step away. I resigned from a career I had worked hard to build and spent the next six months creating space to listen, reflect and reconnect with what mattered most. My husband and I packed up our apartment and moved back into my family home with my parents, and the period that followed was filled with insight, acceptance and multiple trips across the Tasman.
To the people around me, it didn’t make much sense. Why would someone walk away from greater visibility, greater financial security, greater responsibility and greater opportunity? But despite everything that suggested I should keep climbing, something deeper was asking me to pause. I needed to understand not only what had changed, but who I was becoming.
Despite everything I stood to gain from having more, something within me knew that achievement alone would never be enough. Not if it came at the expense of my well-being, my sense of vitality and my love of life. Not if I lost my connection with myself in the process.
Since then, both through my own experiences and through coaching women navigating leadership, career transitions, motherhood, relationship changes and major life crossroads, I’ve heard countless variations of the same question:
“I know I need something different, but I can’t work out what the next step is…”
What strikes me is that these women are never lacking capability. In fact, the opposite is usually true. They are intelligent, insightful and highly resourceful. They understand their situation intellectually. Yet understanding isn’t always enough. Because lasting change doesn’t happen simply because we know better. It happens when we begin to live differently. And that is where many women find themselves stuck.
In the gap between knowing and living. The gap between insight and action. The gap between believing and becoming. This is where summer offers us an important lesson.
The abundance we see reflected in nature at this time of year is not sudden. The blooms, the harvest and the visible growth are simply the expression of months of unseen development in the preceding seasons. Roots deepened long before flowers emerged and growth was occurring long before it became visible.
Our personal growth works in much the same way.
The clarity we’re seeking may already be emerging. The change we desire may already be underway. Yet we become so focused on finding the perfect answer that we miss what is already asking to be expressed and unfolding within us.
So, perhaps the invitation of summer is not simply to set another goal or pursue another list of achievements. Perhaps it is to pause long enough to ask a different question.
Rather than: “What should I do next?”
What if you asked: “Who am I shaping myself into through the choices I’m making each day?”
Because leadership, growth and transformation are rarely defined by a single moment. They are shaped through small acts of alignment, repeated over time – and this is where meaningful change begins. Not through dramatic reinvention, but through paying attention.
Through listening to ourselves more honestly and noticing what feels aligned and what no longer does. Through understanding the patterns and survival loops that keep pulling us back into familiar ways of thinking, responding and behaving. And through making small, consistent and embodied choices that reflect the person we are growing into.
Summer reminds us that growth isn’t always about striving for more. Sometimes it’s about allowing what is already growing within us to take up space and become visible. To listen more closely to that part of ourselves that knows there is another way forward. A better way.
Because the things we nurture beneath the surface eventually ask to be lived. And potentially, that is where many of us find ourselves right now.
Not at the beginning. Not lost, nor falling behind. But standing in the space between insight and action. The space where self-trust becomes courage. And where the life we imagine for ourselves begins to take shape through the conscious choices we make each day.
As summer arrives and growth becomes visible all around us, perhaps the invitation is simply this:
To trust what is already unfolding.
To recognise what no longer fits.
And to make space for what is trying to emerge.
Because becoming is never about becoming someone else.
It is about becoming more fully yourself.
Since becoming is rarely a journey we are meant to walk alone, these are the themes I explore through Believing Into Becoming™, my group coaching experience for women ready to cultivate greater self-trust, clarity and fulfilment in life and work. For any woman who finds herself standing in a similar space and would like support navigating the journey, you can access my free Masterclass here.
