It’s subsidized through my husband’s job, and I know how rare that is. We’re preparing for a move, which means we’ll be giving this amazing benefit up, and it will convert into a major line-item expense for us.

So I’ve been running the numbers. What’s the salary floor to clear before daycare eats the difference? It’s also the number that tells me whether a second child is possible, because two in daycare at once is a different life than one.

Two of the most annoying questions for women:

1. When are you going to have kids?

2. When are you having another?

My response: Get out of here; it’s none of your business. Will you be raising them or contributing to their college fund?

Recently, and thankfully, there’s been greater attention to the hardships of motherhood (e.g., daycare costs, career discrimination, overall well-being). Instead of merely talking about why women are opting out of motherhood or limiting the number of kids they have, there’s some traction on what can be done to create enabling environments.

Are government incentives the solution?

Some governments are offering incentives for women to have more babies: Singapore’s Baby Bonus, Hungary’s lifetime income tax exemption for mothers of four, and the U.S. Trump Accounts, seeded with $1,000 at birth for education expenses.

Meanwhile, the US fertility rate hit 1.6 births per woman in 2024, the lowest ever recorded, against the 2.1 you’d need to hold a population steady. In a November 2024 survey, 71% of Americans said raising children is unaffordable. Childcare costs came back as the single most-cited reason people gave for limiting family size, at roughly twice the rate of any other factor.

I registered my daughter for a Trump Account (free-ish money from my taxes), but $1,000 at an assumed 8% annual compounding interest without further contributions gets me to maybe covering her college book expenses. That nominal government incentive certainly wasn’t factored into my financial decision-making for sustaining a child over at least 18 years.

The unpaid part

That work doesn’t show up in GDP or on a resume. The cracks show when you take the 4pm meeting from your car, and as the gap a hiring manager asks about four years later.

Mom’s First released a documentary called No Country for Mothers, following Reshma Saujani. It highlights that the women vs. women trope of the girlboss versus tradwife fight is a distraction: two camps yelling at each other about philosophy while nobody funds the actual care. More than 2,500 people crowdfunded the film as credited producers, which tells you something about how badly mothers wanted this said out loud.

And then there’s the policy version of the distraction. Jill Filipovic wrote in Slate about the push, drawn from the Heritage Foundation’s “Saving America by Saving the Family,” to subsidize stay-at-home mothers. Read the fine print, and it only reaches married women with a full-time employed spouse. Single mothers and unmarried cohabiting parents are out. Right now, 80% of childcare credit recipients are single parents, mostly single mothers. Current childcare assistance runs around $9,000 a year per child against costs that can top $30,000.

So the proposal pays some women to leave the workforce while defunding the support that keeps other women in it.

What I’ve tried

I want to be specific because vague solidarity doesn’t help anybody.

Fair Play. My husband and I use a version of Eve Rodsky’s system. We have a document that lays out who owns what, and we meet about it when we feel changes are needed. It’s an ongoing negotiation, and that’s the point. It’s a step toward equity and visibility. A lot of the resentment I’ve watched build in other couples starts with work that one person can’t see.

Solopreneurship. I can pick my daughter up in the afternoon. When she’s sick, I’m usually the one who stays home if we can’t get other family to help out. At this stage of her life, that flexibility has worked for us. Although I can see the shift as I build a portfolio career where I have more demands and we’ll likely have to pay to cover childcare gaps.

Knowing my number. I calculated what we need to earn to cover daycare and still come out ahead. Plus, we’ll be giving up access to our support network, and that means additional costs for aftercare and babysitters. I advocate for my clients and any woman I know to advocate for her worth, but in this climate, my number feels like my direct deposit should go directly to daycare.

At 40, I bought an option

Before any of this, I was 40 and single in New York. I was living a great life with my yappy dog and getting nervous about whether motherhood was available to me.

I met with a reproductive endocrinologist and used $50,000 in benefits through Carrot to freeze my eggs. Until that benefit existed, this was a door I couldn’t afford to open.

I was fortunate to not have any adverse reactions to the medication, and I received excellent medical care. I wasn’t sure about becoming a single mother, or what my life would look like if I opted out of motherhood entirely.

Egg retrieval bought me some time to figure it out.

About a year later, I met my husband, and we conceived naturally. That was luck, landing on top of a decision I’d already made. We make decisions with the information that we have at the time.

Recently, my gynecologist, who is considering whether she wants children, asked me point-blank, “Given what you know now, would you still have decided to have your daughter?” I hesitated a bit before saying yes. I told her two things helped me prepare. One, I helped care for my nephews during the pandemic, which gave me rare insight into raising kids. The other was that I’ve never had rose-colored glasses about motherhood. As an adult, I can see how much work my mom put into raising me—activities, life lessons, setting boundaries. Motherhood is shaping a person, and I don’t take that charge lightly.

What’s moving

Good news: There seems to be a bit of a wake-up call that mothers don’t have to carry all of the weight. Here are some positive shifts in our ecosystems:

• New York State committed $4.5 billion to child care for FY27 with universal pre-K for every four-year-old by the 2028-29 school year and free care for two-year-olds in the city.

  • Mayor Mamdani opened the city’s first free on-site child care center for municipal workers this fall, saving participating families up to $20,000 a year. It’s 40 children. It’s also proof of concept, and proof of concept is how this stuff spreads.

• Employers are moving too, unevenly. Carrot existed for me because a company decided fertility was a benefit and not a personal problem. Amazon, AARP and Levi’s have all built out caregiving support in the last two years.

• No Country for Mothers is doing something I haven’t seen policy do: getting women who’d normally be on opposite sides of this argument into the same room.

There’s still so much work to be done. But the story that this is simply how it is for mothers is being rewritten.

What’s your story?

• If you’re weighing whether to become a mother: what’s the question you can’t get past?

• And if you’re already in it: what holds your week together?

In solidarity,

Meris

If you’d like to see what I offer, free subscribers receive:

• Job Search Summary: Your network wants to help you, but may not know how. This one-page template tells them exactly what you’re targeting, why you’re credible for it, and which introductions to make. Your next career move stops depending on people guessing what you meant by “open to opportunities.”

• The Power Position Exercise: If the roles you keep applying to feel slightly off, this diagnostic finds where your passion, proven skills, and market demand overlap. You walk away knowing whether the work you say you want is viable, plus one action you can take this week.

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“I feel like a loser, and it is really hard to regain hope on some days. My self-confidence is shrinking.”

She’d lost a relationship and a job in the same stretch. Everything else in her post was a plain, unemotional description of two hard years, and then this one evaluative word sitting in the middle of it.

A few lines later she explained where it came from:

“A younger version of myself thought I would be in a different life chapter at this time.”

That type of thinking is a trap. We’ve been conditioned to think of life milestones as fixed destination points that we need to hit at the right time (+/-), when, in reality, there’s more fluidity and nuance to them.

Decisions become our plans

Part of the plan breaks down after college. You’re supposed to find a job or go to grad school. But what if you still don’t know what you want to do?

My aunt worked for PBS/WETA, and there was a post-grad internship. I went from being a PR major to a TV production intern.

I wasn’t worried about my 401k, owning a house, a future partner, or my career trajectory. I made enough to cover my expenses and didn’t even have to deal with roommates (amazing since I shared a room and lived with 5 other women in college).

For a few years, I experimented with freelance TV production, an arts foundation, a PR internship, and took a couple of existential travel breaks. In 2007, I landed a job that I constantly cite as transformative at Planned Parenthood. I was in my mid-20s and not on a clear fast-track, but I felt that I was finding my way.

What 15 years of program management taught me about this

In program management, you start with a kickoff meeting. You share the vision, scope, budget, and staffing. Incomplete information results in assumptions.

You write them down so you can go back and check them when reality delivers new data. This is a learning process.

• What informed your assumptions?

• Why did the inputs, results, etc. vary?

• What were the impacts of the changes?

We don’t generally apply this type of analytical thinking with our own lives. The 28-year-old’s plan gets treated as a commitment. We keep climbing, become more risk-averse, and 15 years of new information doesn’t always factor into us revising our life plans.

The overreaction question

From coaching clients, social posts, and networking events, I hear:

“40s, ‘good on paper’ job, but it’s a bad fit. Am I going through a midlife crisis?”

Something must be wrong if we aren’t following the socially constructed “plan,” right? There must be some serious consequence for not being a VP by 40, married with a mortgage and 2.5 children. And there is, it’s self-doubt, judgment, disappointment, and the list goes on.

What if we reframe this as a midlife assessment? We’ve been following a script that was written for a different version of ourselves. We’ve grown, our interests have changed, and/or we want different things.

The loop we can’t escape

“I feel like I am just stuck on this hamster wheel of trying to become the perfect woman.”

It’s a loop that we can’t escape. We think about what we’re lacking: another certification, a 5am morning routine, a partner, or a better wardrobe.

It’s the comparison game, feeling behind our peers. Maybe you did all of the “right” things—a first marriage, a master’s degree—and yet, the result you were promised never showed up.

Before you go into self-flagellation mode, ask yourself: How can you fairly judge where you are in your specific existence against a universal schedule?

The exercise

Pull the plan out and look at it directly.

Write down what your 28-year-old self assumed. Be specific and generous with her, because she was working with what she had. She assumed things about your industry, earning potential, health, family structure, and what you wanted by now.

Next to each item, mark: still true, changed, or discard. Mock up below.

• What surprises you about your answers?

• What was hard to let go of?

• What felt liberating to discard?

What’s your thing?

“Does anyone else not have a ‘thing’?”

I get asked this a lot. The premise is that other people were issued a single organizing passion and you might have received the short end of the stick.

I believe everyone has at least one ‘thing.’ You show up in a way that no one else does. People continuously come to you for it. When you talk about it, a smile pops up on your face.

Drop yours in the comments.

If you want someone who’ll take the plan apart with you, schedule a free 30-minute discovery call with me.

I met on a club volleyball court in a New Jersey suburb outside New York.

The town was diverse for the time. We were two biracial girls working out what our identities meant and where we fit, belonging to multiple communities and living on the fringe at the same time.

We were friends off and on for years after that. We both went to school in the Boston area and overlapped at different times in DC.

Lourdes went into education and policy, nonprofits, and schools. I went into project management and social impact. In our own ways, we were committed to public service.

Then we both became coaches. It was a new role for us to harness our years of experience in a new way.

Lourdes got there first. She was already doing the work when I started asking her questions about it. I had 15 years of project management behind me and a PMP. Building a plan is the one thing I have never struggled with. What I was missing was somebody who had walked that path and would tell me the truth about it. Lourdes was that. She’s the reason I took the first step, and the second one.

How can we help other women of color?

As biracial women, we have spent our whole lives oscillating between our two cultures. Sometimes living in the space between them, which can be lonely.

We started talking about creating a community for women of color going through transitions. We’d been there, and it was tough at times. What if we could make it easier for others?

There are a lot of coaching programs for women, but there are few built for women of color, for their needs, circumstances, and challenges. One example is the ongoing news coverage on the sharp decline in workforce participation and spike in unemployment among women, particularly how Black women have been disproportionately impacted (see graph). Factors include mass federal downsizing, DEI rollback, healthcare infrastructure and social safety net shifts. The Transition Lab became our solution to supporting women of color going through a variety of transitions (e.g., relocation, career shift, unemployment).

The ending comes first

William Bridges wrote that every transition has three parts: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning.

The neutral zone is the middle stretch, where the old thing is over. The new thing hasn’t started yet, and there’s a gap, possibly an urgency to sprint across before anyone notices you’re in it. It’s the in-between.

I’m currently in it as I job search and prepare for a move. I can see the ending on the horizon, while I navigate the in-between and have a hazy vision of the new beginning.

It’s uncomfortable and challenging, but it’s where the work happens. The ending is loss, and the new beginning is logistics. The middle is where you figure out who you are in a new city, as a mom or with a different job title. It’s also the part people try to do alone.

That’s what The Transition Lab is built on. Six Mondays inside the neutral zone, in a room of women who know what it is to be between things, and are ready to move forward.

Lourdes and I built the room we had needed and couldn’t find.

What do you need to move forward?

Maybe there’s a feeling of stuckness, or a call to make a change, but fear holds you back. So you stay, and indecision or more research doesn’t lead to action.

Write the shift you want to make and put it in the comments. No explanation required. What’s a small step that you can take in the next week to move toward it? A info interview, catching up with a mentor, journaling, etc.

If you’re looking for more support to move forward, The Transition Lab is waiting for you.

Meris

P.S. Join me and Lourdes for six Monday sessions, October 5 to November 16, for women of color 10+ years in transition. You leave with your Power Position and a plan. Details here: https://thetransitionalab.lovable.app/*

“I have caring responsibilities which mean I must earn to the level I am. Resigning really isn’t an option. My caring responsibilities bind me to this level of pay.”

A woman in her 50s wrote that in January. There are three layers stacked inside it, and only one of them is about her job.

The care obligation sets the salary floor. That might be childcare or a nurse for an aging parent. —>The floor sets which jobs are available to her. She might need to leave early for school pickup or a doctor’s appointment. —>Those jobs shape her career.

I’m lucky that my husband shares household responsibilities and childcare, but we’re all living in different situations (e.g., divorce, multi-generational, single). It can’t be contested that women still carry the brunt of invisible labor at home.

There’s a lot of talk about the binary of stay vs. go, but the decisions behind it have already been made two levels upstream by people who aren’t in the room.

Deciding to leave a job is often treated as, “find your courage,” or “take the leap, the net appears.” That may be part of the decision-making process, but I argue the bigger constraint is number.

The household negotiation nobody scheduled

“Worked 18 yrs to build a niche career, husband now says ‘quit or no second kid’.”

That’s a post title from last year. 18 years of specialized work showing up in a household negotiation as a bargaining chip.

The easy response is to make this about the husband, but there’s a structural problem at play.

In most two-earner households, the career decision gets made at home, and that conversation happens without an agenda, data, and potentially in the middle of a crisis.

I spent 15+ years running global programs. I’d never make a decision carrying an 18-year cost and resolve it in a hallway conversation on a Tuesday night. It would be scheduled, I’d bring documentation, and we’d assess costs and trade-offs, in money, time, and energy

Are we doing this for the biggest financial decisions in our households? Maybe, sometimes.

The childcare math

“Childcare options are going to cost more than my income.”

Daycare, aftercare, babysitters, camps, it’s a long list.

You know the costs are coming, but it isn’t always possible to be prepared. My daughter has a good start for her college fund, but we lucked out with subsidized daycare. As we prepare for a move, we’re anticipating $2,200-4,000 a month. The assumption is that with time our salaries will increase. We just have to make it to kindergarten, right? Another kid, no problem.

What’s still adjustable when the floor is fixed

Sometimes our careers hit life events (e.g., maternity leave, a sick parent), and we are forced to lean into negotiable variables such as:

Which hours, not how many. Whether you own the 7am block or the school pickup window is worth more to most people than a small raise, and it’s a far easier ask.

Who knows. A manager who understands the situation, the colleague who covers without being asked. An invisible constraint gets no accommodation, ever. It just gets absorbed by you.

The questions we receive

“If one salary could cover your expenses, would you stay at home?”

A man asked me this yesterday. He said women didn’t recognize the impact their decision not to have kids was having on the population at large. I’ll add that he’s single without children.

I was curious about his perspective, so I engaged in this conversation. His main argument was that the fertility rate in many countries is dropping due to household financial capacity. That is one of many issues. I cited that in the U.S. with a 50% divorce rate, it’s risky for anyone to be dependent on their spouse’s income. There are also challenges in re-entering the job market after taking time off. Plus, there’s still the imbalance of the workload at home. Is this single-income family household salary covering housework, breaks for the caregiver, etc.

I’ll leave you with two questions:

What’s the most ridiculous question or assumption that you’ve heard about your decision to have or not have kids?

As you think about salary floor, is it time for a refresh?

That’s what I hear at community events, I read countless posts and comments on my LinkedIn feed, and I see the same themes on Reddit. AI is coming for our jobs, and there are too many qualified people competing for whatever is left.

So that’s what I brace for when someone books time with me.

Then the conversation starts, and we end up somewhere else.

The first stretch goes where you’d expect, because that’s the version people have rehearsed. What surfaces next is usually focused on the direction of their career: what they want to be doing or what’s going to carry them through the next 20 or 30 years of working, which is a long stretch to spend on something that stopped meaning anything a while back.

The urgency is real, and it’s also sitting on top of a much deeper question.

The differentiator question

I was working through a career story with a client recently.

She has strong skills and experience in her field, but in this landscape and at her level, on paper she’s one of many.

We explored how she could bring her interests and other elements of her personality into her job search. She’s danced for years. And what she pointed to wasn’t the movement.

Learning from your passion

In dance, you are corrected constantly—posture, timing, positioning. It’s relentless, it’s specific, and none of it is personal. She shared how that experience made her open to receiving feedback, and she views that as part of the creation and learning process.

She can take feedback without flinching, act on it, and go back and ask for more.

What hiring manager wouldn’t love to hear that? She trained this skill in a studio, on her own time, at her own expense, and it isn’t something that you would glean from her resume.

The part I didn’t see coming

That conversation sent me back through my own history.

Dance has been a through line in my life since I was young. Not nearly at the same level. I took ballet/tap classes and performed in talent shows that my mom choreographed. It’s something that I enjoy, but it isn’t my strongest skill.

For several months, I’ve been taking classes where every two weeks we learn a choreographed dance. It took my client’s answer for me to realize the benefit that I’ve been receiving.

It’s the only place in my week where I’m consistently bad at something, AND I continue showing up.

I am not good at learning choreography. My memory for sequences is average on a good day, and there’s a particular feeling that comes with walking into a room knowing I’ll be a step behind or off-beat. It’s uncomfortable, but not defeating.

I pick up changes faster. When I make a mistake, I adjust instead of stopping. I respond to correction in real time without losing the thread.

Read that list back in a work context, and it’s a performance review.

Where your differentiator hides & how to use it

There’s a forum post I keep coming back to: “Does anyone else not have a ‘thing’?”

The premise is that everyone else was issued one organizing passion and you got skipped. In my experience, most people have several and count none of them because what they do on their own time doesn’t look like career material to them.

The passion/interests circle in The Power Position is tricky because it shifts and evolves. Some will be lifelong (e.g., cooking, travel), while others are meant for a phase (e.g., skateboarding, sticker collections).

Pick the thing you love doing or that you keep returning to.

Then ask: What has it trained you to do?

Something you could say to a hiring manager in one sentence and have them recognize it immediately (e.g., recovering from a visible mistake mid-performance without stopping).

You have at least one, developed over years, and filed under your hobbies.

What are you doing outside your job that’s uniquely making you better at it? And how can you put that to work in your search?

Nobody discovered me. I pitched the opportunity. (Full circle moment given I was a PR major.)

I’m breaking this down for you because the mechanics are more repeatable than they look and most people skip the easiest step.

The proximity problem

Once you decide that you want visibility, you still have to go out and do the work. I went through my own trial and error period. From erratically posting and timidly commenting to cultivating my LinkedIn feed, starting this Substack, and owning the topics that I want to be known for.

It took time, and sometimes I felt that I was talking to myself.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve used the ‘low-hanging fruit’ marketing concept. Basically, what are your quick-win strategies that are low-cost and low effort? Who is someone interested in what you have to offer and that you have access to? I looked at the rooms I was already standing in, and I raised my hand.

Four times, same move

Boston University. I’m an alum and a career coach. Those two facts sitting together make me useful to a community I already belong to. The alumni team runs career programming, and I have a relevant framework. That’s not a cold pitch; it’s a match nobody had made yet.

ICF South Florida. I’m a member of the chapter, and there was an open call to present for International Coaching Week. My pitch was that my framework was something I could teach to fellow coaches that would benefit their clients.

La Mesa with . We met at a networking event and stayed in touch. We’re both interested in supporting mid-career women through pivots and transitions. It was a natural pairing to become a Coach when she created a related community.

The Bloom. I’ve followed the social impact community for years because of my career in global health and development, running programs across 11 countries. There was a shared language and experiences; no translation required. It was a no-brainer when they posted a call for Coaches. (FYI: If you’re a Bloomer, I’m hosting a fireside chat, “Redefining Social Impact Careers: A Fireside Chat on Creatively Rethinking Your Path” 8/26/26).

Four opportunities:

• Cost $0

• Effort: Minimal (I already had the framework, a couple of hours to create the decks and lead presentations)

• Gain: At least 100 event participants, 1 public recording, 15+ new LinkedIn contacts, 1 client lead.

Each one of them started from a point of connection.

The audit

Here are three questions to help you find two or three rooms where you can step into the spotlight.

1. Where do I already have standing? Alumni networks. Professional associations. Communities where you are a member. Former employers. Parent groups. Spaces where you have credibility and name recognition.

2. What do I know that this room needs? The specific overlap between your expertise and their problem. For BU, that was alumni who want a clearer read on their next career move, and I have a framework for exactly that.

3. What problem does this room have? Every community has a recurring gap. Programming committees need speakers. Newsletters need contributors. Newer members need mentors who are a few years ahead. Find the gap that matches your expertise

Then you pitch with a concrete offer. “I’d like to run a session on X for the chapter, 45 minutes, here’s the outline” makes saying yes easy compared to, “Let me know if you ever need speakers.”

Why this is the job search too

The same structure runs underneath a job search, which is what I’ve been living for the last several months.

Applications are you asking a stranger to evaluate you against a document. Slow, high volume, low conversion.

The alternative is positioning yourself as the answer to a problem someone already has, somewhere you’re already known. A former colleague who knows what you’re looking for. An alum connection in the functional area you’re interested in. A community where your background is the shared language.

A couple of weeks ago, a former coworker who knew about my job search thought of me when a role opened, and referred me. I was contacted by the recruiter the same day that I applied, and within four days I interviewed with the hiring manager. That doesn’t happen from a cold application.

It happened because I’ve activated my network; they know what I’m looking for and what I have to offer.

No playbook. 10 teams to activate. That was Peloton.

I got to that moment because I was passionate about equity and inclusion, I had a strong project management track record, it was 2020, and I had a referral.

This is an example of how I leveraged my Power Position. Today at noon, I walked Boston University alumni through the whole framework. This is the written version, because I want you to be able to shape your career story.

The three circles

What you love. What you’ve proven you can do. What the market will pay for.

Your Power Position is the overlap.

Passion without market demand is a hobby. Market demand without proven skills is a job you can’t qualify for. Proven skills without interest is how you end up burned out and dreading Monday mornings.

The part the diagrams leave out

These aren’t three fixed circles, one sweet spot, congratulations, you’re done.

Mine move and so do yours.

Market demand can be erratic and doesn’t care about your 5-year plan. Your skills compound whether or not you’re tracking them, which is why most people are underselling work they did 3 years ago. And your interests shift, maybe before you even notice it.

So the useful question is which circle moved since you last looked.

Four times, same math

PBS—> Guggenheim Arts Foundation—> Planned Parenthood. I started out wanting to tell stories that expanded access and equity to information and services. That’s where my passion circle was, and I followed it first, which is what a lot of people do.

Grad school. I want to create impact at a global level, and my skills circle was the thing standing in the way. So I grew that one intentionally. Deliberately, expensively, over 2 years.

Global health. A $200M+ USAID health portfolio at JSI across 5 countries. Abt’s first project in Afghanistan, stood up from nothing. JSI’s first international subsidiary in India. By the end of that stretch, I ran complex programs in places where the operating context fluctuated due to government changes and security issues.

Tech. I took the program management muscle I’d built in global health and moved it into a sector that priced it completely differently, while maintaining the same throughline.

I wasn’t doing anything wildly different between global health and tech. Rather, it was the demand for what I did.

What it costs to check late

A woman in her 40s wrote this on a forum in March:

“I’m fearful there is a giant values misalignment and that I’m wasting my life in exchange for a big paycheck that may or may not be worth it.”

She’s describing a job sitting at the intersection of market demand and skills, and has drifted out of what she loves.

The reason it feels like a crisis is that she’s been asked, probably by everyone including herself, what do you want? That’s the wrong level of question. It’s too big to answer on any given Tuesday, and failing to answer it makes her feel like something is wrong with her.

Which circle has shifted? That’s a question you break down and answer.

Where to start

Skills and experience first: It’s the only circle you can inventory without guessing. Pull the last 3 years of your work. Write down what you built, what changed because you built it, and what you’d charge someone to do it again.

Market demand: Use AI to analyze 20 job descriptions in the direction you’re curious about. Not to apply. To see what language the market is using right now for the thing you already know how to do. The gap between their words and yours is helpful intel.

Interests: What you enjoyed at 28 has shifted. What you find yourself reading about at 11pm, when nobody is prompting you, that’s something to dig into.

I built a 15-question diagnostic that runs all three. It takes about 20 minutes, and it’s the part you can do without me. Download it here.

If the answers make you uncomfortable, that usually means it worked.

Let me know where you’re finding the most resistance.

A glimmer is a small moment that tells your nervous system you’re safe. The warm sun on your face. A stranger who slows down to let you cross. The first sip of coffee before anyone needs anything from you. Touching grass, if you want the internet version.

They are deliberately small. Graduating, getting married, closing on a house— are milestones. They come with a whole emotional apparatus, and you can see them coming for months. A glimmer lasts 4 seconds, costs nothing, and you can miss it entirely if your attention is directed somewhere else.

Which, for most of the women I work with, it is.

Mine was a book

“The Wishing Game” by Meg Shaffer. It’s a book about books, which is my happy place. A woman trying to adopt a boy, an author from her childhood, and their stories intersecting for a happy ending.

It pulled me out of reality and reminded me about wish-making. Believing in possibility, without a plan attached to it.

That is not my native setting. I’m a pragmatist. I plan for every edge case, I require evidence before I decide, and I have built a career on being the person in the room who has already thought about what goes wrong.

But I can be woo woo adjacent, too. I get a daily dose of it watching my daughter experience her firsts in the world. The joy she gets from pointing at dogs and saying “daw” or her gently stroking a leaf. She has no model for how things are supposed to go, so nothing disappoints her. Every ordinary object is full of possibility. I get to be a part of that for a few moments every day.

What we are collecting instead

Attention is a budget, and it’s really challenging to spend it on purpose.

If you’re mid-career, running a team, and also the person your family calls when something breaks, your attention is already committed. Aging parents, small kids, a job that expanded without a corresponding title change. You aren’t choosing where your focus lands, because it’s getting claimed by others.

And under that kind of load, attention goes exactly where you’d expect: toward threats. Toward whatever might blow up next. Your brain is doing its job. It has identified that you are the last line of defense on about six to a million things, and it is staying hyper-alert to monitor them.

A job search makes this visible faster than anything else I’ve seen.

You start reading everything as data. The recruiter who went quiet after a great call. The role that closed before you finished the application. The connection who said “let’s talk next week” in March. Nothing is neutral anymore. Every silence is information and all of it points in the same direction.

Your field of vision tunnels into what’s going wrong, because that’s where the threat lives, and you have appointed yourself the person who catches it early.

The same thing happens inside a job you’re tolerating. You track the meeting you weren’t invited to, the project that went to someone else, the tone in an email you’ve now read six times. You get very, very good at it.

The searching brain and the noticing brain are the same!

Is this really what you want to be good at?!

Nine months of practice at scanning for what went wrong doesn’t stay in the container you built it for. You don’t clock out of it at 6pm. It follows you to dinner. It sits with you while your kid tells you about her day, and it keeps running in the background while you’re supposedly relaxing on a Saturday.

It’s a real skill in hyperdrive and taxing your well-being.

This is where I part ways with most of what gets written about burnout. Rest is the standard prescription, which has its uses, but it treats exhaustion. Attention is a separate problem. You can come back from two weeks off and resume the scan within an hour of opening your laptop, because it was never about being tired.

The smallest possible intervention

One glimmer a day. Write them down for at least a week. I shared one yesterday.

One small thing that registered as good. Something that brings a brief smile to your face or positively distracts you.

Two rules that make it work.

1. It has to be small.

   🛑 “My daughter is healthy” is gratitude.

   🟢 “The light in the kitchen at 7am,” you’re on the right track.

2. Write it, don’t just think it. This is part of the training. A passing thought takes 2 seconds and leaves no trace.

After a week you’ll have 7 lines. That’s evidence at your fingertips, but you may start to see a pattern. Maybe around 4pm on day 3, you catch yourself scanning for something to write down. That’s the reversal. You’ve pointed the same machinery in the other direction.

I won’t tell you that this fixes a job you need to leave or a search dragging into month 10. But it’s a tool to stop those things from taking over the rest of your life while you sort them out.

The vigilance your ambition requires doesn’t come with an off switch. So you build one.

Over the next week, I’d love to hear about one of your glimmers.

Ten years with the same employer. She did the work of a team with occasional support from contractors. C. was underpaid, undersupported, and convinced she wasn’t competitive outside of a company she once enjoyed working at.

That last part — the “I’m not competitive” belief — was doing the most damage. I challenged her on the supporting evidence. She was drained by the wear and tear of a decade of being told, in small ways, that her value was situational. C. became used to the company’s ways of working, stopped prioritizing her growth, and lost track of trends in her industry.

She was a one-woman show because she absorbed work that wasn’t resourced, picked up the slack for poorly planned timelines, and felt pressure to deliver.

The problem

When we started working together, she couldn’t articulate what she’d built. C. was always in reactive mode and lacking the time and energy to assess and celebrate her achievements.

We talked through the work she did, and I probed about the results. There was evidence, and I encouraged C. to gather data that said: I did this, it went from X to Y, and the company benefited by Z.

And the job search she’d been running, quietly, on the side, was going nowhere. She was applying to roles and getting silence back. Not because she wasn’t qualified. Because her application didn’t show her.

There was something else. Whenever she said she was stretched, or that a new project felt outside her bandwidth, someone in leadership would say, “We’ll get you more support” and then not follow through. She got used to going along until she passed her breaking point.

The pursuit

Once C. pulled together her work, I helped direct her narrative. She was proactive in leveraging AI to improve her resume and summarize her results. We discussed coping strategies for her to deal with work stress while she conducted her job search.

The dog-walk ritual came from her. At the end of the day she closed her laptop, and C. walked her dog to signal the end of work. She told me it was the only time in the day that felt like hers.

She also started a bingo card (sample below). A private document where she logged office absurdities: the commitment that didn’t land, the meeting that was a re-run of the meeting before it, the “we’ll loop you in” that never happened. It wasn’t a venting exercise. It was a reality check and a reminder that the situation wasn’t permanent.

And when someone in leadership came to her with a new request, she stopped saying yes or no immediately. She said: “Let me look at my plate and come back to you.” She stopped absorbing on instinct and started choosing.

The payoff

C’s not done with her job search.

The payoff is that she’s different now. She walks into conversations at her company with a new mentality. She knows what she built, can say it out loud, and has set boundaries.

The one-woman show is exhausting. A workplace that makes you feel like you’re holding it together needs you more than you need it.

It’s still yours; your login works and your name is still on the org chart. The decisions that used to require your input are now being made without you. The projects that used to sit in your lane have shifted. And the meetings where your presence used to be required are now optional.

Your role is eroding. And nobody is saying that out loud.

Role erosion happens when the organization stops taking what you have to give. And the identity disruption it creates is, in some ways, more disorienting than burnout, because at least with burnout there’s a clear cause and a plausible fix.

With role erosion, you’re trying to name something that has no event horizon. It’s a slow drift where one day you realize you haven’t felt genuinely useful in four months and you don’t quite know when it started.

With my clients navigating this, the first response is usually to work harder. To be more available, visible, and present in the meetings they haven’t been pulled out of yet. That tends to accelerate the problem. Working harder at something that’s structurally broken doesn’t fix it. It just burns more of your resources while the structure stays the same.

Sometimes the answer is yes, and there’s a lateral move or a new opportunity that puts you back in the work that matters. Sometimes the answer is no, and the role erosion is a signal that the organization has moved on without you, intentionally or not.

William Bridges calls this an Ending that hasn’t been named yet. Everything on the surface is still intact, but the inner contract — what your work means and who needs it — has dissolved.

Possible steps to take:

• Boundary setting: What are you willing to accept going forward?

• Build your external proof (e.g., writing articles, speaking engagements).

• Document your value and achievements (e.g., brag book, portfolio)

• Networking: Obtain feedback, advice and put out feelers for other opportunities

“Applying without networking is like whispering in a stadium. No one hears you.” That’s a line I found in a job search forum recently, from someone who’d been running a search in silence for months. It applies well to someone still employed whose role has been eroding. It’s the same principle: when the context changes around you, it’s to start building the connective tissue, before you need it.

If your role is eroding right now, I’m acknowledging that it isn’t uncommon. It’s incredibly unsettling, but I also want to highlight the possibility that this could be the thing that moves you into something better.

That’s the double shift. Not the two jobs you’re working. The two selves you’re trying to hold at the same time: the one who shows up fully for the people who need you at home, and the one who shows up fully for the work that needs you on the screen. And the exhausting weight of knowing that you may be shortchanging one of them.

Generally, there’s empathy for a childcare crisis. People understand “I had no one for pickup.” Elder care isn’t usually covered by company time-off policies and health benefits. So, you manage it in the margins.

The WFH model can be double-edged: it allows you the ability to provide in-home support or duck out for doctor’s visits AND the work is everywhere, which means so is the guilt.

I don’t have a clean framework for this one. The women I know who navigate this responsibility without burning out are the ones who got honest about what they could carry and stopped apologizing for the rest. They named the constraint and asked for what they needed. And when the system couldn’t give it to them, they made decisions from that reality.

“Full-time RTO means either pay for childcare I can’t afford or quit,” a Reddit post from June. That’s the math women are calculating. It’s two impossible demands and a decision you should never have had to make.

Where do we turn? A supportive manager, personal and familial support systems, or dropping what can’t be held anymore. Protect the hours that matter and let go of the rest. I acknowledge that there still may be costs (e.g., promotion, work trips). A client shared that he worked from his father’s deathbed due to work pressure.

I could go on a rant about how we need better social support systems, but in the meantime I see you. This is hard. I’m managing my father and my 18-month-old daughter. I scan through social service websites and run the numbers on daycare and senior care costs. If there’s something you’ve figured out that works, I want to hear it. Those strategies don’t get shared often enough.

That’s what identity drift looks like from the inside. You don’t leave the wrong job in a dramatic arc. You stay in it, slowly, one small compromise at a time, until you look up and don’t recognize the decisions you’ve been making.

I had a title I’d worked for, a salary I’d negotiated, and a team that counted on me (I later realized too much). I was putting out fires without relief. Competent but not engaged. That gap between what I was capable of and what I was doing kept widening. That’s what I now call identity drift. It doesn’t announce itself; it’s more of a faint whisper.

The burnout I hit in 2019 didn’t come from overworking alone. It was the slow erosion of things that used to feel like mine. Creating informed strategies. Overseeing execution. Instead, decisions were overturned and flashy ideas overshadowed established plans. By the time I was taking client calls from my bathroom, due to poor internet connection, I’d been drifting for at least six months.

That’s what makes staying in the wrong job so costly. The visible cost is time and money. The invisible cost is who you stop being while you contemplate if it’s time to go.

Something I repeatedly hear in client coaching sessions: “I hate my job, but quitting on the spot isn’t realistic for me right now.” I get it, but the problem with that framing is that it treats the decision like a switch. Stay or go. Now or never. The real question is what you’re losing every month you stay without a plan.

William Bridges wrote about this in Transitions. He refers to the Ending as the point where you start loosening your grip on an identity that no longer fits. Even when my clients suspect there’s been a shift, there’s a resistance to act on it. Sometimes, they wait too long until a decision is forced upon them. Others ask themselves, “How much would it take to leave a job that’s fine?”

Fine is not a career strategy.

The identity cost shows up before the burnout does. You feel it in small ways at first. Sunday dread that you feel 24/7. The meeting you dread because it has nothing to do with anything you care about. The promotion you pursue because it seems like the next logical thing to do.

CliftonStrengths ranked Input as my top theme when I took the assessment. I’m someone who needs to collect information, ideas, connections, and ask questions. I was gathering intel that I was in the wrong place, but I wasn’t translating that into action (yet).

The thing that matters more than the stay-or-go decision is how the identity cost compounds. Six months of drift is recoverable quickly. Two years of drift takes longer in career time and the internal work of remembering who you were before you got so good at the job that stopped fitting you.

So if you’re in a job that’s fine and you’re wondering why you’re tired, ask yourself: When did you last feel genuinely curious or excited at work? If you can’t remember, the drift has probably been going on longer than you think.

The decision to stay or go rarely comes first. What comes first is whether you’re willing to look at what staying has been costing you in who you’re becoming, or not becoming, while you wait for a reason bad enough to justify leaving.

She showed up, hit targets, and played the game. On paper, nothing was wrong. On the inside, she was hitting her head against the wall every time a new idea went nowhere or a push for change dissolved into organizational silence.

At some point, she stopped asking “how do I prove myself here?” and started asking a harder question: what is the right work environment for me?

That question cost her something. It meant admitting the problem wasn’t effort. The environments weren’t working. And no amount of extra hours was going to fix that.

So she left to build BrokersOfGood from scratch. Ten years later, she’s running a company built around her values: real partnerships between businesses and nonprofits and no performative sponsorships or polished pitches masking misaligned relationships.

What she learned building it is what I want to talk about today.

Reviving your intuition

Lori told me women are pushed toward rationality. Justify the decision, show the data, make the case. The intuitive signal gets deprioritized until it gets quiet. Lori’s intuition is loud now because she stopped ignoring it. She described it as a practice, not a personality trait. You can rebuild it.

Instead of managing her time, she manages her energy. Her morning walk is non-negotiable. Her nervous system is steady before the day starts. She hunts with intention, like a lioness, and rests without guilt between. Her output didn’t drop, and she shed what no longer served her.

For years, the operating belief was: work harder, and it’ll work. Dropping that story wasn’t easy. It meant sitting with the discomfort of “this environment is wrong for me” instead of reaching for a fix that kept her busy.

In coaching, I see that women who make the hardest moves aren’t the ones who push harder. They’re the ones who stopped performing for an audience that wasn’t worth it.

Lori didn’t optimize her way out. She got honest about what she wanted and what she was willing to do.

That’s available to you, too. Is your work working for you?

What’s one thing you’ve been ignoring that your body already knows?

P.S. If that question landed for you, you might be interested in how The Power Position Review can help you evaluate where you are to position you for what’s next.

A client told me that her company finally said yes. After years of asking for support, actual headcount instead of one more contractor, they started moving on it. She felt seen and heard, and almost fell into the trap of feeling like she could stay.

But the yes came too late.

She’s been in the same seat for a decade. Doing her own job plus that of a team she doesn’t have. Making the case, again and again, for the resources the work obviously needed. The recognition landed around the same time she’d internally decided to leave.

The cost of staying too long

When a company finally gives you what you’ve been asking for, it lands like relief. It’s proof you mattered all along. Sometimes it is, but timing is information too. The late yes tells you what your ask was worth to them when it was inconvenient.

Compensation works the same way. Money is recognition, and it’s also the thing that pays for the life you’re building outside the job. A raise that shows up a decade into being undervalued doesn’t erase the decade. It just clarifies the math.

My client knows she should have left years ago. She stayed because it was comfortable, and comfort is a powerful drug when the alternative is uncertainty. She likes the focus of the work and the people she works with.

But who’s driving the direction of her career? By staying, she let the company direct her growth, and the role drained the energy she needed to explore anything else or enjoy her life after 5pm.

She’s in the messy middle. Imposter syndrome gets loud right when she needs to act, telling her the ten years of wins only worked because she knows the company, and the next one will find her out. We’re naming what she’s saying goodbye to so she can make room for what’s next. And the practical core: running her Power Position, mapping where her skills and experience meet market demand, so the next move is chosen instead of defaulted into.

That last part is critical. A move made from clarity about your market fit is different from a move made from burnout. One sets the terms, while the other just runs.

How to plan for what’s next

She’s been too overworked to put time into a job search. She’s also run the numbers, and she can’t afford to stay. And she has a feeling she doesn’t have what it takes to compete in this market.

I asked her," What evidence do you have for that?” She paused. There wasn’t a clear answer. The imposter story is real work, but the pause is the starting point. I gave her some starting points to focus on, and if you recognize yourself in any of it, it’s yours too.

• Build a brag book. Capture wins, positive emails, and feedback, impact supported by data. It breaks the confidence spiral when you see the evidence on paper, and it feeds your resume.

• Track your energy for a week. Note what fuels you and what drains you. That becomes the case for what to delegate or hire for, including drafting the job description for the staff you don’t have yet, and showing what it costs the company when your time goes to lower-level tasks.

• Translate the “missing” experience. Map what you already do onto the skill set you think you lack. Example: If you don’t have a set budget, look at requests, approvals, vendor quotes, etc. That’s budget-adjacent experience with real numbers behind it.

• Reality-check the feeling. Ask a few trusted people (e.g., work contacts, peers) to test the “I wouldn’t hire me” story against feedback and data.

My client left that session saying, “I have nothing to lose by trying.” We’ll keep working from there, while honoring the need for stability.

If you’ve been in a holding pattern, look hard at why. That waiting is the thing I work on with clients first, before a single resume or job posting. My discovery call link is in my profile.

So here’s my question for you. How old do you have to be before you take the wheel?

She shows up, hits her targets, and makes her manager’s life easier. She gets the work done before the deadline and uses the extra hours to think about how the work could be done better next time. She has ideas, and sometimes she shares them. Most of the time, they go nowhere.

She doesn’t complain or job-hop. She doesn’t ruffle too many feathers. When something isn’t working, her first instinct is to try harder, take on more, or fix it from the inside. She tells herself that effort is the variable. If she gives more, the situation will give back.

This is the story I hear most often from the women I coach. It’s also the story told me when I interviewed her for Rerouted.

Lori spent years in the nonprofit sector as the employee everyone counted on. Strong work ethic. Big ideas. The kind of person who couldn’t accept “that’s how we’ve always done it” and kept proposing change in environments that weren’t built to absorb it. From the outside, she was doing everything right, but inside, she was hitting a wall.

The story she was telling herself: try harder, prove more, take on more responsibility, and eventually it will land.

It didn’t land, and it wasn’t ever going to. I asked Lori, “What was the moment you realized that something needed to change in your career, and how did you act on it?”

The nonprofit budgets she worked against weren’t built on what was possible with the resources available. They were built on what the org wanted to claim. So she was being asked, in her words, to swim across the channel when you’re barely able to float, and the only thing they’ve given you was actually to make you sink.

“I never stopped to think: do I have everything I need to actually achieve this? That never crossed my mind as an employee. Me being the optimist, me thinking that I could do these things, me seeing this as a challenge, never really stopped to think: oh, well, do I have everything I need in place to actually achieve all of these things? That never crossed my mind as an employee.”

That’s the trap. The high-performing, optimistic, “I can figure this out” employee doesn’t audit the setup. She audits herself. When the targets don’t get hit, she looks inward. When the ideas don’t land, she assumes she needs to communicate them better. When the burnout starts, she questions her resilience.

Lori, looking back from her 40s, asked a question I want every woman reading this to ask:

These are tough questions and it may take time to flush out the answers.

My clients who eventually make the move that changes their career trajectory aren’t the women who tried harder. They’re the women who stopped to ask whether the system they were performing inside could reward what they were giving.

The shift isn’t from “I’m not good enough” to “I am good enough.”

It’s from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What is this workplace built to do? And, “Is it the right fit for me?”

Lori left traditional employment to start BrokersOfGood, a company built on partnerships between businesses and nonprofits, run on a model she chose instead of one she inherited. It took her years to get to the version of it she’s running now. It was a bold move, but the interesting part is what she had to stop believing about herself to do it.

If you recognized yourself in the first three paragraphs, I’d offer one thing. You’re probably not underperforming. You’re probably under-resourced, working in a place that mistakes your willingness to absorb that gap for endurance, and treating your effort as the renewable resource that closes it.

The audit isn’t about you. The audit is about the place.

What’s the question you’ve been avoiding asking about where you work?

This is the final post in a four-part series on the Power Position framework. Post 1 introduced the framework; post 2 covered Passion & Interests; post 3 covered Skills & Experience.

This is the circle people resist most. Not because the questions are emotionally difficult, but because the answers require work most people haven’t done.

Once you do it, you can’t ignore what you discover.

The pattern

A mid-career woman decides she wants to pivot into organizational development, consulting, UX research, internal strategy, fractional leadership — any number of legitimate directions.

She gets clear on her interests. She takes stock of her skills. Then she builds her entire strategy around the assumption that demand exists for what she wants to do.

Six months later, she is frustrated, confused, and wondering why her strategy isn’t working.

A successful strategy cannot be built on a hypothesis that was never tested.

What market demand means

Market demand is not a feeling, “I think there’s a need for this.” It is not “everyone I talk to says it’s a great idea.”

Market demand is specific, verifiable, and current evidence that there are viable employers in your sector looking for someone with your skills and interests, at a level and salary that meets your situation.

That evidence looks like:

1. Job postings you can find right now, not aspirational postings you remember from two years ago.

2. Salary ranges on those postings that cover what you need to earn. A role you can’t afford to take doesn’t serve you.

3. Conversations with people doing the work that confirm the demand is real, industry trends are stable and/or growing, and the pathway from where you are to where they are can be mapped out.

Three sources that matter. One on its own is not enough.

Why this circle is a moving target

I’ve done more ongoing work on this circle than the other two. The Passion & Interests and Skills & Experience circles were clearer for me earlier on. The Market Demand circle for my coaching practice — who pays for it, at what price point, through which channels — required research, testing, and adjusting.

It still does.

I don’t say that to discourage you. I’m pointing out that this circle is not a one-time exercise. Markets change. Your positioning shifts. The question is whether you are making decisions based on evidence you have gathered, or on assumptions you haven’t examined.

If you cannot answer “is demand for this work growing, holding steady, or shrinking” with specific evidence, you have your next research task.

What counts as evidence:

• Job posting volume and frequency over the past 90 days

• Industry trend reports (Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends, LinkedIn Economic Graph, sector-specific labor reports)

• Salary data on Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, Payscale

• Conversations with people currently doing the work

The last one is the validation point. The first three give you the shape of the market. The last one tells you whether the shape matches the reality.

What to do when the overlap is smaller than you hoped

Sometimes you work through all three circles and discover that your overlap is small. The market is there, but pays less than you need. The skills are there, but the willingness is not. The passion is there, but the market is shrinking.

That is useful information, and data can move us forward.

It tells you what to negotiate, what to test, and what to expand. It tells you whether you need to broaden the direction, adjust the timeline, or close a specific gap before the strategy is viable.

It also tells you what to stop doing. The applications that don’t fit. The networking conversations that aren’t moving you forward. The roles you keep almost applying for and not quite pulling the trigger on.

When you can see where the overlap is and isn’t, you can stop guessing.

How to get a second set of eyes on what you’ve found

I’ve given you the worksheet, but it takes time and effort. You may have the answers, but you struggle with what they mean or what to do next.

That’s the right moment to bring in a second perspective to help you pressure-test what’s there.

I created The Power Position Review for that reason.

It’s a 45-minute one-to-one session where we discuss one circle of your choosing— the assumptions that need more evidence, the circle that needs more work—to give you a clear sense of where to focus next. You leave with specific next steps, not a vague sense of direction.

The Power Position Review is $97. Book here.

If you haven’t downloaded the worksheet yet, start there.

This is the third post in a four-part series on the Power Position framework. Post 1 covered the framework overall; post 2 went into Passion & Interests.

This week features the Skills & Experience circle.

As my mid-career clients explore what’s next in their careers, they ask: What am I qualified to do?

It’s a reasonable question, but it can keep you stuck.

What matters more is: What do I want to keep doing?

The gap between those two questions is where many mid-career transitions go wrong.

A track record is not an obligation

I coach women with deep expertise in one area who are also profoundly tired of it.

Women with fifteen years of project management experience who would rather never lead another project. Women whose strongest skill on paper is people management — a skill they’re good at and dread using for the rest of their careers. Women who built their reputation on a specific competency and are now organizing their whole job search around that, not because they want to, but because they don’t know what else to put on a resume.

This is the sentence that I see land hardest in coaching. Mid-career women have absorbed, often without naming it, that their job is to maximize the value of skills they’ve already built. That walking away from a competency is wasteful. That changing direction is “starting over.”

What if it isn’t? Reframe: It is choosing a direction based on where you want to be, not staying locked into where momentum has carried you.

The willingness question

The most useful question on the worksheet, in my opinion, is this one: What are you willing to do to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be?

Not “can you.” Not “is it possible.” Willing to do, given your current circumstances, responsibilities, and the energy you have.

If the answer is no, that’s not a dead end. It’s a redirect. You can make a trade-off, extend the timeline, or shift the direction slightly. All three are workable. What is not workable is proceeding as if the answer was yes when it isn’t. That is what creates the frustration six months from now.

The willingness question forces you to stop fantasizing and start planning with the materials you actually have.

Adjacent proof

The second question in this circle that I want you to spend time on: what evidence do you already have that you can do this work, even without the exact title?

Mid-career women consistently undercount adjacent experience. Projects you led informally. Volunteer work that used the same skills. A side initiative that produced results. The cross-functional project that wasn’t in your job description but became the most meaningful work of your year.

This is real evidence, and it’s part of your credentials.

If you’re considering a direction that isn’t a direct line from your current title, the question is: When have you done parts of this work, in conditions that prove you can do it again?

That evidence will be the foundation of how you tell your story in your next conversation, next application, or next interview.

What this circle is really doing

The Skills & Experience circle is not a backward-looking inventory of what you’ve already proven. It’s a forward-looking filter: of everything you’ve built, what’s worth taking with you, and what’s worth leaving behind.

Asking “What am I qualified to do?” keeps you in the same orbit, looking for a different version of the role you already have or had. I work with clients to open up the range of what’s possible.

Where to focus this week

Spend the most time on question four (willingness) and question five (adjacent proof). Those two together do the most useful work.

Download the Power Position Exercise here:

Next week is the last circle: Market Demand. It’s the one that determines whether everything else you’ve worked through is actionable or theoretical.

Are your career intentions based on a feeling or sense, or are they supported by market reality?

If you have or want to work through the Power Position Exercise and want a second set of eyes on your circles, The Power Position Review is open through June 3. One 45-minute session, one circle, one next step. Use promo code PowerPlay for $20 off through June 3.

Two companies and two pay equity adjustments. Through the same mechanism, I received different outcomes.

At Company A, the audit moved my base salary up by about 6%. At Company B, the audit increased it by less than half a percent.

The difference wasn’t the company. It was what I did at the offer stage, years before either audit ran.

Here’s the story, and the four-question script I’d hand any woman walking into a pay conversation this quarter.

AFTER

Most of us were trained to think about pay in one window a year. Annual review, merit increase, or promotion conversation if you’re lucky.

That window is too narrow.

There is a second money conversation happening at most mid-size and large companies, and most employees either don’t know it exists or how to ask for it. It’s called a pay equity review.

What is a pay equity audit?

It’s a structured analysis of pay structures, comparing employees who do work of equal value versus solely their job titles. A well-designed audit compares across departments, not just within them. It looks at the cumulative impact of every individual pay decision your managers have made: offers, raises, and bonuses. Even when pay systems are designed to keep things fair, the audit is a quality control mechanism to catch when it goes off track.

Korn Ferry has a solid walkthrough of how companies run these audits if you want the technical version. It also explains why so many companies hesitate to run them, which is useful context if yours hasn’t done one in a while.

I am talking about something the technical articles don’t cover.

My two-company story

Company A. I started in October 2016, and in March 2018, the company ran a pay equity study that resulted in a 6% adjustment.

I negotiated at the offer stage with little success, and the audit came two years too late. While the increase was great, it didn’t make up for 17 months of being under-compensated. Merit increases were calculated on a lower base salary.

The audit fixed the present, but it didn’t reimburse me for the past.

Company B. It was the highest salary offer that I’d received, and I had a contact inside the company who confirmed it aligned with the company’s pay bands. I negotiated for $10,000 more, which was a 6.25% bump before I even started.

Two years later, a pay equity audit moved increased by salary by less than half a percent. Nominal.

At first glance, that looks like the audit barely did anything.

But the audit was nominal because the salary negotiation put me in the correct band. The audit isn’t a separate raise event. It’s a band-correction mechanism. If you negotiate yourself into the right band, there is little for the audit to correct. If you don’t, an audit will increase your salary, but it might be too little, too late.

The three questions to ask, in order

Question 1 (to yourself): What’s my counter-evidence?

Before raising the topic, collect information that supports your case (e.g., job board metrics, industry resources, real-time benchmarking platforms). Pay gaps of more than five percent between groups doing equal work typically require further investigation. If your number is more than 5% off the market band, you’ve found something worth pursuing.

Question 2 (to yourself): When was the last time my company ran a pay equity review?

If you don’t know, that’s your starting point. Many companies run them every one to three years. If yours hasn’t run one recently, that’s a reasonable advocacy point.

Question 3 (to an internal influencer): This approach depends on the company culture. If you don’t want to publicly raise the question at a Town Hall, consider speaking with trusted influencers (e.g., employee resource group leads). If you feel comfortable and safe, ask your supervisor or HR business partner, “I’ve been reading about pay equity audits. How does the company conduct them?” This is a neutral information question.

The part most people skip

A pay equity audit is a company-level tool. Your individual negotiation is a person-level tool. They are not substitutes. They are layers.

This is the move I see mid-career women miss most often. They wait for the system to be fair, instead of operating both inside the system (annual merit conversations, performance documentation) and on top of it (pay equity advocacy, market benchmarking, direct negotiation at every offer).

You are allowed to do all of it.

What part of this conversation do you want to rehearse before having it for real? Hit reply and tell me.

Last week, I wrote about the overlap between what you care about, what you’re skilled at, and what the market pays for. This week, I’m going deeper into the passion and interests circle. It asks for something specific and potentially uncomfortable.

What you care about vs. what you’ve decided to care about

These are two different lists, and I see clients struggle to parse them out.

A government program manager says she cares deeply about public service. A nonprofit leader says her passion is mission-driven work. A product manager says she’s interested in developing inclusive products.

That may be true. It may also be the answer that sounds right. The answer shaped by years of professional identity, what supervisors rewarded, what looks good in a cover letter, or what your colleagues expect you to say at a networking event.

The longer you’ve been in your career, the harder it is to tell the difference.

The question that cuts through

Here’s the one I want you to sit with: what would you do if no one was paying you to do it?

Not what you would do if you were rich or what you dreamed about at 22.

What do you find yourself doing, reading, talking, or caring about, as the person you are today? Not the person you planned to be. The person you are, with the responsibilities you have, and the energy you have left at the end of a Tuesday.

That answer is closer to your real passion list than anything you’ve put on a resume.

It’s also harder to answer than it sounds, because many of us have been performing our interests for so long that we’ve lost track of the difference between what we care about and what we’ve decided to care about.

That’s what happens when your interests are also your livelihood for fifteen years. The professional version of you and the whole you merge, and untangling them requires deliberate effort.

The exclusion question

There’s a second question most worksheets skip entirely: what parts of past roles did you dread, even when you were good at them?

That answer belongs in this circle too. It’s where you start triaging.

Being good at something doesn’t mean you should keep doing it. Being asked to do it, getting promoted for it, being known for it — none of that obligates you to build the next chapter around it.

I work with women who are excellent at people management and would rather never manage another person. Women who are skilled at stakeholder communications but find the work depleting, or who have built reputations on a skill they no longer want to use.

The exclusion list is the most underused tool in mid-career planning. It’s what tells you where not to go, which is sometimes more useful than knowing exactly where to head.

The “should” interests audit

The last piece of this circle is the hardest. Look at your Passion & Interests list and flag the items that are there because they sound right.

The ones that look good on paper or what other people expect of you. The ones you’ve convinced yourself you want because the alternative feels too uncertain.

Star those items to flag for re-examination.

Some of them will turn out to be real interests after you’ve stress-tested them. Others will reveal themselves as career-identity holdovers from a version of you that doesn’t exist anymore.

Either way, naming them is the first step. You can’t separate real passion from inherited passion if you won’t admit which one is which.

Where to focus this week

If you’re working through the worksheet, the two questions I want you to spend the most time on are four (what you want to avoid) and five (your “should” interests).

Those two together eliminate the dead weight. What’s left is closer to a usable answer.

Download the Power Position Exercise here.

Next week, I’m going into the Skills & Experience circle, and the question that matters more than “What am I qualified to do?”

What came up when you worked through your Passion & Interests list? Was the “should” pile longer than you expected? That’s usually the most telling part.

If you've worked through the Power Position Exercise and want a second set of eyes on it, The Power Position Review is open through June 3. One 45-minute session, one circle, one next step.