76: The Midlife Performance Shift

So it wasn't that long ago that this was an incredibly taboo conversation.

This was like, "Well, first of all, I don't want people to know that I'm midlife." Mm, sorry, we kind of already know when we've hit midlife.

It's not that much of a secret.

But also, we didn't want people to think that it was going to take away from our abilities.

We didn't wanna look like we weren't thriving and performing.

I'm so glad that this is a conversation that's coming to the table more often and that it's becoming more commonplace and more common speak to talk about this.

So picture this.

Picture the woman who is used to having all of her you-know-what together, like running the meetings, managing the teams, making the decisions all day long, and then suddenly something starts to change.

They start waking up at 3:00 a.m.

They can't find the word that she absolutely knows during the meeting.

Energy starts to crash in the afternoon.

She might become more irritable or anxious, more than usual.

Workouts can feel harder.

She can feel less energized.

Recovery feels different, and she doesn't necessarily think like, "Ah, maybe this is perimenopause." She's probably thinking, "What is wrong with me?" You know, menopause isn't just a women's health conversation.

It also has a workplace performance conversation written all over it.

This is not about women becoming less capable.

It's really this change in our physiology, and it's not got anything to do with a loss of competence.

So the more that we can speak about this and make it more acceptable, the more we're willing to understand that, that these changes are just part of life.

Physiology can change the conditions under which the woman is trying to perform.

So I wanna break down some of the, some of the common things, like we know when we associate menopause, we associate it with hot flashes.

It's so much more than that.

[laughs] Hot flashes get a lot of attention, but they're really just one tiny piece of this menopause transition.

Many of the symptoms that women experience can follow them directly into the workplace.

They did for me, and they do for a lot of my friends.