This week, I turn 49. It also happens to be my wedding anniversary. Hubby and I got married on my 30th birthday, which means every year I get to mark two things at once: how far we've come together, and how far I've come in myself.

This year, something feels noticeably different. Not harder. Clearer. And I want to share what this year has actually taught me about leadership, about success, and about the kind of life I'm building from here. Not the tidy version. The honest one.

At 30, I was ambitious, capable, and working very hard. I'd followed a man to New Zealand, it hadn't worked out, and I'd quietly built a serious HR career in the wreckage of that plan. I was also, if I'm honest, constantly performing. Performing competence. Performing certainty. Performing the version of myself I thought was most acceptable to the room.

At 49, I don't do that anymore. Not because I stopped caring. Because I stopped needing to. And that distinction has changed everything about how I lead and how I show up.

Let me tell you what I genuinely care less about at 49. Not as a brag. As a relief.

I care less about being liked by everyone in the room. I still care deeply about the women I serve. But I've stopped contorting myself to be palatable to people who aren't my people.

I care less about appearing to have everything together. Last year was what I called my swan year, smooth on the surface and legs paddling furiously underneath. I was running coaching sessions, managing a part-time contract, moving house twice, supporting my mum from the other side of the world, and showing up for my teenage girls. At 49, I'd rather just say: this is what's actually going on.

I care less about whether my path looks logical to someone else. I've lived in seven countries. HR director, relocation consultant with a newborn in Mumbai, walking group organiser in Chongqing, coaching award winner in Delhi doing pro bono work because I couldn't get a work visa. None of that looks linear. It's all connected. At 49, I can finally see the thread.

And I care less about the timeline. The idea that there's a window for ambition, and that window closes, is one of the most damaging things we tell women. The women I work with who are starting businesses in their 40s and 50s are not behind. They're better resourced, better boundaried, and far less willing to settle for work that doesn't mean something.

There's a conversation I come back to more than any other. My father died in September 2021, during Auckland's longest lockdown. I couldn't get to him. The borders were closed. Before he died, we had a last real conversation, and in it he told me something that has become the backbone of everything I've built since.

He told me I could do more. Not that I was falling short. That there was more in me than I was using. He'd watched me build communities in cities where I knew nobody, win a global coaching award doing pro bono work, start a business at 40 with no guarantee it would work. His assessment was: you're just getting started. I hear those words on my morning walks. I hear them when something is hard and I'm deciding whether to keep going. 'Em, you can do more.' One of the clearest signs that 49 feels different from 39 is that I finally believe him.

For most of my career, ambition meant doing more, taking on more, proving more. That's not sustainable ambition. That's performance with a plan.

Sustainable ambition looks different at 49. It means building something I actually want to still be building in five years. It means saying no to work that pays well but drains everything. It means designing a week around what I need to produce my best thinking, not around what looks impressively full.

Years ago in Taipei, I made a deliberate decision: I wouldn't fill the gap immediately. I'd spent years filling every gap in every city. This time I waited. That pause led to a school gate conversation that eventually became The Leap To Lead.

7 countries. 25 year career. Two daughters who are watching. One business built from the wreckage of a plan that didn't go the way I expected. And a birthday this week that feels, for the first time in a long time, like something genuinely worth marking.

I'm less interested in proving now. More interested in building something real, being present for the people I love, and showing my girls what it looks like to lead your own life rather than manage it. That is what 49 is teaching me.

Before you go, one question to sit with, what are you less interested in proving now?

You don't have to answer me. But I'd encourage you to answer yourself.