If you say you're fine whenever someone asks how you are, and you couldn't quite say what's behind it, this is for you. A lot of capable, senior women get to a point where their working life looks like the one they planned and feels flatter than it should. 'Fine' is the word that covers it.

What 'fine' sounds like

Fine makes sense as an answer, because for everyone around you it's true. The job pays, the family's looked after and nobody's in crisis. So when the flat feeling turns up, there's nowhere for it to go. You can't call it unhappiness because you're not unhappy, and you can't call it burnout because you're still getting everything done.

You hear it at the school gate, in a catch up with your manager and when a friend asks how work's going. It closes the conversation before it starts, and most of us are very good at it.

Why it's so hard to say anything truer

Many of the women I work with used to like their jobs. They worked towards the role for years, they're good at it and they can see the value they add, which is exactly why the flat feeling is so hard to name. Complaining about something you chose and worked for can feel ungrateful.

There's also being the one everyone leans on. People assume that because you've handled everything before, you'll handle this too, so hardly anyone asks how you actually are, and when someone does they get 'fine' as well.

And there's a practical reason. If you said more, the next question would be what you want to do about it, and you may not know. You might not be able to leave the job because the income matters and your family relies on you, and there's no spare month to think it through. So the feeling gets put off until later, and later turns into a year.

Why the usual advice doesn't fit

Most advice from here is to find your passion, take a leap or book a retreat. All of it assumes you can step away for a while, and if you can't, it becomes one more thing that isn't available to you.

None of it is wrong. It just comes too early, because it asks you to decide what's next before you've seen where you are.

Start with where you are

The right next step looks quite different depending on your situation. You might be in the middle of a change and genuinely not know what comes after. You might be the capable one who keeps everything running, at a cost. Your life might look sorted from the outside while a lot of what fills your days no longer feels like you, or you might know exactly what you need to do and keep waiting for the right time.

These are different places, and each one asks for a different kind of help. This is the territory I work in as a transition coach, and it's what I built the Transition Intelligence framework around.

Where to start

I've put twelve statements together into a short Check-In. You choose how true each one feels for you right now, it takes about five minutes and it's free. You'll see where you are in your transition and what I'd work on next, and you don't need to have anything figured out first.

Take the Messy Middle Check-In