Five ways for women in their 50s to feel happier at work, by a careers coach

Many midlifers find themselves facing existential questions: What makes life meaningful? What do I care about? What legacy do I want to have? Who am I? As priorities shift, caregiving responsibilities might ramp up, and time marches on, it’s normal to stop and consider the choices you’ve made. This might manifest as doubts about your marriage – the rate of over-50s divorces are consistently rising – but it’s also often work or your career path. Around 57 per cent of women in perimenopause or menopause question their career direction or want to quit their jobs, according to a 2026 study by HR publication People Management. Polly May, 49, is a business and confidence coach based in London, who works with women who are re-assessing their day-to-day life. “When women first have young children,” she says, “they likely shove their needs low down on the list, and job-wise they’ve perhaps gone part-time or given up work. Or they carry on working hard, bending over backwards to try and juggle everything, pretty much expiring from exhaustion in the process. “Then, they hit perimenopause and might be rushing to meet work deadlines, but also still doing the laundry, helping the kids get through their GSCES and A-Levels, and getting them into university, and all those things which I know can pile on the pressure, because I’ve done them all.” May finds that the women she works with stand back at some point and ask themselves, “Wait, what am I actually doing? What do I want for my future? What if I didn’t do this job, but I did something different? What will life look like when my kids leave home?”. Shorts Mid-life is often framed as a time of decline, rather than opportunity, and there are undoubtedly, for many women, a spectrum of pressures and challenges – yet there are ways to make it a more fulfilling, meaningful phase of life, says May. After all, the number of women over-50 in the workforce has grown consistently in recent decades, and, on average, women don’t retire until at least their mid-60s, according to ONS data. Here, May explains the five key questions a midlife woman should ask herself, in search of a happier working life. Before you quit, ask yourself what percentage of your job you enjoy “When I was moaning about my previous role at the dinner table,” says May, “saying it was such hard work and I wasn’t getting the job satisfaction I wanted, my 17-year-old son said; ‘Well, why are you doing it?’ It really prompted me to think, ‘OK at what point am I going to stop a job that isn’t right for me anymore?'” May says she was enjoying less than 50 per cent of the work she was doing, and when she speaks to women, she asks them to work out what percentage they enjoy. “If it’s not [at least] 60 per cent, you’ve got a problem,” she says. “You might find that you really don’t like 10 per cent, you find 30 per cent to be boring paperwork, but you enjoy 60 per cent – that’s a pretty good percentage. “But if you’re looking at less than 50 per cent, it’s worth thinking whether you can do something else.” That much time spent unhappy, says May, is going to impact your sense of self, and sense of hope in the future. List the five things that matter most to you May asks her clients to work our their top five non-negotiable values. “What do you actually care about?” she asks “What would make you feel that your work is more important, or enjoyable?” May says that so many people get out of university, get a job that they’ve not thought about very much, because they just, understandably, need a job. “But then, 20 years later, you’re like, ‘OK, I’ve had a career in marketing and I didn’t actually plan this, and I don’t even know if I like it’. If you find yourself feeling stuck, or wondering what else you might have done, it’s worth re-assessing what matters to you, because that can help you work out what to do next.” May had a client in management consultancy, who felt in mid-life that she was weary and unexcited by her role. She thought long and hard about what drives her, what she’s passionate about, what she would find a good use of this time in her life – and she went to work in local politics. Remember your identities beyond your job title “People who feel that their work is a great deal of their identity, often don’t really think about who they are beyond that role,” says May. “It could be anything – ‘I like doing Lego’, ‘I love my garden’, ‘I’m a mother’, ‘I’m a good cook’. To feel less stuck in work, it’s important to remember everyone has various identities.” This is important, because when one’s sense of identity is totally rooted in work, there are then many limiting beliefs about what you might be, and what success might look like to you. “Yet, success at age 50 looks different than it did at age 20,” says May. “That success may be forging on, or it may involve prioritising mental wellbeing over high salaries or prestige.” Sometimes, something less “impressive” on paper, might make for a happier, better life that brings out other parts of your personality. “That may not be a career shift,” says May, “but it could be taking up volunteering, or a new hobby, or re-training on the side of your job. The point is to stop and think about what skills and interests you have that aren’t necessarily part of your job description.” If you’ve been, say, a management consultant for years, you might feel attached to it, and fear a loss of identity that may come with a career change. “But once you realise that it doesn’t really matter to the world what you do,” says May, “as long as you’re comfortable with it, then it can open up new job ideas.” May, who was herself a professional opera singer and then a director of music, has had clients move from high-powered city jobs into childminding, and headteacher roles into counselling training. May says not to let fear get in the way of rethinking your life choices (Photo: Barney Jones) Picture what your life will look like in five years “I do a lot of ‘future visioning’,” says May, “which sounds a bit woo-woo, but it’s not really. It’s just encouraging yourself to think and articulate in detail what the future would ideally look like.” Imagining an ideal role, or career, might help guide you to examine what isn’t working about your current job situation. Equally, it might be that it’s worth looking at your personal life, as well as work. May had a client who had been a stay-at-home mother, and was glad she’d done that, but now the children were about to leave home, she felt she needed something else. “She was in tears, broken about who she was and what her identity would be.” She decided in the end she wanted to train as a therapist. At the same time, she also realised that she needed to make more time for her marriage, because in three years time when her children were out of the nest, she wanted to be enjoying this new phase with her husband. “Her marriage was good, but she didn’t want to be empty nesting and then realise her marriage had fallen apart. She wanted to do things together, like they used to, before children.” When did you last give yourself 10 minutes without your phone? “I don’t believe that very many people, especially with Instagram and all these distractions,” says May, “give themselves 10 minutes to think properly without any anything else going on. I’d advise sitting on a park bench and really having a think about your life, and even small pockets of time like that may help reignite your hopes and dreams. Allow you to actually consider what’s possible.” May says that the key to all this is to be brave, and think without too many limits. If you’ve long wondered about starting your own business, but don’t see yourself as an entrepreneur, question why that is. If you think you’d be happy working with children, but you wonder if it’s as “prestigious” as the corporate career you already do, question why that is. If you want to change careers but feel you need to stick it out until retirement, do you actually have to do that? “The biggest factor in all of this is fear,” says May, “and it takes bravery to rethink your choices. Allow yourself to figure out what might actually make your day-to-day life more in line with the things that matter to you at this point in your life.”