The Most Personal Transformation Leaders Rarely Talk About

A couple of years ago, I started becoming someone I didn't quite recognise at work.

I was increasingly irritated. I was grumbling more than usual.

My tolerance was lower. My filter wasn't always working. And sometimes the diplomatic response I knew I should make wasn't the one that came out of my mouth.

This wasn't particularly like me.

I've spent much of my career navigating complex organisations, difficult stakeholders and challenging conversations. I know how to read a room. I know when to push and when to step back. I know how to disagree without necessarily making the disagreement the story.

But suddenly, that became harder.

I remember one particular conversation with a colleague. Something was said that I found dismissive. Normally, I would have paused, considered what was really going on, and chosen my response carefully.

Instead, I bit back.

And I remember thinking afterwards: Where did that come from?

There were other moments like it. Not catastrophic. But enough for me to know that something was different.

One colleague — someone with very high emotional intelligence — noticed. Rather than judging my behaviour, he simply asked:

“Are you okay?”

It was such a small question. But looking back, it was an extraordinarily important one. Because at the time, I wasn't entirely sure that I was.

When the transformation is happening to you

I've spent much of my career helping organisations and leaders navigate transformation.

I've worked through major organisational change, digital transformation, restructures, new operating models and the very human responses that accompany them.

I understand change. Or at least I thought I did.

What I hadn't understood was how different transformation feels when you're the one being changed by it.

Around this time, I spoke to my doctor. I had been navigating perimenopause for years, but I was now transitioning into menopause and my hormonal profile had shifted. My HRT was adjusted. And gradually, I started to feel more like myself again.

I want to be careful here.

This is my personal experience, not a universal prescription for menopause or HRT. But it helped me understand something I hadn't recognised while I was in the middle of it. Some of what was happening to me at work wasn't simply about work.

Menopause didn't create the problems

This is where the story becomes more complicated. Because there were things happening professionally that I genuinely disagreed with.

The strategic direction of the organisation was changing. Work I believed deeply in was being deprioritised. There were decisions I questioned. There were behaviours I found difficult. And there were times when I felt that my experience and contribution weren't being valued in the way they once had been.

Menopause didn't invent those concerns. They were real.

What menopause appeared to change, for me, was my ability to regulate how I responded to them.

The filter that had served me throughout my career became less reliable. I could still recognise the diplomatic response. I just couldn't always summon it quickly enough.

There were moments when I would hear myself saying something and think: Actually, I still believe that. I just wouldn't normally have said it that way.

That distinction matters.

Because one of the dangers in talking about menopause at work is that we inadvertently give organisations another reason to dismiss women's legitimate concerns.

“She was hormonal.”

“She was emotional.”

“She wasn't coping.”

That isn't the conversation I'm advocating. Quite the opposite. We need to be capable of holding two truths at once: a woman can have legitimate professional concerns and be navigating physiological changes that affect how she experiences and responds to the environment around her.

Being right doesn't protect your reputation

I learned something uncomfortable during that period:

Being right doesn't protect your reputation.

You can have legitimate concerns. You can see risks that others don't. You can even eventually be proved right.

But how you communicate those concerns still matters. Particularly when you've spent decades building professional credibility.

There was a professional cost to some of my responses during that period. And that's difficult for me to admit. Because I had spent years building a reputation as someone who could navigate complexity, influence stakeholders and work constructively through difficult situations.

Suddenly, I wasn't always showing up as that person. And I didn't understand why.

Am I losing my edge?

This was perhaps the hardest part. I started questioning myself.

Was I becoming less capable? Was I losing my judgement? Was I simply not as sharp as I used to be? Was this what getting older looked like?

For a woman who had built much of her identity around competence, those questions were deeply unsettling.

And this is something I don't think we talk about enough when we talk about menopause.

We talk about hot flushes. We talk about sleep. Increasingly, we're talking about brain fog.

But we talk much less about what happens when an experienced woman begins questioning the capabilities she has spent decades building.

Memory. Concentration. Word retrieval. Confidence. Emotional regulation. Professional identity.

For some women, changes in these areas can be profoundly disorienting. And when nobody around you is talking about it, it's remarkably easy to assume the problem is simply you.

Later, I moved into another piece of work. Different environment. Different context. And there I was again.

Thinking strategically. Building relationships. Solving complex problems. Clients valued what I brought.

My experience hadn't disappeared. My capability hadn't vanished.

That mattered enormously. Because it helped me separate what I was experiencing from who I believed I had become.

What I would do differently now

There is one particular professional situation from that period that I have replayed many times.

I had significant concerns about what was being proposed. And I expressed them. Very directly.

Looking back, I sometimes think:

I should have kept my mouth shut.

But that's not quite the lesson. I shouldn't have silenced myself. I should have left the conversation. Given myself time to think. Gathered the evidence. Documented the potential risks. And sent a considered, evidence-based response explaining my concerns and my recommended approach.

In other words, I should have created enough space between the reaction and the response to allow my professional judgement to catch up.

Because the lesson wasn't:

Don't speak.

It was:

Protect the credibility of what you have to say.

That's a lesson I wish I had understood earlier. And it's one I think extends far beyond menopause.

Self-leadership isn't simply knowing what you think. Sometimes it's knowing what you need in order to communicate what you think effectively.

We need menopause literacy, not menopause assumptions

This is also why I believe workplaces need much greater menopause literacy.

But literacy doesn't mean looking at every woman over 45 who is behaving differently and thinking:

Menopause.

That would be both ridiculous and dangerous.

Greater menopause literacy means creating workplaces sophisticated enough to recognise that experienced women may be navigating significant physiological change without making assumptions about their capability.

It means managers understanding that changes in concentration, memory, sleep, confidence or emotional regulation can occur during the menopause transition.

It means women having enough knowledge to recognise what may be happening to themselves.

And it means creating enough psychological safety for a conversation to occur without a woman fearing that disclosure will permanently change how her professional capability is perceived.

Sometimes the appropriate leadership response isn't an immediate judgement about performance. Sometimes it begins with a much simpler question:

“Are you okay? Is something going on?”

I know how powerful that question can be. Because somebody asked it of me.

Not the beginning of the end

I'm 60 now. And one of the things I feel most strongly about is that menopause should not automatically be framed as the beginning of professional decline.

For many women, it arrives at precisely the point when we have accumulated extraordinary professional capital.

Experience. Judgement. Pattern recognition. Relationships. Perspective.

The ability to see around corners because we've been around a few of them before.

And yet it can also coincide with a period when some women begin questioning themselves more deeply than they have in years.

That's the paradox I want us to talk about. Not because every woman experiences menopause in the same way. We don't.

And not because menopause explains every professional challenge a woman encounters in midlife. It doesn't.

But because for some women, this is a significant transformation occurring at precisely the point when they have the most experience to contribute.

Perhaps the question isn't simply:

How do we help women survive menopause at work?

Perhaps it's:

How do we help women lead through it?

Because some of the most important transformations we will ever lead won't be happening in our organisations.

They'll be happening within us.

And perhaps self-leadership is understanding how to navigate those changes without losing sight of the experience, judgement and capability we've spent a lifetime building.