The Wobbly Middle: Women's Career Crossroads In Midlife

One night Wendy Welpton woke up in agony. She was a fit and healthy runner who had always taken good care of herself. Four years of chronic pain followed, with no clear answer from anyone on how to fix herself.

What eventually changed things was a book, a lot of reading, and going back to study in midlife: first anatomy and physiology, then a movement certification. Out of that came Reclaim Movement and her book, Move Well For Life.

This a conversation about noticing the signs and about making changes through small shifts.

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How do you turn a conversation into a £68m turnover business? Helen Cannon started a managed travel co in her late 30s (with five children at home!) off the back of a conversation in a restaurant. While the whole industry was pushing clients onto booking tools and stripping out the human contact, Helen saw that her ability to build good, lasting relationships would set Ison Travel apart.

In a little over a decade, Helen has grown Ison into a super-scaler operating across five countries, with a workforce that is 70% women. Within that, 25% are over 55, and 5% over 65.

After over a decade in the family business, Heather took the painful decision to close its doors and change careers. The decision was long in the making but the relief was quick in flooding her senses. Now in her 40s, Heather retrained as a hypnotherapist, starting from scratch with zero clients and, in her words, imposter syndrome through the roof.

Propelled by her purpose-led approach, Heather now works with everyone from burnt-out professionals to Comrades ultramarathon runners.

In this episode Heather and Patsy talk about what hypnotherapy actually is (nothing to do with being made...

“From the very earliest point of your career, you're building a wonderful mental Rolodex of people who might roll into any future part of your life, and I could've been more confident with that.” Dolly Jones, former editor of vogue.com, now an author building a portfolio career, reassures and encourages those of us at a career crossroads to get in touch with old friends and colleagues for encouragement and guidance.

For twelve years Dolly Jones ran vogue.com, at exactly the moment the fashion world looked most like The Devil Wears Prada. When she returned to work...

Values-led and commercially minded Georgina Atwell turned a career crossroads moment and her knowledge of the publishing industry into two book businesses that give back.

Georgina grew up with chocolate and books running through her veins — a family chocolate business on one side, a lifelong love of reading on the other. She spent eight happy years at Penguin, then was made redundant while on maternity leave.

From her kitchen table she built Toppsta, a platform where children recommend books to each other, now home to more than 160,000 reviews. She did it on a shoestring: starting on...

Travel blog income, going viral on Instagram and hut-to-hut hiking with kids - Bea Searle turned school holiday travel into a midlife career.

Bea Searle has never quite known what she wanted to do but she is totally at ease with that. A part-qualified accountant who escaped the Big Four, she worked in top-end travel until her second child made the five-week India trips impossible. In lockdown, she started a travel blog, Wild Bee Outdoors, for the joy of it but as the world opened up so she left it go.

Eighteen months ago she...

Rita King is a Legendary Siren - a mermaid at Florida's Weeki Wachee Springs - who returned to the water after a whole working life away. She first performed in the famous mermaid shows as a teenager in the late 1960s, then raised a family, taking the sensible route to pay the bills. But the pull to the water never faded.

When she retired from the US Postal Service at 60, Rita retrained at mermaid school and waited four years for a place among the Legendary Sirens to open up. Now she runs adult mermaid camps for women...

For women rethinking their careers in midlife, Season 4 of The Wobbly Middle is here and this summer it belongs to the women who bring us the sunshine.

The holiday you book. The book you pack. The swimwear you brave. The financial confidence to enjoy it.

Host Patsy Day speaks to women who have navigated a career crossroads in midlife and gone on to build businesses, solve overlooked problems, or finally pursue long-neglected dreams. Like the mum of five who built a multi-million pound travel business and the US postal worker who went back to mermaid...

Executive MBA, going back to study as a mature student, and finding your tribe in midlife with Urmi Dutta-Roy (CFO, The Folio Society) and Louise Welch (ex-PlayStation, now working fractionally) are executive MBA alumnae and good friends.

In this conversation they talk about the difficulty women have creating space to investing in themselves; about stepping away from the nine-to-five, and how "the 100 year life" changes our attitudes towards learning and the shape of our careers. They are honest about the trade-offs (financial, practical, emotional) and the rewards too of going back to study: community, confidence, a lens...

Non-linear careers, midlife career change and what it takes to walk into a boardroom. Shefaly Yogendra - engineer, Cambridge PhD, portfolio board director and author of Uncharted Spaces: Reset the Agenda. Reimagine the Boardroom - joins Patsy on her book’s launch day.

Curiosity and patience are the golden threads running through Shefaly's life, and in this episode they take us from beehives in rural Kenya to onion warehouses in India, by way of a black cab in London.

If you’re at a career crossroads, feeling returning ambition, or quietly reimagining what a second act...

Modelling, Motherhood and the Microbiome | Catherine Hurley Arbibe on Gut Health & Investigative Wellness Journalist Rebecca Newman

From behind the scenes at the world's biggest fashion shows to the science behind the gut microbiome - Catherine Hurley Arbibe shows us a new road to gut health.

Catherine read medicine at Oxford, modelled internationally gracing the covers of Vogue, Marie Claire and Cosmo, and is now the founder of NEWROAD30, a gut health supplement developed with scientists from Oxford, INRAE Paris and Queen's University Belfast. Catherine talks candidly about the reality of life as an international model...

Women in midlife came of age between punk and the Spice Girls. That spirit doesn't leave you. If you're returning to work after a career break, rebuilding career confidence, or just need a shot of self-belief to counter the midlife angst, Jacquie and Rebecca will have you powering up.

Jacquie Duckworth worked in the media on iconic brands ranging from Country Life to FHM, Grazia, and the Times before co-founding Visible Start, a free 10-week career returner programme. Rebecca Byrne is one of its graduates: a former actor and NCT trainer who now works in community health — an...

Comedy as a midlife career move — and why humour is one of the most powerful tools for change and an anti-dote to midlife angst.

What if the thing that makes you funny is the same thing that makes you powerful? Journalist, author and activist, Lynn Harris, has spent three decades using comedy to drive cultural change. From co-creating the cult 1990s superhero Breakup Girl, Lynn has now founded Gold Comedy, an online comedy school where women in their 40s and 50s are bringing the most fire.

In this conversation, Lynn and Patsy talk about the ge...

A career pivot story about retraining as a psychologist after a career break — for women starting over in midlife.

What happens when you realise the career you built isn't the life you want? Carri Simmons spent years as a drama teacher until the toll of staying in the wrong role became impossible to ignore. "I had to leave because I wasn't able to be open to the world because I was in fight or flight. I was in a trauma mode."

In this episode, Patsy talks to her long-distance bestie about walking away from teaching, go...

Returning to work after a career break — the psychology of luck, neuroplasticity, and starting again in midlife.

Julianne Miles knows what it takes to return to work because she's done it herself. After stepping away from marketing when her children were small, she spent over a year asking herself "can I really start again?" — a question many of us will recognise. The answer was yes: she retrained as a psychologist and went on to co-found Career Returners, a social enterprise that has changed how employers and policymakers think about career breaks.

In this episode, Julianne shar...

The neuroscience behind action boards / vision boards and goal-setting — and how to use them at a career crossroads.

Do action boards actually work, or are they just arts and crafts with ambition? In this bonus episode, investigative wellness journalist Rebecca Newman draws on the research of neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart, author of The Source, to explain what's really going on in our brains when we make an action board — and why they might be exactly the tool you need in your wobbly middle.

Then theory meets practice as Patsy and Rebecca head to the craft room...

A career pivot story about leaving corporate life after redundancy and going back to study — from risk consultant to magistrate and PhD researcher.

When a long-term relationship ended in her twenties, Pip Symington chose adventure. She landed a job in Asia and spent twenty years working across Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Japan as a risk consultant and loving every minute of it. She said yes to everything, until one day it was gone.

Made redundant and reeling Pip turned to friends and a bit of therapy before redesigning the shape of her working life. Sh...

Thinking about leaving corporate life and building a business, breaking back in after a career break, going back to study, or just taking your long-neglected dream seriously? The Wobbly Middle is a podcast for women rethinking their careers in midlife.

Season 3 has a light "Going Back to Study" thread running thought it. It launches on Blue Monday, 19 January — that mid-January moment when morale plummets, resolutions flatline, and job searches spike. So we're sending in reinforcements.

Patsy talks to women who've navigated career change in their 40s and beyond — a journalist who founded a comedy, a teac...

Actress, writer, podcaster, and mother of three, Salima Saxton joins The Wobbly Middle Season 2 finale to talk about reclaiming yourself. From centre stage to the school gate and back again, Salima shares what it took to reawaken her creative life after years on mute.

In this warm, frank conversation, she reflects on the disconnection so many women feel after stepping back from their careers - and how she wrote her way back into her multi-hyphenate roles. Together with hosts Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day, Salima dives into the messy middle of rediscovery, thrills at the power...

We talk about social media careers, learning tech in your 40s and a career pivot into digital.

From olympic dreams to a digital sisterhood, Joy Foster traded a career in the City for a quiver of arrows, followed love across borders and then and then, somewhat accidentally, became a digital entrepreneur.

Her creation, TechPixies, now serves as both launchpad and lifeline for women looking to pivot, re-enter the workforce, or start from scratch.

In this episode, Joy talks about what it means to bloom wherever you’re planted even when the soil is fo...

Liberating and taboo-busting, femtech founder Rachael Newton (former hedge fund lawyer turned entrepreneur) is part of a new wave of founders, thinkers, and advocates throwing open the bathroom door and reshaping the policies, products, and possibilities of period products and menstrual care.

In this episode, Rachael tells us how she designed Nixit, the revolutionary, reusable menstrual disc after she realised her tampon waste took so long to break down it would likely survive the apocalypse alongside the cockroach.

Rachael assessed the alternatives in the market and found them wanting. (Hell, there are more gadgets to...

Where female investors bring the values—and the returns.

Experienced fund manager Leila Kardouche knew that to keep doing what she loved—investing—it had to be on her own terms. So she co-founded Variis Partners, a women-led firm that’s diverse by name (Variis means “diverse” in Latin) and by nature, built on a culture rarely found in traditional finance.

In the high-stakes investment world, Leila is confident about what sets the foundation for success: her age, experience, financial stability, and wisdom—along with the complementary strengths of her co-founders. On taking bold steps later in life...

Sophia Champion de Crespigny loved physics. She studied civil engineering for 8 years, fascinated by structure and design. In the workplace, however, she found herself wading through actual sewage in the field - and the more metaphorical kind in the office. Engineering may have been the plan but it turns out it wasn’t the fit.

When Sophie finally quit, she left without a grand plan, just with the instinct that there was something else out there for her.

We’ve got mail. You've got questions on changing when change is hard, tackling overwhelm and learning tech in your 40s!

Susannah and Patsy open the mailbag and respond to some of your excellent (occasionally panic-tinged) every-woman questions about navigating midlife career change.

This means, Patsy, who usually prefers to hide behind the microphone (and strong opinions about editing), has to sit in front of it. Susannah on the other hand is already on her second podcast of the day—just casually interviewing biotech CEOs before breakfast—and brings her usual mix of energy and insigh...

When Hannah McCracken returned to advertising after a career break raising her children, she anticipated going back at the same level, with some flexibility. She was met with a “no” — neatly packaged as professional advice: expect less.

Less responsibility. Less pay. Less relevance.

But for Hannah, time out never meant value lost. She had built her career at some of the world’s top ad agencies. She knew her worth—and wasn’t about to apologise for the years spent mothering. She rejected the tired narrative that stepping away from work somehow erases your talent, ambition or...

We get the inside scoop on what it was really like producing a live, chaotic political interview with then-candidate Donald Trump — the pressure, the reputational stakes, and Aundrea’s strategies for the toughest of interviews.

This bonus episode is packed with big energy, behind-the-scenes moments plus Aundrea’s “Wobbly Middle” Go-Bag essentials.

Listen now! Don’t miss the full conversation with Aundrea Cline-Thomas on transferrable skills and new careers for journalists in our main episode, Lights, Camera...Pivot!

The Wobbly Middle is a podcast for women rethinking their careers in midlife. Each season, Patsy and Su...

Newsrooms collapsing. Journalism jobs vanishing. Three-time Emmy winner and TV reporter Aundrea Cline-Thomas saw the signs flashing like a breaking news ticker: the industry she loved was falling apart live on air.

Stepping behind the camera, Aundrea launched her own production company, Mountain Court Media, as well as the community initiative The Rewrite to help other journalists navigate their own pivots.

With the poise of a prime-time pro and the candour of a hot mic, she shares the behind-the-scenes on walking away from a career in front of the camera to build a new career — an...

Do you feel a pull towards something new but aren’t sure what’s next?

So do we! The Wobbly Middle is a podcast for women rethinking their careers. Each season, Patsy and Susannah sit down with women who share their career pivot stories — leaving corporate life and building businesses, breaking back in after career breaks, going back to study, and taking their long-neglected dreams seriously.

Following a No. 1 ranking on Apple Podcasts GB Careers chart, hosts Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day—who leapt off their own corporate career ladders—return for Season 2 with more inspi...

Donna was in her 40s when she picked up a camera. A stay-at-home mum in a new country, she poured her passion for food into a blog to fill the long school days. Good photos were essential, so—like every resourceful mother—she taught herself. The result? Drool-worthy, award-winning images that launched a stellar career.

Now in her 50s, professional food photographer Donna Crous has cancer. With the same creativity, determination, and heart that shaped her career, she’s using her Diary of a Booby Queen to educate women about secondary breast cancer and to give them the co...

Notebooks at the ready—this is a masterclass in taking ideas to thriving ventures from one of the UK’s most dynamic businesswomen. Debbie Wosskow OBE has built, scaled, and sold multimillion-pound businesses, including Love Home Swap, and now leads the charge for female founded businesses with the £250 million Invest in Women Taskforce and her new venture The Better Menopause.

In this candid conversation, Debbie shares the lessons learned from decades of experience: the sunlit uplands as well as the darkness. With a different business for every decade of her life, Debbie’s playbook is packed with insight...

Born in the New Mexico deserts where running water was a luxury, Dr. Emily Connally was an unlikely contender for the ivory towers of Harvard and Oxford — but with grit, brilliance, and a touch of rebellion, she soared. Yet her greatest achievements may not be in the lab...

When the pandemic struck, Emily applied the same expertise she used to map the brain’s complex pathways to chart a thriving grassroots network. Starting with a schoolgate foodbank, she built Cherwell Collective which is transforming how local networks tackle food waste and sustainability.

From elite academia to c...

Sophie was 37 when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Recovered but with a heavy dose of heartache, she had a choice to make: return to the legal career she had spent years building or follow her passion into the fires of the kitchen.

With humour, grit, and inspiring zest, Sophie Archer reveals how her strength grew to fuel her culinary dreams - all the way to MasterChef: The Professionals. This is a story that will ignite your own ambitions and leave you hungry for possibility.

Midwife turned femtech founder Nina Van Schaick felt a deep calling to support mothers through the transformative experience of child birth. But as she witnessed the trauma caused by failures in maternal care, she knew change was urgently needed. With less than 2% of pharmaceutical R&D dedicated to maternal health, Nina decided to take action herself and developed Peripear, a groundbreaking product designed to minimise perineal tearing.

Join warm, funny, and bold Nina as she shares how she moved from the delivery suite to the boardroom to create meaningful change for women’s health.

What happens when one of the most influential woman in the City resigns at the top of her game? Dame Helena Morrissey stunned the financial world when she stepped down as CEO of Newton Asset Management at 50 — without a fully formed plan. In this compelling episode, Helena opens up about the unfinished business that drove her forward; and how she learned to embrace discomfort as she forged a new path.

As one of the most prominent advocates for equal pay and opportunity, Helena also sets out her powerful vision for getting more mid-career women into investment roles. Li...

Helen was made redundant while pregnant. In the playground, she watched as skilled mums - lawyers, accountants, architects - pushed swings, frustrated by the lack of jobs that could accommodate family life. Grabbing her phone and laptop, she decided to take matters into her own hands. In this episode, Helen Wright of 9-2-3 tells us of life at the forefront of the movement that is reshaping our working lives.

The Wobbly Middle is a podcast for women rethinking their careers. Each season, Patsy and Susannah sit down with women who share their career pivot stories — leaving co...

When their often young, sub-fertile patients needed perimenopause help, Drs Susanne Hooper and Melanie Hacking took a sharp right turn in their careers...

The Wobbly Middle is a podcast for women rethinking their careers. Each season, Patsy and Susannah sit down with women who share their career pivot stories — leaving corporate life and building businesses, breaking back in after career breaks, going back to study, and taking their long-neglected dreams seriously.

New episodes of The Wobble Middle drop every two weeks. You can also read our Wobbly Middle musings on Substack at The Wobbly Middle. Yo...

Patsy quit her job. Susannah quit the city. Now they’re on a quest to find the path through the wobbly middle of their careers - that in between space at the career crossroads where you know you want change but don't know how to move forward.

Looking for some career change inspiration? This podcast is for every woman who’s asking “What's next for me?”.

Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day sit down with women who share their career pivot stories about leaving corporate life and building businesses, breaking back in after career breaks, going ba...