The Present Day Wise Woman

There's a moment many women hit in midlife, not the sports car kind of crisis, but the quieter, more disorienting version. The one where your life looks fine from the outside and feels strangely hollow from the inside. In this episode, Jennifer Jefferies asks the question that cuts straight through: Who are you when you're not doing everything for everyone else? Jen explores the identity s...

Death is the one appointment none of us can cancel, yet most of us are completely unprepared for it. Glenda Aurisch and Ros Berry are end of life doulas from regional Victoria who are bringing death back into community, back into conversation, and back into the hands of women and families who deserve better than silence and confusion at life's most sacred threshold. They stand in coffins for t...

Reinvention, relationships, emotional healing, and AI. Martha on what it actually takes to stop suffering in silence, why the goal is not to let go of the past but to gain closure on it, and how to move from I need you to I want you. Martha Mok walked away from a 19-year abusive marriage, a 22-year career, and everything she thought she was. Then she built something bigger than all of it. She is t...

In a world where so many women our age are told technology is not for us, Danielle is proof that curiosity has no expiry date. At 69, aromatherapist Danielle Sade is writing songs on Spotify, cutting weeks of research to seconds, and building a creative life most women half her age haven't imagined yet. This conversation will wreck your excuses. SHOW NOTES : AI as an Amplifier: AI amplifies hu...

Walking in Two Worlds: Tammy Silk on Strength, Softness and Showing Up for Yourself What does it really cost to be the strong one? Tammy Silk is a proud Tagalakka / Wallangamma woman, mother, nurse and relational leader who has spent decades showing up for everyone around her. In this conversation she opens up about walking in two worlds, the hidden weight of carrying everyone else, and why true s...

The most dangerous kind of burnout is the one that still shows up to work looking capable. If you're a high-achieving woman in midlife who is exhausted in ways you can't fully explain, waking at 3am, running on caffeine, holding everything together while quietly falling apart, this episode is for you. Jen unpacks why burnout in high-performing women isn't a personal failure. It's t...

What if the biggest obstacle to women's collective power isn't out there, it's between us? Hanna Milling is a PhD cultural studies scholar, mediator, trauma and breath therapist, and peace researcher behind From Women to Women, a global project dedicated to healing the wounds of sisterhood. In this raw conversation, Jen and Hanna name the things women rarely say out loud, the subtle kn...

This week's guest changes the rooms she walks into, and changes them for the women coming next. LJ Kennealy spent three decades in the Royal Australian Air Force, rising to Wing Commander and Gender Adviser to the Chief of Air Force. She's been deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and worked at the United Nations in New York fighting to get more women into peacekeeping worldwide. When...

The global backlash against women's rights, Me Too six years on, why AI is quietly replicating old prejudices at scale, and what we can do about it. Sharp, funny, fierce and full of hope. Tracey Spicer spent three decades anchoring national programs for the ABC, Ten and Sky News. She's a multiple Walkley winner, an Order of Australia recipient, and accepted the global Sydney Peace Prize al...

She went from wrapping her baby in towels because she couldn't afford nappies to reaching 88 million people worldwide. Lisa Nichols is a New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and one of the featured teachers in The Secret, and in this conversation, she holds nothing back. We talk about finding your "never again" moment, grieving the life you thought you'd have, recl...

You already know who you want to be. You can feel her. She's the woman who moves through her day with energy, who stopped apologising for taking up space, who is done waiting for the right moment to start living her life. So what's actually in the way? In this episode, The Present Day Wise Woman Jennifer Jefferies, gets honest about the real reason women in midlife keep delaying their own...

From the front lines of Timor-Leste to the local surf break, Cherisa Pearce is a former Army Major with 21 years of service who traded her uniform for a new mission, community, connection, and radical resilience. Now Secretary of the Currumbin Palm Beach RSL Sub-Branch and Chair of the Veterans' Support Centre, she's also a mum and coordinates a local surf group, proof that life after serv...

She recorded vocals for World of Warcraft. She sang on film scores. She spent over two decades shaping the voices of young girls through Northwest Girl choir. And her very first date with her husband? A Seattle Men's Chorus holiday concert — in 1989. Now, more than thirty years later, she's stepping onto the podium of Seattle Women's Chorus as its first female resident conductor. Beth...

Raga D'Silva, activist, author, co-creator of Older Queer Voices, and co-founder of the UK's only queer-led speakers' agency, has spent years refusing to let that question go unanswered. A lesbian of Indian origin who came out in her 50s, she knows what invisibility costs. In this conversation, we talk about the AIDS crisis's long shadow, older LGBTQ+ people forced back into closet...

What started as a joke became a movement. Jane McCann built an audience of 200,000 women not by having it all figured out — but by being radically honest about figuring it out at all. In this conversation, Jane and Jen explore what midlife actually gives you when you stop treating it as something to survive. Beauty standards that were never yours. The unexpected freedom after divorce. Why the wome...

Jen challenges the concept of retirement, noting its etymology means " to withdraw, pull back, go away. " She argues this narrative was built for men working in depleting systems, not for women in midlife who are " just getting started. " Rather than fading away gracefully as society expects, women in midlife are discovering their true selves and should embrace this powerful tr...

Anita Heiss is an award-winning author, professor, public intellectual, and proud Wiradjuri woman. She writes romance and joy alongside truth-telling and sovereignty - creating space for urban Black women to be seen in their full humanity. Her new novel, Paradise Pact, is exactly that: a story about self-love, female friendship, and what it means to keep reaching for joy while never letting go of...

The Night They Arrested Mardi Gras with Kate Rowe It was 1978. Kate Rowe was 26, sitting on the bonnet of a truck rolling down Oxford Street, chanting at the top of her lungs. Sydney's very first Mardi Gras. Just one year after coming out to herself. Not a protest, a party. Until the police arrived. In this episode, Kate takes us back to that night: what it felt like to finally say it out loud...

Most of the world expects women to put on an 'invisibility cloak' after a certain age, but today’s guest didn't just refuse it—she shredded it. At 72 years young, Lak Nge Mooi—the legendary Mama See—is here to prove that age isn’t a decline; it’s just the beginning. SHOW NOTES Lai shares how she started exercising in her 60s after realizing her health was declining due to a sedentary l...

Think age is an expiration date? In Uganda, a group of women aged 50 to 79 - affectionately known as the Cricket Grannies - is proving otherwise. Trading traditional retirement for cricket bats at the Jinja Cricket Academy, these women are building a powerhouse community on the shores of Lake Victoria. In this episode, we explore: The Power of Play: How Coach Aaron’s 12-month program is transformi...

Why is it easier to take life-changing advice from a stranger than from your own mother? In this solo episode, Jennifer cuts to the uncomfortable truth: we don’t reject wisdom because it’s wrong. We reject it because of who it comes from. Drawing on lived experience, cross-cultural insight, and Harvard’s contagion theory, she unpacks how Western culture confuses urgency with progress, independence...

Anita Mattu knows what it means to step out of the shadows. After becoming a primary caregiver at just 24 and later navigating a dyslexia diagnosis, Anita transformed her life’s challenges into a mission for global change. As a Transformation Coach and author, she now helps others dismantle the imposter syndrome and limiting beliefs that keep them hiding. In this episode, we explore the mechanics...

Perimenopause. Menopause. The midlife transition. Somehow still one of the most misunderstood, under-researched, and over-opinionated spaces in women's health. My guest today is on a mission to change that. Ann Marie McQueen is a veteran health journalist, award-winning reporter, and the founder of Hotflash Inc — and she has built a platform that cuts through the noise to deliver the evidence...

She's been on your screen, on your bookshelf, and now she's showing up in the perimenopause conversation with the same fearless energy she brings to everything she does. Andi Osho — award-winning actor, bestselling author, and someone I've known for nearly a decade since we met at a Marianne Williamson retreat in LA — is done with Black women being left out of this conversation. Full stop. We get...

Her mammogram was clear, 3 weeks later she had cancer, 6 weeks after the surgery she ran a marathon. Then she took her shirt off and never put it back on. Louise Butcher is an athlete, an advocate, and the author of Going Topless and who is literally stripping away the stigma surrounding breast cancer and society’s norms. She is pushing the boundaries of what it means to be 'authentic' and...