The Wobbly Middle: Women's Careers In Midlife

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...

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...

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 f...

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...

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 rur...

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...

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 bef...

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 Gol...

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 fli...

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...

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 w...

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 ye...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. Sh...

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...

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...

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. Follo...

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...

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 conve...