Midlife has a way of telling the truth. Not in a dramatic, blow-up-your-life kind of way, but in that quiet, unmistakable moment where you realise the old way of doing things is no longer sustainable. You can feel it in your body. In your energy. In the way you look at your calendar and think, I can’t keep living like this for another twenty years.

That’s why I was so drawn to this conversation with Annie Coleman, Ambassador at the Stanford Centre on Longevity and Founder of Realise Longevity, where she helps organisations and leaders turn the 100-year life into a real strategic advantage, not just a headline. Annie brings a rare mix of sharp leadership insight and deeply human perspective. She doesn’t talk about longevity as anti-ageing or optimisation theatre. She talks about it as what it really is: a chance to design a life that’s sustainable, meaningful, and aligned with who you’ve become.

In this interview, we explore the questions midlife forces us to face: what success is actually for, why exhaustion is often the first crack, how identity recalibrates, and what becomes possible when ambition shifts from proving to purpose. If you’ve been feeling that inner nudge to rethink how you live and lead, Annie’s words will land.

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You help organisations prepare for the 100-year life. When you zoom out, what do you think midlife is really hereto teach us, about work and about how we want to live?

Midlife is a wake-up call. It asks us to stop living on autopilot and start living deliberately. In the first half of life, many of us are busy proving ourselves; building careers, raising families, meeting expectations. Midlife is when the question shifts from, “How do I succeed?” to, “What is this success actually for?”

It teaches us that time is our most precious asset. That energy matters. That relationships matter. That purpose isn’t something you retire into; it’s something you need now. It’s an invitation to design a life that’s sustainable and meaningful. Not just impressive.

So many women reach midlife and quietly realise the old way of doing life isn’t working anymore. What tends to be the first “crack”?

Often, it’s exhaustion. Not “I’m tired this week,” but a deep, existential tiredness. A sense of, “I can’t keep doing this at this pace, in this way, for another 20 years.” Sometimes it’s triggered by a health scare, redundancy, children leaving home, a relationship shift, or simply waking up one morning feeling strangely disconnected from the life you’ve built. The crack is usually emotional before it’s practical: loss of motivation, irritability, boredom, or a quiet grief for the parts of yourself you’ve sidelined. It’s not failure. It’s information.

We’re living longer, but many of us weren’t taught how to live longer well. What are the foundations of a good long life?

I think about this through what I call a Purpose Portfolio, the mix of assets we build to support a long, healthy, meaningful life.

It has three elements.

1. Vitality Assets: movement, sleep, nutrition, emotional regulation, recovery and relationships. Not as “wellness extras,” but as strategic investments. In a 100-year life, energy is your primary currency. Also, the people who inspire you and light you up. These are the relationships you need to spend time investing in.
2. Productive Assets: skills, experience, networks, reputation. We all have capabilities we’re good at; the ones we’re good at and love to do are our true strengths. Using those strengths in later life is crucial if we want to feel genuinely fulfilled. My own career didn’t wind down in my 50s; it took off. I was headhunted into UBS at 51, spent eight years there, then became CHRO at UniCredit, leaving at 61. Those were my most fulfilling and best-paid years.
3. Transformation Assets: our desire to make a lasting impact, to know our life matters. It doesn’t have to be a grand, capital‑P Purpose. It’s about doing something, however small, that feels meaningful to you.

When these three are in balance, people tend to live with confidence, relevance and a grounded sense of purpose.

Midlife often comes with an identity recalibration. How do you help organisations make space for that?

I help organisations reframe what they’re seeing. What’s so often labelled as “loss of drive” is, in reality, someone asking a more searching question: “Does this work still reflect who I am and what I value?” That’s not disengagement; that’s a leadership inflexion point

I’ve lived this myself. I stepped into one of the most demanding roles of my career at 51. If anyone had assumed I was winding down, they would have been very wrong. What changed wasn’t my ambition, but my appetite for work that actually matched my experience and values.

So instead of asking, “What’s wrong with her?” I encourage leaders to ask, “What’s emerging here and how do we support it?” That shift opens the door to better conversations about redesigning roles, stretching responsibilities, and aligning talent with where someone is now, not where they were at 35.

When organisations make space for this, midlife stops looking like a problem to be managed and starts functioning as an engine of deeper judgement, perspective and strategic thinking. In other words, identity recalibration becomes a source of strategic advantage, not a performance risk.

For women, midlife can be layered with menopause, caregiving, and changing bodies. Why isn’t this a private issue to manage quietly?

Because it’s not merely an individual issue. It’s a systemic one. At exactly the point when women are at their most experienced and valuable, many are also navigating intense biological change and heavy social pressures. Expecting them to “just cope” in silence isn’t resilience; it’s wasteful and unfair. With simple adjustments, flexibility, health support, manager education, and realistic workloads, organisations can choose between quietly burning out exceptional women or retaining some of their most irreplaceable talent.

Many women are redefining success in midlife. What changes when ambition becomes about sustainability and self-trust?

When ambition becomes sustainable, women stop running their lives like an endless sprint and start treating energy, health and time as nonnegotiable assets. Success shifts from “How much can I carry?” to “What is worth carrying?” and that alone changes careers, relationships and leadership choices. When self-trust replaces the need for constant external validation, women back their own judgment, say no more cleanly, and take braver, better-aligned risks. The result is a way of living that looks calmer and clearer on the surface, but underneath is more courageous, principled and resilient than ever.

There’s often a quiet grief that comes with the 100-year life. How does that show up at work?

It shows up as overwork, perfectionism, restlessness or disengagement. Sometimes, as anger. Sometimes, as a sadness people can’t quite name, often driven by pouring energy into meeting others’ expectations instead of investing in what we truly want and need to feel fulfilled and reach our full potential. Many high‑performing women realise they’ve been living reactively rather than intentionally. The grief tends to gather around the things we didn’t do; regrets rarely attach to the things we tried.

I recognised that in myself at one point, being very capable, very busy, and quietly wondering when I had last stopped to ask what I wanted next. Acknowledged, this grief becomes wisdom and a catalyst for change. Suppressed, it becomes burnout. But it’s rarely too late; I’m a firm believer that, for many of us, the best is still to come.

If someone is entering their second chapter now, what questions should they ask themselves?

I start with these:

• What do I want more of, and less of?
• What gives me energy, not just status?
• How do I want to be remembered?
• What am I willing to let go of?

Then:

• What skills do I need now?
• What am I tolerating?
• What would I try if I knew I couldn’t fail?

These questions shift people from drifting into designing.

From an organisational perspective, what’s possible when companies invest in midlife women?

You unlock extraordinary value when you treat midlife women as a strategic asset, not a HR problem to be managed. Organisations that back women in their 40s, 50s and beyond tap into deep institutional knowledge, stabilise leadership pipelines, improve culture, and see measurable gains in retention, innovation and

performance. You get leaders who can hold complexity, mentor across generations, and connect strategy with humanity in a way younger talent simply hasn’t had time to learn. In other words, you’re not “doing the right thing”; you’re compounding your organisation’s most sophisticated form of human capital

If you could leave midlife women with one truth, what would it be?

The one truth is this: midlife is not a cliff, it’s a concentrated season of power. Studies of senior women leaders show that this stage often brings greater confidence, clearer identity, sharper judgment, and a renewed sense of purpose, even alongside real pressures and hormonal change. You are not “past your peak”; you are standing at the point where experience, resilience and self-knowledge finally catch up with your ambition. Longevity means you likely have decades of impact ahead, which turns midlife from an ending into a launchpad for reinvention, bolder leadership, and work that feels truer to who you’ve become.

This is not the beginning of the end. It’s the beginning of your most intentional chapter. You are not behind. You are better equipped than ever. For many women, the best is genuinely yet to come, not because life gets easier, but because you finally have the clarity, confidence, and courage to design it on your own terms.

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What I love about Annie’s perspective is that she doesn’t romanticise midlife and she doesn’t pathologise it either. She names it as the wake-up call it is: a moment when time becomes real, energy becomes precious, and you start asking better questions. Not just about work, but about how you actually want to live.

Her idea of a Purpose Portfolio is such a grounding reframe, especially for women who’ve spent decades being everything to everyone: vitality as an asset, skills and reputation as fuel for your second chapter, and a deeper kind of contribution that doesn’t need to be loud to be meaningful. And perhaps most importantly, Annie validates what so many women feel but don’t always have language for: that the grief, the restlessness, the irritability, the quiet sadness at work isn’t weakness. It’s information. It’s wisdom knocking.

If you’re in the thick of perimenopause, caregiving, career pressure, or that strange sense of outgrowing your old life, let this be the reminder Annie offers so clearly: midlife is not a cliff. It’s a concentrated season of power. You’re not behind. You’re not past it. You are, in many ways, better equipped than you’ve ever been to choose what’s worth carrying, and what you’re finally ready to put down.
You can explore Annie’s work and Realise Longevity here: https://www.realiselongevity.com/