Here’s what tends to go unsaid.

The senior women carrying this fatigue are not under-prepared for the challenges wearing them down.

They’re actually over-prepared. The situation that genuinely threw them at thirty-five; the hostile stakeholder, the meeting that went sideways, the credit quietly taken by someone else is something they could now navigate more easily at fifty-five.

Which means the exhaustion isn’t evidence that they can’t cope.

It’s the accumulated cost of being doubted more than everyone around them, for decades.

The competence kept growing. So did the scrutiny.

And the gap between the two is where the tiredness lives.

This is why I don’t treat “why do I bother” as a wobble to be coached away. I treat it as information.

It’s not a failure of confidence.

It’s a rational response to spending thirty years being asked to prove what you proved long ago.

To keep having the same conversations, time and time again.

If more confidence isn’t the answer, and let's be clear: it isn’t, because there was never a shortage, then what is?

It’s deciding where your hard-won wisdom gets spent, and on whom. Which rooms are worth your energy.

Which battles are worth fighting, and which are simply expensive loyalty to people who were never going to listen, however many years of evidence you put in front of them.

In practice, that almost always comes down to a move you’ve been deferring.

Leaving an organisation that you've been quietly outgrowing or that’s easing you towards an early “retirement” nobody has the honesty to call by its real name.

Or actively positioning yourself with the people who really decide on who gets promotions, rather than waiting to be noticed for work you assume should speak for itself.

The reason these moves get deferred is that they feel as though they require a readiness you don’t yet have.

But the readiness doesn’t come first.

It comes after the move. It's a paradox, but waiting to feel ready is the most reliable way to never go.

I work with women in STEM reaching for senior roles and who are discovering the real work has only just started.

That real work is rarely about volume, about being bigger, bolder, more assertive in the meeting.

It’s about reconnecting with the version of themselves for whom everything still felt possible, before the long erosion of being doubted set in.

The women I love working with don’t leave coaching louder.

They leave it feeling more like themselves. They fall back in love with who they are, and from there, the moves they’ve been putting off stop feeling like risks and start feeling like the obvious next step.

So if someone tells you to be more confident, you have my permission to be sceptical.

You were probably never the problem.

The question was never whether you believe in yourself.

It’s where you’ve decided to spend the 'self' you created; after all, it was thirty years in the making.

If this resonated, I write about moments like this every week, the ones senior women in STEM recognise immediately and hadn't quite named yet.

Real stories, fresh client insights, and the conversation most people around you aren't having, or sharing.

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