She arrived at our session with something heavy on her mind. Weighty in fact.

She'd been thinking about the woman she was before her illness.

Before the years of fitting a big job around a busy household.

While trying to go through a gruelling treatment schedule.

Then, as we talked, we returned to the values she'd shared in our very first sessions, long before any of it.

It caught her completely off guard.

What mattered to her then, her core values, was exactly what mattered to her now.

"That version of me wasn't a different person," she realised.

"After my illness, I'd built this whole story that she was completely different to who I am now. But mercifully, I'm still her, if not even more grounded than before! With my priorities clearer than ever!"

But hearing her own words from years before, she recognised the same person.

The same values. The same humour. The same things that mattered most to her.

What had changed was the details around the edges.

How she organised her days. How she fitted work around family. How she squared a circle that kept expanding.

"The core of who I am has never shifted," she told me. "Those are just the peripherals."

And the word she used for how that felt?

Gratifying.

Then, a moment later, a better one.

Relief.

I watched it land.

Her face softened into a small smile she didn't even know she was making.

She put it far better than I or anyone else could.

When your life fills up with other people's needs, you don't stop being you.

You just lose sight of yourself for a while.

Strangely, she said, her illness had given her a 'reset button'.

For a time she couldn't focus on anything except getting well.

So she handed over responsibility for everything, right down to the Christmas lunch, which her husband strategically sourced from Marks & Spencer.

Job done.

As she recovered, she had a choice about what exactly to pick up again.

And what to leave behind.

She's choosing to be that person again, fully.

Who she is at her core now shapes how she spends her days.

To help her remember, she's having her three core values printed and put on the wall behind her desk, so she sees them every working day.

Creativity. Freedom. Security.

"It makes me smile just thinking about it," she said.

"I feel lighter. Like I can breathe."

She even noticed, with some delight, that designing a logo with those words that she'd love to look at every morning was itself an act of creativity.

The values weren't just back.

They were already at work.

If you've come through a hard few years, you may have written a narrative about who you were before.

Often, it isn't accurate, or even the kindest way to think about yourself.

And it may miss the fact that you're still grounded in the very values you hold dear.

It's worth checking.

You might find she was braver than you remember.

And far more like you than you think.

As I wrote in why "be more confident" is the wrong advice for senior women, the real work is rarely about becoming someone louder or bolder.

It's about reconnecting with the version of yourself for whom everything still felt possible.

Sometimes that version never left.

She was just waiting for you to listen.

If you're not sure what you want next, when promotion isn't what you actually want might be a good place to start.

If you've lost sight of yourself somewhere along the way, I'd love to have a conversation.

Email me at suzanne@doylemorris.com to arrange a chemistry call.

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.

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