I’ve had a run of conversations lately with women who are not exactly lost but are trying to figure out what comes next for them.

These women are not lacking skills or experience. They may have worked, raised kids, moved countries, supported partners, adapted, and kept a lot of things moving, but that does not make it easy to answer the question of what comes next.

By midlife, most of them are not looking for work just to stay busy. They’re trying to build a life that fits who they are now, not who they were ten or twenty years ago. That can be uncomfortable because there is rarely a simple path from the life you had before to the one you want now.