Hello and welcome. I can’t quite believe that this episode is coming out, and we are here in June. It’s been a very full year with so much happening, and I’m a bit in awe of the output that not just I have been able to produce in the first five months of the year, but equally the people that I’m working with in my program, Pivot Pathfinders, in the Watch Her Lead Academy, and with my one on one clients, it’s been absolutely incredible to see what has eventuated, and I don’t know about you, I’m really looking forward to the summer break, because I’m here in the Northern Hemisphere, and no matter where you are, I hope that you are doing well and thinking about taking a little pause over the next couple of months, but before we get there, I wanted to come back to the topic for today’s episode, which is really all around what AI and restructuring are really revealing about high achieving women’s careers, now AI and restructuring – those are two of the most common topics that I am speaking to women about at the moment, and it’s not surprising, right? AI is here, it is changing the way in which we work, and organizational restructures are happening as well, with innovation, with technological advancements comes change, and organizations are looking at how they can work more productively and utilize AI over expensive labor. Now, this is not to say that AI is going to take away your job, or you’re going to be made redundant, although that might be a reality for either yourself or someone that you’re dealing with, which is really hard. What I’m actually seeing, beyond these conversations, like deeper than the topic of AI and restructures, is that you know if you’re a high achieving woman and you’re at least your late 30s and your 40s or even 50s, you’ve probably been someone who’s built a career that’s looked exactly the way it was supposed to look, and if you’re listening to this podcast, maybe you’re someone who’s been aware that that path that you were sold when you first embarked on your career is no longer a certain path anymore, because no one could foresee the impact of AI, and how that was going to innovate and disrupt your industry, and even though that path is not clear now, it’s actually stirring something deep in you, and that maybe you might not want to admit that something hasn’t fit for quite some time. If that is you, this episode is for you. So, if you’re listening, maybe you framed your, your work as you know something that’s burning you out, or it’s a season that you’ve just got to push through, but that feeling won’t go away, and you keep feeling that dip that comes with being ambitious, and you find that no matter how hard you work, no matter how hard you push through, that feeling that this isn’t it keeps coming back, that feeling that, oh my gosh, I’m not going to be able to sustain this pace, and am I even on the right track, and is the existing track that I want to pursue even possible for me? That is what comes back, and the world shifting underneath you has made that feeling more impossible to ignore. I’ve been doing this work now for over a decade, and you know, a decade ago it was more about permission, permission to change now with AI and restructures, it’s like not just about permission to change, it’s I need to change, I need to innovate, and I need to think about what my options are. So, if that’s you today, I want to offer you a different frame for what this moment is actually revealing, not about the job market, but about you, and I’m going to talk about the question you’ve been deferring, and why you know career advice, the typical career advice that out that’s out there is probably going to keep you stuck in the very productive feeling loop without actually touching what’s stuck. So, with that being said, let’s get into it, so what’s actually happening. Let’s start with an honest look at what’s real right now, because I think a lot of us are absorbing a lot of noise, and it’s worth separating what’s actually happening, happening from what’s being projected onto it now out there.

What we’re seeing is absolutely AI is reshaping what’s valued in organizations. Some roles are changing significantly, some are disappearing, and new ones are emerging without a clear map for how to get into them. Companies are restructuring, sometimes there’s genuine adaptation, sometimes there’s a cover. For decisions that were coming anyway, and if you’re sitting in a senior role right now, or you’ve been in your career long enough, and feeling less certain about the future than you did three or four years ago, that feeling is not paranoia, it’s a reasonable read of a genuinely shifting landscape, and, and this is the important part, that external shift is also being used as the reason to finally pay attention to something that was already there, so what do I mean by that? For a lot of the women I work with, the feeling that this path that they’ve been on, that it doesn’t quite fit anymore, it’s been present for some time. I’ve worked and spoken to women where it’s, you know, been a few months, maybe a year or two, sometimes even decades, and what would happen is that it would surface, and then it would get filed away, because the career was still working on paper, the path was still there, even if it wasn’t what they wanted to walk, and because there was too much at stake to start pulling at the threads, because the timing was never right. What’s changed isn’t the feeling. What’s changed is that the external world has removed the option of indefinite deferral, and this matters because the way you respond to this moment depends entirely on which problem you think you’re solving. If you think this is a market problem with a skills gap, a positioning problem, a visibility problem, you’ll do what the market tells you to do. You’ll update your LinkedIn, you’ll reskill, you’ll build your personal brand, and you’ll stay visible. And none of that is wrong. That stuff’s really important. But if you follow just that advice, while that deeper question goes unaddressed. You’ll find yourself 18 months from now more visible, more upskilled, and busier, but still feeling the same way, like you’re not happy and you’re not on the right path for you. And that’s because external advice is addressing the external problem, and what most of these women are actually dealing with goes a lot deeper than that, so what is it actually revealing? So I want to offer you a reframe here, AI and restructuring that external pressure that isn’t the crisis, it’s the thing that made the crisis impossible to defer, or is making the crisis impossible to defer, and the crisis, if we can call it that, is this: you’ve reached a point where the path you might choose might not be the right one anymore. I’ll say that again, you’ve reached a point where the path you chose might not be the right one anymore, and you haven’t given yourself permission to take that seriously. If you really let that in, the path that you chose might not be the right one anymore. That is a terrifying question or thought to experience for most high-achieving women, that question of is this path still right for me has been treated as a luxury, something to revisit when things settle down, when the kids are older, when the mortgage is paid off, when the kids’ school fees have been paid, when you’ve hit the next milestone, or when the timing is better, but the problem is the timing is never better, and now the external world has essentially forced the question into the open, and here’s the thing that I find really interesting when I look at this pattern, the dissatisfaction almost never shows up as a clear desire to do something different, it just shows up as exhaustion that rest doesn’t fix it, shows up as a creeping sense that the things that used to feel meaningful and impactful, they feel hollow now, and are noticing almost against your will that some people actually enjoy their work, and you’re not sure you remember what that felt like, or the more confronting version, a clarity that you know that you’d rather be doing, say that again, or a more confronting realization, that deep clarity that you know you’d rather be doing something completely differently, and a complete inability to let yourself take that seriously.

So, again, what AI and restructuring are revealing in the most general possible way is that this moment, this question gets to be asked properly, not as a luxury anymore, not as something you could defer, but something to look at now. And the women I see getting the most stuck at this point are the ones who are trying to answer it using the same frameworks that built the career that no longer fits. There’s a reason that women with your level of achievement often feel this most acutely. It’s not a contradiction. It’s actually quite logical when you understand what’s underneath, so the skills that got you to where you are right now, the resilience, the execution, being the person others rely on, holding it together under pressure, pushing through, they’re also the skills that make this the hardest thing to navigate, because those skills were built on a certain relationship with uncertainty, one that treats it as something to manage, push through, or solve. And what this crossroads is asking you to do is asking something different of you. It asks you to sit with that uncertainty long enough to actually hear what it’s telling you, which is opposite of what everything your career has rewarded you for so far. So, there are three layers I see operating for almost every woman I work with at this point, and I think naming them clearly is one of the most useful things I can do in this episode. And this, if you were in the Solid Ground series, you’ll have heard of this before, and you’ll have already taken the assessment to figure out which one applies to you. Okay, so the three layers. The first one is the nervous system, so your career – your career has been proof of your competence, your worth, your safety in some cases. And when that feels threatened, either internally, because you’re like, I don’t want to do this anymore, or externally due to AI or restructuring, your nervous system doesn’t treat it as an intellectual question that can be reasoned through, it treats it as danger, real physical nervous system danger, which is why smart, analytical, and genuinely capable women can understand intellectually that they need to make a change and still find themselves unable to move. It’s not a motivation problem, it’s not a clarity problem, it’s a nervous system that has been trained to treat any deviation from the established path as a threat. That’s the first layer. The second layer is identity. Wow, this is a big one, and this is one I personally experienced when I left the world of corporate and commercial real estate. So, when your career has been so tightly woven into who you are, your sense of competence, how others see you, what you’ve built. Changing direction doesn’t just feel logistically complicated, it feels like a loss, like you’d be letting go of the version of yourself that everyone recognizes, including you, and that’s not a weakness, that’s what happens when you’ve been successful for a really long time. The career becomes part of the architecture of yourself, and questioning the career starts to feel like questioning yourself. Think about it, when you go out to a dinner party and someone says, “So, who are you? Like, basically, you’re trying to get to know you, they say, “Oh, so what do you do? We intrinsically wire your identity with what it is that you do, and so when you want to change that, it feels life-threatening. The third layer is the practical one, so you’ve built real things, an income that supports a real life, a professional reputation that took years to establish, a network, a track record, a financial structure, and anyone who tells you to just bet on yourself and trust the process has probably never had this much at stake. So that practical layer is real. School fees, mortgage, aging parents, you need to look after the money conversation is real. The risk conversation is real. These aren’t excuses, they’re legitimate constraints that need to be worked with, not dismissed. But here’s what I want you to notice: each of these three layers needs something different. Nervous system stuckness needs something different from identity confusion, which needs something different from practical strategy, and most career advice, almost all of it only speaks to that third very practical layer.

So, you get strategy without nervous system support, and you find yourself with a perfectly logical plan that you can’t make yourself act on, and you can conclude that you must be the problem, but you’re not the problem. You simply were trying to intervene and solve for the wrong layer, which is why when I work with my clients in my program, Pivot Pathfinders, we work with all three layers: your nervous system, your identity, and the practical strategic pieces you need. All three, so let me bring this into something practical. The conventional response to what’s happening in the world of work right now is to reskill, reposition, get visible, stay competitive, update your CV or your resume, and work on your personal brand. Make sure you’re not invisible in your organization. Again, all not wrong in isolation. All of that is reasonable advice. But here’s what gets missed: the fact that you have a nervous system and you have an identity that’s tightly woven into what you do, and treating those two pieces like a strategy problem, so you can do an enormous amount of impressive looking work that doesn’t actually help you move, you can update your LinkedIn and feel a brief hit of productivity while the un. Underlying question of this is going to work goes untouched. You can invest in reskilling and feel like you’re moving forward while your body is still braced for impact every time you imagine actually making a change. You can network and put yourself out there and do all the right things and still wake up six months feeling exactly the same way because the thing underneath the action hasn’t shifted the real work, the work that actually moves the needle starts with getting honest about which layer is loudest for you right now. Is it the nervous system? Does the idea of change produce physical responses in your body, maybe tightness, resistance, a sense of dread, or is it your identity? Do you know something needs to change, but you find yourself really struggling to imagine who you’d be without this career in its current form. Is it practical? Are there real financial constraints, risks, things that you’ve built that genuinely need to be factored into whatever comes next? I’ll be honest, most people have all three present to some degree, but there’s usually one that’s really running the loudest, and that’s where the work starts. When you think about AI and restructuring, it isn’t about blowing up what you’ve built. I want to be really clear about that, because I think one of the things that keeps women really stuck at this crossroads is a false binary. Oh, and our mind loves these binaries, these either ors, the idea that the only options are staying exactly where you are or burning everything down and starting afresh, and neither of those is what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is making bold career moves, but from solid ground, and that’s the phrase I keep coming back to in my own work, not reckless moves, not paralyzed, non-moves moves that are really informed and grounded and built on a clear picture of what you’re actually working with. So, remember that’s the nervous system, your identity, and the practical reality, and that’s a different conversation to the one most career coaching offers, and it produces different results. So, wherever you are listening to this, whether the external pressure is acute right now or whether it’s in the background as a little hum that’s been getting louder for a while, I want to leave you with one question to sit with, which layer is loudest for you right now, not which layer feels most acceptable to admit, but which one is the one that you want to start with, is it your nervous system that’s just activated when you think about change? Is it your identity that’s so tightly woven to what you do, or is it the practical pieces that are keeping you stuck? As I mentioned at the start, I’ve been running this series called the Solid Ground Series, and it’s a free course that actually supports you through exactly this, so that you can build solid ground as you navigate change, and if you’d like to join, you’ll get the tail end of it now, but I’ll probably relaunch it at some point.

But just come on over to the show notes at Siobhan barnes.com forward slash 150 that’s 150 to sign up, and you’ll get all the details there, and if you’re further along, if you know something needs to change, and what you’re looking for is real support to work through this properly from the nervous system perspective, identity and practical perspective, I’d love for you to come and check out Pivot Pathfinders. We’re relaunching and getting started in June, and you’ll be able to get the support that you need to begin to navigate your pivot, whether it’s completely imminent or it’s something you want to build slowly towards. So, again, all the details of that will be over at the show notes over at Siobhan barnes.com forward slash 150 and have a read and see if it’s speaking to where you are right now. Thank you so much for tuning in. As we spoke about what AI and restructuring are really revealing about high achieving women’s careers at the moment. If you have any comments, I would love for you to come and check me out over at Instagram at I am Siobhan Barnes over on LinkedIn, and I’d love to hear what your biggest takeaway was from today’s conversation. And as we wrap, please remember, as always, you are here for a reason beyond merely hustling, grinding, and merely surviving. You matter, you.