For most of our lives, we’re rewarded for being the strong ones.
The reliable ones.
The women who “get it done” no matter what.

Before perimenopause, you can more or less get away with it.

You can:

• Do what you think you should do, instead of what you actually want

• Force yourself into structures that promise success, even if they don’t really fit

• Say yes to work you don’t love just to keep the peace

• Make other people happy, even when it costs you your own wellbeing

• Build a portfolio career or a busy business so there’s never a quiet moment to feel how misaligned it all is

From the outside, it looks like ambition, drive, resilience.
People admire your capacity, your productivity, your strength.

But on the inside, there’s often a different story: pressure, strain, and a creeping sense that you’re holding everything up by sheer force of will.

The trouble is, force and strength can look almost identical from the outside.
You might even congratulate yourself on how much you can hold, without realising that you’ve slowly been abandoning yourself in the process.

The storms of perimenopause: seeing through the illusion

Then perimenopause arrives. Often not as a gentle nudge, but as a storm.

Your body changes.
Your energy shifts.
Your nervous system becomes far less willing to be overridden.

What you used to power through suddenly floors you.
Late nights, endless to-do lists, squeezing yourself into other people’s timelines – all of it becomes harder to tolerate.

And in the midst of that, something radical can happen:
You begin to see that what you called “strength” was often just force.

You see the places where you’ve been pushing yourself to fit into systems that were never designed with you, your body or your season of life in mind.
You notice how often you’ve put your own needs last in order to keep everything running smoothly for everyone else.
You realise how much of your “drive” was fuelled by fear – of not being enough, not doing enough, not being seen as enough.

In the cracks, a quiet possibility appears:

“Maybe there’s another way.
A softer way.
A way that feels… more like me.”

A way that is:

• More aligned with who you truly are now, not who you were ten or twenty years ago

• Less like a performance and more like an honest expression

• More pleasurable, spacious and, in some mysterious way, more effortless

Once you glimpse that possibility, you can’t unsee it.
The old story – that you just need to try harder, be more disciplined, push a bit more – starts to lose its power.

The insight can arrive in a single moment.
But living from it is a process.

From force to ease: reclaiming a different kind of power

Here’s the thing: being busy is culturally rewarded, especially for women in business.

Busyness can feel like proof that you matter.
It can feel like safety: if you’re constantly doing, nobody can accuse you of not trying hard enough.
It can even be a way to avoid the discomfort of asking, “Is this actually what I want?”

In that sense, being busy can become a kind of addiction.

The path out of it doesn’t start with a new strategy, a new planner, or a more optimised morning routine.
It starts with awareness.

Awareness of:

• Where you’re forcing yourself into “shoulds”

• Where you’re saying yes out of guilt or fear, not genuine desire

• Where “being the strong one” has actually meant abandoning your own needs

• Where your body, especially in perimenopause, is clearly saying “no”, even while your mind is saying “just push through”

From there, the shift is surprisingly simple – but not always easy.

We stop trying so hard to be what we think we’re meant to be.
We experiment with following what feels genuinely easiest and most alive in our bodies, not just what looks impressive from the outside.
We allow ourselves to build businesses, offers and schedules that support our energy, instead of drain it.

This isn’t laziness.
This is a different quality of power.

It’s a power that doesn’t need to prove itself.
A power that’s rooted in self-respect instead of self-abandonment.
A power that honours the wisdom of a body in transition, instead of fighting it.

Perimenopause can feel like everything is falling apart.
But it can also be the doorway into a new way of being – one where your strength is no longer measured by how much you can endure, but by how deeply you can honour yourself.

If you’re reading this and recognising yourself in these words – the busyness, the pushing, the sense that something has to change – you don’t have to navigate this alone.

This is exactly the transition I support perimenopausal entrepreneurs through:
From force to authentic strength.
From constant doing to aligned, easeful action.
From people pleasing to a life and business that actually feels like yours.

There is another way. Softer, truer, and still incredibly powerful.

Much love

Sharonah x