Nobody warned you midlife would show up as a 3am hot flush, a burnt-out career, and a woman you can't quite find anymore.
Professional career counselling for Australian women in midlife.
Evidence-based, Australian data, and none of the advice that tells you to ‘just be more resilient’.
You are extremely good at this. That's the problem.
You're the glue holding the family together while building a career that still means something.
The accidental counsellor for everyone around you, quietly wondering who does that for you. School canteen, food in the fridge, the unofficial taxi service.
You hold it together with the kind of competence that makes it look easy from the outside. So nobody checks, and the load keeps piling up.
Meanwhile three things are true at once, and they don't sit comfortably together. You need the income.You need the work to matter.You don't have the capacity you used to. Advice that ignores any one of them isn't advice you can use.
Eventually it gets too much. I know, because I've been that woman, and because I've spent years sitting across from her.
And I know, because it usually arrives as an email at 11pm - the whole story, followed by an apology for how long it is. That apology tells me more than the email does.
You cannot resilience your way out of structural maths.
The system was built for someone whose life looks nothing like yours.
It assumes an uninterrupted career. No caring years. A body that behaves the same at 52 as it did at 32. Someone else handling everything that happens outside working hours.
The evidence is in the numbers.
Women earn 79 cents for every dollar men earn - about $28,356 a year (WGEA, 2026). They approach retirement with roughly $86,300 less superannuation. Not because they worked less, but because the work that fell to them was never counted.
In my own research with 40 Australian women over 35, 98% reported overwhelm and 65% had never sought professional career support.
We've been told this is just what midlife is.
It isn't. It's design.
What I actually do
Not motivational coaching. Not therapy. Definitely not a transactional résumé-writing service. You've possibly tried at least one of those already.
I'm a professionally trained career development practitioner, which means evidence-based practice and real labour market data rather than a pep talk. Alongside that, I've spent years studying mind-body therapies and Ayurveda.
These lenses do not replace professional career practice. They deepen it. They inform how I understand:
Energy, capacity, and burnout
The relationship between work, health, and identity
Why some career strategies stop working over time
What sustainable work actually requires at different life stages
The work itself is fairly practical. Where you actually are and how you got here.
We’ll look at what your capacity genuinely is now. What direction makes sense without forcing it before you're ready. How to translate everything you've done into what comes next. And the tangible things too - the CV, the positioning, the interview.
The short version is that I work on women's rites and rights at work.
Rights, you already know. The pay gap, the super gap, the unpaid load that appears on no payslip anywhere. I track that properly, using Australian data.
Rites is the part we often miss. The transitions that quietly change who you are, what you want, and what you're prepared to give. We've had the rights conversation for decades. It's time we had the rites one too.
For women. And for the organisations they work in.
Working with women in mid-life
Most women arrive wanting to sort out their career. What they're usually after is themselves.
The version of you that existed before you became everything to everyone else - she isn't gone. She's underneath all of it, and she has opinions about how the next twenty years are going to go.
That's usually where we start. Not with a job title or a five-year plan, but with what's actually true now. What you can carry and what you can't. What still matters and what you've been holding onto out of habit. What you want the second half to look like, given you're the one who has to live in it.
From there it gets practical. Some women change roles or industries. Some redesign how they work. Some stay exactly where they are and change everything about how they do it. What matters is that it fits the woman you are now, and that it earns you a proper living while it does.
You don't have to know what you want before you get here.
Working that out is the job.
If you've been solving this at 3am on your own, it might be time to have the conversation in daylight with someone who does this for a living.
Most organisations offer EAP, and it does a job - it's there when someone's dealing with something in their personal life and needs a counsellor.
It's not built for the work conversations. Restructures. Uncertainty nobody can answer questions about. Quiet quitting, quiet cracking, the experienced person who's still delivering but has clearly stopped investing. Roles that changed shape without anyone renegotiating what that means for the person in them.
Those aren't personal problems. They're workplace ones, and they need someone who works specifically at the intersection of people and work.
Career EAP is retention work. It gives your people a way to renegotiate how they work before quietly deciding to leave. Experienced employees rarely resign over one thing - they resign because there was no mechanism to change anything. This is that mechanism.
Outplacement is for redundancy. When roles genuinely go, people deserve better than a template CV and a login to a jobs board. Done properly, it protects the dignity of the person leaving and the reputation you keep with everyone still watching.
Both are particularly useful for experienced employees and complex transitions, and for organisations that understand wellbeing isn't only psychological. It's structural, relational, and career-based.
Working with organisations: Career EAP and outplacement
A deeper look at this work
I kept hearing the same story from women in practice, so in 2025 I went and checked whether it held up. I surveyed 40 Australian women over 35 about work, health, capacity and identity, and wrote up what came back.
The white paper explores how career, health, identity and life stage collide in midlife, and why work that once fit can stop fitting without anything obvious having gone wrong. It puts data behind the stories, which matters when you've spent years being told it's just you.
It's written for women, though a good number of organisations have used it to understand what their experienced female employees are actually dealing with.
I'm Narelle Vigor - career counsellor, researcher, and a Gen X woman who's lived most of what she helps other women through.
Late-diagnosed AuDHD. Single parenting through a marriage breakdown. A body that nearly gave out on me in my 30s. A career that kept asking more of me than it gave back. I didn't work out how to rebuild my working life by reading about it. I worked it out by living it.
My practice is built on thirteen-plus years of professional career development, postgraduate qualifications, and thousands of hours with real women in genuinely complex situations. I also bring long-term study in Ayurveda and mind-body therapies into how I understand capacity, health and work - not as a replacement for evidence-based practice, but as a deepening of it.