You were the first generation expected to work full-time, raise a family, manage a household, and carry it all…without anyone showing you how.

Your exhaustion is not a personal failure.

Your career worked for the woman you once were. Now it’s time to build work for the woman you have become.

IMRAMA is a 12-week career ‘rite of passage’ built for women in midlife

Most career advice assumes you have unlimited energy, unlimited time and no competing responsibilities.

Many women in their 30s, 40s and 50s know that isn't reality.

The challenge isn't confidence.

The challenge isn't motivation.

The challenge isn't that women lack capability.

The challenge is that their capacity has changed and their careers haven't changed with it.

That's where IMRAMA begins…

She is very insightful and goes a step beyond just helping you write a resume and find a new job. She genuinely cares and works with you to uncover a fulfilling and rewarding path forward. I have no hesitation recommending her to everyone I know!
— Lauren

You Already Know Something Needs To Change

You've probably known for a while. The research confirms it - 65% of women who need career support haven't accessed it yet. Not because they don't want it. Because of time, cost, and not knowing where to start. IMRAMA exists for exactly that reason.

  • Clarity on what you actually want from your career - not what you were told to want, or what you wanted ten years ago

  • To understand why you feel the way you do - and why the standard advice keeps missing the mark

  • Work that fits your values, your capacity, and your actual life, without killing

  • A way forward that doesn't ignore your biology, your caring load, or your history

  • Tools for the exhaustion - not just the job application

  • A plan you can act on without needing to overhaul your entire life first

  • Language for yourself - to describe what you offer without shrinking or over-explaining

  • Direction that comes from who you are now - not who you used to be

  • Support that is genuinely accessible - in time, in format, and in cost

Then you are in the right place!

You have tried everything.

You've done the therapy. The yoga. The journalling. You've blocked social media, reduced your hours, changed jobs, simplified your life.

You've kept showing up and swimming even when the water was so cold you couldn’t breathe…

and told yourself that resilience is a virtue.

You are now exhausted.

All. The. Time.

Here’s what the standard career advice misses completely:

Your career and your life are not separate things.

The system you have been navigating was not built for your biology, your caring responsibilities, your values, or the very particular kind of depletion that comes from holding everything together for everyone else while quietly wondering if this is really it.

It was not built for the mental and emotional labour that is ongoing and unrecognised.

It was not built for perimenopause hitting during the years you are supposed to be at your career peak.

It was not built for the invisible provider who keeps everything afloat while no one notices the cost.

It was not built for the woman who has been bending like a pretzel accommodating everyone else's needs and has quietly lost track of her own.

The coping strategies you have tried - the ones that are healthy, even the ones that have helped - were never going to be enough on their own. Because they treat the symptoms.

IMRAMA addresses the cause.

This is not about pushing harder.

It’s about building a career that actually fits the woman you are - right now, in this season, with this life.

The research confirms what you already know in your body.

In 2025, Soul Compass surveyed 40 women over 35 about their career and life experience. What emerged was not a collection of individual struggles.

It was a pattern.

98% reported difficulty balancing professional and personal demands - not occasionally, but as a chronic baseline. 74% had been feeling this way for more than a year. 43% experience it almost every day.

The most common coping strategies - therapy, yoga, reducing hours, changing jobs, keeping swimming, push through - had low overall efficacy. Not because the women weren't trying. Because they were treating symptoms.

The cause is structural. It is not you!

You have been navigating a career system built by and for someone who does not have your biology, your caring load, your values, or your particular kind of invisible labour. The map was wrong. You were not.

IMRAMA starts with you.

IMRAMA was built for you if:

  • You dread Monday mornings

  • You've outgrown a role that once fit

  • Menopause, burnout or caregiving has changed what you can sustainably manage

  • You know you need a change but don't know what that change is

  • You've achieved success but no longer feel fulfilled

  • You're tired of being told to simply become more resilient

  • You are running on empty but have no idea, time or energy to know where to start to change it

  • You know you are super capable but your capacity is shifting

  • You are like the 98% of women in my survey who struggle finding balance between work and life priorities

If you read any of those and felt a flicker of recognition know that you are in the right place.

IMRAMA is a 12 week journey - and she’s different

Because she starts where most career advice refuses to go: with who you actually are, what has actually happened to you, and what you actually need. Not needed, but need now and moving forward.

IMRAMA helps women reconnect with who they are at their core - the woman who was often forgotten while caring for everyone else.

Then she gets practical.

This is not therapy.

It is not a vision board exercise.

She is a structured, evidence-based career development journey that accounts for the whole of your life - your nervous system, your capacity, your values, your history, and the season you are actually in. She supports you to rebuild from there.

Most career programs focus on:

  • Resume writing

  • Job applications

  • Interview preparation

IMRAMA begins somewhere else.

Before we talk about jobs, we explore:

  • Capacity

  • Values

  • Identity

  • Burnout

  • Life stage

  • Sustainable work

And when you are a woman in midlife career transition this matters more than most realise.

Here is what that looks like across 12 weeks:

Phase 1

The Inner Journey (Weeks 1-4)

We start with an honest picture of where you are - your life, your capacity, your energy, your burnout profile. Not to judge what we find. To see it clearly, so we have something real to work with. The reality is midlife career transition is often driven by more than one factor. Burnout, menopause, caregiving, the need for more meaningful work, capacity changes all add up. It is never just one thing.

Phase 2

The Reckoning (Weeks 5-8)

Your values, your strengths, the patterns and beliefs that have been running the show, and the direction that actually fits who you have become. This is the career work. The SOUL Goals framework, the Passion Finder Formula, your professional identity - all of it grounded in your real life, not a theoretical one. Career change for women over 40 or 50 is often framed as ‘hard’ or unadvisable. The reality is the only work is sustainable work.

Phase 3

The Return (Weeks 9-12)

A 90-day plan. Boundary scripts. Your voice, activated. The practical tools - resume, LinkedIn, interview skills - for those who need them. And a closing ritual that marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. Sustainable work after burnout and career change, changing life seasons or values often reflects a return to the core self, the lost woman who we need to get to know again. And who needs to express herself clearly.

Every week includes:

  • A 10-minute video lesson from Narelle

  • A structured workbook to take the concepts into your life

  • An Ayurveda Corner audio — a short practice drawn from ancient wisdom that supports nervous system regulation, self-awareness, and the kind of restoration that makes sustained change possible

Plus a 15-resource bonus toolkit including values exercises, career mapping tools, resume and LinkedIn resources, and specialist support for neurodivergent women.

All self-paced. With space thoughtfully woven in to allow reflection and contemplation. She is deliberately delivered in small bite sized chunks - not a ‘the world is going to end tomorrow if we don’t fix this’ way. Delivered week by week so you get reminded each week to jump in and tackle the next little bit.

This is what becomes possible

A clear and honest picture of where you actually are: your energy, your capacity, your values, your burnout profile - so you have something real to build from rather than something you've been performing.

Language to describe who you are professionally and what you offer, in your own words, without shrinking or over-explaining. The kind of clarity that changes how you walk into a room. The kind of clarity that changes outcomes.

A direction. Not a perfect plan with every step mapped out - a real one, grounded in who you have become and what you actually value now, with a 90-day plan that fits the life you are living rather than the one the system assumes you have.

Career tools that account for your whole life - your biology, your caring responsibilities, your history, your nervous system. Not just your CV. Resume, LinkedIn, interview skills and values mapping, available when you need them rather than forced on you when you don't. These things are the 20%, not the 80% that matters first and foremost.

A settled nervous system. The Ayurveda Corner practices woven through every week are not decoration. They are the infrastructure that makes sustained change possible - the part that most career programmes leave out entirely and then wonder why the work doesn't stick.

And something harder to name but no less real: the experience of having taken yourself seriously for twelve weeks. Of having crossed a threshold deliberately. Of knowing what is on the other side of it.

You’ll walk away with tangible new skills to navigate the world of work, but more importantly you will have a clearer sense of self, direction and a deep knowing of where your capacity truly sits in this season of life. These are skills for life.

Meet Narelle - The woman behind IMRAMA

She knows this territory from both sides of the desk.

I’m a CDAA Registered Professional Career Development Practitioner with more than 20 years of experience supporting people through career transition, identity shift, and the particular kind of reinvention that midlife tends to demand. But professional cred aside my own experience informs IMRAMA more than you might imagine.

I’m also a midlife woman with kids, stepkids, a peri-raging and sleep deprived nervous system, unpacking an AuDHD diagnosis that arrived in my forties, and a lived understanding of what it costs to hold everything together while quietly wondering if anything is ever going to change. Deep down I’m a Gen X rebel - with a cause!

In 2025 I conducted the research behind the Soul Compass Midlife Intersectionality White Paper - a survey of 40 women over 35 about their career, health, wellbeing and life experience. What they told me made it clear that the standard career support model was not built for women like us. IMRAMA is my response to that.

I am based in Albury, NSW, and I work with women across Australia.

That is why I do this work.

How do I approach this work? Glad you asked!

The Capacity First Framework

For decades women have been told success is about capability.

More skills.
More resilience.
More productivity.

IMRAMA starts somewhere different.

Capability determines what you can do.

Capacity determines what you can sustain.

And sustainable work is the foundation of a sustainable life.

Old school career counselling models don't suit women. They never have. I am not interested in fitting you into a system that was never designed for you. I am interested in helping you navigate the world as it is and build something that actually fits - the career, the life, and the woman you are right now.

'It was a privilege to walk with you through your career transition.' - it’s something I mean every single time I say it.

Do any of these scenarios resonate?

You are good at your job - experienced, capable, high-functioning - and you are exhausted in a way that no amount of annual leave is fixing. You have been performing competence for so long you can barely remember what it feels like to actually want something for yourself.

You are the one who holds everything up. The household, the income, the emotional weight of everyone around you. You do it well and nobody really notices, including you. You have stopped expecting to be seen. You have started wondering if this is simply who you are now.

You built a business for freedom and somewhere along the way it became another cage - another load to carry, another set of demands you are not sure you can meet. The vision is still there. The energy to chase it is not.

You have put your career on hold so many times - for children, for a partner, for a health crisis, for someone else's need that felt more urgent than your own - that you have lost track of who you are professionally. You are not starting over. But you are not sure where you are starting from.

You are doing everything right on paper and something still feels wrong. The career looks fine from the outside. The life looks manageable. But there is a quiet knowing that this is not it - that somewhere between ambition and accommodation you lost the thread of what you actually wanted.

If any of that landed - you are in the right place.

Join IMRAMA

IMRAMA is Self-Directed, let me tell you why…

From the research I know women don’t have a lot of time to invest each week in anything that will actually help their situation. IMRAMA is built to fit in around the edges of an already busy life. The point is to make life easier and with less friction - not to add to it. She is built with you in mind.

12 weeks. Your pace. Your rite of passage.

What's included:

  • 12 video lessons with Narelle

  • 12 structured weekly workbooks

  • 12 Ayurveda Corner audio practices

  • 15-resource bonus toolkit

  • Access to discounted 1:1 sessions during your 12 weeks ($99/hour, standard rate $190)

All prices include GST. Secure checkout via Stripe.

Pay In Full

$297 one time

Pay By Installment Over 3 Months

$109 per month for 3 months

IMRAMA is on her maiden voyage and priced accordingly, to help as many women as possible on board and journeying. When she is full the price will increase to ensure service is still deliverable in a personalised and considered way.

What this work actually looks like. One woman's story…

Alison came to me at one of those junctures midlife specialises in - the kind where everything shifts at once and the ground you were standing on turns out to have been someone else's property all along.

She had spent years supporting her husband's business. Bookkeeping. Administration. Operations. Client communication. She had built substantial, transferable skills during that time. She would not have called them that. She would have called them 'just helping out.'

When the marriage ended, the structural reality of her situation became brutally clear. Her husband replaced her with a paid employee within weeks. Alison walked away with real capability and no infrastructure. No job. No income. A mother. A woman managing a chronic health condition. And for the first time in years, entirely responsible for her own survival, and that of her kids. Career change in her 40’s seemed impossible at first.

When we sat down together, the first thing we did was the values work. Alison moved through the list slowly. What emerged surprised her. Family was still there - but it was no longer the organising principle of her entire existence. Rising to meet it were values she had never had space to honour: independence, health, connection, belonging, personal growth.

When she reached her five non-negotiables and looked at them written on the page, she went quiet for a long time.

Then she said: 'None of these are about anyone else.'

She was not being selfish. She was being honest for the first time in years.

Alison did not transform overnight. She used the skills she already had to build a small business - one that did not make her wealthy, but gave her something the marriage never had: agency that was entirely hers. She pursued the interests she had put aside. She built, slowly and deliberately, a life designed around who she actually was.

Her life is quieter now, and smaller in some material ways. But it fits. Most importantly Alison is happy and living her purpose.

That is the thing the values work makes possible - not a bigger life, but an honest one.

  • 'empowered me to focus on my why and ignore the background noise'

    —Jaquie

  • 'career, life, capacity and challenges navigated strategically so landed on my feet'

    —Lisa

  • 'employed in less than 2 weeks'

    —Kerry

  • Narelle genuinely cares and works with you to uncover a fulfilling and rewarding path forward.

    —Lauren

  • What truly sets Narelle apart is more than just her expertise, she genuinely cares. She goes above and beyond to achieve the best outcomes for the people she supports. Thank you, Narelle!

    —Pat

Not sure yet?

Book a free 15-minute Soul Strategy Call and let's make sure IMRAMA is the right fit for you before you commit.

Frequently Asked Questions