Small Achievable Steps Over the Summer: Lessons from The Wobbly Middle of Career Change
Patsy Day is the host of The Wobbly Middle, a podcast about women rethinking their careers in midlife. Her next episode with Oxford-based Georgina Atwell - who founded Toppsta, the UK's biggest children's book review platform, after redundancy, and is now launching Readerama, a new home for second-hand books - is out 21 July 2026. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
It’s the end of term crunch: prize giving, sports day, teacher presents, tired children. I cannot wait to be free from the school run, to chuck the schoolbags in the garage and kick the school shoes to the back of the cupboard. In my mind, I’m imagining an endless summer of river swimming and watermelon smiles. From past experience, I know I’m heading into 8 weeks of “just give me a couple of minutes to finish this job” and “I have a call at 2pm but after that …” Come September when the kids go back to school, I’ll have been treading water since July.
I want this summer to be different. I’m a lawyer on a career break and I’ve recently been considering taking up law again - in some form or another. I want to move a few steps forward.
Over the past two years I’ve been interviewing women in midlife who’ve changed careers, built businesses, returned from career breaks, gone back to study and taken their long-neglected dreams seriously. Happily, the way they did it is perfectly compatible with our summer capacity because it’s about taking small steps, one at a time.
So, slip your feet into your new summer sandals and let’s go:
Find your focus: I'm a recent convert to action boards. An action board is a collection of images that represent where you want to head. They’re not just about the vibes. Images are a seriously powerful prompt for the brain. Our brain filters out most of what it sees, keeping only what it believes is a priority. So, if you show it images of your goals, it starts noticing the opportunities that match them. Hang your board where you'll see it first thing in the morning and last thing at night, when your brain is at its most receptive.
And the best thing is you can build it from your sunlounger using your airport-treat magazine. As you flick through, tear out anything that speaks to what's important to you and where you want to be this time next year. Then get your scissors and glue. If you want to know more, listen to investigative wellness journalist Rebecca Newman tell us how to make one on The Wobbly Middle episode Pin It To Win It.
Use body doubling to do the essentials: There are certain tasks I pretty much need someone to bind my hands to the keyboard in order to get done. Like updating my CV or refreshing my LinkedIn profile. 9-2-3's Job Club is coming soon. It has templates, guides and video tutorials on how to make them really good… but to actually, physically do it? Gah. Try body doubling, by which I mean working alongside someone who simply sits with you while you get on with it. It's a technique popularised in the ADHD community, where an extra body in the room makes starting a task easier. Ask a friend or your partner to sit at the table with you until it's done. Or try Focusmate, an app that pairs you with a stranger somewhere in the world who may, say, need to practise their violin at the same time. CV updated, concerto rehearsed.
Start an ideas factory: If you’re feeling stuck because you simply don’t know what to do, grab a notebook and keep it close. Write down 5 imaginary careers (realism doesn’t come into it - but fun does!); scribble down 3 things you wanted to be when you were a kid; doodle; jot down ten things you love doing from baking to styling your clothes to playing the harmonica. Dancing, sewing, yoga. Write down what you’re good at. Write down the mean things you say to yourself and how you can reframe them. Don’t overthink it. The aim is to get your creative juices flowing, to reconnect. I love The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron for this kind of creative stuff.
5 Minute Power Moves: This one was shared by Joy Foster, founder of TechPixies. Joy believes confidence is a choice - it is something we can lose when we spend years focused on everyone else but we can win it back by taking action. The five minute power move is about taking one small step, every day in the direction of your dream. Every day may be a stretch for us mere mortals but make a time every week to send that email, look up that course or make that call. When Joy started TechPixies she had no money to invest in it. Her power move was a call to her local business support service in Oxford, now called Enterprise Oxford, and that morning, a new grant opportunity had landed on the desk of the man who answered. That grant launched her business.
The women who’ve shared their stories with me - from a midwife-turned-femtech innovator, to a stay at home mum who taught herself photography and became a Nikon Ambassador to a journalist who founded a comedy school - all say the same thing that confidence comes from action. These small steps will not only move us forward but they’ll help build our confidence so that come September when we wave the kids off, we’ll also be on our way.