You didn't lose the ability to make friends, you lost the environments that did it for you. May, 2026 By Andrea Maizes, ACC, CPRC At some point in midlife, a lot of women quietly start to wonder if they're just... bad at friendship now. The calendar is full but somehow lonely. There are colleagues you like but don't really know. Old friends who've drifted. A general sense that the warm, easy closeness you used to have with people has become harder to find and harder to sustain. Here's what...

May1, 2026 By: Andrea Maizes, ACC, CPRC When I left corporate life after 35 years as a Senior HR Executive, I thought I was closing a chapter. A long one. A defining one. The kind you mark with a nice dinner and a card from colleagues and a vague plan to finally travel. What I didn't understand was this: I wasn't ending the book. I was editing it. And editing is so much harder than quitting. Quitting is dramatic. Editing is deliberate. And most of us have never been taught how to do it....

May 1, 2026 By: Andrea Maizes, ACC, CPRC I've sat across from a lot of high-achieving women in their 50s and heard some version of the same sentence: "I think I'm ready to retire." And when I ask what's driving that feeling, the answer is almost always some variation of “I’m exhausted, done, over it”. Here's the hard truth I share with every single one of them: that's not retirement readiness. That's depletion. And the two look almost identical from the outside, which is exactly why...