Podlipodcast player Webplayer

STYLE & STRATEGY WITH SONYA

STYLE & STRATEGY WITH SONYA

102: She Hasn't Lost Capability. She's Lost Capacity.

STYLE & STRATEGY WITH SONYA · Sep 25, 2026 · 37:08

0:0037:08

Listen in the Podli app 🎧

Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.

A woman who has led for twenty years starts saying less in the rooms she used to run. She stops putting her hand up. Everyone around her calls it confidence. She reaches the same conclusion herself.

Karen Stein spent twenty-nine years at Deloitte, twenty-four of them as a partner, before moving into executive coaching. She was coaching women partners when she began hearing a different conversation in the room, and noticing the same thing in herself. Tears in the car on the way to work, then again on the way home, with nothing wrong at work or at home. Thinning hair. Leg cramps that wrecked her sleep. Blood pressure spikes that sent her to a cardiologist. Every test came back fine. Nobody said the word perimenopause.

In this conversation Karen draws the distinction the whole episode rests on. Capability has not gone anywhere. Capacity to act, in that particular moment, has. She talks about what happens when a leader carries that silently, how to raise it at work without it becoming your whole story, what she teaches the men in the room, and what to do when brain fog arrives mid-presentation. Plus the virtual backpack she wants every midlife leader carrying, and why she stopped colouring her hair.

 

Key takeaways
  1. Capability and capacity are not the same thing. As Karen puts it: "It's not that they've lost their capability, it's just that they've lost their capacity to act in that moment." What gets called confidence going is often capacity, temporarily.
  2. The cost is opportunity. When a leader reduces her participation, she stops being championed for the next role, because people are no longer hearing from her. She is not passed over on merit. She is passed over on visibility she withdrew herself.
  3. Karen's own experience went undiagnosed by professionals. Cardiologist, stress tests, blood tests, all clear. She found the word perimenopause through her own research, and asked what that meant for every other woman in the workforce.
  4. The timing is not a coincidence. The age bracket Karen works with, roughly forty to sixty, sits directly on top of the point where women are expected to move into more senior roles. Karen's position is that the two have to be addressed together.
  5. How menopause is handled tells you what the culture is. If people can talk safely about this, they can talk safely about mental wellbeing, relationship breakdowns and everything else. If they cannot, that is information about the organisation, not about them.
  6. Raise it as an operational ask, not a diagnosis. Karen's approach is to assume the other person may never have heard of it, explain what you are experiencing, name a specific and small request, and open a conversation about what is possible. Her example is a twenty-five dollar desk fan.
  7. Practical tools exist for the moments that arrive without warning. Breathable fabrics and layers, hair up, a handheld fan, a pause and a sip of cold water mid-meeting, palm cards you rarely look at but know are there, and naming a hot flush so it is not misread as anxiety.
  8. Every midlife leader is carrying a virtual backpack. Experience, wisdom, foresight, a clearer sense of boundaries and strengths, and a changed tolerance for what is worth their energy. Karen's coaching question is which of those to reach for in the moment, because by the time you get there you forget what you are carrying.

 

Timestamps

 

Links and resources

Karen Stein

Episodes: STYLE & STRATEGY WITH SONYA

PodliGet the free Podli app
↓ App