I have been following the layoff announcements coming out of the US and Canada closely, and one thing keeps standing out to me.

What the data rarely captures is what a layoff actually costs a woman in midlife, beyond the job itself.

I used to think that the women who felt the most stuck were the ones furthest from change.

Years of working with women through exactly that feeling taught me something that genuinely surprised me, and I have been wanting to put it into words for a long time.

A new doubt crept in. Something did not go as planned. Someone in your life questioned your decision. And suddenly, the old version of your life started to feel a lot more comfortable than the uncertainty ahead of you.

This is one of the most common and least talked about parts of real change. The pullback. And it happens to almost everyone who tries to move forward honestly.

At some point, most of us have sat with a version of the same question. You are not miserable enough to feel justified in leaving. You are not fulfilled enough to stop thinking about it. And so you stay, and you wait, telling yourself that when things get bad enough, you will know.

You know that feeling when you're sitting in a meeting you've been in a hundred times before, and somewhere between the agenda and the action items, you realize you're not really there?