Into the Forest - Navigating Midlife Careers and Life

The WaterShed Moment: Navigating Midlife Careers — the spring season finale of Into The Forest. In this episode, I share my personal WaterShed moment, what women in midlife careers are really juggling, the strategic advantage we hold when making midlife career choices, and the power of staying true to yourself. Pour a steaming cup of java or tea and settle in as I weave personal story with career theory and research. Last episode until the summer series. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Substack.

There is a moment in the forest when the noise inside you begins to quiet.Sometimes, midlife can feel like the opposite of that. Between disrupted sleep, a fog that settles over a mind that used to be razor-sharp, or anxiety that arrives uninvited, it’s as if our our body is speaking a language that we were never taught to read.In this episode, my guest Kathleen Jaggassar, an international speaker on Aromatic Nervous System Regulation and the president of the Canadian Alliance of Aromatherapy, acts as our translator and guide as we explore the integrated and embodied practice of aromatherapy.We explore promising research and scientific evidence on how essential oils are transforming women’s experience with sleep disturbances, mental clarity, and emotional balance during perimenopause and menopause. We examine aromatherapy as an integrated modality that, when utilized alongside practices like breathwork, produces a tangible impact on both physical and mental well-being.This episode is for the women who is tired of being told that her symptoms are simply a reality midlife. This is for the woman who knows there is wisdom in what she is feeling, and is ready to explore a new resource for her midlife toolkit.Breathe in. Something is shifting.

Every root system grows in response to its own terrain and so does every woman's leadership journey.In this episode, we step beneath the canopy of midlife and sit with what it means to lead from a place of personal understanding, alignment, and agency. We explore the concept of leadership, not as a title bestowed on someone, but as a living thing. Something that grows in the quiet acts of thinking, being, and doing, on a daily basis.Every woman leads. In her own life journey, her home, her community, and beyond.My first guest, Dr. Kathy Toogood (author of Women Thriving in Leadership: Practices for Cultivating Wholeness and Community) offers something rare in a season of loud leadership formulas. She offers us a definition that turns inward. She also shares her personal experiences and a few tools to help us explore our inner terrain.Then we travel east, into different terrain. My second guest, Wendy Woodhouse, brings us into the lives of a few women in rural Kenya whose leadership stories weave in the very fabric of survival, evolving leadership, community, and the land they tend to. Their paths are shaped by different soils, different resources, different barriers, and different cultural histories. Some things align and some things differ. We hold the story of Leah, alongside the western midlife journey of inner excavation to ask: where do these paths cross, and where do they diverge?Gently interwoven in this conversation are the shifts in identity during midlife, the surfacing of new personal aspects, and the force of self-determination and personal agency. While we know that leadership emerges in all landscapes, so too do we understand that a woman's journey is uniquely influenced by her intersecting identities, resource access, and cultural background.This is an invitation to explore your notion of leadership and to gently widen our gaze. We hope you will walk this path with us.An important note:Think of this podcast like a walk through an old growth forest. What you hear here grows naturally from emerging conversation. The kind where ideas take root, branch out, and reach toward light that's still finding its way through the canopy. Everything expressed by myself as your host, or my guests, represents individual views and lived experiences, not universal truths for any community or culture.We approach cross-cultural storytelling with humility, recognizing the inherent gaps in our own perspectives and understanding. We remain committed to continuing to learn. We do our best to be thoughtful and responsible as we discuss sensitive and evolving topics.This conversation represents good-faith dialogue. Like trees that bend in the wind, please know that views may shift and grow over time. We ask that our conversation be understood in the genuine context in which it was offered. Just as we cannot pull a single leaf from the forest floor and to understand the whole ecosystem, we ask that our words not be clipped, edited, reposted, or repurposed in any way that strips away their original context or misrepresents their meaning. Selectively cutting or reshaping what is said here in a way that distorts, misleads, or harms is not permitted.This podcast is for informational and reflective purposes only and does not constitute professional mental health or medical advice. By listening, you acknowledge and agree to these terms. I am genuinely grateful you chose to wander this way with us. I’ll meet you in the forest.

The strongest trees have roots we never see.This week, I chat with Melinda Lloyd, Clinical Social Worker about the foundations of boundary setting.Episode 1 of Into The Forest invites is one of those quiet, inviting listens, where you can explore your own groundwork and cultivate awareness around your current boundary setting practice.

Trailer: Into The Forest is the podcast for women navigating the rich, complex landscape of midlife. This is a space where career questions get honest answers, life changes get the space they deserve to fully explore, and the natural world becomes a surprisingly powerful compass. Hosted by Belinda Deenik, each episode goes deeper into what this season is genuinely offering including the biology behind the changes, the kind of leadership that grows without a formal title, and the career wisdom that only comes from having lived enough life to know what actually matters.