The Week Off They Never Get

I took a week off recently, and I very nearly talked myself out of it. I'd decided I was fine, that I didn't really need it, and I clung to that right up until the first morning when I finally stopped and realised how tired I actually was.

It turned out to be exactly what I needed. The weeks before had been some of the most intense coaching I've done in ages, and it wasn't until I put it all down that I understood quite how much I'd been carrying around on behalf of the women I work with.

I won't describe any of them in a way they'd recognise, and I've changed enough of the details that even they probably wouldn't spot themselves, but their stories stayed with me all week.

There was the woman grieving a loss she didn't feel she was allowed to grieve, because the diagnosis sat with her partner rather than her, and who somehow found room on top of everything else to feel guilty for having any feelings at all.

There was the one who's been doing this so long that she mentioned, almost in passing, that she can't really remember who she used to be, the way you'd talk about losing something you'd given up looking for ages ago.

There was the woman who used to speak in front of huge crowds for a living, and now the thought of a single webinar frightens the life out of her.

And there was the one doing everything she can not to let her job slip while her body deals with the side effects, because she loves what she does and isn't about to lose that as well.

What stayed with me long after the week ended is that I get to step away. I can take a week, recover, and come back able to hold all of it again. The women I've just described don't get that.

There's no week off from fertility treatment, no pause button on the grief, or the physical toll, or the strange experience of waking up and not quite recognising the person you've become. It carries on through the good days and the bad ones, through the early appointments and the back-to-back meetings and the dinners where you smile and tell everyone you're fine.

And because it's so relentless, the most natural thing in the world is to start putting everything else on hold until it's over. I'll sort my career out once I'm pregnant. I'll go for the promotion once this is behind me. The trouble is that "once this is over" has a habit of shifting, because one cycle turns into another, a break becomes a different protocol, a loss sends you back to the start, and the finish line you were aiming for keeps sliding off into the distance. So you wait. And while you wait, you stay in the role you'd have left years ago, you let the bigger decisions gather dust, and somewhere in all of it you put yourself on hold too, almost without noticing.

What that does to a woman's confidence is the part I care about most, and it's rarely what people expect. It isn't that she's forgotten how to do her job, because the skill is all still there. What's happened is that treatment has spent months beating her over the head with her own inadequacies, until the part of her that used to simply trust herself has gone quiet. The confidence that once felt automatic now feels like something she has to drum up from scratch every single morning, and telling herself to "just be more confident" doesn't touch it, because that was never the problem.

I know all this partly because I felt the pull of it myself. My own confidence took a battering during treatment, and even so, I made deliberate decisions about my career rather than putting everything on pause. I was promoted while it was all going on, and I turned a big job down because it was the right call at the time, not because I was waiting for life to settle down first. I'm so glad I didn't put myself completely on hold, because if I had, I'd have lost years I couldn't get back.

The work I do isn't about telling women to be more confident, which has never helped a single person. It's about giving them somewhere to put it all down, making sense of what's really going on underneath, and helping them build the kind of confidence that holds when the pressure comes back, or the clinic calls with bad news, rather than the wobbly kind that topples over at the first knock. I call it bouncae-back-ability. It’s the kind that lets you make decisions about your career and your treatment without losing yourself somewhere in the middle of it all.

So if you're in the thick of this right now, reading it and recognising yourself, I'd gently say this: the fact that you can't take a week off from any of it is exactly why having the right support matters so much. You don't have to carry the whole lot on your own, and you don't have to wait until it's all over to start feeling like yourself again.

If you'd like to talk it through, a free call is the easiest place to start.