I know the fixer reflex because I’ve lived inside it my whole life.

So when my client told me what happened, I recognized the look on her face before she finished the story. One of her team members, usually the most buttoned-up presenter she had, showed up late to a product launch meeting with an important client and stumbled through it. Unprepared. Off his game in a way she’d never seen from him. The client noticed. She could feel the relationship wobbling in real time.

She’d already built the plan by the time she sat down with me. She was going to reach out to the client herself, smooth things over, and quietly start looping in a more seasoned team member for anything client-facing going forward. Efficient. Protective. The kind of move that saved her more than once before.

“What would happen if you let him find his own way through this?”

She looked at me like I’d asked her to do something reckless.

She sat with that question longer than usual. I watched her turn it over, resisting the pull to answer it the way she answered everything: quickly, competently, with a plan already halfway built. For a few seconds, she didn’t fix anything. She just sat in not knowing what the right move actually was, which, for someone who’d built a career on always knowing, was its own kind of hard.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I’ve never let someone sit in a mess like this before.”

I wasn’t there to give her the answer either. My job was mostly to keep asking the next honest question, so she had somewhere to put the discomfort besides a fast solution.

That not-knowing was the beginning of something, even though it didn’t feel like progress. It rarely does, in the moment.

What Came Next

Over the following weeks, she didn’t disappear into fixing, and she didn’t leave her team member to flounder either. She asked him what was going on, and learned about the situation at home that had thrown him off. She asked him what he thought he needed, rather than telling him what she’d decided he needed. It was slower than her instinct wanted, and required her to tolerate a version of “in progress” that had no guaranteed ending.

He asked for two things: a little grace on deadlines for a few weeks, and a chance to rebuild the client relationship himself rather than have it quietly taken from him. Neither was a guarantee. She could have overridden both requests in an afternoon and probably felt more in control doing it.

She didn’t. She gave him the grace and stayed close without stepping in, checking in without checking up. Three weeks later, he asked for a second meeting with the client himself, prepared this time, present in a way he hadn’t been the first time around. The client agreed. The account held because she’d let him fix it.

What Staying in the Mess Actually Cost Her

I don’t think people would have called what she did brave if they’d been watching. There was no dramatic conversation or visible risk. From the outside, it probably looked like she simply did less than usual.

But I know what it cost her because I know the feeling from the inside. Every instinct she had was built for speed and certainty, and she spent three weeks doing the opposite: staying slow, staying uncertain, resisting a fix she could have executed in an afternoon. That kind of restraint doesn’t get applause. Nobody sends a note praising the crisis that didn’t happen because you let someone else grow into solving it.

This is where I think the Inner Wave of a transition often hides in plain sight. It happened in a pause like hers: sitting with a discomfort long enough to actually notice it, instead of moving past it toward the fastest available relief.

What I Tell Myself When the Reflex Kicks In

I still feel that fixer pull constantly, in my own life and with clients. It hasn’t gone away. What’s changed is my relationship to it. I’ve learned to notice the reflex arriving, the same fast, competent certainty my client felt, and to ask myself a version of the same question I asked her: is this actually mine to fix?

Sometimes the answer is yes, and I move. Often, especially with the people I love most, the answer is no, and the harder, quieter work is staying with them.

Where in your life is the reflex to fix asking you to move faster than the situation needs?

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María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes about the quiet, unglamorous work of becoming who you’re meant to be next.

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At first, I couldn’t place the sound I heard.

I’d just climbed out of the water at Slide Rock, still catching my breath from the cold, standing on the bank while the July sun dried my shoulders. The creek in front of me looked exactly like it had ten minutes earlier. It was clear and moving at its usual unhurried pace over the red rock. Nothing about it looked capable of what I heard coming.

There was a low rumble at first, somewhere upstream, low enough that I almost mistook it for thunder. Then it got louder, closer, until it wasn’t a sound anymore so much as a presence, something moving toward me with a power the creek didn’t have a minute before.

I stepped back from the bank instinctively. And then, I watched the water change before my eyes. It was the same creek and the same rocks, but they transformed in what felt like seconds into something faster and darker. It carried branches and debris I hadn’t seen anywhere near it before.

I stood safely back and felt two things at once: awe at how fast it happened and a quiet, physical gratitude that I’d gotten out when I did.

What I Recognized in the Water

It’s taken me a while to understand why that moment has stayed with me the way it has many years later. It wasn’t so much about the flash flood, although that was scary. It was about how ordinary everything looked right up until it wasn’t.

I’d been in that water minutes earlier, and nothing about it warned me. There was no shift in color upstream or change in temperature. My senses didn’t catch anything before my ears did. The disruption didn’t announce itself. It just arrived, fully formed, while I happened to be standing close enough to feel its force.

I’ve thought about that morning every time I’ve found myself back in the messy middle of a transition, which, if I’m honest, has been more times than I expected by now. A diagnosis. A loss. A decision that upended a plan I’d built a life around. None of them announced themselves the way I wish they had. They arrived the way the current at Slide Rock did: sudden, loud only once they were already close, and impossible to have fully prepared for no matter how carefully I’d been watching the water.

What the Current Taught Me, Once I Was In It

Here’s what I didn’t expect. Standing on that bank, watching the current change, I was both afraid and amazed. There was something almost holy about it. It was a force moving through that canyon with a power I had no part in and no control over.

That’s stayed with me too, longer than the fear did. Because most of the disruptions I’ve lived through since have carried some version of that same, uncomfortable truth: the force that scared me also made me keenly aware of how fast a life can shift, and how much of what I thought was solid ground was really just calm water — temporarily.

I think this is part of what the Middle Wave of The Ripple Journey™ holds. It’s that strange mix of fear and clarity arriving at once, neither one canceling out the other.

What I Know Now About Standing on the Bank

I wasn’t in the water when the current changed. I’d gotten out minutes before, for no immediately apparent reason. I’ve wondered since whether it was luck, instinct, or divine timing. I suspect the latter. Regardless of the reason, what I did once I heard the sound matters: I stepped back. I didn’t argue with the water or wait to see if it was really as strong as it sounded before I moved.

I wish I could say I’ve always responded to life’s sudden currents that well. I haven’t. Some I’ve stood too close to for too long, certain I could outlast them before they reached me. But I’ve gotten better, slowly, at trusting the sound before I can see the water, and at believing a change is real before it’s fully arrived. And I’ve learned to move accordingly, rather than wait for proof.

The creek at Slide Rock went back to looking calm within an hour, the way these things do. You’d never have known, walking by that evening, what had moved through it that afternoon. I think most of us have experienced a few stretches of water like that. Calm on the surface, with evidence of the flood still there if you know where to look.

What sound have you learned to trust before you could see what was coming?

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María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes from the moments that taught her the most, including the ones she didn’t see coming.

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My husband looked at me one morning last month and said, “You seem like yourself again.”

I had to think about that for a second, because I hadn’t noticed the shift until he brought it to my attention. Somewhere over the previous few weeks, the bracing had eased. I was still watching and adapting, still aware of all the things that had changed since his new diagnosis. But I wasn’t white-knuckling my way through the day anymore. The house felt less like a problem I was managing and more like home again.

That’s the closest I can get to describing Still Water from the inside.

It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no morning when you wake up and think, I’ve arrived. It’s more like one day someone you trust tells you that you seem like yourself, and you realize they’re right, and you feel something loosen a little at the thought.

What Another Drop Taught Me About This One

There was a morning not long ago when I stood in our kitchen and noticed the green oxygen tubing running from the bedroom into the living room. My husband was still sleeping. The house was quiet. And something about seeing that tubing made the weight of what had changed land differently than it had before.

We’ve been on a caregiving road for a while, he and I. New diagnoses layered on older ones, new equipment, new routines built around a body that keeps asking us to adapt.

I know the Ripple Journey from the inside, not just because I keep living it, but because living it is what gave it a name. This latest Drop set the waves in motion again. There was the internal reckoning, the honest conversations we needed to have, and then the slow reaching out to friends who could sit with me in it without rushing me toward a brighter interpretation.

And then, slowly, the settling.

What I know about transition is that it moves in waves. The Drop hits, the water is disturbed, and what follows isn’t tidy or sequential. And then, eventually, there’s a quieter kind of steadiness on the other side. Urgency softens. The hard thing is still present, but it’s no longer running the whole show.

That settling — not resolution, just the return of breath — is what I’ve been calling Still Water for years. Writing about it as part of a framework is one thing. Living through another Drop and finding my way back to Still Water is another thing entirely.

What I Got Wrong About Still Water When I First Named It

The Ripple Journey didn’t start as a framework. It started as the pattern I kept noticing in my own transitions — and the name came later. When I first described Still Water, I think I imagined it as a destination. The place you get to after all the hard work. And there’s something true in that because it does come after. But calling it a destination implied it would stay, and that’s not quite right.

Still Water is more like a state you return to. Or maybe: a state you practice returning to. Because the waves don’t stop, new ones come. And I’ve had enough Drops by now — professional, relational, health-related, the particular accumulation of things that life hands you after 50 — to understand that what shifts isn’t the disruption. What shifts is the trust that you can find your way back through the waves.

That trust is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through enough transitions to have earned it. That’s not optimism, exactly. It’s closer to evidence. You’ve come through things before, and you know it now in your body, not just in your head.

The Green Tubing Is Still There

I want to be clear about something, because I don’t want this to read as a tidy ending.

The situation hasn’t resolved. My husband’s health is what it is. The equipment is now part of our home, our routine, and the texture of a day. Some mornings are heavier than others. The grief that lives at the edge of a long caregiving relationship doesn’t disappear because you’ve found your footing again.

What changed is something smaller and more real than resolution. I stopped fighting the weight of it. At some point, I just let it be what it is. It’s hard, and it’s ours, and also full of the ordinary things we love about our life together. His humor came back first. That helped more than I can say.

There’s something about letting yourself stop performing okayness that gives actual okayness room to return. I don’t know how to say that without it sounding more prescriptive than I mean it. I just know that when I stopped trying to carry it gracefully and started carrying it honestly, something shifted.

For Wherever You Are In This

If you’re reading this in the middle of your own long transition — a job that ended, a role that changed, a future that looks different from what you expected — I’m not going to tell you that Still Water is waiting on the other side if you just do the right things. That’s not how it works, and you probably already know that.

What I will say is that the water does calm. And sometimes the first sign is someone who knows you well saying, "You seem like yourself again." Or noticing that you laughed at something without it costing you anything. Or realizing that you made a decision this week without rehearsing all the ways it could go wrong.

Small signs. Easy to miss.

Worth paying attention to.

If something in this article struck a chord and you know someone else who might benefit, please share it.

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María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes from the steady practice of learning to live honestly again amid what has changed.

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“I think I might be overqualified.”

She didn’t say it with confidence. She said it almost apologetically, as if naming it might somehow make things worse.

We were talking about a role she had just been passed over for. On paper, she was more than capable — years of leadership, proven results, the kind of experience most organizations say they want. And yet, she didn’t get the call.

Not because she lacked something, but because, somehow, what she brought didn’t seem to land.

At one point, she paused and said, “I know I have something to offer … so why does it feel like it doesn’t count?”

It’s a question I hear more often than people realize.

When experience stops translating

There’s a particular kind of disorientation that can happen at this stage of a career.

You’ve spent decades building something — skills, judgment, resilience, perspective. You know how to navigate complexity. You’ve led, solved, adapted, delivered. And yet, in certain rooms or conversations, it can feel like none of that is fully seen.

Sometimes it shows up in subtle ways. An interview that ends more quickly than expected. A polite but distant response. A comment about being “overqualified” that doesn’t quite make sense, and hits home hard.

Other times, it’s quieter than that. You start to question how to talk about what you’ve done. You wonder if your experience translates anymore. You catch yourself editing your story, trying to make it sound more current, more relevant … more acceptable.

Underneath all of it is a deeper tension: if everything you’ve built still matters, why doesn’t it feel that way right now?

What’s really happening

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, both through my clients and my own life:

Your experience isn’t the problem. But it may not yet be positioned so it can be fully seen.

Much of what you’ve built wasn’t designed for this moment — not because it’s outdated, but because you developed it in environments where its value was already understood.

Inside an organization. Within a role. Under a title that helped others translate it.

When that structure changes, whether by choice or circumstance, you’re often left holding something incredibly valuable, but without the same context that once made it obvious.

That’s where the disconnect begins.

The shift most people miss

It’s easy, in those moments, to assume something has been lost. That you need to update, repackage, or even downplay parts of your experience just to stay in the conversation.

But what if that’s not the real work?

What if the real work is learning how to see your experience differently — so you can express it differently?

Because experience, at its core, isn’t just a list of roles or accomplishments. It’s pattern recognition, judgment shaped over time, knowing what matters, and what doesn’t, without needing to prove it every time. It’s the ability to walk into complexity and find your footing.

That doesn’t disappear. But it does require a new way of communicating it.

Sometimes the environments you’re pursuing aren’t designed to recognize the depth you bring. Sometimes the language you’re using doesn’t fully capture it. And sometimes — and this is the harder truth — the next chapter you’re meant to step into doesn’t look like the one you’ve been trying to return to.

A better question

That realization doesn’t always come with clarity right away. It can feel like standing in between, no longer wanting to go backward, and not yet seeing exactly what’s ahead.

But this is where something important begins to shift.

Instead of asking, “How do I fit into what already exists?” a different question starts to emerge:

Where does what I bring actually belong now?

That question opens up entirely new possibilities. Not because you’re starting over, but because you’re starting from experience, just in a new direction.

What’s still true

If you’ve been feeling this tension lately — the sense that you have more to offer, but aren’t sure how it’s being seen — you’re not alone.

It’s a real part of transition. And it’s not a sign that your value has diminished.

It may be a sign that it’s ready to be expressed differently.

Because your experience hasn’t lost its value, it may simply be waiting for the right context and the right conversation to come fully into view.

If this resonates, you’re not the only one navigating this question.

These are the kinds of conversations we have inside Betweenward — conversations about what still matters, what’s changing, and what might be possible from here.

So, I’m curious…

Where has your experience felt most valuable, and where has it felt hardest to translate right now?

If you’re open to sharing, I’d love to hear what this moment is looking like for you.

María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life.

Join us in the Betweenward™ community.

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There comes a moment after discernment when something else must happen.

You begin to see what drains you and recognize what you’ve been tolerating. You feel the bend in your own life — the subtle curve of strain that has gone unnoticed for too long.

And then you’re faced with a quieter question: If this no longer fits, what will you protect instead?

For many of us, the first shift is awareness. The second is restraint. But the third is more difficult. It requires a decision. It asks us to act on what we now know.

Not dramatically or impulsively. But deliberately.

The Myth of Infinite Capacity

For much of our lives, capacity has been a point of pride. We were praised for our endurance, admired for our availability, and trusted because we could handle what others could not.

Being capable became part of our identity. Being dependable felt virtuous. Being responsive signaled value.

Over time, this subtle equation forms: the more we can carry, the more we matter.

Emotional labor slips easily into this identity. We become the steady one, the listener, the one who absorbs tension so others don’t have to. We say yes because we can, stay available because we’re able, and step in because it feels generous.

But generosity without discernment eventually becomes diluted. Our energy spreads thin as our time fragments. And the very qualities that once felt like strength begin to feel costly.

As we move further into this chapter of life, our relationship with time shifts. We begin to feel more clearly that it is finite, not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet, undeniable one. Research on adult development suggests that when time feels more bounded, we naturally become more selective. Meaning rises above maintenance, and depth begins to matter more than momentum.

This isn’t urgency. It’s clarity. And clarity, if honored, becomes stewardship.

When Protection Feels Selfish

Stewardship sounds noble in theory. But in practice, it often feels uncomfortable.

When I began limiting the open times on my calendar for client sessions, I felt hesitation. When I guarded my weekends more carefully, I worried about disappointing people. And when I made space for my husband and the small, unremarkable moments we share, guilt surfaced more than once.

I have spent decades being available. Shifting that pattern felt, at first, like withdrawing something valuable.

But underneath the guilt was something stronger. I knew that if I didn’t begin protecting my time sooner rather than later, the cost of waiting could be emotionally catastrophic.

Not because something dramatic would happen overnight. But because regret accumulates quietly. It forms in the spaces we didn’t claim, in the evenings we surrendered too easily, and in the conversations we postponed. It gathers in the ordinary moments we assumed would always be there.

What I feared most was the possibility of losing something I could never reclaim.

That realization changed the equation.

Stewardship Is Not Withdrawal

Stewardship is the careful tending of what is finite.

It’s the recognition that energy, attention, and presence are not infinite resources. And it’s the understanding that what we protect shapes what we experience.

To steward something is not to hoard it, but to honor it.

When I make room on my calendar now, I’m not stepping away from contribution. I’m choosing where my contribution is most wholehearted. When I limit availability, I’m not becoming less generous, but more intentional about where my generosity flows.

There’s relief in that. Peace. Gratitude.

Relief because I’m no longer overextending by default.
Peace because my choices reflect my priorities.
Gratitude because I can feel the difference when I’m fully present instead of partially available.

Those emotions aren’t indulgent. They’re instructive. And they signal alignment.

Choosing Without Regret

Discernment narrows what we’re willing to tolerate. Stewardship determines what we’re willing to protect.

You don’t have to overhaul your life to practice it. You may only need to protect one evening, one conversation, or one stretch of time that belongs fully to you and those you love.

For some, stewardship may look like fewer meetings. For others, it may mean declining roles that once felt obligatory. It might mean saying, “Let me think about that,” instead of an automatic yes.

The form will differ. The principle remains the same.

What you protect today shapes what you’ll remember tomorrow.

I don’t want to look back and realize I was present everywhere except where it mattered most. I don’t want the habit of availability to cost me irreplaceable time.

So, I’m learning to make room. Not out of fear, but out of devotion.

Stewardship, in this season of life, isn’t selfish. It’s wise.

And wisdom, when acted upon gently and consistently, leaves fewer regrets in its wake.

María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life.

Join us in the Betweenward™ community.

Subscribe now