What coaching women through menopause taught me about work and what their employers never got to see

A personal reflection from Lucie Caffrey, co-founder of Hello Mimi.

For years, I coached women through perimenopause and menopause. The thing that surprised me most, early on, wasn't what they told me. It was what they'd told no one else.

Almost none of them came to me to talk about symptoms. They came because they thought they were failing.

What they actually described

A woman would sit down, often the person everyone else leaned on and describe, carefully, almost as a confession, the things that had started happening.

Losing a word mid-sentence in a meeting she'd once have led in her sleep. Reading the same email four times and still not holding on to it. A wave of heat and panic arriving uninvited, in the worst possible moment. And underneath all of it, the same quiet, frightening question: is this just who I am now?

Most hadn't connected any of it to menopause. They'd assumed it was them. That they'd lost their edge. That they were, somehow, becoming less.

Why they told no one

Here's the part that matters most for anyone thinking about menopause at work. Almost none of these women had told their employer. Many hadn't told anyone at all.

I understood why, because they explained it to me. To say it out loud at work, I'm struggling, I'm not coping the way I used to, felt like handing over evidence against themselves. These were women who'd spent twenty or thirty years being the capable one, the reliable one, the one who held it together. Admitting they were floundering felt like admitting they no longer belonged in the room.

So they said nothing. They compensated. They worked twice as hard to produce what used to come easily. They quietly turned down the stretch project. They began, in ways nobody around them noticed, to withdraw.

It's why I wasn't surprised when I later saw the figure: only about a quarter of women who've been unable to work because of their symptoms feel able to tell their manager the real reason (CIPD, 2019). In the coaching room, I'd have guessed even fewer.

What actually changed things

Here's what I learned, and it's the reason I do what I do now.

The thing that turned it around for these women was rarely a policy, or a benefit, or an adjustment. It was the moment someone helped them understand what was happening and told them, with some authority, that they weren't failing. That this was real, it was common, it had a name, and it could be managed.

That understanding did something a policy never could. It lifted the shame. And once the shame lifted, everything else became possible: the conversation with the manager, the adjustment, the decision to stay rather than quietly plan a way out. The support their employer had been offering all along suddenly became something they could reach for because they no longer felt they had to hide.

But it had to reach them first. And it usually reached them privately, on their own terms not through anything their workplace had put in front of them.

What I wish more employers could see

By the time menopause shows up in your absence figures, or in an exit interview, or in a resignation with a tidy explanation attached, she has almost always been managing it alone for months. Sometimes years. The moment when you could have kept her happened long before, quietly, at 3am or on the drive home and nothing you'd made available ever reached her there.

So the question I've come to think matters most isn't "do we have a good menopause policy?" Most organisations can build one. It's a quieter question: what actually reaches her, in the moment she needs it, before she's ready to tell a soul?

That question is the reason Hello Mimi exists. Not because policies and managers don't matter, they matter enormously but because I watched, over and over, brilliant women slip away in the space those things couldn't reach.

If you're thinking about menopause support for your own organisation, that's the part I'd sit with. Not what your plan says. Who it actually reaches.

I'd genuinely love to hear how you're approaching it.

Lucie xx

About this article This is a personal reflection from Lucie Caffrey, co-founder of Hello Mimi, drawn from her coaching experience. It is educational and general in nature and is not medical advice. Every woman's experience of menopause is different, and anyone with specific health concerns should be supported to seek care suited to their own needs.