Menopause Rise and Thrive | Helping Women Navigate Midlife and Menopause

129. Confidence and Workplace Support - Gen Z through the Boomers

• Dr. Sara Poldmae | Healer, Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and Functional Medicine Practitioner

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Are you feeling unfulfilled in your career—or wondering if it's too late to shift into something that lights you up? Maybe you're returning to the workforce after a break, or you're managing menopause symptoms that are quietly chipping away at your confidence. If that sounds like you, you're not alone—and this episode is exactly what you need.

In this conversation with author, coach, and former professor Dr. Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, we explore how midlife can be the most powerful chapter of your professional journey. Jodi brings wisdom, warmth, and a deeply thoughtful approach to navigating career transitions with courage, intentionality, and self-compassion.

 

In this episode:

  • Why midlife can be a powerful turning point in your career
  • How menopause impacts confidence—and what helps bring it back
  • The importance of being intentional with your energy, time, and values
  • Why your competencies don’t disappear (even if brain fog tells you otherwise)
  • Creating more flexible, inclusive workplaces for women in all life stages
  • How younger and older generations can learn from each other
  • Why now is the time to build communities—not just careers

 

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Dr. Jodi Vandenberg-Daves:

 

Connect with me, Dr. Sara Poldmae:

Website: https://risingwomanproject.com

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/drsarapoldmae

 

Have a question I can answer? Send me a message! I love to hear from my listeners!

Sara Poldmae:

Sarah, welcome to menopause. Rise and thrive. I am Dr Sarah pulled May, and this podcast is your go to guide for navigating perimenopause and menopause. If you are feeling a little overwhelmed, trust me, you are in great company each week, I'll bring you expert advice, raw, honest conversations and simple tips to help you stay grounded and maybe even find some humor in the process. Let's rise, thrive and tackle this wild ride together. Hi everybody today, I welcome Dr Jody Vandenberg Davies. She's a coach, a consultant, a facilitator, an editor and an author with over 25 years of experience in higher education and nonprofit leadership, she empowers leaders and guides individuals through their career journeys. And I'm just so excited to talk to Dr Jody today, because so many times in midlife, we are either re entering the workforce, or are in a career that hasn't really filled our bucket, so to speak. So I really want to dive into all things career, especially during midlife, and I know that Dr Jody will be a great fit to guide us through this.

Jodi Vanderberg- Daves:

Thank you. It's lovely to be here. Yeah, welcome. Well, tell us a little bit more about yourself. My introduction was super brief, but we would love to hear more about your work and all the things. Yeah. Well, I was a professor for a very long time, and I started out in history. My PhD is in history, and I moved into women's studies, which then had different names of that department over time, and I did a lot of different things over my academic career, but I was always kind of ambitious to try different things and so and I do see my journey as really pursuing knowledge, especially for the sake of justice, and also because I'm just interested in history and the big world, and moving more into finding ways to connect with and mentor people. So my path led me down a lot of mentoring paths, I guess, took on a mentoring kind of cast to it, and I did a lot of interesting things. By mid career, I kind of now look back at my 40s and think, wow, there's just so much zest and drive and forward movement. In that decade, I had three children, I was directing large federal grants. I was developed, still developing new courses. I ended up changing departments and and, you know, then developing yet new courses. And along the way, there's so much to take joy in. And and I remember, like, my 40th birthday feeling like, Wow, 40s are the fullness of life. And I, and I still believe that, you know, I think not that I'm not feeling full in my 50s here, but, but there was something about kind of that arrival. But also, as that decade goes on and you get closer to menopause, there is a feeling of fatigue setting in and I think there's a need for women to be really much more strategic about what they're doing with their careers. So you know, again, by the time I had reached that age, I had explored a lot of different corners of the box. I had gotten myself kind of a position on campus to facilitate grants for people. I took three years and directed my city's regions, Diversity Council, nonprofit work I slid into that. I went part time at the university. I finished a major book on the history of motherhood, which did well and and I had also survived some really hard things in my career. I mean, the decision to change departments was really based on being put in a difficult position and unfriendly environment and feeling pushed out. So there were just a lot of things to process. And I think we're taught to just keep moving forward and powering through. And I remember, you know, feeling like there I could see an end to to the full time academic world career, what was pulling me partly, was more mentoring, coaching, getting out in the community and speaking and having community interfacing work along the way too. Because one of the things I did was direct a large federal grant to help history teachers at all levels. And so I was out, you know, I was, I was interfacing with school districts and teachers and things like that. And I felt pulled to do these different different things, but I also was trying to honor, you know, where I where, what I had already learned. And this thought came to me around age 50, I need to do more consulting and less heavy lifting. And I think as women, we're taught to just kind of keep feeling like we need to prove ourselves and audition for every role. One of the things I've been speaking on a lot and doing a lot of webinars on is perfectionism and how that's partly socially constructed for us as women. Yeah, it's there all along, but there is some research showing that the biggest confidence gap for women and men, between women and men is right around that time in the 20s, early 20s, when you're. Getting maybe out of college or otherwise entering the workforce, and that's a rough time to be struggling with confidence. Young people do in general, but women tend to more but then that erodes by the time you're in your 40s, and that gap is much smaller by the time you're 60. Women are often more confident than men, but I'd love to see that sped up, and I think that some of it is that getting getting more clear. Now I will say my intentionality around going from consult consulting, going from too much heavy lifting into more consulting. I'm talking in my role, not yet being a, you know, fully into the consultant role, right? But even in my role that did not always succeed. But, you know, I ended up overseeing the merger of two departments, and that would and as a leadership administrative role that I remember that as a year without sleep, but there's still kind of a that intentionality helped me move into my 50s and and where I wanted to be with things, and ultimately led me to leave the university well before retirement age and leave in my last year at the University, I was very intentional about deciding I didn't I was not going to teach courses. I was going to take a financial hit for the last year and just focus on being a good department chair and leader and a mentor to the people that that were in my orbit and that made me leave on such a happier note. It helped me kind of recover my my health, which had suffered, and so that, I guess is you asked my story, and I'm all into my messaging here, about about intentionality, but as I think about my story in relation to your themes, that that just came up, yeah, for sure, and I think it's so important to realize, and I say it time and time again on this podcast, that midlife is our chance to become more intentional, right? And it's interesting that you say that our confidence goes up midlife, because I have always kind of thought the opposite, with at least with midlife, when we're experiencing a lot of physical symptoms, what I have seen with my patients is a lack of confidence, not necessarily in their abilities and skill sets, but because of the physical symptoms and then the Brain fog and things that come along with menopause like that. Fatigue can be like bodily all encompassing. What I have seen is that that can rock a woman's confidence, but when you're saying that, it actually comes up that makes sense to me, if a woman is feeling well, because what I've seen in clinic is, once we can get them feeling better, they are unstoppable. So it's yeah, it's not that they're lacking confidence in their ability. They're lacking confidence in their day to day ability, if that makes sense, because they don't know if the body is going to cooperate or if the brain fog is going to be in their way. This is so helpful for me to think about too. Yeah, that. Thanks for those insights. I is because I sort of, as you're talking, I sort of picture that, that arc of feeling, feeling like, wow, I have these competencies under my belt by your 40s. You know, you usually do have that. But then, yes, menopause can derail you. You know, it way better than I do, but it, oh, it has. There's so much going on there. So, yeah, it's kind of getting through that tunnel. The competencies don't go away, right? Your networks, your the way people look to you for answers, because now you have some wisdom and some gravitas. That doesn't go away. But it is, we have to often wear a mask around what we're dealing with, physically, emotionally, because of menopause, right? So I was excited to talk to you because, like, like, every woman who's been through it has been through it, been through it. I got diagnosed with stage zero breast cancer at age 49 Well, not yet menopausal, and went through that. And, you know, very light diagnosis, diagnosis as these things go, but nonetheless, rocks your world. And a few years later, I had the the everything. It was just like the whack a mole with my body, everything, every weird system, hot flashes that I'm still dealing with. And yeah, there is a way in which those those struggles are often so silent, and I am so excited that there's more women, doctors like you, particularly, coming out and talking about it and making it more visible and helping women cope. Yeah, and the conversation's changing, you know? I mean, there's even workplace support for menopause, which I think is super empowering, because, like you said, those competencies don't change. It's just that they might look a little bit different day to day. And I think it's so important, as women become more, you know, stepping more and more into leadership roles, being able to make these kind of changes in the workplace, so that women feel supported. Because I think if we feel supported.

Sara Poldmae:

It. And know, Hey, it's okay to take a 20 minute meditation break. If we have a workplace that allows for us to truly nurture ourselves, we can actually outperform our men, the peers. Yes, those are great points. And you know, it makes me think about something as a, you know, teacher of women's history over many years, and looking at the workplace as a gender scholar and leadership development person, what's good for women is often good for everybody else.

Unknown:

Well, because ain't happy, nobody's happy, is the old saying.

Jodi Vanderberg- Daves:

That's part of it, but it's also true like because, yes, there's a ripple effect into families. There's a ripple effect into how we are with our colleagues and everything and co workers. But it's also like needing Family Medical Leave Act everyone thought that was for working moms. Well, not that many years later, we found that half the people taking it were taking it for personal health reasons, and people have all kinds of other family needs. Women are the ones that we think have bodies. Ben just supposedly Go on, go on in life, ignoring their bodies. It's sort of the myth, and we're much more kind of worked up about women's bodies, because they can get pregnant, right? Yeah, they can have menopause and things like that. But when we start to accommodate for the complexities of people's lives and their bodies and their health, yes, it's an amazing retention strategy. It's an amazing way to create psychological safety in the workplace so that people can do their best work, and I think it aligns so beautifully with what the younger generations are telling us they need mental health days, mental health space, space for conversations about my mind and body aren't doing well right now, you know, and and having that be part of the conversation, instead of just that kind of capitalist assembly line where you just keep going until you know you they put the gold watch on you. Even the need for flexibility, for schedules, the need for on ramps and off ramps, and different kinds of part time work, or flexible work, work from home, all those things, women are more likely to feel compelled to demand them so that their life doesn't just collapse on them. And yet everyone can benefit from that. There's always going to be some people who are that person, and they go all the way through and you know, maybe even if they don't have elder care because their sister deals with it, they have no health problems. But those people are the exception, and you're a person. We seem to have built our workplaces around those people in a lot of

Sara Poldmae:

ways. Yeah. So I love the idea of accommodating menopause and and again. You know, I think there's a generational thing, but I have a feeling that the Gen that the millennials, I'm an elder Gen X myself, that the millennials and Gen Z folks are just going to be talking about it straight up, you know,

Jodi Vanderberg- Daves:

by the time they get there, yeah, 100% I think that it's so beautiful. I don't know if you have children, but I have a 21 year old daughter, and the conversations that they have are just different than what we had as, you know, teenagers and early adulthood. And it's so beautiful to see, like I see her sorority sisters when they leave the room, they say, I love you, and I'm like, wow, you never did that stuff with our girlfriends. I mean, maybe our besties, but like, and they're all her besties, or whatever. But it's so funny, because I realized when she was applying, or, you know, petition, whatever, rushing to be a sorority girl. I was so against it. I kept my mouth shut because I tend to like let her make her own decision. I I'm a very like, hands off in certain ways, but as soon as you come to me, I will wrap you in your My arms and give you whatever advice you need. But if you don't ask for my advice, I'm not going to give it, because I want Marc, you know, I wanted her to kind of build her own world, right? And so I was so against it, because I just remembered girls being a little too competitive for my taste, and I didn't like the whole popularity contest vibe of it, but it ended up being such a special and is such a special part of her world, the connections she's made, and the way they lift each other up, and the connections career wise, that they're getting in their social circle. So it's been so nice, and I'm looking forward to seeing what that generation does bring to the workplace, because I think you're right. The conversations they're having, they're going to demand more than we did. And there's a real negative stigma against the younger generation having kind of a crappy work ethic. And I don't think it's that generation. I think there is some truth to some of the work ethic issues. Let's see which one is it the millennials. I think that, and that's not necessarily them. It's more that change for humans is hard. So if we were to sit at a table and actually listen and have a back and forth conversation, some of the execs may get it, but what's happening is it's just, I don't want to work, and then the execs like you don't want to work, and it becomes law. So yeah, it's great that we have leaders like you to bring these conversations to the fore. Front so happy to have you on the show today. Oh, thank you. Yes, yes. I learned so much from my daughters and my Gen Z son. My daughters are millennials. And yeah, the new conversations, like, I call it the social imagination, like, what's possible, you know, they they expand that. They open those doors. And yeah, I also the my book, leading with courage, a career long guide for idealistic women. I brought it, I brought a copy of it today. Courage, a

Sara Poldmae:

career long guide for idealistic women. Oh, I can't wait to grab a copy. Yeah, thank you. I

Jodi Vanderberg- Daves:

definitely talk a lot about generations. I use my historian lens to look at a little bit of like, what these different generations have been through. That's a small part of of it, but it's the backdrop. And I'm I'm trying to create a career long guide that looks at these different chapters and stages of of the career, including how hard it is to develop your credibility and confidence when you're young, and then how messy it is maybe have children or just lots of obligations and and, and maybe take on formal leadership roles in mid career, and then at the the 50 plus. How, you know, what can we do more of that consulting and heavy lifting. But are we also dealing with ageism? Probably, you know, and how can we kind of think about what legacy we're able to leave, grieve, maybe some losses of things we weren't able to do, you know, just process that end of career. But I try to take those two kind of frameworks of the career journey and the intergenerational differences and commonalities and open up space for more intergenerational conversations. I think that would just be so valuable, because in our culture, we have all these memes that are just, you know, move over boomers and what, all the kind of negative and then Gen Z has no work. We

Sara Poldmae:

can learn from the boomers, and we can also learn from the Generation Z, for sure.

Jodi Vanderberg- Daves:

Yes, I think those two ends of the spectrum are just, they're just fascinating because, like, if you were a boomer woman, you know, there were a lot of battles that that Boomer women had to fight before I came along as Gen X and and really, like, things were just very explicitly hard in certain ways. And, you know, just you could be fired if you were gay you didn't, you know, until 1978 you could be fired for being pregnant. And then you have, like, the Gen Z who are facing this climate crisis, this political chaos, the idea that work doesn't seem that rewarding because the economic situation is so hard that you can't often make a living, you know. I think about having a baby and having zero worries about co pays, and yeah, and paying for having a baby, you know? And so, so it's important that we understand one another across these generations, and I feel like I'm getting a little bit away from the menopause moment.

Sara Poldmae:

But maybe it's the menopause moment, because so many of us have daughters and sons, yeah, to have this conversation and remember and give props to our mothers, right? Because I think each generation, I think it's just human nature to kind of take for granted the privileges that were earned for us from the previous generation. And I just finished on Audible the book atmosphere, and it is a really good book by I think it's Taylor Jenkins Reid. I don't know if you've ever read her before, but it's about a woman astronaut that I don't want to give any spoilers away, but it talks a lot about some of the oppression that she felt because she became an astronaut in the early 80s. So there was a few different ways that she was being oppressed because of different things in her life. So our conversation is timely because that that book is really sitting deeply with me, and I'm a reader, and I just finished rereading the red 10. I don't know if read that. That's a good I'm familiar with it. Yeah, I don't know if I ever read it, but it was like in the air for a while.

Jodi Vanderberg- Daves:

It's worth a read. It's interesting because I do not I was raised Jewish, but I'm not a practice. I'm not practicing in in that religion. I'm more on the Buddhist side of things, but the red tent is a biblical story and brings in a lot of biblical characters, but talks very much. The Red tent is where women would go to menstruate, and talks more about the intergenerational, you know, communication between men that we're talking about, but this was back in biblical days, and it's the same conversation, just slightly different, right? It's about roles and duty and career, like how they were contributing to the family and the pushback. So this is a conversation that's been going on for 1000s of years, not just recently, not just with these generations that we were talking about, the Z, the millennials and the boomers and the X. It's been going on for a long time, and I think it's an important conversation to continue to have. Tell me again, the name of your book. It's called leading with courage, a career long guide for idealistic women. So it's really part of the gap in the literature. I wanted to fill in the advice literature to women, the leadership development literature is it's very values based. It's very much about bringing your values as a way to empower yourself and others. So it's less about it's less transactional, it's less ladder climbing. And there's and the thesis is, you can be a leader from anywhere. I lift up college student leaders. I was a college professor for so long, even mentioned High School. And then, like, how can you in early career, be that question asker, you know, and and find ways to to kind of move the needle on things by, by bringing that new perspective, yeah. And then just, you know, again, mid career, how do you, how do you set boundaries, and how do you, how do you practice leadership with with authenticity and ethics. How do you make institutional change? So it's really, it's, it's all the different kind of pieces of of a career, long journey based in values, pro social values, inclusivity, diversity, equity, inclusion, those words that are still important to me, and I think that, you know, back to the older women. I mean, this is part of the reason we need this is because, you know, the what you brought up about the astronaut and atmosphere and the way that men could just talk to women and just like, I mean, I've, you know, Gail Collins did, who was op ed editor of the New York Times for a very long time, and still writes in the New York Times. I believe she did a really cool book where she interviewed women on things like, what was it like to be like on a construction site when you were the first woman, and sometimes men would urinate on your tools, like, like, just hazing, different things that just, this is what it means to keep you out. You know, still

Sara Poldmae:

happens on construction sites to this very day, it

Jodi Vanderberg- Daves:

probably does. But one of the things that I've been kind of hearing is that in this Trump 2.0 era, those behaviors are like, who's going to stop you from hazing? I'm using it kind of an extremely gross one, but, you know, it's maybe not getting someone a chair or just just just putting somebody down in these different ways being exclusive. You know, making, maybe making sexual, maybe sexual harassment is just like, not so policed as anymore, whatever it might be, those things, maybe we can learn more fight from asking these older women, how did you cope with that when that was just normal? Because, you know, for me, and early on, you know, like, for a lot of millennials, too, I think there was, there were some, of course, we still had it, but there was, like, there were some more guardrails around feminists had helped create, and the laws, you know, like, these things were against the law, right? And companies were concerned about litigation, yeah. And now, why? You know, why would they be so, how do we? How do we survive that? I think our elders have some things to teach us,

Sara Poldmae:

right? That's why it's so hard to believe that a lot of our elders, anyway, we go into a whole nother conversation. I'm so excited to read your book, and I think I I'm going to make sure to put it in my daughter's hands as well, because I do think that that intergenerational piece is so important. We can learn from all of each other. And, you know, let's try and not let history keep repeating itself, you know, the more knowledge that we have. Because I don't think that we all even always recognize microaggressions, and sometimes we take advantage of, you know, and play to some of those things that they work in our favor. And I think the more we can be educated and more conscious about these things, I think the stronger women can become, yeah, yeah, great, yeah. I think, I mean, because I do talk about college students, and I hope she would like it, yeah, are there other things that you that you wanted to ask me related to again, I feel like we're getting a little far from the topics you usually talk about. But are we, are there things coming to mind for you about where this all intersects or no. I mean, I think we touched on it earlier that even if just to speak to my patients and to anyone listening in midlife, your competencies don't go away. And I think Jody made that crystal clear in the beginning. I think that that's the big take home message to midlife women in particular, but the second take home message is more about the intergenerational learning. Learn from your mothers, ask your aunts questions, ask your daughters questions. You know, I think we have this moment here where we're giving ourselves permission to heal and to feel better, and then once we do feel better once you're working with providers that are listening to you, and you feel empowered again where you don't feel like it's a day to day survival mode that sometimes we feel like in midlife. That's your opportunity, and dare I say, maybe your duty, to start having these conversations because the world. Needs us to have these conversations now. It's scary out there and on a negative note, but I mean, I could even cry right now that it's hard to believe where we are currently. And I'm sure there's things going on behind many closed office doors that are being permitted because or reintroduced into this society that we don't need, and the stronger we can become, and the more conversations we can have, and the more people like Jody that are putting it down in print, the better, because we just can't afford not to have these conversations, and we can't have them yelling at each other over Facebook.

Jodi Vanderberg- Daves:

Yes, absolutely, it's what everyone is saying. We need to be building communities. And I and the workplace. I mean, part of my vision is, can the workplace be one of those spaces where we have some civic space, where we because they are the places we show up every day, you know, in varying degrees, depending on, you know, remote work, but we show up in those places. These are the people we spend part of our days with. How can we practice building communities, empathy, listening? And then I just want to return to that, that piece about the you know, when going through menopause. So I think that it if you think about if you're just if, for example, you're a mother, what did you accommodate in your life to have a child when you were in that stage, and think about when you're in menopause, like, maybe you made some some career shifts, maybe you pulled back on some things here and there. Maybe you saw, hopefully you saw yourself as a long term investment. And this is a chapter. It's the same thing with menopause, like, it's okay to to pull back, to reset your boundaries, to pull inward and and have you know, keep your networks alive, but have confidence that you maybe need a little space, just as you did it when you were a new mother, or if you were never a mother, that's okay. You could still use the metaphor you need to a little crucible for your self care whatever other moment you you did that already in your career. Use your story as your power, to empower yourself to take that time and space so that you can move through at the help of doctors like you move through and be on the other side of that. And there's so much left to give. Older women are doing things way past when they used to in the workplace and in the world, and, you know, getting their voices out there. So let's get women through this without too much beating up on ourselves. And I love making life too hard.

Sara Poldmae:

I love it. I love it. Well. Thank you so much, Jody for being on the show. We'll make sure to include all of your information in the show notes, and I hope that we keep in touch. I can't wait to read your book. I'll definitely give you my feedback. Give it to my daughter. It's been an absolute pleasure. Yes, same for me. Thanks for inviting me. I love your mission, too. Thanks for all that you do. Oh, well, thank you. Jody, you

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