By Rebecca Jarvie-Gibbs, Co-Founder and COO of Example, and creator and host of Fine Form Podcast
When I started Fine Form, I wanted to understand what building a career actually feels like from the inside. Thirty conversations later, here are a few things I’ve learned.
We’re playing a game built on someone else’s terms.
So much of the architecture of modern work — the metrics we use to measure success, the pace we’re expected to sustain, the values that get rewarded — was built around a model of ambition that is fundamentally masculine. Speed, scale, competition, relentless forward momentum. The assumption that the person doing the work has no competing demands on their time, energy or identity. That model didn’t emerge by accident and it wasn’t designed with women in mind.
What I find striking is how thoroughly many of us internalised it before we thought to question it. The women I’ve spoken with didn’t opt into a broken framework knowingly — they were handed it early and spent years measuring themselves against standards that were never quite theirs.
The most quietly radical thing I’ve witnessed across these conversations is women deciding to define success on their own terms — not as a statement, but as a practical daily decision about what they’re actually optimising for. That shift, small as it sounds, changes everything.
It’s hard but critical to separate who we are from what we do
At some point, work stops being something you do and becomes something you are. The career, the business, the title quietly absorbs the whole self until there’s no meaningful separation between the two, and that fusion feels like commitment, even like success, right up until the moment it doesn’t.
What I heard from women who have experienced burnout isn’t that they simply worked too hard — it’s that when the work wobbled or changed or ended, they didn’t know who they were without it.
We’ve been told burnout is a systems problem, that with the right routines and the right approach to time we can out manage it, but the pattern is almost always the same: identity and work collapse into each other so gradually that by the time it becomes a problem, there’s nothing left underneath.
Almost every woman who came through it describes what followed as clarifying in a way nothing else had been — clearer, more herself, less willing to compromise on what actually matters. The work is still there. It just no longer gets to be everything.
The invisible load is real — and it isn’t a personal failing
The emotional management of teams, the care work inside professional relationships, the constant low-level anticipation of what everyone around you needs before they know they need it — women are carrying an enormous amount that never appears in a job description. What strikes me, again and again, is how many have absorbed this as their own deficiency rather than a structural reality.
The writer Stefanie Sword-Williams coined a term that I think speaks to this brilliantly — careout. Not burnout from overwork, but the specific depletion that comes from endless emotional availability — the cumulative cost of putting everyone else’s needs before your own, every day, for years.
Often women struggle because they’re doing too much and none of it is being counted, and the simple act of naming that — of sitting with other women and saying me too, I thought it was just me — turns out to matter a great deal.
The hardest part of building something is deciding you’re allowed to
This comes up in almost every conversation, regardless of industry or career stage. The hardest part of building something, for so many women, isn’t the idea or the execution — it’s the internal negotiation about whether they’re even allowed to try.
Whether they’re allowed to take up space, to be ambitious, to fail publicly or succeed in ways that matter to them. We’ve been shaped, from very early on, to wait for permission that frequently isn’t coming. But what I’ve also witnessed is that once a woman stops waiting for it — once she decides the permission is hers to give herself — something shifts in a way that is difficult to articulate but impossible to miss. Across thirty conversations, it never gets less striking.
Growth will pull you in every direction. The hard part is knowing what to protect
Business is full of noise about what you should be doing — scaling faster, reaching further, optimising everything. And there is real tension in growing something you’ve built from the ground up, because growth changes the thing, and not always in the ways you’d choose.
What I’ve noticed in the women who have navigated it well is that they didn’t resist change — they embraced it, evolved with it — but they stayed anchored in why they started in the first place.
That anchor is what allowed them to make decisions from a place of clarity rather than pressure, to distinguish between the evolution that serves the work and the drift that quietly hollows it out. The ones who found their rhythm didn’t do it by holding tightly to what existed before. They did it by remaining clear on what they were actually protecting.
Reinvention is not a sign that something went wrong
So many of the women I’ve spoken with have, at some point, fundamentally changed direction — moved industry, closed something, started over, redefined their role entirely — and described it not as failure but as the best decision they ever made.
Women are quietly brilliant at reinvention, more willing than they’re given credit for to sit with uncertainty, to start from scratch, to build something better from what didn’t work.
The cultural story around career is still largely linear — climb, accumulate, don’t go backwards — but almost none of the women I’ve interviewed have lived a linear career, and all of them are glad that’s how it unfolded for them. It is never too late, and however much that sounds like a platitude, in practice it never is.
Rebecca Jarvie-Gibbs is the Co-Founder and COO of Example, and the creator and host of Fine Form — a podcast exploring ambition, identity and what success actually means. Fine Form Series 2 drops every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts.
