The verification code arrived a minute after I requested it. Not being particularly patient, I was getting organized on one monitor, while watching my inbox on my laptop.

I noticed the email pretty quickly, but, by the time I switched back to the website, found the right box, and typed in the numbers, the code had expired.

So I requested another one. I got it right this time.

This is the kind of small digital experience that can make a perfectly capable person wonder whether technology has finally won.

It hasn’t. But it does have an irritating sense of humor.

Digital confidence is becoming one of the most important everyday skills we can develop, especially after 50. Not because everyone needs to become a technology expert, but because so much of daily life now happens through screens, apps, passwords, links, portals, and online accounts.

Work. Medical appointments. Banking. Travel. Shopping. Communication. Government services. Entertainment. Even the menu at a restaurant may expect us to scan a square on the table before we can find out what comes with the chicken.

Avoiding technology altogether is becoming harder. Feeling comfortable with every part of it may be impossible.

Fortunately, comfort and confidence are not the same thing.

Confidence Doesn’t Mean Knowing Everything

A digitally confident person doesn’t know what every button does.

They know how to pause.

They read the screen before reacting. They look for familiar clues. They ask whether a request makes sense. They know when to proceed, when to back out, and when to ask someone for help.

Most importantly, they understand that confusion is not evidence of incompetence.

Technology changes constantly. Buttons move. Websites get redesigned. Apps update themselves and proudly announce that everything is now “more intuitive,” usually moments before hiding the one feature we actually use. And when did the search field move from the top of the iPhone screen to the bottom? That really messed with my muscle memory. At this point, muscle memory is the only memory I can reliably count on.

Nobody keeps up with all of it.

Digital confidence is the ability to keep learning without turning every unfamiliar screen into a judgment about ourselves. Remember, it’s not you. It’s them. They made it more complicated than it needed to be, with the thinking that more is better. Our experience tells us less is more.

Participation Matters More Than Perfection

Many adults over 50 already use more technology than they give themselves credit for.

We send photos. Use maps. Join video calls. Pay bills. Look up medical information. Stream movies. Buy airline tickets. Text family members. Post on social media. Upload documents. Search for answers.

Those are digital skills.

The fact that we occasionally forget a password or cannot find an attachment does not erase everything we already know.

Confidence grows through small, successful experiences. You learn how to scan a QR code. You turn on two-step verification for one account. You upload a document. You ask an AI tool to explain an unfamiliar concept in plain English.

One useful result changes the way the next challenge feels.

The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. The goal is to become less intimidated by it.

Good Judgment Is Part of Digital Confidence

Confidence without caution is not the goal either.

The digital world contains useful tools, helpful people, confusing design, bad instructions, aggressive marketing, and a healthy supply of criminals pretending to be Medicare, your bank, the IRS, Amazon, Microsoft, or a panicked grandchild who urgently needs gift cards.

Digital confidence includes knowing when to stop.

Unexpected urgency is a warning sign. So are threats, strange payment requests, unfamiliar links, requests for verification codes, and anyone who wants remote access to your computer.

A simple approach works in many situations:

Pause. Verify. Contact independently.

Don’t use the number or link inside the suspicious message. Open the official app, type the website address yourself, or call a number you already trust.

Also check the sender’s actual email address, not just the name you recognize. “Amazon Support” can look reassuring until you notice the message came from something like amazon-help-472@randomdomain.com. That’s usually your cue to report it as phishing and delete.

If the message is legitimate, it will still be legitimate after you verify it.

And any emergency requiring immediate payment in gift cards deserves the same trust you would give a raccoon suggesting that your trash can doesn’t need a lid. No problem. It’ll be fine.

AI Can Help Build Digital Confidence

AI is one of the newer parts of digital life, but it can also make technology easier to understand.

You can ask it:

“Explain this error message in plain English.”

“Walk me through this one step at a time.”

“What questions should I ask before I click this?”

“Help me describe this problem clearly to technical support.”

You can also take a screenshot of the page, message, or error and upload it to an AI tool. Then ask:

“Look at this screenshot and tell me what this message means.”

“Where should I click next?”

“Does anything in this email look suspicious, including the sender’s actual email address?”

Before uploading a screenshot, crop or cover passwords, verification codes, account numbers, private medical information, or anything else you want to keep private.

That doesn’t mean AI is always correct. It isn’t. Important medical, legal, financial, and security information still needs to be verified.

But AI can be a patient starting point. It doesn’t mind explaining something twice, simplifying the answer, or trying another approach.

Used well, it can help turn technology from something that talks at us into something we can question.

The Practical AI Series So Far

Over the past several months, I’ve been creating a group of practical resources for people who want to use AI without making life more complicated.

Each one addresses a different obstacle. I’ve written articles on each topic as a quick start. They can be found on my Substack page.

AI Without the Nonsense Starter Kit

The Starter Kit was created for people who were curious about AI but didn’t know where to begin.

It explains what AI does well, what it does poorly, and how to start with small, useful tasks instead of trying to understand the entire industry.

The central idea is simple: AI is a tool, not a decision-maker. You remain in charge.

50 Practical ChatGPT Prompts for Real Life

The prompt pack came next because many people opened an AI chat and immediately faced the digital equivalent of a blank sheet of paper.

They didn’t need more theory. They needed examples.

The prompts cover communication, planning, travel, health conversations, career transition, home organization, learning, and decision-making. They are meant to be copied, adapted, and used as conversation starters.

Prompts are not magic spells. They’re better questions.

Make AI Sound Like You

Once people began using AI to help with writing, another problem became obvious.

The results often sounded polished, professional, and completely unlike the person who wrote them.

Make AI Sound Like You focuses on using AI as an editor without surrendering your personality. It includes before-and-after examples, rewriting prompts, a human-tone checklist, and a personal voice worksheet.

AI can help organize the words. The experience, judgment, humor, and voice still need to come from you.

The What’s Next AI Workbook

The workbook moves beyond everyday tasks and uses AI as a reflection partner.

It is designed for mature professionals thinking about reinvention, contribution, work, identity, energy, and the next chapter of life.

The workbook starts with personal reflection rather than an AI prompt. Readers write first, then use AI to help identify themes, organize ideas, challenge assumptions, and explore realistic next steps.

AI helps with the thinking. You make the decision.

What’s Coming Next

I’m now working on Digital Confidence After 50, a practical guide to navigating technology, AI, online communication, accounts, passwords, scams, and digital change without shame or panic.

It will include a digital-confidence self-check, small “try this once” exercises, password and verification guidance, scam-awareness basics, AI comfort-building activities, and a simple plan for choosing the next digital skill to practice.

The guide is planned for next week. I hoped to have it ready for my regular Thursday article, but it didn’t happen for this week.

Like the earlier resources, it will not try to turn anyone into a technology expert. There are already plenty of manuals for people who enjoy reading manuals.

This one is about staying engaged. Because digital confidence is not knowing every answer. It is knowing that when the next unfamiliar screen appears, you can pause, look, ask, try, and keep going.

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“How the hell is this still happening,” he said. “I apply to every job I’m qualified for, yet I never get a call for an interview. What the hell is going on? Is ageism this bad, really?”

I asked him my two questions. Have you had any interviews at all? No. Can I look at your resume? Yes.

I didn’t need more than thirty seconds, because in my experience, there are a few common mistakes our 50+ job seekers consistently make when it comes to resumes. His resume was making all of the mistakes.

Someone Should Not Be Able to Calculate Your Age From Your Resume

Jeff’s work history went back to 1988. His college graduation date sat right there in black and white: 1992. High school was still listed, on a resume for a man in his fifties. I was able to tell him that he is 55 because I graduated the same year.

Additionally, the formatting hadn’t been touched since his last job search, eight years earlier, when he was applying for an internal promotion. He was submitting the same version every time, which simply doesn’t work in today’s job market, and it hasn’t worked in quite some time.

Your resume has one job. Get you the interview. To achieve that, it has to pass AI or recruiter prescreening, then appeal to a busy hiring manager or whoever is making the decision about who gets an interview.

Jeff’s resume wasn’t doing its job.

The Four Simple Fixes

1. Remove dates from the 1900s.

2. Cut work history older than 20 years. Most of that old experience is irrelevant now anyway.

3. Remove high school completely. At this point, it’s assumed that you graduated.

4. Remove college graduation and certification dates, except for certifications that expire.

The Bones of a Strong Resume

Two pages is the right length once you’ve got 20-plus years of experience. That’s not a compromise, that’s the standard.

Order matters. Professional Summary first. Skills right after. Then measurable Accomplishments, the ones with a number attached, because numbers catch the eye and serve as proof of your impact. Followed by Experience and Education (education first if you have anything above a Bachelor’s degree). Use clear bullets showing what you actually executed and delivered in each role, leading with strong verbs: executed, delivered, engineered, developed, drove, etc.

Keep the format simple. No heavy bold, no fancy design graphics, and definitely no photo. A photo doesn’t help you, and it opens the door to even more bias, conscious or unconscious.

Two Gate Keepers, One Resume

A little more on the two things your resume must do.

First, your resume has to clear the AI screening. This means key words from the job posting need to be included in every resume you submit. A simple format lets you modify your Professional Summary and Skills sections quickly for each posting. Your other details can stay the same, once you’ve created your main version.

Second, your resume has to appeal to a hiring manager who is busy, distracted, and making a decision in seconds, not minutes. This person doesn’t have time to do an archaeological dig. If your resume reads like a novel, you lose. As someone who did a lot of hiring in my corporate days, I know this from experience. If a resume didn’t make it easy for me to see a snapshot of what that candidate could do for me, I’d simply set the resume aside with a plan to “get back to it later.” Spoiler alert: I never got back to it later.

Ageism gets blamed a lot in this process, but if your resume is giving your age away, the fix is simple: remove the opportunity for someone to do the age math. Your goal is to get into the interview and sell yourself, with the high energy and amount of experience you will bring to the role.

From Overlooked to Offer

We rebuilt his format so it was clean for the AI tools and clear for a human. We strengthened his content so 60% of the bullets had proof behind it: percentages, dollars, numbers. We removed high school, cut his graduation date, and pulled his work history back to the last 20 years.

Two pages. Submitted as a PDF, so it holds its shape no matter whose screen opens it.

I also taught Jeff how to use AI as an editor, to make quick adjustments that align his Professional Summary and Skills with each job posting. His job was to spend a few minutes making the final edits, then read every line and fix what didn’t sound true, because it wasn’t his job to hand his story to a machine and hope. Once his bullets below these two sections were done, he never had to touch them again, unless he remembered something important he wanted to add.

One month later, Jeff had his first interview. Three months later, he had an offer in hand. We negotiated it, because I never let a client take the first number, landing on a salary that was $12k more than initially offered.

The Takeaway

Ageism is real, but it can only be applied to your resume if you allow it.

Also, you don’t have to do it alone. Having someone, like me, in your corner who understands today’s job market can make a real difference. I also know that not everyone is in a financial position for private coaching, so I’ve created a group mastermind that kicks off in September to help with every part of your job search:

• Week 1: Get past the bots. Fix your resume so it clears the AI screener and actually lands in front of a human.

• Week 2: LinkedIn strategy. Work your network, not the void. Activate the people you already know instead of waiting on job boards to save you.

• Week 3: The SLAY Method™. Interview training built specifically for experienced professionals, not entry-level scripts.

• Week 4: Final rounds, handled. Walk in prepared, not hopeful.

• Week 5: Negotiate like you know your worth, because you do.

A small group, on purpose. Real feedback only works in a room this size, plus a community of professionals in the exact same season as you.

Templates, scripts, and tools that outlast the cohort. This doesn’t stop when the calls end.

If you’d like to learn more, pop over to my website: Learn More Here

Your Free Resume Checklist

Run your resume against these four checks before you submit it anywhere.

▢ Simple, easy-to-read format, built in this order:

1. Professional Summary (modify for each posting)

2. Core Skills (modify for each posting)

3. Accomplishments (top 3 to 5)

4. Work Experience (last 20 years only)

5. Education (no dates)

▢ Dates older than 20 years removed from Work Experience and Education, including graduation dates and certificate dates.

▢ One primary version saved and protected. Copy it, then modify the copy for each job you apply for.

▢ Saved and submitted as a PDF.

In addition to the mastermind, I’m offering two new free workshops in August, sponsored by BoldTimers:

Get the Interview: How to Build a Resume That Actually Works in Today’s Job Market is a 1-hour live Zoom workshop where I’ll teach you how to make your resume an offer magnet, on August 25 at 10am PT.

Save your spot Here

Ace Your Next Job Interview: SLAY the Interview. Land the Offer, follows the same day at 2pm PT. Attend one or both, depending on where you are right now.

Save your spot Here

Choose the resume workshop if you’re submitting resumes like crazy and not getting offers. Choose the interview workshop if you’re getting interviews and not making it past the first round.

Choose both if you’d like.

Tabatha Jones is a Career Advancement & Job Search Coach, founder of Empowered Leadership Coaching® and The Corporate Escape Sherpa®, and creator of the SLAY Method™, an interview framework designed specifically to help experienced professionals communicate their leadership and land the opportunities they’ve earned.

A former Fortune 50 Executive Director with more than 20 years of leadership experience, Tabatha left Corporate America at 50 to build the business she runs today, helping professionals navigate promotions, career pivots, and intentional next acts with confidence.

She writes about career strategy for BoldTimers and is the author of Promotion Ready in 3 Months: The Women’s Guide to Career Advancement.

We say it when we’re trying to spark a new job search, learn a challenging skill, or change something about ourselves when life feels off-track. And, of course, it often relates to fitness.

The phrase has its roots in classical Greek and Latin philosophy — have you ever heard the adage carpe diem,” or seize the day? And it has been applied to a sea of self-help books and motivational seminars urging us to move forward in our lives and not look back. It is part of the modern belief that we should never avoid dwelling on our faults and our friction points. Instead, we should, to steal the words of Devo in the song “Whip It,” always “go forward, move ahead, try to detect it, it’s not too late.” We are told to whip ourselves into shape.

Of course, a behind-the-music look at Devo’s early punk-pop anthem would reveal that the band with flowerpots on their heads did not mean this seriously. It was a tongue-in-cheek indictment of our culture, our need to allows push ourselves beyond our limits if we are to succeed — or until we are too battle-scarred and weary to do anything more.

In the fitness world, this is a consistent theme. You must start today if you want to see results tomorrow; you should never look at your body shape or your current health condition too closely but instead envision what you can become with some work; you must, of course, whip it good.

But for older adults who have endured many years of hard work at the office, at home or at the gym, being asked to do more than we could even imagine can be a turn-off. Telling someone they’re not fit enough or that all it takes is Herculean effort to turn an aging Corolla into a Cadillac often backfires. For me and others, after I hear all the platitudes about “no pain, no gain” said in so many words, I just want to sit down and take a nap.

For many years, I was one of those countless millions who attempted to kick myself to life to get a project done that I knew I had to do and but had zero energy or desire to start. I was a world-class delayer — a procrastinator who could find anything to do except the task at hand.

Now, as a personal trainer for mature adults, I believe that we must instead slow it down and assess our bodies and ourselves before embarking on any new fitness journey. Some of us can be crazy like me and really enjoy the hyper-intensity of exercise and how it gets the bodily juices flowing like a roaring stream. But for a vast majority of the population, older and younger, the sacrifices required to reach that level are steep:

• Injuries happen when you ignore your body and push past your limits.

• Chronic fatigue creeps in as cortisol rises and your body breaks down muscle for fuel.

• Time constraints pile up, and workouts become chores — like mowing the lawn on a 90-degree day.

So you quit. The “start today” mantra becomes “never in a million years could I do this.”

Sadly, and sometimes tragically, our body suffers for it. Weight creeps up, muscle mass slips away, balance worsens and everyday tasks feel heavier. That in itself is also quite tiring.

It took a traumatic incident for me to flip those negatives into positives. But most people shouldn’t have to wait for a crisis. I often tell beginners reclaiming their bodies to ease up on the reins. Exercise, like any worthwhile goal, takes time, patience and consistent hours before progress shows.

If you have a bad week where you do not work out, another week is ahead of you. If you cannot stay with a workout program that sticks, you probably need to reassess where you are, what your body is telling you and adjust the plan. In the long view, it is not critical to worry. Life throws curveballs — adapt.

There are a lot of small steps you can take now to improve your health. A recent New York Times articles ticked off areas that can make an impact on longevity while in middle age and beyond. The good news is that none of them require pushing your exercise intensity level to 11.

That advise includes doing anything with resistance training with dumbbells. You don’t need the heaviest weight in the rack. You’re not auditioning for a powerlifting meet. Start light and see what your body can handle.

That sound advice also involves getting a good night’s sleep and going to bed at a fairly routine time; taking the stairs instead of the elevator when possible; and adding a bit of interval training. The latter involves conducting an activity that is higher in intensity — but only for 30 seconds. Then, rest for another 30 seconds. Repeat this 10 times, and your heart rate will thank you.

Do not be consumed when you can’t always whip it good in the gym. The great basketball player Michael Jordan said that ““I’ve failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” And I personally like this advice from tennis star Venus Williams: “Just believe in yourself. Even if you don’t, just pretend that you do and at some point, you will.”

So don’t stress about today or whether your body is whispering that you’re failing at fitness. Pretend you believe in yourself — and take small, manageable steps instead of punishing ones.

Trainers like me are always here to help with motivation, accountability and support. Make it your mantra to start today — but give yourself room to breathe. As the Dalai Lama teaches, a calm mind and self-confidence are powerful for your health. You can climb the mountain — one rock at a time.

Joe Pryweller is a longtime fitness advocate who has finished close to 20 half marathons, a full marathon, a Spartan Race and a Hyrox competition in his 60s and has worked with others on their fitness journeys. He survived a heart attack in 2015 and has used that experience to motivate himself and others to reach fitness goals.

Joe is a Certified Personal Trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine and operates a remote and in-person exercise coaching business called New Chapter Strength. He is also a professional journalist who writes articles on fitness-related topics for BoldTimers and elsewhere.

If you are looking to kickstart your own fitness journey, you can visit New Chapter Strength for a free exercise consultation. You can email Joe at New Chapter Strength or go to his website, www.newchapterstrength.com.

Medical Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for general educational purposes only and should not be taken as personalized medical advice. Always consult with your cardiologist or primary care physician before beginning any new exercise regimen, especially if you have a history of chronic health conditions or heart complications.

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, not because she’d fixed it, but because she’d let him.

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 was fully capable of executing 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, not in some dramatic before-and-after, but 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?

María Tomás-Keegan is Co-Founder & Chief Coaching Officer of BoldTimers, a movement helping experienced professionals navigate what’s next with clarity, courage, and community. She’s also a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and creator of the Ripple Journey™ framework for life and career transitions. She writes about the quiet, unglamorous work of becoming who you’re meant to be next.

The cursor blinks on the screen while your notes sit nearby, half-finished but at least honest.

You’ve written a few thoughts about what might come next. Maybe you’ve listed what still gives you energy, what no longer fits, and what you’re curious enough to explore. You may even have a few ideas that feel promising, although “promising” and “ready to reorganize my life around this” are not the same thing.

That’s where many people get stuck. Not because they lack experience. Usually, it’s the opposite. Mature professionals often have a long trail of skills, stories, responsibilities, wins, setbacks, and practical judgment behind them. The challenge isn’t having nothing to work with. The challenge is sorting through all of it without turning the process into a second career.

This is where AI can help. Not by deciding for you. By helping you think.

The Problem with Asking AI for the Answer

It’s tempting to open ChatGPT and ask the big question directly.

“What should I do next?”

ChatGPT will answer. That can be helpful, and it can also be the problem. It may suggest consulting, volunteering, teaching, writing, starting a small business, mentoring, taking a class, joining a board, or building an online presence.

Some of those ideas may be useful. Others may miss the point because ChatGPT hasn’t heard the real story yet. It doesn’t know which parts of your work gave you energy, what added stress, which parts wore you down, or what kind of pace fits your life now. It doesn’t know whether you want income, flexibility, purpose, community, structure, or simply fewer things that sound “quick” but somehow eat half the afternoon.

You know those things, or at least you can discover them. AI works best when you bring your life into the conversation first.

Write First, Then Use AI

Before you ask ChatGPT for ideas, write a few honest notes on your own.

This does not need to be polished. In fact, polished may get in the way. You are not writing a public statement, a résumé summary, or a LinkedIn post. You’re simply getting your own thoughts out where you can see them.

Start with questions like some of these:

• What still gives me energy?

• What do people still ask me for help with?

• What am I glad I no longer have to do?

• What kind of work, role, or responsibility no longer fits?

• What do I miss from earlier chapters of my life?

• What kind of contribution still matters to me?

• What financial needs should I be honest about?

• What health, energy, caregiving, or schedule realities need to be respected?

• What does my next chapter need to support, not just express?

After you’ve written a few notes, bring ChatGPT into the process.

Try this:

Here are my reflections about what might come next in my life. Please help me identify themes, strengths, repeated values, and useful questions I should consider. Do not tell me what to do. Help me think more clearly.

That last instruction matters.

When you tell AI not to decide for you, you’re putting it in the right role. You’re not asking it to choose your future. You’re asking it to organize your thoughts, notice patterns, and point out questions you may have missed.

That’s a very different conversation.

Ask for Patterns Before Plans

Most people ask AI for a plan too soon.

Plans feel productive. They come with steps, timelines, and a pleasant sense that the future might behave if we just make a neat enough list. Unfortunately, life has never shown much interest in cooperating with tidy outlines.

Before you ask for a plan, ask for patterns.

Try prompts like these:

What themes do you notice in my reflections?

What seems to give me energy?

What strengths show up more than once?

What values appear to matter most to me now?

What assumptions might I be making?

These questions help you use AI as a mirror, not a steering wheel. You may discover that several of your ideas are really about teaching. Or that your strongest energy comes from solving problems, not managing people. Or that you keep coming back to connection, service, creativity, independence, or usefulness.

Those patterns matter. They help you avoid chasing a next chapter that looks impressive but feels wrong once you’re living it.

Let AI Challenge Your Assumptions

A good thinking partner does more than agree with you.

ChatGPT can help you notice where your thinking may be too narrow, too harsh, or too tied to an old story. This can be especially useful for mature professionals, because we often carry assumptions about what we’re allowed to do next.

Maybe you think it’s too late to start something new. Maybe you assume your skills are too specific to transfer. Maybe you believe contribution only counts if it comes with a title, a paycheck, or a formal role. Maybe you think slowing down means becoming less useful.

Some limits are real. Others are old stories that stayed in the room long after they stopped being helpful.

Try this prompt:

Based on what I wrote, what assumptions might be limiting how I think about my next chapter? Please be thoughtful and practical. Do not be harsh, and do not tell me what to do.

That kind of prompt gives AI permission to push a little without taking over. The goal is not to have ChatGPT talk you into something. The goal is to help you separate real limits from habits of thinking that may no longer serve you.

Your Reaction Is Useful Information

Sometimes AI will suggest something that makes you immediately think, “Absolutely not.”

Good.

That reaction is information.

If ChatGPT suggests starting a consulting business and you feel tired before you finish reading the sentence, pay attention. Maybe you do want to use your expertise, but not in a business-owner role. Maybe you want to mentor, advise informally, write, teach a short class, or help one organization at a time.

You can tell ChatGPT that:

I don’t want to start a business or take on more pressure. Based on my reflections, what are lower-commitment ways I could use these strengths?

Or:

I like the idea of mentoring, but I don’t want a formal program. What are simple ways to test that idea?

This back-and-forth is where AI becomes useful. The first answer rarely matters as much as your response to it. Each reaction helps refine the conversation.

AI gives you something to think against – a backboard. Your judgment does the deciding.

Use AI to Create Small Experiments

Once you’ve noticed a few patterns, don’t rush into a grand plan. Try a small experiment.

A small experiment is a low-risk way to learn from real life. It could be a conversation, a volunteer shift, a short article, a one-page website, a class, a mentoring offer, a consulting conversation, or a weekend project. The point is not to announce a new identity. The point is to test an idea before you build a life around it.

Ask ChatGPT:

Based on these reflections, suggest ten small experiments I could try in the next 30 days. Keep them realistic, low-risk, and aligned with my energy, values, and current responsibilities.

Then read the suggestions slowly. Don’t accept the list as instructions. Treat it as raw material.

Circle the ideas that feel possible. Cross out the ones that make you tired just looking at them. Rewrite anything that feels close but not quite right.

That’s the point. AI can help you generate options, but you still get to filter them through your experience.

Keep the Human Part in Charge

There is a lot of noise around AI right now. Some of it is useful. Some of it makes a simple tool sound like it arrived wearing a cape.

For readers of BoldTimers, the practical question is not “How do I let AI run my life?” It’s “How can I use this tool in a way that respects my experience, my judgment, and my real-world needs?”

That’s where AI can be genuinely helpful. It can organize scattered thoughts, turn a messy page of notes into themes, ask questions you hadn’t considered, compare options, prepare for conversations, draft a plan, or turn a vague idea into a small next step.

But it should not replace your judgment.

Your life experience is not a minor detail. It is the source material.

A Practical Way to Try This

I built a short What’s Next AI Workbook for readers who want to turn reflection into a practical next-step exercise.

It’s designed for mature professionals thinking through reinvention, contribution, work, identity, and what still matters now. The workbook includes reflection prompts, AI-assisted exercises, a skills inventory, a “What still gives me energy?” worksheet, a contribution exercise, and a practical system for using ChatGPT as a thinking partner without handing over the decision.

You can also follow more of my practical AI writing on my Substack publication, where I focus on making AI useful, simple, and human.

For now, start with one page of notes. Ask AI to help you see the patterns.

Not to decide.

To help you think.

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If you’ve spent any time in this newsletter, two ideas here should already feel familiar. A few weeks back, Jim wrote about using AI as a thinking partner instead of an oracle, something that helps you think more clearly rather than one that just hands you an answer. More recently, Tabatha broke down why your resume is a marketing document, not a transcript, and why the number attached to your impact matters more than the duties you list. If you haven’t read either yet, pull them up first. Everything below builds on both.

Take them as settled, because they are.

What’s underneath them is this: what do you actually type into the AI, and why does the obvious move, hand it your resume and ask it to “make this better,” quietly work against you.

Last year, reviewing resumes for a role I was hiring, I noticed something I couldn’t unsee.

I had a stack on my screen, and a few resumes in, I wasn’t reading different people anymore. I was reading one document wearing different names. “Proven track record.” “Results-driven leader.” “Spearheaded cross-functional initiatives.” Same five verbs, same rhythm, same shape, over and over, like everyone had walked into the same tailor and asked for the same suit.

Somewhere under each of these was an actual person. An actual story. Thirty years of judgment and scar tissue and real decisions made under pressure.

I couldn’t find a single one of them in the language.

I started skimming faster, not slower. That’s the opposite of what a resume is supposed to make a hiring manager do.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Hiring managers now have a name for the gap this creates: the “resume illusion.” And the data backs up what a lot of us have felt sitting across the table. A recent industry survey found that 65 percent of hiring managers say AI-polished resumes have made it harder to tell who can actually back up what’s on the page.

The tool that was supposed to make you stand out is quietly making everyone sound like the same person.

Which means it’s making it harder, not easier, for a long, real career to read as real. And if you’re over fifty and job searching, that’s exactly backwards from what you need. Your specific, textured experience is the one thing a twenty-six-year-old competitor can’t fake. Sanding it down into the same five verbs everyone else is using is giving away your only real advantage.

Here’s the myth, and here’s the correction, in the same breath.

The myth: AI’s job is to write the words. The correction: AI’s job is to read the room. To decode what a posting and a hiring process are actually testing for, so you can rehearse your own true story against it before you’re standing in front of someone who’s already read the same stack I have. That’s a fundamentally different job for the same tool, and it’s the one that actually plays to what you bring to a job search that a twenty-five-year-old candidate simply can’t: years of reading rooms for a living.

That’s the whole shift. Not ghostwriter. Reconnaissance and rehearsal partner.

I know that might sound like one more thing to learn when you’re already exhausted from applying into silence. Fair. But each of these takes fifteen minutes, not a weekend, and they’re aimed at the part of the process that’s actually breaking down for experienced candidates: not getting noticed, but not landing once you’re in the room.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, with three moves you can try tonight.

Reverse-engineer the posting.

Paste the actual job posting into the AI and ask it a different question than “write me a resume for this.” Try something closer to: “Here’s a job posting. Tell me the three things this team is actually worried about, and which lines are just boilerplate everyone copies.”

A phrase like “self-starter” often isn’t really about initiative. It’s coded for “we won’t have time to hand-hold you.” “Wears many hats” usually means understaffed. “Fast-paced environment” is often a polite way of saying turnover is high, or the team is stretched thin.

You already know how to read a room. You’ve been doing it your whole career, in meetings, in negotiations, in a hundred conversations where what was said and what was meant weren’t quite the same thing.

This just gives you a faster first pass at the room before you walk into it.

Rehearse the objection, not just the pitch.

Most people use AI to polish an answer. Fewer people use it to find the question they’re avoiding.

Set the AI up as the interviewer, not the answer key. Give it the real posting and type something like: “Interview me for this role as a skeptical hiring manager. Ask follow-up questions. Don’t let me off easy.”

Then do this specifically: have it ask you the “overqualified” question, and push a second time after your first answer.

That question is frequently not about your capability at all. It’s a soft, deniable way of saying “we’re worried about your age, and we’re not going to say that part out loud.” You want to have already answered it, calmly and without defensiveness, long before someone in a real room asks it.

Stress-test your own story.

Take the answer you’re proudest of, the turnaround, the launch, the team you rebuilt from nothing, and hand it back to the AI. Ask it: “Play devil’s advocate against this story. Where’s the hole? What would make someone doubt it? What’s the one follow-up question that would catch me flat?”

This is the step most people skip. It’s the uncomfortable one. It’s also exactly the step that keeps you honest instead of polished and hollow.

A story that survives its own cross-examination is a story that will survive the real one.

Three moves, same underlying skill underneath all of them: read the room before you’re in it, rehearse the question you’re dreading, cross-examine yourself before anyone else gets the chance.

None of that is about writing prettier sentences. It’s about walking into the room with fewer surprises than the person sitting across from you.

Here’s the limit, and it matters more than any of the three moves above.

AI can clean up how you say it. It cannot invent what you actually did.

If it suggests turning “contributed to a project” into “led a seven-figure initiative,” and that isn’t what happened, that’s not sharpening your story. That’s fabricating one you’ll have to defend live, in a room, to someone trained to ask the follow-up.

That’s not leverage anymore. That’s the same resume illusion I opened with, just aimed at yourself instead of at a stack of applications.

The whole value of this approach depends on the story underneath being true. AI can help you find it, sharpen it, and rehearse it under pressure. It cannot build it for you.

That part was always yours. It’s the part no algorithm on the other end can fake either.

So, one thing, tonight. Not a list of tactics to get to eventually.

Pick one posting you actually want, not a practice one. Run it through the first move above and see what the room is really worried about. Fifteen minutes, one posting, one honest look underneath the language.

Do that, and the next resume you send won’t be the thirteenth suit off the same rack. It’ll be the one a tired hiring manager actually stops scrolling to read, because for once, it sounds like an actual person instead of the tool that wrote it.

What’s the coded phrase in a job posting that’s tripped you up, or the question you’re still dreading in an interview? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

Bennie Soto is the founder of An Intentional Age, built on a simple bet: the judgment and pattern recognition that come from decades of experience are exactly what AI can’t replicate, making experienced professionals AI’s most potent users, not its casualties.

After more than three decades in marketing and leadership, he now builds AI literacy programs for executive leaders and their teams, and for professionals in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who are done being told to slow down.

Bennie writes about AI and intentional living for BoldTimers, and shares more of his work at anintentionalage.com.

Yes, there are many days that I feel like I’m 45 again, that I’m midway through a growing career, still have a few kids at home, have abandoned those age wrinkles, and don’t need to fend off the scary effects of aging: chronic injuries or illness, stiffer joints, loss of taut muscle tone, an obstreperous back and hips that like to bark at me like a dog wanting a walk. Only in this case, that canine wants me to sit down, slow down and power down.

My mind is still sharp and clear. I love being around those generations that are much younger than me. I enjoy liveliness, activity, engagement, creativity. I still listen to current music, not nostalgic reminiscences, and I read the books and watch the shows and movies that we are all talking about right now. I am up to date and feel like a younger person.

I just need to tell that to my body, however. It is sending different signals. Forget you, I say; let’s dance to the current tune.

And that, my friends, is a major reason why I exercise regularly. I’m not deluding myself that I am much younger than my birth certificate states, and I embrace my 68 years on earth. I can forgive myself for having more muscle stiffness, more tightness in my back and hips (one of which offers lingering arthritis), more lasting pain when I do strain a body part.

I’m not about to ignore these symptoms or try to forget them. That is an unfortunate impossibility due to biological age. But I can make it easier on myself.

Fortunately for me, aging well runs in my family. I can still pass for 50. One of my former college roommates saw a recent Facebook post and remarked that I have barely aged since then. While he is definitely overstating the facts, I’m proud of how I look and how I’ve cared for myself.

But tell that to my body, which sees the world differently. To my body, I am still 68, not the age others see me and that is reflected in my mirror. I haven’t yet located the magic potion that can rewind the body clock.

However, as I’ve mentioned in other articles, I also tend to my body, so that it does not regularly give in to the ravages of time and, yes, the “suckiness” that comes when your body parts get more worn, like a balding tire that is still rolling along.

So here is some practical advice that you can use to tend to your own garden that is your body, without having to resort to taking more medicine or just giving up, which is the worst idea you could have. Even if you have serious arthritis in the limbs or are hobbled by injury or disease, you can still do something about it, in your own way and in your own time.

A good way to start is by spending at least 20 minutes a day by stretching. It will do wonders for your movement and keep your barking muscles quieted. You can then progress to balance, posture, mobility and movement exercises, which I’ll discuss in my upcoming series of articles.

Here are a few daily stretching activities I recommend to maintain your body health and ensure that you preserve your strength, flexibility and mobility to age well:

Start Your Day with Static Stretching

Once you wake up, grab breakfast, and get those muscles moving, it is a great time to stretch. Save the coffee for later — stretch first.

Begin with some static stretching, requiring you to hold a stretch for around 30 seconds at a time. This can involve activities such as:

• Raising your calves and then your heels off the ground while standing against a wall.

• Extending one leg and then the other in a lunge position or onto a box or couch until you feel tightness.

• Lying down in a supine position and bringing each leg upward one at a time in a straight line from your hip.

• In a supine position, stretching one leg across your body and clutching your thigh with your arm while holding it. Then repeat on the other side.

• Standing up and stretching your arm across your body to strengthen your rotator cuff. Keep your legs and pelvis facing forward.

Don’t Forget the Foam Roller

It is easy to find a foam roller or Swiss ball (basically an inflated plastic ball) online or at a sporting goods store. Do some rolling in areas that are sore and tight, including your shoulders, lat muscles, glutes, back, and calves. You can do this either before or after your static stretches.

End with Some Active Stretches

These more advanced stretching exercises require you to move part of your body instead of holding it still, for around 1–2 seconds on each side and in multiple repetitions. Some examples include:

• Standing against a wall and moving each leg from side to side and then forward and back for at least 10 repetitions per side.

• Lying in a supine position on your back, raising one leg at a time and pulling it across your body and then back to the middle for 8–10 reps.

• Stepping up and down on a low box without excessively rounding the spine. For a more advanced stretch, move to the side and step up laterally instead of facing forward.

• Moving into a lunge position and twisting your body from side to side, holding your arms straight out with palms together.

• Trying a high knee hold while either holding onto a surface or standing freely, and doing this 10 times each side. You can progress to kicking up each leg and holding out the arms in a position known as the Frankenstein. You can also walk while doing the Frankenstein.

Start Some Stretches Involving More Resistance

To begin a resistance phase of your exercise routine, start applying some force to specific body parts so that you can add muscle and core strength.

These can include: two sets of around 10 pushups (either traditionally or with your knees on the ground or your hands on a chair or couch); two sets of 10 sit-ups, done either as a curl or a short lift of your shoulder blades; bridges that require you to lie on your back with arms at your sides and then lift your mid-back up and down 10 times; and some arm circles and jumping jacks.

I’ll detail some basic balance, mobility and resistance exercises you can do at home in future posts, so stay tuned for that.

But whatever you do, make it a consistent routine, one you can do almost any day in the time you have available. Make it fun and add in some variety to your routine.

And if you need some coaching from me on how to get started, or if you want me to help you design a fitness plan that works for you, you can look me up at www.newchapterstrength.com and book a free consultation.

But whatever you do, make sure you own it. You owe it to your body to stay connected to your younger mind.

Joe Pryweller is a longtime fitness advocate who has finished close to 20 half marathons, a full marathon, a Spartan Race and a Hyrox competition in his 60s and has worked with others on their fitness journeys. He survived a heart attack in 2015 and has used that experience to motivate himself and others to reach fitness goals.

Joe is a Certified Personal Trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine and operates a remote and in-person exercise coaching business called New Chapter Strength. He is also a professional journalist who writes articles on fitness-related topics for BoldTimers and elsewhere.

If you are looking to kickstart your own fitness journey, you can visit New Chapter Strength for a free exercise consultation. You can email Joe at New Chapter Strength or go to his website, www.newchapterstrength.com.

Medical Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for general educational purposes only and should not be taken as personalized medical advice. Always consult with your cardiologist or primary care physician before beginning any new exercise regimen, especially if you have a history of chronic health conditions or heart complications.

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, 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?

María Tomás-Keegan is Co-Founder & Chief Coaching Officer of BoldTimers, a movement helping experienced professionals navigate what’s next with clarity, courage, and community. She’s also a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and creator of The Ripple Journey™ framework for life and career transitions. She writes from the moments that taught her the most, including the ones she didn’t see coming.

The notebook is open on the kitchen table, the coffee is still warm, and the question at the top of the page looks harmless.

What’s next?

Then there’s a pause that feels suspiciously like a roadblock.

Not because there’s nothing to say. Usually, there’s too much. Work history. Family responsibilities. Money concerns. Health. Identity. Pride. Regret. Curiosity. Fatigue. Hope. A few ideas that seem interesting, and several that sound exhausting before they even get written down.

For many mature professionals, the question of “what’s next” doesn’t arrive with a marching band. It may show up after retirement, semi-retirement, a job change, a layoff, a business transition, a caregiving season, a birthday with a zero in it, or the quiet realization that an old definition of success no longer fits quite right.

We tend to think the answer has to be big. A new career. A fresh brand. A dramatic reinvention. A bold announcement with a polished LinkedIn photo and just enough brick wall in the background to suggest deep personal growth.

Maybe.

But not always.

Sometimes the next chapter starts much smaller. Sometimes it starts by noticing what still gives you energy.

The Next Chapter Doesn’t Have to Impress Everyone

One of the traps of later-life reinvention is assuming it has to look impressive from the outside. That makes sense. Many of us spent years measuring success by visible things: titles, income, responsibility, business growth, influence, reputation, or how many people needed us before 9:00 a.m.

There’s nothing wrong with achievement. Most of us worked hard for what we built, and there’s no need to apologize for that. But at some point, the question changes. It’s no longer only, “What can I prove?” It becomes, “What still matters?”

That question has a different tone. It’s quieter. Less performative. More honest.

For some people, the answer may still involve paid work, leadership, consulting, teaching, or building something new. For others, it may be mentoring, volunteering, writing, caring for family, helping a community, or using decades of experience in a way that doesn’t require carrying the same old pressure.

That’s not stepping back from life. That’s choosing contribution over noise.

Start With Energy, Not a Job Title

When people ask what they should do next, they often jump straight to categories.

Should I consult? Should I start a business? Should I volunteer? Should I write? Should I teach? Should I finally start that podcast everyone keeps threatening to start?

Those can be useful questions later. But they’re not always the best place to begin.

A better starting point is energy.

What still makes you lean forward? Maybe it’s solving messy problems. Maybe it’s helping someone younger avoid mistakes you already paid for. Maybe it’s organizing chaos, writing, explaining, connecting people, fixing systems, encouraging someone, teaching a skill, or making something a little better than it was when you found it.

The next chapter often hides in those moments. Not in the grand life plan. Not in the title. Not in the bio. In the ordinary moments when you feel useful, interested, and awake.

That’s worth paying attention to.

What No Longer Fits Matters Too

This is where honesty helps.

Not everything from your previous chapter needs to come with you. Maybe you’re done managing people. Maybe you’re tired of deadlines that never stop breeding. Maybe you still enjoy the work, but not the politics around it. Maybe you want income, but not full-time pressure. Maybe you want purpose, but not another calendar that owns your life.

That doesn’t make you less ambitious. It means your ambition has matured.

There’s wisdom in knowing what no longer fits. It keeps you from rebuilding a life around the very things you were relieved to leave behind.

A next chapter built only on what you’re good at can become another obligation. A better one considers what you’re good at, what people need, what your life can realistically support, and what still gives you energy.

Use AI to Notice Patterns

This is where AI can be surprisingly useful, especially if you don’t treat it like a magic answer machine.

I don’t recommend asking ChatGPT, “What should I do with the next chapter of my life?” That gives AI too much authority and not enough context. It may hand you a tidy list of ideas that sound reasonable but don’t fit your actual life.

A better approach is to write first. Take ten or fifteen minutes and answer a few questions in your own words:

• What still gives me energy?

• What do people still ask me for help with?

• What kind of work or responsibility no longer fits?

• What do I miss from earlier chapters of my life?

• What am I glad I no longer have to do?

• What kind of contribution still matters to me?

Once you’ve written a few notes, bring AI into the conversation.

Try this:

Here are my reflections about what might come next in my life. Please help me identify themes, strengths, repeated values, and useful questions I should consider. Do not tell me what to do. Help me think more clearly.

That instruction matters.

When you tell ChatGPT, “Do not tell me what to do,” you’re setting the terms of the conversation. You’re not asking AI to choose your future. You’re asking it to help you sort through your own thoughts with more clarity.

AI should be a thinking partner, not the decision maker. Useful, patient, and available, but still not the one living your life.

Small Experiments Beat Big Announcements

A next chapter doesn’t need to begin with a leap. In fact, a leap may be the wrong move.

Start with a small step, an experiment.

Have one conversation with someone doing work that interests you. Offer to mentor one person. Write one article. Volunteer once. Build one simple resource. Take one class. Help one organization solve one problem. Spend two hours testing an idea before deciding whether it deserves two months.

Small experiments are underrated because they don’t look dramatic. But they give you real information. You find out what energizes you, what drains you, what people respond to, and what you absolutely do not want to do again, which is also valuable.

Sometimes the best gift of a small experiment is the sentence, “Well, I won’t be doing that.”

No failure. Just data with slightly better manners.

Contribution Can Be Enough

One reason I like writing for BoldTimers is that it gives space for this kind of conversation. Not hype. Not “go crush your next act.” Not another lecture about staying relevant by pretending to be 35 with better knees.

Just practical ways to keep thinking, learning, contributing, and using new tools without losing your own judgment.

That matters because many mature professionals are not done. They may be done with a certain pace, a certain kind of pressure, or a certain identity, but they’re not done contributing.

The next chapter may not be about chasing success the way you once defined it. It may be about using your experience more intentionally.

Less noise. More meaning. Less proving. More usefulness.

A Practical Way to Begin

I built a short What’s Next AI Workbook for readers who want to turn reflection into a practical next-step exercise.

It’s designed for mature professionals thinking through reinvention, contribution, work, identity, and what still matters now. The workbook includes reflection prompts, AI-assisted exercises, a skills inventory, a “What still gives me energy?” worksheet, a contribution exercise, and a practical approach to using ChatGPT as a thinking partner.

You can also follow more of my practical AI writing on my Substack publication, where I focus on making AI useful, simple, and human.

For now, you don’t have to solve the whole future.

Start smaller.

Ask yourself what still gives you energy.

Then pay attention to the answer.

Want to go deeper? See my Practical AI Resources page.

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“I actually think I’m interviewing pretty well,” she told me. She wasn’t being defensive. She was genuinely confused. From her perspective, she was answering every question well.

The confidence didn’t surprise me. Patty had built a successful career over several decades. She was smart, accomplished, and exactly the kind of professional most companies say they’re looking for. So we jumped right in.

I asked my first question: “Tell me about a time you made a mistake.” She smiled. “I honestly can’t think of one.” I nodded and moved to the next question: “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a leader.” She smiled again. “Never. I’m really easy to work with.”

The situation became clear, fast.

Oh no. Double oh no.

Not because Patty wasn’t qualified. I’d just uncovered the real reason fifteen interviews hadn’t turned into a second round.

The panel wasn’t looking for perfection

During my years leading teams in Corporate America, I interviewed many candidates, and I never once expected someone to tell me they’d never made a mistake. In fact, hearing that usually made me more nervous than hearing about the mistake itself. The candidates I remembered weren’t the ones who avoided mistakes. They were the ones who owned them.

Everyone makes mistakes. The candidates who stood out could explain what happened, take ownership, tell me how they fixed it, and share what they learned. That tells me far more about someone’s judgment than pretending they’ve never gotten anything wrong.

The disagreement question works the same way. Interviewers aren’t trying to determine whether you’re argumentative. They’re trying to understand whether you have the confidence to respectfully challenge an idea, influence a decision, or speak up when something doesn’t make sense. Those are leadership behaviors.

Patty didn’t realize that. To her, disagreeing with a leader meant having a knock-down, drag-out argument with her boss. That wasn’t what the interview panel was looking for at all.

The stories were there all along

As we started digging through Patty’s career, something interesting happened. The mistake she thought she didn’t have? We found several. None of them were career-ending disasters. They were ordinary moments that demonstrated accountability, sound judgment, her willingness to take calculated risks, and growth.

Then we tackled the disagreement question. Instead of searching for conflict, we started looking for influence.

• Had she ever challenged a timeline?

• Recommended a different approach?

• Presented data that changed someone’s thinking?

• Questioned a process that wasn’t working?

• Protected a customer?

• Mentored a teammate through a difficult situation?

The answer was yes. Again and again and again. She had spent years leading. She just wasn’t confident bringing her leadership to the forefront when the interviewer asked their questions.

If interview after interview has ended in silence, you’re probably closer to Patty’s story than you think.

The leadership you’ve stopped noticing

After years of interviewing candidates in Corporate America and coaching hundreds more in my own business, I’ve noticed something fascinating: people early in their careers are usually trying to prove they’re capable. People with twenty or thirty years of experience have the opposite problem.

They’ve been solving problems, influencing decisions, mentoring colleagues, and leading through change for so long that it no longer feels remarkable. They assume everyone does those things. They don’t. What feels ordinary to you often looks extraordinary to the interviewer. That’s what makes it so easy to undersell your experience as a seasoned professional.

Experienced professionals don’t lack leadership stories. They stop recognizing them as leadership. One of the biggest interview mistakes I see is overlooking leadership because it has become second nature.

Leadership isn’t a title. It’s influence. It’s taking ownership. It’s building trust. It’s solving problems before someone asks you to. It’s helping people move forward together toward a common goal. If you’ve built a long career, chances are you’ve been leading for years, even if you don’t have the title. You just haven’t been telling your stories that way.

Why I created the SLAY Method™

This exact coaching conversation is one of the reasons I created the SLAY Method™. Most professionals are familiar with the STAR framework: Situation, Task, Action, Result. It’s a solid way to organize an answer, but experienced professionals often spend too much time describing the task and not enough time explaining the leadership they demonstrated along the way.

Interviewers aren’t only asking, “What did you do?” They’re asking something much more important: why should we trust you? That’s why I replaced Task with Leadership.

SLAY™

-Situation

-Leadership

-Action

-Your Outcome

That one change completely shifts the conversation. Instead of sounding like someone who completed an assignment, you sound like someone who creates results, earns trust, and influences outcomes. That’s what hiring managers remember.

Patty had great examples, she just hadn't shared them

She already had great stories. She simply hadn’t taken the time to uncover them or recognize them for what they were. Like many experienced professionals, she believed she could rely on years of experience to carry the interview. Instead, she discovered that some of your best examples take time to remember, and even more time to articulate in a way that highlights your success, impact, and value.

She didn’t need to change her career. She didn’t need to invent new accomplishments. She didn’t need more experience. She needed to recognize that every interview question was an opportunity to demonstrate her leadership.

Her career didn’t change. Her experience didn’t change. Her stories didn’t change. The only thing that changed was how she told her stories. She connected the dots for the interview panel instead of expecting them to do it themselves.

If you’ve ever walked out of an interview thinking, I know I’m more qualified than I sounded, there’s a good chance your examples aren’t the problem. The way you’re telling them might be. The interviewer doesn’t know your career the way you do. They only know the story you tell in that room. Make it count.

Ready to uncover the leadership stories you’ve been overlooking?

Join me for my free workshop, Ace Your Next Job Interview: SLAY the Interview. Land the Offer. Together, we’ll identify the leadership hidden throughout your career, strengthen your interview stories, and help you answer behavioral questions with confidence so hiring managers remember you long after the interview ends.

Wednesday, July 22 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. I’d love to see you there.

Save Your Spot Here

Here’s a cheat sheet to help you remember SLAY. See you in the workshop!

Tabatha Jones is a Career Advancement & Job Search Coach, founder of Empowered Leadership Coaching® and The Corporate Escape Sherpa®, and creator of the SLAY Method™, an interview framework designed specifically to help experienced professionals communicate their leadership and land the opportunities they’ve earned.

A former Fortune 50 Executive Director with more than 20 years of leadership experience, Tabatha left Corporate America at 50 to build the business she runs today, helping professionals navigate promotions, career pivots, and intentional next acts with confidence.

She writes about career strategy for BoldTimers and is the author of Promotion Ready in 3 Months: The Women’s Guide to Career Advancement.

We all know the drill: we tell ourselves that we have to start exercising, spend more time on that passion project, get off the couch and take a long walk, bike on a nice summer day, or fill our time with an enjoyable activity that we think about every day but seldom slot in the time to act on it.

As the great thinker Bertrand Russell would say, “"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." Yet we often convince ourselves that tomorrow — or the next day — will be the perfect moment to finally begin, that our plate has enough food groups on it already and is full for the time being.

So we end up putting more stress on ourselves. All the “woulda-shoulda-coulda” words creep into our vocabularies. Meanwhile, the figures are staggering on stress in the workplace. The Global Organization for Stress tells us that six in 10 workers in the world’s largest economies report that workplace stress is rising and is a major deterrent to our productivity and our health.

Even in retirement, this plays a factor. We no longer care about that gold watch of latter generations when we retire. Instead, we fantasize about all the glorious benefits ahead: more time to travel, to enjoy the outdoors, to golf or play tennis or swim, to just enjoy ourselves doing the things we love.

However, life sometimes has other plans, whether it be financial challenges upon retirement, or family and health concerns, or merely the lack of gumption it takes to get up and go now that we are older. A quote credited to Socrates states that “Enjoy yourself – it's later than you think." And for many of us, that line hits harder with each passing year.

I know this myself: I’m the world’s worst procrastinator, at least in my own eyes. Part of it can be credited — or blamed — on adult-onset ADHD that forces me to fight constant distraction and an unorganized life on a daily basis. I can always find ways to fill my time that do not involve working on myself. With the endless cascade of streaming options, 24-hour news channels and the indigestible array of too many choices on the Internet to preoccupy my mind, it sometimes feels miraculous that I get anything done at all.

Many retirement studies back this up: After you first retire, you go through the honeymoon phase where you travel and enjoy your life of leisure. But after about a year of that comes disenchantment. That easy-as-Sunday-morning life can spiral into boredom, loneliness and an aimlessness that comes from time spent without meaning or direction.

The good news is that many retirees — at least those that choose not to go back to work full-time — enter a reorientation stage where they discover new adventures, challenges and routines that ignite their sense of play and get them back into a healthier groove of life. To paraphrase a frequently used phrase, retirement becomes a time to stop living for work and begin living for yourself. By recalibrating and reconsidering our plans, we give ourselves permission to reignite purpose.

You can not only feel closer to your younger self again, but you can add in the social aspect of working out with a group or in joining with a trainer as a partner in your journey. Your body has more energy too and feels a sense of purpose, discarding those guilt feelings from spending too much time on the sofa or computer screen. Movement becomes a catalyst — not just for fitness, but for identity.

It applies to those who work too. Exercising is the “best medicine” to reduce stress and unleash those ecstatic endorphins that not only lead to happiness but also reduce the effects of pain on our bodies and minds.

So what can you do to get started? You can join a gym and find a trainer, or locate an online fitness program that keeps you engaged and puts you on a customized plan that fits your schedule and lifestyle. You can start your routine with daily stretching and some simple strength work, ranging from lifting weights to adding pushups on the high end to doing some bridges or cobras with a medicine ball and some squats and light dumbbell curls to sharpen the senses. Small steps build momentum — and momentum builds confidence.

In my next weekly article, I’ll discuss some of the techniques you can use to get started on a course toward better fitness, geared to older adults and to those where time and potential for injury can play a factor.

But remember that time should not be our enemy but instead can be used to our advantage and as our collaborator. You may be at or nearing the end of one path, but you are opening yourselves up to something new that may reboot your senses and your feeling of well-being much better than before.

They say that it is the journey and not the result that matters most. I’d add that the quest involves living your best life, and that is reachable at any age.

In retirement, you never get a day off. But you might also get to daydreaming too much. Waking up is sometimes hard to do, but the sandman can wait for another day. Your next chapter is waiting — but it won’t start until you do.

Joe Pryweller is a longtime fitness advocate who has finished close to 20 half marathons, a full marathon, a Spartan Race and a Hyrox competition in his 60s and has worked with others on their fitness journeys. He survived a heart attack in 2015 and has used that experience to motivate himself and others to reach fitness goals.

Joe is a Certified Personal Trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine and operates a remote and in-person exercise coaching business called New Chapter Strength. He is also a professional journalist who writes articles on fitness-related topics for BoldTimers and elsewhere.

If you are looking to kickstart your own fitness journey, you can visit New Chapter Strength for a free exercise consultation. You can email Joe at New Chapter Strength or go to his website, www.newchapterstrength.com.

Medical Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for general educational purposes only and should not be taken as personalized medical advice. Always consult with your cardiologist or primary care physician before beginning any new exercise regimen, especially if you have a history of chronic health conditions or heart complications.

Dana stopped telling Carol the real story.

They’d been friends for over twenty years, since their kids were in the same kindergarten class, and for most of that time Dana told her everything. But lately, when Dana mentioned the business she was building, the leap she’d taken after leaving a corporate role that no longer fit, Carol’s face said it all. Her eyes tightened, and she paused before she spoke.

Are you sure that’s wise, with everything you’ve got riding on this? Carol asked, more than once, in slightly different words each time.

She never suggested Dana couldn’t do it. She didn’t have to. The doubt came through in the questions: whether Dana had run the numbers, whether she’d thought about what happened if it didn’t work out, and whether a steadier path might be waiting if she just picked up the phone and made a few calls.

Dana stopped picking up the phone to share her small wins. She’d started editing herself before she spoke, offering Carol the smoothed-over version instead of the real one. It was easier than watching that tightening around Carol’s eyes, easier than defending a decision she’d already made peace with.

Nobody had done anything wrong, exactly. Carol wasn’t trying to hurt her. She was scared, in her own way, watching someone she loved take a risk she couldn’t imagine taking herself. But they built the friendship around a version of Dana who needed reassurance and safe choices, and it strained at the edges every time Dana tried to bring her new, riskier self into it.

There were nights Dana missed the old version of them more than she let herself admit. She’d catch herself reaching for her phone to tell Carol something exciting, and then remember, mid-reach, what it would cost her to say it out loud. That brought its own particular kind of loneliness, which was quieter than grief and harder to name, since nothing had technically ended. Carol still called on birthdays and still asked how Dana was doing. It just wasn’t safe anymore to answer honestly, and Dana hadn’t realized how much of that twenty-year friendship was built on that safety until it started to go.

Once Dana started working from home, Beth started dropping by.

It felt natural at first, even welcome. Dana spent years commuting, sitting in meetings, and grabbing lunch at her desk between calls. Now she was thirty feet from her own kitchen most days, and Beth, already retired for a few years, treated the new arrangement like an open door. There was a knock on a random Tuesday morning. Beth came in and poured herself coffee before either of them had a chance to discuss it. You’re home anyway, Beth would say, sitting herself down.

The first few times, Dana said nothing. She closed her laptop, joined Beth for coffee, and told herself this was one of the good parts of the new arrangement. But the business needed hours she didn’t have to spare, and the interruptions were costing her more than a morning. They were costing her the deep, uninterrupted stretches when she was the freshest, when the real work actually happened.

So she said something. It wasn’t easy. She rehearsed it in her head for three days before she found the nerve, certain she was about to lose another piece of her old life the way she’d already started losing Carol.

When she finally sat Beth down, her hands were cold, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. She told Beth, plainly, that she loved their visits but needed most weekday mornings protected, that a text before coming by would help, and that working from home wasn’t the same as available. She braced herself for the same tightening she’d seen in Carol’s eyes.

It didn’t come. Beth went quiet for a moment, surprised, maybe a little stung. Then she said, I had no idea. Of course. The visits shifted to late afternoons, with a text first. Beth started asking real questions about the business instead of talking around it. What felt, for a few tense weeks, like it might be another friendship straining against who Dana was becoming, settled into something that adjusted rather than broke once Dana gave it a chance.

What Made the Difference

Dana used to think the difference between Carol and Beth was that one of them loved her more. She doesn’t think that any longer. Carol’s doubt came from real fear, the kind that shows up when you love someone and can’t imagine taking the risk they’re taking. Beth’s habit of dropping in came from a genuine misunderstanding of what working from home actually meant, nothing more. Neither woman set out to fail her.

The difference, Dana came to see, was capacity. Beth could stretch to meet a version of Dana she hadn’t expected, once she understood what was actually being asked of her. Carol couldn’t, or wouldn’t, not yet, maybe not ever. And the only way Dana found that out was by being honest with both of them, plainly, out loud, instead of quietly managing the relationship around an assumption.

That honesty came at a cost either way. With Beth, it cost Dana three sleepless nights and the fear of losing someone else. With Carol, it cost her something slower and harder to point to: the quiet grief of watching a twenty-year friendship reveal its limits, and having to sit with that instead of fixing it. She hadn’t expected telling the truth about what she needed to lead to two such different outcomes.

There’s a phrase I’ve said to more clients than I can count, and repeated to myself more than once: people come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.

Some relationships exist to meet a specific need for a while and then complete their purpose. Some carry you through a chapter and aren’t built to follow you into the next one. And some, if you give them an honest chance, prove capable of expanding far more than you expected.

You don’t always know which kind you’re in the middle of. You usually only find out by testing it: by saying what’s true for you, asking for what you need, and watching how the relationship responds to that information.

What Doesn’t Get a Clean Ending

Dana still doesn’t know what will happen with Carol. Some days she pictures a slow rekindling, years from now, a friendship easing back into something smaller and safer: cordial, surface-level, no real access to the parts of each other’s lives that used to be shared freely. Not healed, exactly. Not lost, either, just resized into something that fits the distance between them now.

She’s stopped needing to know which one it will be. What she knows instead is what happened with Beth, and what that taught her: some relationships hold more than you think, if you give them an honest chance to. Some don’t, and that isn’t always anyone’s fault. And some just quietly become something smaller than they used to be, which is its own kind of settling, neither loss nor repair, just true.

Which relationships in your life have been waiting for you to be honest about who you’re becoming?

María Tomás-Keegan is Co-Founder & Chief Coaching Officer of BoldTimers, a movement helping experienced professionals navigate what’s next with clarity, courage, and community. She’s also a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and creator of the Ripple Journey transition framework for life and career transitions. She writes about the relationships that hold, the ones that don’t, and what it costs to find out which is which.

You’re getting the interviews. That part isn’t the problem.

You show up prepared, you know your résumé backward and forward, and you walk out of the room feeling like it went fine. Then the silence starts. No follow-up. No feedback. Just the quiet kind of no that never actually says no.

If that’s familiar, you’re not alone, and you’re not imagining it.

That’s exactly what Tabatha Jones built this workshop to address. Tabatha is a career strategist with more than twenty years of corporate leadership and hiring experience, and she’s spent that time on both sides of the interview table. She knows precisely where experienced candidates lose the room, and it’s rarely about qualifications.

On July 22nd, she’s hosting Ace Your Next Job Interview, a free live workshop sponsored by BoldTimers.

What You’ll Walk Away With

This isn’t a lecture. It’s a working session built to leave you with something you can use immediately.

You’ll leave with a confident, ready-to-use answer to “Tell me about yourself,” one that finally reflects your experience instead of burying it. Most people either ramble through a decade of history or flatten it into a single modest sentence. You’ll walk out with neither.

Have you experienced this? The interviewer asks a follow-up you didn’t prep for, and your answer starts strong, then trails into “...and, yeah, that’s kind of it.” The SLAY Method™️ gives you a structure so that moment doesn’t happen. You’ll always know where the answer is going, even when the question catches you off guard.

You’ll also walk through a prep strategy that has you showing up ready instead of scrambling the night before. No more rehearsing in the car, hoping the right words show up when you need them.

And you’ll see real examples of what’s actually working in interviews right now, along with the quiet mistakes that are costing experienced candidates the offer. The kind of thing nobody tells you directly, until now.

None of this is about becoming someone else in the interview chair. It’s about finally sounding like the person you already are.

Why BoldTimers Is Behind This

We’re sponsoring this workshop because we’ve heard this story too many times. We see talented, accomplished professionals who did everything right and still walked away from an interview feeling unseen.

The Details

Ace Your Next Job Interview
Free live workshop with Tabatha Jones
July 22, 2026 · 10:00 AM Pacific · Live on Zoom
No cost. No credit card required.

Save your spot here.

If you’ve ever left an interview replaying every answer, wondering what you missed, this hour could change how the next one goes.

A promotional email landed in my inbox with the kind of promise that makes you pause for a second.

For one low price, I could supposedly get access to major AI tools, including several from Google’s AI ecosystem. The offer sounded broad, useful, and maybe even practical. Since I write about everyday AI use, that caught my attention.

But one phrase made me slow down: “30% off the entire funnel.”

That’s when curiosity turned into caution. I suspected bait and switch.

This is a good example of how I use AI in real life. Not to replace thinking. Not to make every decision for me. Just to help me ask better questions before I click, buy, subscribe, or wander into an online sales maze wearing flip-flops and false confidence.

Below is the actual type of request I gave ChatGPT, followed by the kind of response it gave back.

The Situation

I received an email promoting a platform called GemVerse AI. The offer claimed it could provide access to multiple major Google AI models from one dashboard, including Gemini, Veo, Imagen, Deep Research, Code Assist, text-to-speech, and live AI conversation tools.

The email promoted a one-time front-end cost of $14.95 and also mentioned a discount code for 30% off the “entire funnel.” That raised an important question: Was this really a simple low-cost tool, or was the $14.95 price just the first step in a much larger sales funnel?

The Prompt

Please review the following email and click through the links. I want broad exposure to AI models. They are offering a one-time cost of $14.95, but reference 30% off the entire funnel. Please do as much research as possible to determine what the overall costs might be.

The email says the platform includes access to:

• Gemini 3.1 Pro

• Gemini 3.1 Flash

• Google Veo 3

• Imagen 4

• Nano Banana Pro

• Gemini Deep Research

• Gemini Code Assist

• Flash TTS

• Gemini Live

It also lists several bonuses, including web business models, lead generation, email marketing, software development, and expired domain training.

The offer repeatedly says to act before pricing changes and mentions that only a limited number of discounted spots remain.

Please help me determine whether this is a good purchase and what the real costs might be.

The Response

“Bottom line: I would not buy this for your real AI workflow.

At most, I’d treat the low front-end offer as a curiosity purchase only. I’d use a credit card, buy nothing else, test it immediately, and be ready to request a refund within the stated refund window.

The real funnel appears to be much larger than the advertised $14.95 front-end price. Based on public funnel materials, the total package could run roughly $1,075 to $1,275 before the 30% coupon, or about $752 to $892 after the discount. Another third-party offer page showed a lower possible stack, but the vendor’s own materials supported the higher estimate.

What I Found

The offer page redirected into a LaunchpadJV-style product funnel. Public listings showed GemVerse AI as a launch product with a low front-end price, affiliate commissions, and claims that it gives access to Google’s latest AI ecosystem from one dashboard.

The product’s public sales materials listed multiple upsells, including:

• Front end: About $15 to $17

• Unlimited upgrade: $197

• Elite upgrade: $97

• Automation: $47

• Intelligent Agent: $47

• Done-For-You: $197

• Avatar Studio: $37

• Learning Booster: $47

• Agency: $97 to $197

• Reseller: $197

• White Label: $97 to $197

Using those numbers, the likely all-in funnel could be more than $1,000 before the discount. With a true 30% discount, it could still be several hundred dollars.

The Red Flags

The biggest concern is not whether Google has AI models. Google does have advanced AI tools and subscription plans.

The concern is whether this third-party dashboard is actually giving reliable, transparent, licensed, full-quality access to those models.

Several things stood out:

The product did not appear to be an official Google product.

The sales materials used heavy urgency language.

The offer referenced an “entire funnel,” which usually means multiple upsells.

The claim of broad or unlimited access to expensive AI tools is difficult to square with how AI usage is normally priced.

Google’s own AI services charge based on subscription tiers, usage, tokens, images, video generation, grounding, or other limits. So a one-time low-cost payment for unlimited lifetime-style access deserves caution.

The Practical Recommendation

For broad exposure to AI models, I would use cleaner and more transparent options instead.

ChatGPT Plus is still strong for everyday writing, research support, planning, and business communication.

Google AI Pro would be the cleaner way to test Google’s AI ecosystem directly.

Poe or OpenRouter would provide access to multiple models with more transparent pricing.

Perplexity Pro would be useful for research with citations.

Official Google tools or established creative platforms would be safer for experimenting with image and video generation.

The Verdict

I’d pass.

The front-end price is cheap, but the offer is built like an affiliate-marketing funnel, not a stable professional AI platform. The “30% off the entire funnel” language is the giveaway. The real money appears to be in the upsells.

For actual work, including articles, HOA communication, websites, LinkedIn profiles, research, and publishing, reliability matters more than a bargain dashboard with unclear limits.

A better use of the money would be testing one month each of a few transparent AI tools rather than getting pulled into a sales funnel.”

Why This Matters

This is the part of AI that doesn’t get enough attention.

Most people don’t need AI to write a business plan in 14 seconds or generate a photo of a raccoon running a taco truck on Mars. They need help making better everyday decisions.

Should I buy this?

Is this offer what it claims to be?

What am I missing?

What does this phrase actually mean?

What are the likely costs after the shiny front-end price?

That’s useful.

AI didn’t make the decision for me. It helped me slow down, compare the claims, and understand the real question. The question wasn’t whether $14.95 was affordable. The question was whether I was stepping into a much larger buying path without realizing it.

That’s a practical use of AI. It’s not flashy. It’s not complicated. But it can save money, time, and a decent amount of buyer’s remorse.

And frankly, avoiding buyer’s remorse deserves more respect.

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Kim heard it for the third time in four months. “The panel felt you were overqualified.”

She was 57, a former Senior Director at a major technology company who had spent decades building her career: leading large teams, influencing strategy, and earning every promotion along the way. The problem was she didn’t want another leadership role.

Kim had intentionally decided she was finished climbing the corporate ladder. She wanted to return to the hands-on work she’d genuinely loved before she ever moved into management, work where she could focus on meaningful projects, keep a healthier work/life balance, and finish out her career on her own terms. So she started applying for Senior Analyst roles, positions that on paper looked like a few steps down but that, to her, were exactly the right fit.

Every interview seemed to end the same way. The hiring team assumed she’d get bored, leave the moment a management opportunity opened, or expect a salary far above the range. No one ever asked why she actually wanted the role, or so Kim believed.

The Opportunity She Didn’t See

After another rejection, she reached out for help. We sat down to review everything that had happened, and I asked her one simple question: “Did they ever give you the opportunity to tell your story?” She thought for a moment, then said, “No.”

Then we walked back through every interview together, and that’s when we discovered something important: they had given her the opportunity, more than once. Every interview included two questions, “Tell me about yourself” and “Why are you interested in this role?”, and most candidates treat these as warm-up before the interview really begins. They aren’t warm up questions. In my opinion, they’re the two most important questions you’ll answer, because they give you the chance to shape the narrative before the interviewer starts filling in the blanks with their own assumptions.

Answering the Wrong Question

Kim had been answering both questions the way many experienced professionals do, walking through her career chronologically and highlighting promotions, accomplishments, and major initiatives. Everything she said was true. It just wasn’t answering the question the panel was silently asking: why would someone with your background want this job?

One of the things I teach every client is this: never expect the interviewer to connect the dots. Own your story and connect the dots yourself. Every interviewer brings different assumptions into the room, and if you leave gaps in your story, they’ll fill those gaps with their own conclusions. For Kim, those conclusions sounded like this: she’s only taking this until something better comes along, she’ll probably get bored, we’ll lose her in six months. None of it was true.

Rewriting the Story

We also realized the disconnect started before she ever walked into the interview. Her resume told the story of someone climbing the corporate ladder, but it never explained why she was intentionally stepping into a different kind of role. We rewrote her Professional Summary to reflect exactly what she wanted at this stage of her career, making it clear she was seeking a hands-on opportunity where she could put decades of experience back into the work she loved most.

Then we rebuilt her interview answers. Instead of simply listing accomplishments, she explained that leading teams had been a rewarding chapter of her career, but that she’d intentionally chosen to return to individual contributor work because that’s where she found the most fulfillment. This wasn’t a fallback plan. It was a deliberate decision.

When she answered “Why are you interested in this role?” she made the case clearly: this wasn’t a placeholder while she waited for something bigger, it was the work she’d been missing since she stopped doing it herself. She reinforced that same message in every thank-you note, reminding the panel why the position fit her long-term goals.

The Offer

Nothing about Kim’s experience changed, and nothing major was changed on her resume except how it framed her story. The only thing that changed was that she stopped assuming the interview panel understood her motivations and started telling them instead.

Over the next several interviews, the “overqualified” objection disappeared. Within a few weeks, she accepted an offer as a Senior Analyst with another technology company. She got exactly what she wanted, because she finally gave interviewers the information they needed to see her the way she saw herself and her future role.

The Bigger Lesson

That lesson extends far beyond candidates who are told they’re overqualified. Whether you’re making a career pivot, returning to work after time away, changing industries, stepping into a lower-level role by choice, or simply pursuing work that fits this season of your life, don’t assume the interviewer understands your “why”.

Your resume tells them what you’ve done. Your interview tells them why this next step makes sense. Your job is to connect those dots before they create their own story. The strongest candidate isn’t always the one with the most impressive resume. It’s the candidate who removes uncertainty.

Join the Workshop

If you’ve been interviewing without receiving offers, I invite you to join my free workshop, Ace Your Next Job Interview: SLAY the Interview. Land the Offer.

We’ll cover how to answer the questions that matter most, tell stronger stories, and confidently connect the dots so interviewers understand exactly why you’re the right fit.

Live on Zoom | July 22 at 10:00 a.m. PT

REGISTER HERE

_{Tabatha Jones is a Career Advancement & Job Search Coach, founder of Empowered Leadership Coaching® and The Corporate Escape Sherpa®, and creator of the SLAY Method™, a practical interview framework designed specifically for experienced professionals navigating today’s hiring market. A former corporate executive with more than 20 years of leadership experience, she left her Executive Director-level role at 50 to build the business she runs today.}

_{Tabatha writes about career strategy for BoldTimers and is the author of Promotion Ready in 3 Months: The Women’s Guide to Career Advancement.}

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In some ways, our body shapes our mind. When we arise from bed in the morning and feel the creakiness in our joints, the stiffening of our knees and hips, the difficulty bending to tie our shoes, it shapes our perspective. When we feel like walking up and down stairs consistently is ax taxing as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, we wonder when the spryness was replaced with sagginess. When we spent too much time looking back to our former athletic selves, we can no long turn our heads and look forward.

I’d love to tell you that you should ignore your bodily signs of aging, that your mind is your greater attribute, that you can safely reject what’s in the looking glass and that you should not go down that rabbit hole - OK, I’ve used up my Alice in Wonderland metaphors but whatever. But that’s only half the truth. You get the point: our strength is elsewhere than our body types. It’s in the mind, in our social connections, in our time spent with others and in learning and experiencing something new.

All that is well and good but sometimes I honestly wonder how much of that is empty platitudes. Just look to the science. A recent study from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., found the mind-body connection to be integral to our well-being. The neurological study points out that “the brain areas controlling movement are directly hardwired into the networks responsible for thinking, planning and controlling involuntary organs. Physical actions actively shape our mental reality.”

The Association of Psychological Science (APS) provided an article on how the body shapes the mind and argues that body engagement with the environment factors into how we see, feel, learn, and communicate. Philosopher René Descartes famously said “I think, therefore I am.” But author Haruki Murakami - an author I highly suggest who has written about the mind-body connection - refutes that by stating “I move, therefore I am.” Murakami, now 77 years old, still runs every day, a testament to the philosophy he lives.

My torment over my body goes back more than 20 years, when in my 40s, I started to realize that my body was already betraying me. We had a young daughter at home and I had a demanding job and a long commute. All of that contributes to the perceived lack of time for exercise more profound that walking a stroller around the block. I felt sluggish, overweight and always exhausted. I’m still surprised that I did not get into a car accident when driving home from work, as my eyelids would narrow and the sandman started knocking at my door.

Then, of course, as I’ve mentioned previously, I had the heart attack in 2015 that changed my life completely. And I haven’t looked back since.

You don’t need a traumatic event to understand how our body can rebel against us if we don’t tend to it consistently. You just need to understand your body and what it can do for you and against you. Think of it as an express train to your brain and your wiring system. It is simple: if you feel good about your body, your mind will exalt in gladness.

Some call this the endorphin release, that of our “happy hormones” providing the rush we need. But a sudden stimulus that can leave just as quickly is not the entire story. Hospital chain Integris Health reminds us that body image and perception are intertwined like a leafy branch. According to many neurological scientists, there are four steps to our body-mind connection. Integris writes that it is:

Let’s get back to how this affects us as we age. Our bodies naturally are more tired, a bit creakier, much stiffer and more apt to break down due to injury or illness. Neurotransmitters, those dopamine and serotonin gates in our body, can be diminished to where we just do not feel like ourselves anymore. Aging, as we know, is not for the faint of heart — but it also isn’t a sentence.

But enough about the torment. Wallowing in the negative is worse than being a stuck pig in a sty. You can get out of this revolving cycle of complacency, the feeling that our best days have passed. While aging is a natural process, it also can be accomplished gracefully if you make it a point to tend to your body, to listen to what your body tells you. It may also lead to greater respect from others who see you as still vibrant and robust. Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived a full life as she aged, put it well: “Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art."

I will get into more detail in other articles on how you can bring back that loving feeling to your bodies and what that means for your mind and your overall health. But I can suggest a few simple ways to get started:

- Stretch Every Day: Static stretching (where you hold a move for around 30 seconds) provides a good starting point. Then, you can move into active and dynamic stretching that allow your body parts to move (think a hamstring stretch where you move your leg in the air while on your back, a deep squat or bending at the hips) or more cardio-related, dynamic stretches that involve leg swings or walking lunges. I’m also a big yoga proponent, and there are plenty of studios offering gentle stretching.

- Do Some Basic Cardio Work Three Days Week: That can start with walking to moving with more power and speed to holding light dumbbells while walking. If you can, light jogging, even for short distances, is a great energy release. I love the treadmill, as I can adjust my speed and incline while preserving my joints from the hard impact of pavement-pounding. And if you can, hike in the woods; it’s both a mental and physical release to commune with nature.

- Start Some Resistance Training: You don’t have to be a bodybuilder to enjoy lifting weights. But as we age, the need to strength core muscles, legs, back and shoulders becomes more acute. You can start light under a trainer’s assistance and progress to heavier pounds or a speedier lift. Just don’t overdo it or you’ll be stocking up on the Ben Gay at the pharmacy. That’s why supervision can be important, or at least stack with weight machines at the gym.

-Work on Your Flexibility and Balance: Believe me, none of us want to reach 80 and find that we can no longer walk a longer distance that a half mile, are stooped or are concerned that a fall might be a Titanic-size disaster. So do some basic flexibility and balance exercises a few days a week, such as attempting to balance on one foot for as long as you can or standing straight with one leg pointed up and to the ceiling. Trust me, you will get better the more you try it. And flexibility work can be built into your stretching routine by rotating your body side-by-side or back and forth, or deeper hamstring stretches where we lie near a door and raise our heel to place it on the wall.

Whatever you do, don’t give up on yourself and don’t became too tormented by our aging bodies or too complacent to care anymore. I’ll leave it to comedian George Burns, who lived to be 100, for the final word: "You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old."

Joe Pryweller is a longtime fitness advocate who has finished close to 20 half marathons, a full marathon, a Spartan Race and a Hyrox competition in his 60s and has worked with others on their fitness journeys. He survived a heart attack in 2015 and has used that experience to motivate himself and others to reach fitness goals.

Joe is a Certified Personal Trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine and operates a remote and in-person exercise coaching business called New Chapter Strength. He is also a professional journalist who writes articles on fitness-related topics for Boldtimers and elsewhere.

If you are looking to kickstart your own fitness journey, you can visit New Chapter Strength for a free exercise consultation. You can email Joe at New Chapter Strength or go to his website, www.newchapterstrength.com.

Medical Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for general educational purposes only and should not be taken as personalized medical advice. Always consult with your cardiologist or primary care physician before beginning any new exercise regimen, especially if you have a history of chronic health conditions or heart complications.

The tomatoes needed staking again, the way they have every July for the last eleven years.

Paula noticed it on her way to the mailbox, still in the clothes she’d slept in, coffee in one hand and her phone in the other. A work email arrived overnight from someone who assumed weekends were flexible. She read the subject line, decided it could wait until Monday, and slipped the phone into her pocket. The tomatoes stopped her before she’d even made it past the garden bed.

She knelt in the dirt for a minute, tying the wandering vine to its post. Her hands knew the motion before she’d decided to make it. A few feet over, the basil had gone to seed, flowering out top-heavy and bitter, the way it did whenever she waited too long to cut it back.

Both things were true in the same patch of soil. One plant needed tending to keep going. The other needed cutting back before it spent everything it had left making seeds instead of leaves.

Paula stayed there longer than the moment required, dirt on her knees, mail still unretrieved, phone still buzzing faintly in her pocket. She’d been noticing this same pattern everywhere lately, though it took the garden to make her actually see it clearly.

Where Else the Pattern Showed Up

It wasn’t just the garden. It was the way she’d sat with a friend on the phone the week before, not offering advice, just staying present while the friend cried. She felt something in herself settle rather than drain. She used to assume that kind of presence cost her something. Lately, it just felt like hers.

The uninvited guilt showed up an hour later, when she went to bed before finishing the thank-you notes she’d been meaning to write for a month. The guilt arrived on schedule, the way it always did, whispering that a better version of her would have stayed up.

And it was there Friday, too, in a meeting where she’d said, plainly, that she didn’t have the capacity to take on one more project this quarter. She expected to feel like she’d failed someone. Instead, she felt strangely light, the way you feel after finally setting down something heavy you’d forgotten you were carrying.

Nothing about her days looked any different from the outside. She still made the calls, forgot the thank-you notes, walked to the mailbox, and put dinner on the table. But underneath the sameness, something was quietly being staked, and something else was quietly being cut back, and neither one announced itself.

What Was Being Staked

The thing taking root, the thing she found herself relieved to have still, wasn’t really one skill or one habit. It was closer to a capacity: her instinct to notice people, to tend to what mattered to them, and to feel something like joy in the small, unglamorous moments of showing up.

Somewhere in the last year and a half, she worried that this part of her had belonged only to a life she no longer had, or to a version of her job she’d since let go of.

It hadn’t. It had just been waiting for a new place to land.

What Was Being Cut Back

The thing going to seed, the thing that had served her for decades and no longer earned its keep, was a belief more than a habit: that her care only counted if it cost her everything, if no one else saw the cost, and if she never let herself ask for the same in return.

That belief showed up as guilt over unfinished thank-you notes. It showed up as the reflex to carry things alone rather than say she was tired. It showed up as a lifelong habit of conforming to whatever would earn someone else’s approval, whether that was a boss, a friend, or her own inner sense of who a capable woman was supposed to be.

Staking the capacity felt like relief, most days. It even felt like joy, on the better ones. Cutting back the belief felt like something closer to grief, and a little like anger at how long she’d let it grow unchecked.

This is often where the Middle Wave of a transition shows up: not as a single insight, but as this kind of sorting, done in scattered, unremarkable moments, long after the initial disruption has settled enough to let real questions in.

Why the Cutting Back Takes Longer

Here’s what Paula was starting to understand, slowly, the way you understand most true things: staking something new is fast compared to cutting back something old. A stake goes in the ground in a minute. A belief that’s had decades to grow doesn’t loosen because you’ve decided, once, that it should.

It’s not enough to just release it. A belief that old leaves a bare patch of soil, and bare soil doesn’t stay bare. Something moves back in, usually the same old belief, like a weed. It creeps back through the same root system it always used, unless something else gets planted in the space it left, something with roots of its own strong enough to hold the ground.

Paula didn’t have a new belief fully grown yet. What she had was smaller: a seedling of a thought, something like I’m allowed to ask for help and still be someone who cares deeply. That new belief hadn’t been tested by a hard week yet. She wasn’t sure it would survive one.

The Same Patch of Soil

By the end of that afternoon, Paula had staked the tomatoes and cut back the basil severely, more than she usually would, since it had gone further to seed than she’d let herself notice. She stood there for a while afterward, the way she had that morning, dirt on her hands instead of on her knees this time, watching the light change over the yard.

She thought about the email still sitting unread on her phone and noticed she didn’t feel the usual pull to answer it before Monday, just to prove to herself she could. She thought about the meeting on Friday, and the lightness that had followed her home from it.

The evening ahead would look like any other. She’d make dinner, and probably still forget to finish those thank-you notes. But something in how she carried both of those facts had shifted, without either one resolving. She was still someone capable of noticing and tending to people, and she was still working on believing that noticing and tending didn’t require disappearing in the process.

Both things were true in the same patch of soil. Paula was learning to let them be.

Monday would come regardless, the way Mondays do. The email would still be there. So would the next request for more of her time than she had to give. She didn’t know yet whether the seedling of a belief she was tending would hold under the weight of an ordinary workweek, or whether the old one would creep back in the way it always had. She suspected it would take more than one Saturday in the garden to know for sure.

But she’d staked the tomatoes. She’d cut back the basil. And for one evening, that felt like enough.

What in you is asking to be staked right now? And what might be ready, even if slowly, to be cut back?

María Tomás-Keegan is Co-Founder & Chief Coaching Officer of BoldTimers, a movement helping experienced professionals navigate what’s next with clarity, courage, and community. She’s also a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and creator of the Ripple Journey transition framework for life and career transitions. She writes about the quiet, ongoing work of sorting who we’re becoming from who we’ve been.

The coffee has gone cold, the notebook is open, and the question on the page looks easier than it feels.

What do I want to do next?

Not forever. Not as a grand life announcement. Not as a shiny reinvention story designed to impress people who aren’t paying attention anyway.

Just next.

For many mature professionals, that question shows up quietly. It may come after retirement, a job change, a health concern, an empty house, a business shift, or the slow realization that the old definition of success doesn’t fit the way it used to.

The tricky part is that “what’s next” can feel too big to touch. So we wait. We tell ourselves we need certainty before we begin. We need a complete plan. We need the perfect idea.

Most of the time, we need something much simpler.

We need a better way to think.

AI Should Not Decide Your Future

There’s a real temptation to treat AI like an answer machine.

You open ChatGPT and type:

“What should I do with the next chapter of my life?”

Seconds later, it gives you a list. Consulting. Volunteering. Writing. Mentoring. Teaching. Starting a side business. Taking a course. Maybe even launching a podcast, because apparently every life transition now requires a microphone.

Some of those ideas might be useful. Some might be obvious. Some might sound good but have nothing to do with your actual life.

That’s the problem with asking AI for advice.

AI doesn’t know what wore you down. It doesn’t know which parts of your work made you feel useful. It doesn’t know whether you want more responsibility, less stress, extra income, deeper contribution, or simply a little breathing room. You know those things. Or at least, you can discover them.

AI is most useful when you stop asking it to hand you the answer and start asking it to help you notice patterns.

Start With Your Own Thoughts

Before you ask ChatGPT what to do next, write a little on your own.

Not beautifully. Not for publication. Not with a clever opening line and a dramatic final sentence. Just write like you’re trying to tell yourself the truth.

Start with a few questions:

• What still gives me energy?

• What do people still ask me for help with?

• What kind of work no longer fits?

• What do I miss from my earlier career or life?

• What am I glad I no longer have to do?

• What kind of contribution still matters to me?

The value isn’t in writing something polished. The value is in getting honest thoughts out of your head and onto the page.

Once you’ve written a few notes, bring AI into the conversation.

Try this:

Here are my reflections about what might come next in my life. Please help me identify themes, strengths, repeated values, and useful questions I should consider. Do not tell me what to do. Help me think more clearly.

That instruction matters.

When you tell ChatGPT, “Do not tell me what to do,” you’re setting the terms of the conversation. You’re not asking AI to choose your future. You’re asking it to help you sort through your own thoughts with more clarity.

That keeps AI in the right role.

Not boss. Not fortune teller. Not a life coach with a clipboard.

A thinking partner — useful, patient, and available, but still not the one living your life.

Ask for Patterns Before Plans

Most people ask AI for a plan too quickly.

A better first step is asking for patterns.

Try prompts like:

Based on what I wrote, what seems to give me energy?

Or:

What strengths show up more than once in my reflections?

Or:

What values appear to matter most to me now?

Those questions help you see your own thinking more clearly. You may discover that you’re not really looking for a new job. You’re looking for a way to keep contributing without carrying the same pressure you carried for years.

You may realize you still love mentoring but don’t want to manage people anymore. You may discover that what you miss isn’t the old work itself, but the sense of usefulness, structure, and connection that came with it.

Those are very different insights. They lead to very different next steps.

Your Reaction Is Part of the Answer

One of the best uses of AI is not getting the perfect suggestion. It’s noticing how you react to the suggestion.

ChatGPT may suggest something that sounds reasonable but feels wrong. Pay attention to that. A bad idea can still be useful if it helps you clarify why it doesn’t fit.

You might respond:

That doesn’t feel right. I don’t want more responsibility. I want more flexibility and fewer deadlines. Please suggest options that fit that.

Or:

I like the mentoring idea, but I don’t want to start a business. What are lower-pressure ways to use that strength?

This is where the conversation becomes helpful.

AI gives you something to react to. Your reaction teaches you something. That back-and-forth is often more valuable than the first answer.

A Simple Exercise to Try This Week

Set aside 20 minutes.

Use a notebook, a Word document, or even a blank email draft. Answer this question:

What still makes me feel useful, interested, or alive?

Write without editing yourself.

Then paste your notes into ChatGPT and use this prompt:

Please read these notes and identify the strongest themes. Tell me what seems to give me energy, what values appear to matter, and what questions I should think about next. Do not recommend a career path yet.

After AI responds, don’t rush into action. Ask yourself:

• What feels true?

• What feels off?

• What surprised me?

• What do I want to explore further?

That’s enough for one sitting. You’re not trying to solve your future before lunch. You’re creating a better conversation with yourself.

Your Next Chapter May Start Small

One of the mistakes we make later in life is assuming the next chapter has to be dramatic.

A new career. A big launch. A bold reinvention. A fresh title that sounds impressive on LinkedIn.

Sometimes the next chapter starts much smaller.

One conversation. One volunteer opportunity. One article. One class. One mentoring relationship. One decision to stop chasing a version of success that no longer fits.

AI can help you sort through the noise, but the human part still belongs to you. Your experience, judgment, values, relationships, and instincts are not side notes. They’re the source material.

Use AI to help you think.

Use your own life to decide.

A Note About the Workbook

I’m building a short What’s Next AI Workbook for readers who want to turn this kind of reflection into a practical next-step exercise.

It’s designed for mature professionals who are thinking about reinvention, contribution, work, identity, and what still matters now. The workbook uses AI as a thinking partner, not a decision maker.

More on that soon.

For now, start with one honest question:

What still gives me energy?

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Some applications disappeared into silence. Others came back with a rejection before she’d even closed the browser. Instant. Before any human could have possibly read a word. When Valerie told me that, I hadn’t even opened her resume yet. I already knew what we’d find.

That’s one of the most common conversations I have with job-seeking professionals over 50. They’ve spent years building successful careers, only to discover that looking for a job today feels nothing like it did the last time they searched. They tell me they’ve applied everywhere, updated their resume, and still aren’t getting interviews. Before long, they begin asking the question that breaks my 55-year-old heart: “Is it my age?”

If you’re asking yourself the same question, I want you to hear this. Your experience isn’t the problem. In fact, it’s your greatest advantage. The problem is that the hiring process changed while you were busy building your career. While you were leading people, delivering results, and solving problems, employers quietly changed how they evaluate candidates.

Your Resume Has One Job

A client once looked at me and asked, “How am I supposed to fit 30 years of experience into two pages?” I smiled and said, “You’re not.” He laughed because he thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

I told him something I now say almost every week: your resume has one job. It isn’t to document everything you’ve ever accomplished. It isn’t to preserve your professional legacy. Its job is to convince one employer that you’re worth interviewing for one specific role.

Once he understood that, everything changed. We stopped trying to squeeze thirty years onto two pages and started asking a different question: “What does this employer need to know to feel confident inviting me to an interview?” Your resume isn’t a biography. It’s a marketing document.

What Those Quick Rejections Really Mean

Before a recruiter ever reads your resume, AI usually does. It compares your resume to the job description, looking for evidence that you’re a match. That’s why some rejections arrive within minutes. Silence often means something different. Maybe your resume made it through the scan but never reached the top of the recruiter’s stack. Different outcomes, different reasons, but they both point to the same question: is your resume speaking the language employers are looking for?

I Was the Hiring Manager on the Other Side

For years I reviewed resumes while leading large organizations. I genuinely wanted to give every candidate a fair chance, but I was balancing meetings, deadlines, and competing priorities. If I couldn’t quickly understand the value someone would bring, that resume went into the “I’ll come back to it later” pile. If I’m being honest, later rarely happened.

The resumes that moved forward weren’t always attached to the most qualified people. They were attached to the people who made their value obvious within seconds. Your resume shouldn’t be written like a mystery novel, and it shouldn’t require an archaeological excavation. It needs to be concise and compelling. Don’t expect prospective employers to connect the dots.

If You’re Going for a Leadership Role, Show Your Leadership

Valerie’s resume listed a VP title, but it didn’t paint the picture. There was almost nothing about the size of the teams she led, the budget she managed, or the business outcomes she delivered. Numbers matter. Scope matters. Results matter. Don’t assume a recruiter understands what “led operations” means. Paint the picture for them.

Instead of: “Led operations across multiple departments.”

Try: “Led a 200-person organization with responsibility for a $12M operating budget, improving on-time delivery by 18% while reducing operating costs by $1.3M.”

Age-Proof Your Resume

I don’t believe in hiding experience. I do believe in removing distractions. Skip graduation dates, remove high school completely, focus on the most relevant 15-ish years of experience, and don’t be afraid to use two pages. You’re not minimizing your career. You’re helping employers focus on the value you bring.

Don’t Write One Resume

A great resume evolves. Your Professional Summary and Core Skills should change with every opportunity because each employer is looking for something slightly different. You’re not changing your story. You’re choosing the chapters that matter most to this audience. Keep one primary version, then create a copy to make alignment edits for every job you apply for. By using AI then adjusting to your tone, this takes less than 10 minutes per resume

One More Thing

I don’t want you walking away believing a better resume is the entire answer. The strongest job searches combine a strategic resume with intentional networking and conversations that happen before hundreds of people click Apply. Your resume opens doors. Relationships open even more. Your ability to crush the interview lands the offer.

Valerie’s Outcome

When we rebuilt Valerie’s resume, we didn’t invent accomplishments or exaggerate her experience. We simply stopped underselling what she’d already done. The same twenty-two year career suddenly told a very different story, and within a few weeks she had interviews on her calendar.

A Resume Gets You in the Room

A resume gets you invited. An interview gets you hired. I’ve seen incredibly accomplished professionals earn interviews only to struggle because they haven’t interviewed in years. Do not wait until you have an interview scheduled to start preparing.

That’s exactly why I’m partnering with BoldTimers to host Ace Your Next Job Interview: SLAY the Interview. Land the Offer, a free live workshop on Zoom, July 22 at 10am PT. If your resume starts opening doors, I want you to feel completely confident walking through them.

Your experience got you here. Now it’s time to make sure your resume gets you where you’re going next.

Reserve your spot HERE.

_{Tabatha Jones is a Career Advancement & Job Search Coach, founder of Empowered Leadership Coaching® and The Corporate Escape Sherpa®, and creator of the SLAY Method™, a practical interview framework designed specifically for experienced professionals navigating today’s hiring market. A former corporate executive with more than 20 years of leadership experience, she left her Executive Director-level role at 50 to build the business she runs today.}

_{Tabatha writes about career strategy for BoldTimers and is the author of Promotion Ready in 3 Months: The Women’s Guide to Career Advancement.}

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Every Thursday, Carl’s team ran the pipeline review, and every Thursday, his manager waited for the moment Carl would find the thing everyone else missed. He could see around corners that nobody else on the team had learned to see yet, the client who’d go quiet before they churned, the deal that looked solid but wasn’t.

Lately, he’d started saying “sounds right to me” and moving on.

His manager noticed. He didn’t say anything yet, but he started keeping a mental list. Fewer questions in the room. A meeting Carl used to run is now delegated to someone else. It’s the kind of shift that’s easy to read as coasting, or checking out, or maybe just tired.

A version of this reaches us the way these things usually do: through a coaching conversation, or a leader thinking out loud about someone on their team. “He’s still good at his job,” the leader said. “He’s just not there anymore.”

A Familiar Pattern

That story stuck with me.

It’s a pattern we’re starting to pay close attention to at BoldTimers. A person who’s been reliably excellent starts pulling back from the exact thing that made them valuable, and everyone around them reaches for the nearest explanation. Coasting. Checking out. Getting ready to retire.

Sometimes that’s true.

More often, something else is happening, and it has nothing to do with ambition running out. Carl might be quietly learning a new system, making him feel like a beginner in a room where he’s used to being the expert. He might be caring for a parent and conserving energy for the hours when nobody from work is around. He might simply be asking himself, for the first time in a long time, whether he wants to keep being the person who catches everything. He hasn’t landed on an answer yet.

None of that shows up in a performance review. It just looks like less.

The problem isn’t that leaders don’t care. It’s that most weren’t given a way to tell the difference between someone stepping back and someone stepping away. Without that distinction, the instinct is to manage the visible symptom rather than ask the quieter question beneath it.

The Cost No One Tracks

Carl’s manager hasn’t lost him. Not yet. But something has already started slipping, and it’s not showing up anywhere the organization would think to look.

He still delivers and hits his numbers. What’s gone is the extra: the flagged edge case nobody asked him to catch, the question in the meeting that used to save the team three weeks down the road. That’s the part that doesn’t get written down anywhere, so nobody notices it’s missing until a deal falls apart in exactly the way Carl would have seen coming.

This is the subtler form of talent loss, and it’s harder to manage than attrition because there’s no exit interview, departure date, or clear moment when anyone has to name what happened. An employee doesn’t have to leave the building to leave the role. They can sit in the same seat for years, doing the job well enough, while the fuller contribution they’re capable of quietly stops arriving.

Most retention conversations are built to catch the first kind of loss. Almost none are built to catch the second.

The Same Blind Spot, Multiplied

None of this is unique to Carl. It’s just easier to see once you know what you’re looking for.

Talent acquisition teams are fighting a version of the same battle from the other direction. AI has made it easy for candidates to apply everywhere and tailor their language in seconds, while the systems built to filter that volume still can’t tell the difference between a keyword match and real judgment.

A resume that says the right things isn’t the same as a person who’s actually seen the problem before. A long career isn’t the same as an outdated one. The harder question for hiring teams isn’t how to process more applications faster; it’s how to stop filtering out the exact kind of experience Carl’s manager almost missed, before anyone even gets to an interview.

Succession planning has the same blind spot, just further downstream.

Most succession conversations start with who replaces someone when they leave. The more useful question comes earlier: what would walk out the door with Carl tomorrow, if he left? Some of that is documented in a process somewhere. Most of it isn’t. It lives in the judgment calls, the pattern recognition, the thing he catches in the pipeline review that nobody else on the team has yet learned to see. And organizations that wait until the resignation letter to ask that question, usually find out too late how much they were counting on.

The Manager’s Role

Which brings it back to the manager.

Some know how to work well with experience. They ask what kind of contribution someone wants to make now, understanding that ambition looks different at 55 than it did at 35, and they stay curious instead of assuming they already know the answer. Others avoid the conversation entirely, not out of carelessness, but because nobody ever taught them what to ask or gave them permission to ask.

That gap isn’t only a training problem. It’s a leadership blind spot, and it’s costing organizations more than most of them realize.

I don’t know how many Carls are sitting in review meetings right now, quietly deciding whether the thing they’re best at is still worth offering.

I do know most organizations aren’t set up to notice until it’s too late to ask.

If you’re an HR, Talent, or Learning leader, I’d genuinely like to know what you’re seeing. Is this the retention conversation happening in your organization right now, or is it showing up somewhere else: hiring, succession, manager readiness, something I haven’t named here? I’m not looking for a tidy answer. I’m looking for the real one.

If this sounds like something worth comparing notes on, I’d welcome the conversation.

Mel Ebenstein is Founder and CEO of BoldTimers, a movement helping experienced professionals navigate what’s next with clarity, courage, and community. He writes about the patterns BoldTimers is hearing from experienced professionals, coaches, and HR and Talent leaders, and the blind spots quietly costing organizations more than they realize.