10 Questions
That Change
Everything After 40

Most of the questions you get handed at this age are useless, and they’re useless for the same reason: you can answer them without finding anything out.

“What’s your passion?” You don’t know, that’s the problem. “What would you do if money were no object?” Money is an object, which is why you’re still here. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Nowhere in particular, and being asked makes you feel worse.

These ten are different. Every one of them has a specific answer, you already know it, and the answer tells you something you can act on. That’s the only test a question has to pass.

How to use them

Forty minutes. A pen and paper, not your phone. Nobody in the room.

Write the answer that arrives first. Your first answer is the honest one and everything after it is negotiation, and you will feel yourself starting to negotiate at about question three. When that happens, put down what you thought before you started being reasonable.

You’re not deciding anything today. You’re collecting information. Those are different jobs and doing them at the same time is why most women stop halfway.

1. If the money were identical somewhere else, would I stay?

The job question, with the salary taken out of it, because the salary is doing all the arguing.

If the answer is no, you have learnt something important and slightly uncomfortable: you are being paid to stay, not choosing to. That is an extremely common and entirely liveable situation, but it should be a decision you made rather than one that made itself.

2. Do I know what is in our accounts, and do I have a real say in it?

Two questions in one on purpose, because plenty of women can answer yes to the first and no to the second.

Money is the area where capable women most often discover they have quietly handed something over. Not because anyone took it. Because at some point it was more efficient for one person to handle it, and then fifteen years went by.

3. When did I last change my mind about something that mattered?

This one catches people off guard, and it is one of the most revealing on the list.

Changing your mind requires you to be taking in new information and to be willing to move. If you cannot remember the last time, it is rarely because you were right about everything. It is usually because you stopped putting yourself anywhere that would test you.

4. Who in my life have I actually chosen in the last five years?

Not who is still here. Who did you pick.

Almost everyone finds that most of their circle arrived through work, through the children, or through a husband, and that the last person they chose deliberately was a long time ago. That is not a failure of character, it is what happens when your time is fully spent. But it does mean that the people around you were selected by your circumstances rather than by you, and circumstances have changed.

5. What do I do that nobody thanks me for, and what would happen if I stopped?

Every household runs on invisible work and you almost certainly know exactly what yours is.

The second half of the question is the useful half. Most of the time the honest answer is “somebody else would do it, badly, and then get used to doing it”. Occasionally the answer is “nothing at all would happen”, and that one is worth sitting with.

6. Whose weekend is it?

Look at the last four Saturdays. Who chose what happened.

This is the question that makes people laugh and then go quiet. A weekend is the clearest available measure of whose life you are currently living, because nobody is paying you to be there.

You are not looking for a dramatic answer. You are looking for the same answer turning up in three different questions.

7. What am I waiting for permission to do, and who do I think gives it?

Say the second half out loud. It usually collapses under its own weight.

Most of the time the permission-giver turns out to be a husband who has never actually been asked, a parent whose opinion stopped being binding twenty years ago, or a version of yourself from 2011. Naming them does most of the work here.

8. If I had a free Tuesday with nothing owed to anyone, what would I do?

Not a holiday. A single ordinary day, at home, in your real life.

A holiday answer tells you what you want to escape. A Tuesday answer tells you what you actually want, which is a much more useful and much harder thing to look at. If nothing comes, you are probably running on empty rather than bored, and the honest next step there is rest, not a plan.

9. What have I been putting off deciding because I was too busy to think?

Being flat out is a legitimate reason to postpone a decision. It is also the best hiding place there is, and a decision can sit in it for eight years without anyone noticing, including you.

Whatever surfaces here is the thing this whole exercise was going to reach eventually.

10. What would I regret not having tried?

Not the big cinematic version. The specific one, the one that turns up uninvited when you are driving.

Answer it plainly, in one sentence, with an actual noun in it. “Living more fully” is not an answer. “Running the business I keep describing to people” is.

Now read the pattern, not the answers

When you have all ten, don’t grade yourself. Put the page down, come back to it in an hour, and look for repetition.

One subject will show up in three or four different answers. That happens almost every time and it is the entire point of asking ten questions instead of one. The thing you would never have named directly comes out sideways, through the weekend question and the permission question and the Tuesday question, and by then it is undeniable.

Most women expect the pattern to be their whole life. It almost never is. Usually it is one area, and six of the ten answers are perfectly fine, and the relief of discovering that is worth the forty minutes on its own.

What to do with it

Circle the one subject that repeated. One, not three.

Then stop, and this is the part nobody manages: do not make a plan tonight. The clarity you feel right now is real and it burns off in about four days, and anything decided inside it tends to be decided by relief rather than by you.

The next step isn’t action, it is arithmetic. Before you change anything you need to know what the current arrangement is costing you in hours, in money and in sleep, and what changing it would cost. Skipping that step is why the January version of this never survives to March.

These ten questions are the second of four moves. Faith, then Awareness, then Numbers, then Clarity. You have just done Awareness, which is the one most women find hardest and the one that makes everything after it possible.

Keep the page. You will want it in about three weeks.