There are two moments when people finally stop ignoring what’s been building and start exploring coaching. One is when everything changes. The other is when nothing on the surface seems to change.

The first is what I call a threshold moment.

Something happened – a job change, a redundancy, a relationship ending, a baby arriving. There’s a clear before and after. The usual script stopped running and the questions that had been sitting quietly underneath finally had room to surface.

Most people who seek out coaching arrive here. The urgency is already present. The discomfort is named. They’re ready to do something with it.

The second entry point is an accumulation moment.

Nothing happened. Life is, by most measures, fine. But something has been quietly building – a sense of being slightly off, slightly far from themselves, slightly on autopilot in a life that mostly fits but doesn’t fully feel like theirs.

These clients are often the most high-functioning people I work with. The drift has been running underneath for longer than they realise, which also means it’s often been doing more damage than they’ve accounted for.

Both are valid starting points.

For the month of May, as we celebrate mothers, I thought it will be very apt and timely to share a bit more about one of the most significant threshold moment there is – becoming a mum. I’ll be sharing some stories of how some of my clients are navigating the journey with intention.

Motherhood is one of the clearest threshold moments I see in coaching, and I think one of the most underestimated in terms of what it actually does to a woman’s sense of self.

Not because it’s hard – most people know it’s hard – but because of the specific identity questions it surfaces. Who am I now that this is my new life? What do I want, separate from what I’m needed for? Which parts of myself did I quietly set down in the transition, and was that a choice or did it just happen?

Those questions don’t always get named clearly, especially for high-functioning women who are good at absorbing difficulty and keeping things moving. The drift in new motherhood can be particularly invisible for exactly that reason.

I’ll be exploring that across a few pieces this month – client patterns, specific drift types that tend to activate in this transition, and some of my own observations as someone approaching that threshold myself.

If it’s not your season for this, pass it on to someone for whom it might be. 🍃

Additionally, if the threshold vs. accumulation framing resonated and you want to take it further – I put together a short self-assessment that walks you through all five drift types, with reflection questions for each one.

It’s called Where are you drifting? and it’s yours to keep.