There we were last Friday at 8am, pretty much the whole theALLBRIGHT team huddled together in a back room, preparing for our annual Power Years Live event. As usual, the air was expectantly excited, charged with last-minute changes and dripping in hairspray. Then our Head of Marketing came in, flipped open her laptop and, in an instant, you could hear a pin drop: well, hello there, James Norton, Marks & Spencer’s extremely dashing Father Christmas, alongside a nicely played Mrs Claus, AKA Lucy Punch, with her knowing power and excellent limelight steals.

Now, I don’t want you to think that, after all our work supporting women to capture their ambition, bring true brilliance to all parts of their lives and drive meaningful gender advancement in our increasingly complex working world, we are the type of team immediately undone by a single male torso. Not true. But, reader, we are also only human, and momentarily we were silenced. Yes, by the pecs. Also, though, by the dawning realisation that midlife was finally being seen as the cool and sexy era we know it to be.

Once we’d gathered ourselves in that back room, the team (a healthy split of Gen X, Millennials and Zoomers) made those few final Power Years preparations and delivered what I believe was one of our best events yet.

Starting the Day Right: Ibiza Style Tapping

I like to capture these big get-togethers in useful editorials, and for this round-up piece, I had in mind a pretty straight review of the day: what was discussed (there was a lot on midlife sex, I have thoughts, keep reading for those), how we worked hard to prioritise sessions based on truths over tools, and what it felt like to do Poppy Delbridge’s Rapid Tapping to plenty of cool Ibiza beats at 10am (short answer: bloody brilliant). And I’ll get on to all of this, I promise.

The truth is, though, I’ve been distracted by another important Christmas advert, and my mind has wandered somewhere satisfyingly different. Have you seen the Waitrose one? If not, Google it immediately. The triumvirate of Keira Knightley, Rivals’ Alex Hassell and Joe Wilkinson is as brilliant as it is thought-provoking: three leading roles, all played by actors over 40, all gloriously real, in a storyline that shows midlife for what it’s still filled with: humour, love, desire, mistakes and great food. There is nothing not to love.

Midlife is having a moment, folks, and, excuse my language, about fucking time.

You see how my straight event review has become a wider piece about women over 40: what we represent, how we age, where we sit in the nation’s psyche and, most importantly, how it feels inside.

Just like our Christmas advert protagonists, the women who joined us at Power Years came with humour, openness and a resolve to own these years; they will not be diminished. Experience is your greatest advantage is our campaign’s North Star, and, oh, did I feel it in the room, the penny dropping as the day unfolded. Yes, on paper, it’s obvious that everything that has come before in life builds into a new type of power and wisdom as we get to 40 and beyond. Feeling it, though, really knowing it’s true, being able to turn it into an arrow and shoot it forward, and hearing that get louder as the day went on, put a little lump in my throat.

We were all Keira Knightleys last Friday: each the sum of her friendships, love affairs, redundancies, health scares, personal joys and professional failures, every thread still being woven into the life she’s living now and the one she’s crafting next. Our speakers reflected those stories back to us through their own sparkly prisms, and oh, there was laughter, tears of course, and so many knowing, nodding heads. I’m sure that in this rather luxurious corner of South London, nearly 150 women drove vital change, not just for themselves but for a generation finally starting to get the visibility and respect we deserve.

Holding the day together was our host, Jo Glynn-Smith, who came to represent the truthful voice we all still need and deserve. If the Christmas adverts have cast midlife as the main character, our speakers generously revealed what she sounds like writing her own script.

Reinventing Yourself After 40: Facing the Professional Backlash

Stacey Duguid, founder of Her Encore, who I was lucky enough to interview after lunch, epitomised the vulnerability we need to hold with care and honesty. Filming herself walking into the Job Centre in June to sign on, after a stellar career at some of the country’s leading women’s glossies, as well as holding the position of Style Director at Harrods, cannot have been an easy choice. But she wasn’t going to hide. Stacey knew she’d become an example of how midlife women remain invisible in recruitment, still discriminated against and now also fighting AI to secure jobs in a biased market that continues to skew towards youth. With more than 50,000 messages on her Instagram after that Job Centre moment, Stacey has become a symbol of not just how brave midlife women can be, but what we bring to the professional table: guts, grit and an unrelenting appetite for opportunities that match our experience.

So Solid Crew’s Lisa Maffia came at things from a different angle: deliberate rebirth, a joyous pursuit of change, unwavering support of women in male-dominated environments, and a bottle-it type of freedom that refuses to be pigeonholed. Singer, agent, entrepreneur, modern-day Cilla Black (all you single ladies, find her dating service on social media), mother, grandmother and welcomer of what lies ahead. The only thing she didn’t do was rap her way up to the stage: there’s always next year…

Defying Gravity: Let Go of the Body You Had

Authors Poorna Bell and Emma Campbell, Blue Lights star Andi Osho and moderator Lorraine Candy, former Elle editor and now midlife expert, unpicked their midlife bodies. It wasn’t a literal disrobing, but I wouldn’t have put it past this lot: their honesty was abounding and emotive. Jo Elvin talked us through the pain and passion of friendships at this stage of life, why we need them, how we can feed their power and what it feels like to intentionally let some go. Shedding was a theme that came through again and again: we cannot, said Andi, inhabit our 50-something bodies if we are still (and I paraphrase) obsessing over the ones we inhabited in our youth. To make way for change, we must first release some of what came before, which is, of course, a metaphor for so many facets of our midlife experience.

And on our Longevity Is Community panel, Debbie Flynn, founder of Club Avandra, opened by telling us she’s 70, still loves her work and is still building her business: a role model for a version of later life most of us were never shown. With Tricia Handley-Hughes and Joy Jibrilu, she made the case that a long life is as much about the people around us as anything we eat or lift.

Between sessions, the queue for the tarot reader rivalled the one for coffee (and later wine), and the UKLASH stand, for those of us looking for more lustrous hair and lashes, was never empty.

Back to James Norton’s chest (you didn’t think I was done, did you?), by way of sex therapist Ruth Ramsay’s session with our very own, mildly red-faced Sophie Catto, Managing Director and self-confessed prude. Ex-stripper Ruth declared sex her safe space, but accepted that wasn’t the case for many women grappling with the pressures and confusion of perimenopause, midlife sandwich stress and likely a lifetime of insecurity about what we look like and how we want to feel sexually.

Capturing Desire: Make Sex Like Tennis

Her takeaway: make sex a hobby, like tennis. Schedule it in, look for lessons if you’re feeling a bit rusty, practise your serve. It wasn’t trite advice: it was an open door to asking for what we want, accepting desire as a conduit to greater happiness and seeing this time of life as a gift, one we deserve to unwrap with both hands.

Midlife might have been put front and centre on festive TV, and yet, as Stacey reminded us, it often can’t get a CV past an algorithm. The broader point: culture has caught up faster than the systems we work in, which is exactly why a room like ours matters. Visibility in a Christmas advert is lovely. Visibility on a shortlist, on a board and in the stories that matter is the point.

I’m convinced every woman who joined us went home, or back to her office, family and group chats, owning a little more of what she’s worth, and resolved to play bigger on whichever front she chooses. If you couldn’t join us, don’t worry: there is so much more where that came from.

Our inaugural 40 Over 40 global listing is now live, packed with stories of midlife courage and achievement that show what success looks like in all its forms. Our Power Portrait Project, a photographic exhibition that puts midlife women in the spotlight, goes on show in the spring, and there’ll be more Power Years events, so keep a lookout.

Here’s my advice, whatever your age. Put your own needs at the top of life's list, identify what is no longer serving you, talk it out with friends, and then practise letting it go, whether that’s a friendship, a habit or an old idea of who you should be. And finally, however scary it feels, start asking for what you want, at work, at home – and from you. Oh and book the tennis lessons, of either variety.

A huge thank you to our host Jo Glynn-Smith, to every speaker, to our partners UKLASH, Club Avandra, InteleTravel and the Nassau & Paradise Island Promotion Board, and to every woman who came.