Cally Beaton: Why Your 50s Are Better Than Your 40s

This time last year I didn't expect to be a best-selling author out on a sold-out tour. It's funny though; last year, on paper, was one of the most successful of my entire life, but it felt really difficult at the time. My anxiety was at an all-time high and my imposter syndrome was raging. Someone said to me imposter syndrome is like comparing your insides with other people's outsides, and that is a good thing to bear in mind when we're feeling riddled with it!

One of my biggest pet peeves is when feminism is mistaken for misandry. Feminism, and indeed equality of any kind, is good for everyone, not 'just' women.

I was very ambitious in my thirties! That's when I first became a board member and I was hugely driven. They say when you're driven, what are you driving out? And that was true for me. I was definitely a workaholic - the one addiction that gets richly rewarded - but it's as dangerous an addiction as any other. I am still ambitious but less blind in my ambition. Nowadays my ambition has everything to do with pleasure and purpose, little to do with money (as long as I have enough to live) and nothing to do with status.

No one really knows what they're doing. Isn't everyone scared they're going to be found out at any moment? I also used to believe that women need to be people pleasers to get on in life.

Only having so many f*cks left to give is hard-won.

For me, 2026 is all about balance. Having worked without a break for over 40 years, while I am still hugely passionate about my career and have many ambitions yet to fulfil, I now balance out the crazy-busy times with quieter days, or even weeks. Not just because I'm in love with my dog, but that too.

The loudest voice in the room is not necessarily the most powerful one. Never has there been a more important time to look at the immense power of gentle leadership: bringing people with us because they want to come, not because they're too scared not to follow.

Coming to comedy later has, for starters, given me the capacity to do it. I am in awe of people who can stand on a stage of any kind and speak when they are young, let alone do stand-up. I was terrified of public speaking until well into my thirties and gradually built up to being a good public speaker over many, many work events during that decade. I didn't know who I really was until midlife either, which has given me the confidence and presence to be able to get up onto a stage as a comedian later in life. And then of course there's the abundance of material after all those years shuffling around this mortal coil.

Confidence is all well and good if it's real, but women learn to be very good at masking, often from a young age, and that is not the same as being confident. I prefer to bring how I'm really feeling and who I really am with me into whatever situations I face, professionally or personally. Vulnerability is where the real strength lies, and nothing is more courageous than being able to first know, and then show, that.

In stand-up you are never far from failure, and you never learn as much from a good gig as you do from a bad gig. All my biggest learnings in comedy have come from the things that didn't go well; that's how we become good. As stand-ups we learn not just to cope with failure, but to welcome it. Otherwise, new jokes would never be written! We'd just stick with the old ones we know work.

In my own experience and that of many of my girlfriends, life in your fifties is much easier than life in your forties. Things reached a peak in terms of how difficult it all felt in my late forties, and in retrospect I was in the midst of a perfect storm of perimenopause, burnout and a looming empty nest. I don't know many women for whom things didn't get extremely tough at some point in their forties, in no small part due to hormones but also due to the many things that tend to be going on in our lives at that point. I've made some radical changes since then, and with those changes comes a renewed sense of power and possibility. With careers spanning five or six decades, we're all going to need to reinvent multiple times. We may as well strap in and enjoy the ride.

There is always hope. In a world that feels as if it is going backwards much of the time, not just in terms of women's rights but of human rights full stop, we have to keep hopeful. And to keep being willing to take action, however small. There are those who would have women become smaller, and we need to have the courage now more than ever to take up space unapologetically.

To order a copy of Cally's book or get tickets for her 2026 nationwide tour, go to callybeaton.com

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