Insights
Essays & reflections on tackling the big and fuzzy situations, life throws at us, thoughts on how we navigate uncertainty, find direction, and become more true to who we really are. This is where I think out loud.
All written by Helene Christensen.
How to Navigate a Midlife Career Change Without Starting Over
A midlife career change almost never means starting over. Here's the things to know that actually takes you through it — and the first honest step — from Helene Christensen.
Midlife Crisis in Women: Why It's Not the Crisis You Think It Is
What we call a midlife crisis in women is almost never a crisis. Here's what's really happening when life looks fine but feels off — and where to start.
How to Find Yourself Again (When Your Life Looks Fine but Feels Off)
Finding yourself isn't about becoming someone new. It's noticing which values stopped being yours. A guided reflection you can do while you read.
What Should You Do With Your Life? Why You Already Know (You're Just Looking in the Wrong Place)
You keep landing on "I don't know" because you're asking the wrong question. Not "what do I want," but what you already notice is true. A different way in.
The unknown is another way of describing the possible
In a darkroom in Seattle, surrounded by developing chemicals and a small group of photography students, I first encountered Yves Klein's famous photograph. A man in free fall from a second-floor window. His chin is lifted. He looks forward. You think: does he not know he can't fly? This essay is about that image. About courage. About moving toward something you cannot yet see. And about why certainty is actually the opposite of courage.
What Am I Actually Good At? The Strengths You Can’t See
If you’ve ever decided you’re not good at anything, it’s usually the wrong conclusion from a real feeling — your best strengths have become so natural you can’t see them. Here’s how to find them.
It Takes a Whole Life to Give Yourself Permission to Be Who You Are
I watched a film recently — Jay Kelly, directed by Noah Baumbach — and found myself sitting with it long after it ended.
It is ostensibly about a career, about success, about a person who has built something significant over a lifetime. But what it kept circling, quietly and without resolution, is the question every achievement sits on top of.
Was I actually there? In my own life, making those choices? Or did I drift into the person the circumstances shaped — and call that a self?
I have been thinking about that question ever since. Not because it is new.
Because I keep finding it at the bottom of everything.
How to Make Decisions When There Is No Clear Answer
There is pressure to appear to have it figured out as you grow as a leader. To perform resolution you don't yet have. To give your team, your board, your stakeholders a clarity that isn't fully real yet — because the environment you operate in has no legitimate place for "I don't know yet." That is not decision-making. It is decision-performance. Here is what to do instead.
How to Change Your Life (Without Blowing Everything Up)
You want to change your life, but not by torching everything you’ve built. Real change moves in stages — smaller and more grounded than the all-or-nothing fantasy. Here’s how to start.
How to Find Purpose in Life (The Conversations No One Has With You)
Most advice about finding purpose sends you inward, alone. But purpose rarely surfaces in your own circling thoughts — it surfaces in the right conversation, in the question no one has asked you yet.
Executive Presence Under Pressure: What It Really Means
If you want to develop executive presence, the advice is remarkably consistent. Stand tall. Speak slowly. Project confidence. Command the room. Dress the part.
It is, when you list it out, a set of instructions for performing a particular kind of authority.
And there is a problem with it. Not that it doesn't work for some leaders — it does. The problem is that it works for one kind of leader. And it produces, across organisations and industries and cultures, a creeping uniformity. Leaders who could be remarkable in their own register learning to perform a borrowed one instead.
Executive presence is not a performance. It is the thing you feel in a room when the person at the front of it is genuinely themselves.
Why Journaling in Circles Is a Sign You Need Structure, Not More Reflection
Journaling in circles isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign open-ended reflection has reached its limit — and that you need structure, not more of the blank page.
When Your Career Feels Empty (and a New Job Won’t Fix It)
Career emptiness that survives job changes was never really about the job. It’s the distance between who you are and who the work needs you to be. Here’s what it’s asking for.
Are You the Kind of Leader the AI Era Actually Needs?
Every conversation about the future of leadership starts in the same place. The world is moving faster. AI is changing everything. Leaders need to be more agile, more data-literate, better at managing complexity.
These things are true. But they are answers to the wrong question.
The question worth asking is not what new skills leaders need to keep up. It is whether the leader in the seat knows what they actually stand for. Whether they can be trusted to make the calls that matter — not just the efficient ones, but the right ones.
In the AI era, that question has never been more important.
Why Am I Unhappy When My Life Is Good?
Your life is good — you know it — and still something feels off. Here’s why you can feel unhappy when everything looks right, and what the feeling is actually trying to tell you.
The Midlife Transition Is a Return, Not a Reinvention
The story says midlife is when you reinvent yourself. The women I talk to are exhausted by that idea. What the feeling actually asks for is a return — to who you already are.
Leadership Doesn’t Require a New You. It Requires the Real One.
At some point in a leadership career, something shifts.
Not dramatically. Not in a way you can easily explain to anyone. But the approach that made you effective starts to feel like it's working slightly less well than it used to. And privately, quietly, you start to wonder whether the person who got you here is the right person to take you where you need to go next.
Most leaders, when they reach this point, look outward. For a new framework. A different communication style. Something to add.
What I want to suggest is that the gap is rarely closed by adding something. It is closed by returning to something.
How to Figure Out What to Do With Your Life
Trying to figure out what to do with your life and getting a blank? The blank isn’t emptiness — it’s years of not being asked. Here’s a more honest way in.
Narrative Leadership: Why the Story You Tell Yourself Shapes Everything Downstream
Narrative leadership has become a fixture of the leadership conversation. Leaders are told to tell stories. There are frameworks for it. Courses. Entire consultancies built around it.
And yet most of it doesn't land.
The reason is almost never the delivery. It is that the leader hasn't done what has to come before any of that. Because you cannot tell a story that lands until you know what your story actually is.