Daphne Ogle-Glenn is a woman-centred transformational coach, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who helps women in midlife shed the roles and masks they’ve carried for decades and reconnect with the wisdom already living within them. Before this work, she spent years in user experience design and strategy, helping organisations understand people more deeply, and now she brings that same depth of listening to women navigating this chapter of life. What I love about Daphne’s perspective is that she doesn’t frame midlife as reinvention for reinvention’s sake. For her, it’s reclamation. Remembering. Coming home to the woman who was always there beneath the expectations, productivity, and performance. In this conversation, she speaks beautifully about identity shifts, inherited stories, and the quiet power of slowing down enough to hear yourself again.
Who are you, and what season of midlife are you in right now?
I’m Daphne, a woman-centred transformational coach living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m also a mom, a wife, a daughter, and someone who deeply loves life, nature, and meaningful conversation.
For most of my career, I worked in user experience design and strategy, helping organisations better understand people. Now I bring that same deep listening to women.
I would describe this chapter of my life as a season of reclamation, though for me, it feels less like reinvention and more like remembering. The work I do with women is about releasing the roles and masks we’ve carried, often without realising it, gathering the wisdom of our lived experience, and intentionally designing what comes next.
Along the way, I trained as a women-centred transformational coach and was also initiated as a Priestess of Avalon, which has deepened my connection to nature, intuition, and the sacred cycles of life.
Midlife, for me, has been less about becoming someone new and more about coming home to the woman who was always there.
What surprised you most about midlife or menopause?
One of the lighter surprises was discovering that, underneath decades of colouring my hair, there was a beautiful silver that I now absolutely adore. It feels like another quiet way of becoming more myself.
More deeply, what surprised me is how much wisdom emerges when we stop performing.
For decades, I was admired professionally for my clarity and leadership, yet privately I still carried a quiet self-doubt. Midlife has been the season when those hidden stories began to surface.
The surprising part is that the transformation didn’t come from trying harder. It came from slowing down enough to listen to my body, my intuition, and the deeper voice that had been there all along.
What’s been the hardest part that people don’t talk about?
The identity shift. So many women spend decades being the dependable one, the one who holds everything together. When that role begins to loosen, it can feel surprisingly disorienting.
On the outside, your life may look stable, even successful. But inside, you may be asking deeper questions: Who am I now? What actually matters to me? What do I want to create with the years ahead?
Those questions can feel lonely, even though so many women are quietly asking them. What I’ve come to see is that this questioning isn’t a crisis. It’s a doorway to a deeper, more honest relationship with ourselves.
What has helped you most?
Learning to listen inward again. Nature walks, meditation, and creating more spaciousness in my life have been essential. So much of modern life pulls us outward, toward productivity, expectations, and constant noise. When we’re disconnected from ourselves, our beautiful brains try to solve everything at once, and life can feel chaotic and overwhelming. Clarity tends to emerge in quieter spaces.
I’ve also embraced a deep growth mindset, learning to hold both my brilliance and my imperfections with compassion. Mistakes and missteps no longer mean something is wrong with me. They’re simply part of being human and part of evolving.
Much of my training involved being coached through this work myself, which helped me see something powerful: the stories many women carry about worth, success, and self-sacrifice are not personal failures but inherited cultural patterns.
Realising that can be incredibly freeing. You begin to understand you’re not broken, you’ve simply been living inside a story that was never entirely yours.
What are you unlearning?
The belief that my worth comes from how much I produce. Like many women, I learned to overprepare, overdeliver, and overgive. I thought if I just worked harder and proved myself enough, the self-doubt would eventually disappear.
Midlife has been the slow unlearning of that pattern. And at the same time, I’m discovering something beautiful: this stage of life is not the beginning of the end. It’s often the beginning of the real work.
Many of us have spent decades gathering wisdom through lived experience. Midlife is when we finally begin using that wisdom fully, bringing our gifts into the world in ways that feel deeply aligned. Some days, I still have to pinch myself that I get to do this work.
What do you wish you could tell your 35-year-old self?
You don’t have to push so hard. The life you’re trying to force will unfold more beautifully when you begin trusting yourself instead of trying to meet everyone else’s expectations.
And perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to control everything. Life flows more like a river than a plan. When we stop swimming upstream and allow ourselves to float, something remarkable happens. The current begins carrying us in directions we could never have orchestrated alone.
You still make choices, navigating rocks, choosing which currents to follow, deciding whether you’re up for wild rapids or a quieter stretch of water. But you’re no longer fighting the river. You’re co-creating with it.
What do you want other women to know they’re not alone in?
The quiet self-doubt that can live inside even the most capable women. Many of the women I work with appear confident and accomplished, yet privately wonder if they are truly enough. There is often a layer of shame around that doubt, which keeps it hidden.
But the ache they feel is real, and so are the possibilities. Often, we don’t have reference points for the next level of who we are becoming or the impact we’re meant to have. That can feel both exciting and unsettling.
What I want women to know is that they don’t have to figure it all out alone.
What’s one small ritual or practice that’s keeping you steady in your daily life?
Morning stillness. Before checking email or stepping into the day, I sit quietly for a few minutes and ask myself a simple question: What wants to emerge today?
And throughout the day, I’m learning to notice when I feel disconnected, when my mind starts to swirl, and when everything feels a little chaotic. When that happens, I pause. I take a few deep breaths. Sometimes I step outside into the sunshine.
And instead of pushing uncomfortable feelings away, I try to greet them gently.
“Hello. I hear you.”
That small shift, allowing what’s present rather than resisting it, often brings me back to myself.
What stayed with me most in Daphne’s words is the gentleness of her truth. Midlife, as she describes it, is not a crisis to fix but a doorway to walk through. A return. A loosening of the old role of being the dependable one, the over-preparer, the over-giver, the woman whose worth was tied to how much she could carry. She reminds us that the quiet self-doubt so many capable women feel is not proof that something is wrong with us. Often, it’s the residue of inherited stories that were never really ours to begin with.
I also love the way she talks about life flowing more like a river than a plan. There’s such wisdom in that. You still choose. You still navigate. But you stop fighting yourself so hard. And her morning practice, asking, “What wants to emerge today?” feels like a beautiful question for this entire season of life. Not what should I force, prove, or perfect, but what wants to emerge. If you’ve been feeling the identity shift, the longing for more space, more alignment, more truth, let Daphne’s words remind you: you don’t have to figure it all out alone. Sometimes the next chapter begins the moment you stop resisting what’s already trying to rise.
This series exists because when one woman tells the truth, another woman exhales. If something in this conversation made you exhale, if you recognised yourself in her words, there is a space where that feeling has a home.
The Midlife Circle is where the deeper conversation lives. Not just other women’s stories, but yours. Bi-weekly essays and The Midlife Edit, a private podcast, tools across all five areas of this season of life, from £19/month or £149/year.
And if you’re ready to go all the way in, the Midlife Inner Circle at £297/year includes the Midlife Manifesto Audio Training, The Midlife Reset course, and four quarterly 1:1 calls with me. Real, personal support for the redesign you’re already beginning.
Kiran x
The identity shift is the part no one prepares the dependable one for: the moment she realizes she has been living inside a story that was never entirely hers. And Daphne is right that the wisdom does not arrive from trying harder. The body usually knows before the mind agrees to listen.
Thank you for sharing these stories @Kiran Singh, Midlife by Design, including mine. May my story be a mirror, a naming for someone else like so many of the stories you’ve shared have been for me.