Working It live: How to make a mid-life career change

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Working It live: How to make a mid-life career change’

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It with me, Isabel Berwick. For this episode, we’re bringing you something a little different. At the start of September, I led a panel at the FT Weekend Festival in London. The topic: how to make a mid-life career change.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In a packed tent, I was joined by three really great guests: Jan Hall, founding partner of leadership consultancy No 4 and co-author of a book exploring career transitions for senior leaders; Ana Baillie, a former financial and professional services lawyer who’s now studying to be a midwife and FT contributing editor and columnist Camilla Cavendish. She used to head the Downing Street policy unit under David Cameron and is author of the book Extra Time: Ten Lessons for an Ageing World. Each of them had a brilliant perspective on why mid-life career changes can be so rewarding and how to go about making one. Before we start, one quick note. This was recorded at a busy festival on a sunny day, so there is some background noise. If it helps, grab a cold drink and pretend you were there with us. Here’s the panel.

So I’m gonna start with a question for all the panellists. Why are so many people thinking about career change in their late forties and beyond? This has become a real thing. I’m gonna start with Camilla. You’ve written a book on ageing.

Camilla Cavendish
Yeah. So I think maybe people who are currently in their fifties — and I’d say it’s more fifties than forties — but are probably the last generation of people who may have actually done one job or maybe two at maximum. And I mean, that is something that’s obviously changed for all of our kids. But there are a lot of people who have been in professional services, for example, who just get to a point where they think it’s repetitive and I want something different.

Now, the other factor that we also have got to look at is that in quite a lot of professional services firms, I mean, I get a lot of calls from people who are in management consulting or accounting. I won’t mention the names of the companies, but those companies have an unofficial retirement date of 60. It is made quite clear to people that you’re gonna be pushed out by the time you’re 60, so you’ve got to start thinking what to do. And I get a lot of calls from people who are sort of early fifties saying, oh my God, you know, what do I do? And I’ve done research all over the world on this.

But the research shows that the older we get, if we’re financially able to afford it, we start wanting to give something back. We start wanting to be connected in a slightly different way, and we want to retain a sense of purpose. And retaining a sense of purpose in older life is the single most important factor that is most correlated with health. The most important thing you can do to age better is to retain your sense of being needed, to retain a sense of self-worth and a sense of purpose.

Isabel Berwick
Ana, why do you think so many people think about career change as you did?

Ana Baillie
I think life is long and increasingly so; we’re, you know, better able to live long lives. And I just felt, why limit yourself to one career when you could have two or three?

Isabel Berwick
Thank you. Jan?

Jan Hall
I think that many people actually go through life and at various stages in life think, could I do something different? So I actually don’t think it’s something that just happens when you hit 50. But at that point, often you actually are at a point where you might be able to think about it. It might be an option. And so it might be an option because you’re gonna have no choice because you’re gonna lose your place at some point. It might be an option because you haven’t got a full-on family to be running around with. It might be an option because you’ve actually earned enough money that you’ve got choices. So for a lot of people, the option becomes something to really think about. So I think it’s all of those different things as people are able to start to think about it and probably should be thinking about it in their fifties.

Isabel Berwick
So just to pick up on that, Jan, when you talk to CEOs or leaders and they start to think about change, do they have something in mind or is it the idea of change that, you know, what comes first, the thoughts about change or the idea about what comes next?

Jan Hall
So one end of the spectrum, I would say, it is the thought about change and wanting to do something else. And it is the sense of purpose or the giving back a bit more. But quite often at the other end, they haven’t thought about it at all and then somebody else makes the decision for them or there’s some terrible hiccup or whatever. And people are put in a position where they don’t have a choice, but they’re faced with it. And the research on that is interesting because actually, it doesn’t matter if you end up having to make a change or you choose to make a change doesn’t matter. Being in a position where you are making a change, kind of like you’ve gone into the room that says change over the door. However you got in the room is kind of irrelevant once you’re in the room, because once you’re in the room it is really scary. And so that’s the other bit of it is the idea of it is a very good idea but the reality of it in the early stages is really scary.

Isabel Berwick
Is everyone scared?

Jan Hall
I think almost everyone. And those people who say they’re not, you know, it’s just too scary to say that it’s scary.

Isabel Berwick
Important to say they’re scared. Ana, I wanted to ask you about your change. Was there a lightbulb moment or was it more of a gradual thing?

Ana Baillie
It was gradual. I was very happy as a lawyer. I love my job. I never fell out of love with the law. It was stimulating. It was fun. I had amazing colleagues, but I also had an experience. Twenty years ago, I was on the west coast of Ireland on New Year’s Eve in a tiny, tiny village and I had a premature baby. And she came too fast and she came very early and I needed help. And I got astonishing help from an amazing local midwife. And that sowed a seed. And it made me think, hmm, that looks like a cool job. You would go home every day thinking, I made a difference. And that seed germinated and I kept being a lawyer and I kept loving being a lawyer. And then I read a book by Linda Gratton and Andrew Scott, about 2017.

Isabel Berwick
It’s The 100-Year Life.

Ana Baillie
It is such a good book. Everyone should read it. And I suddenly, and I love this idea that they had about longevity as a gift. And I suddenly thought, I’m only halfway and I’ve got time. So I thought, I’m gonna be a midwife. And I also realised at that point, if I didn’t try, I would really regret it. And that was a huge incentive to get on with it.

Isabel Berwick
Thank you. Camilla, is there something particular about human ageing that creates this desire in mid-life? Because I think you and I, you’ve written about this sort of spiritual angle to it. Is there something actually spiritual about this or is it mortality? What’s behind it?

Camilla Cavendish
Gosh, that’s such a big question. I mean, can I just say first? I mean, I think Ana’s story is wonderful and really unusual because I think a lot of us actually do have things that we would like to do, but we face enormous barriers in admitting it to ourselves or making it real. I mean, I’ve had a lot of different careers. I’ve been incredibly lucky because I’ve just sort of taken opportunities when they came.

But what I really always wanted to do was to be a writer. And I didn’t become a journalist until I was in my thirties because my father was a writer, never made any money. My mother spent my whole childhood saying, don’t be a writer, don’t be a writer, go into business — which is what I did. And I think a lot of us carry in our heads, maybe without even realising it, sort of preconceptions. And certainly when I started being brave enough to talk to people about being a journalist in my late twenties, they said, you’re far too old already.

And I actually think we’re very, very conservative in the way we look at careers and we have a sort of career timetable in our heads that’s part of this get to 50 and oh my God, you know, you’ve got to start thinking about the exit. A lot of companies, that’s what they still think about, the exit. And we’ve really got to break through that in a way that you have because you’ve just said I’ve got a much longer life ahead. This is what I really want to do and I can do it. But it’s very it’s very, very unusual.

I think most people have, as you said, Isabel, a slightly vaguer sense that there is something out there that’s important. So our colleague Lucy Kellaway, who many of you will read in the FT, I mean, she went off and set up Now Teach, which was a way of her changing career ’cause she’d been a life-long journalist, but also a way of getting older people into teaching. And one of the things I’ve been passionate about is can we get all these amazingly talented and energetic older people into helping with social problems? And there’s a number of organisations in the US. There’s one called Encore, which is rather a nice name I think, it’s a sort of second act where they put talented professionals into non-profits. There’s a whole raft of these things. There’s a brilliant one in Baltimore which has transformed children’s life chances by getting people — again, forties, fifties, sixties sometimes in their seventies — to mentor young kids. What is surprising, in a way, is how few people ever do that.

Ana Baillie
Isabel, can I just comment on that? ’Cause I think it’s interesting, the kind of the idea of is it profit or is it purpose? We need to be careful that we’re not too cartoonish. I would just say in the private sector, there are many, many roles that have some element of social purpose.

Camilla Cavendish
Oh, of course . . . 

Ana Baillie
I don’t think it’s, you know, it’s not binary. And I think it’s arguable, in my old job, I probably had a greater impact on a bigger number of people than I will when I, you know, qualify as a midwife and I’ll just look after one woman and one baby per shift. Maybe that’s what makes it scary that people think they’re leaping from making profit to having a social purpose. And I do think there’s a lot of space in between.

Camilla Cavendish
Can I make a point on that?

Ana Baillie
Yes.

Camilla Cavendish
Because it’s so important. I think you’re completely right. But it’s partly about seniority that people move away from the front line.

Ana Baillie
That’s true. Yeah.

Camilla Cavendish
So a lot of people, when you talk to them about what they were passionate about, it was actually being the maths teacher and now they’re the headteacher. And so often the lowest-paid jobs or the least respected jobs are the ones that are actually at the frontline interfacing with the person who matters. And I think a lot of people get to the boardroom or whatever, and they’ve sort of lost touch with the thing that really animates them. John Lewis had an amazing project a few years ago where it was taking older people to become wine experts in the supermarkets and they weren’t taking them from John Lewis, they were taking them from other companies where they’d all sat on the boards and they then they just sort of got them in aprons kind of three days a week doing what they love. So that’s, I think that’s just to add, to amplify what you were saying, I think you’re completely right. It doesn’t have to, you had to move out of the private sector to do that.

Isabel Berwick
And just to sort of flip that on its head a bit. Jan, when you are talking to people, do you ever come across people who want to do something, you know, more, go further and more lucrative?

Jan Hall
All the time. (Laughter) But actually, if you are in a very nicely paid job, you’re making a flip to accept that you may not earn a lot less, but you’re gonna earn less probably. I suspect for many of the people here, you’re in an incredibly lucky place where the money isn’t the driver.

And so the book that I wrote with my colleague Jon Stokes, is a book which was more focused on if you have defined yourself through your job, it doesn’t mean to say that you’re not still a mom or a dad or a sister or brother or whatever. But if you defined yourself through your job and your identity is first and foremost comes from your job, the hardest thing to give up, unless you know it’s a necessity, isn’t the money. It is the sense of who I am. And for some people, the money gives you that sense of who you are.

And so the real issue, I think, is that for many, many people, they have a sense that they want to change, but they don’t have any real clue as to how. And the bit you’ve got to do in that situation is to sort of own the need to change and own the fact it’s gonna be quite a difficult thing to get your head around. And so when you’re at that point of a major change, you kind of, your conscious brain says, it’s really time I thought about this and I want to change. And your subconscious brain, because it’s kind of an organ and our organs are there to protect us and keep us stable, well, maybe I’ll think about it in two years' time. Maybe I’ll think about it in five years’ time. Maybe I’ll hope I’ll get that non-exec directorship or a chairmanship or whatever it is. That means I don’t have to think about it because it’s difficult.

But actually, I think for many people who do face into it, taking that time a) to live with the uncertainty and the kind of, you know, ups and downs it creates in your head, but b) to then be brave enough to go out and explore because for most people it’s not obvious. So then you’re kind of going, well, how the hell do I find where I go next? And that requires you to be brave and go out and experiment. It requires you to go out and talk to other people. It requires you to share that you’re finding this difficult. Maybe you’ve got through the real scared bit, but you still want to learn. So the real, I think the real thing is not expecting that you’re going to wake up one morning, know that you want to change and know what you want to change to — that’s really unusual. And it might be purpose, but it doesn’t have to be, actually. Just has to be something that you can feel over time will make you happy.

Isabel Berwick
That’s great. And I just want to follow with one thing. You know, we talk about the people who’ve got the lot of status. Do they mistake that for happiness?

Jan Hall
I think if you are in a position where you have a lot of status and it might be actually be funnily enough, headmasters, Jon and I — my co-author — we did a session for headmasters. My goodness me, if you were a headmaster, it completely defines you. My mum was a teacher for disabled kids. She was bereft when she left. Didn’t know what she would do, who she was, because she’d put so much into it. So it’s not all about status. It’s about how invested you are in that thing that you’re doing. But if you have got the status, then you’ve often, over time, if you didn’t start with it, developed what we’ve called in our book the paradoxes of power. And they’re around control, they’re around being powerful, they’re around status, they’re around not looking foolish, they’re around knowing what to do, they’re around feeling an expert. Some of the time, it is a question of sort of letting yourself explore what is it that’s holding you back. And there are ways to do that. But it just takes some, it takes time and it takes investment.

Isabel Berwick
So I wanted to bring Ana in on specifically when you left the law, you know, when you were talking about leaving, that was what was probably a community. That was your last employer, HSBC.

Ana Baillie
Yes.

Isabel Berwick
I mean, you’d been there for quite a long time. How did you break that to your colleagues? How did they react and how did you feel when you were actually about to do that big thing?

Ana Baillie
Some people, I think, thought it was a shame that I was leaving my glossy life in a shiny company. A few were kind of benignly baffled. (Laughter) Oh, that’s nice. And most were really sweet. And what I learned was most people’s responses were about their own values, their own perspectives, their own worries. It was nothing really to do with what I was doing.

Isabel Berwick
So they were bringing themselves to the conversation.

Ana Baillie
Yeah. And I think when you were talking about status, I think it depends who you ask. You know, in some people’s eyes now I work for the NHS, I’m in public service. That gives me enormous status. Whereas there are people probably here who work in financial services who think, what a fool, she left all that behind. Honestly, I think you shouldn’t get too hung up on what other people think. As long as you’re proud — your point — of what you’re doing, that should be enough.

Isabel Berwick
And Camilla, I’ve just read your book, actually. I apologise for not reading it before, but it’s about building longer, fitter lives. Does stagnation make us old, you know? Could this sort of move be a real key thing in? Because it’s not just how long we live, it’s how well we live.

Camilla Cavendish
It is. Yeah. And we shouldn’t forget, in this conversation, we shouldn’t be too cartoonish again. You know, a lot of people don’t have high-status jobs and they don’t earn a lot of money. A lot of people have very repetitive, stressful jobs, which actually they physically can’t continue to do. So we shouldn’t leave them out of this. And they actually often get pushed out at 50 and can’t get back in, which is a whole other conversation. But yeah, in terms of actually ageing better, it’s really fascinating. I went round. One of the things I did was I interviewed a lot of neurologists about how the brain ages and I’m afraid to say, for anyone who’s feeling sort of comfortably over 50 and doing, you know, what they’re really good at — that is actually one of the worst things we can all do for our brain. And by the way, crossword puzzles also apparently don’t really improve your brain. (Laughter) Clever people do crossword puzzles — so apparently that’s another myth.

But what I did learn from all these people was that we can keep creating new brain cells until the day we die. We all do. The only question is how do you integrate those into the brain? And we can keep learning until the day we die. The way to integrate them into the brain is, I’m afraid, to do some quite hard work, which is to challenge yourself to do something that you find hard. And I think this is partly where this career conversation goes. Now, it might be that you are going to take up the piano and there’s loads of amazing studies about how musical instruments actually change the map inside your brain. But going into a completely new profession like you’ve done will probably light up completely different areas of your brain, challenge completely different things and develop new skills. And there’s a real argument there for actually keeping the brain active.

Then you’ve got the physical side, which is — again, I read all this research, you know, sitting down is the new smoking. I thought I was really sceptical about all this. Turns out it’s pretty much true and there is no single better way to stay healthy and stave off a whole range of diseases than aerobic exercise.

Ana Baillie
Just on that point, on the neural pathways. When I was a lawyer, I listened and I spoke and I read, and as a midwife, I’ve had to learn how to use my other senses. So you have to use your hands. You use touch. So I feel a pregnant woman’s abdomen and try and see which way the baby’s lying. And I use my hands to ascertain the progress of labour. And I have to listen. I have to listen to the sound of the foetal heart rate pumping away in the corner of the room. And even though I’m not looking at it, I have to be able to tell if it’s 140 beats per minute, that’s good. If it falls to 100, that’s not good. And so even if I’m not looking at it, I can . . . I’m listening, but I’m terrible at all those things. So I’ve gone from being good at reading and listening and opining to being terrible at doing abdominal palpation. And so I guess hopefully it will work, I’ll get better. But yeah, you’re learning new skills all the time and it’s not comfortable.

Isabel Berwick
Thank you. And Jan, when you were writing your book, what was the most surprising thing that occurred to you? I mean, this has surprised me that, you know, there are different things we can cultivate are so different.

Jan Hall
I think probably it’s that you can’t avoid going into the place that is really uncomfortable. That would be the biggest lesson. 

Isabel Berwick
But this idea of sitting with discomfort has become a bit of a phrase, you know, since the pandemic particularly. But in workplaces now, that’s a big phrase. What practically can we do? Camilla, have you got any ideas on . . . What is sitting with discomfort?

Camilla Cavendish
Well, you and I sit opposite each other at the FT office. (Laughter) I mean, you know, I guess it depends which chair we get or which day, Isabel, doesn’t it? (Laughter) Yeah, I know the phrase and I’m not really sure. I mean, I guess it is about, as I said earlier, kind of trying to interrogate what, who were you originally and what were the things you really wanted to do? And I think Ana’s story is so striking about having had that experience and meeting that woman who made such an impact on your life. And I think sometimes, you know, being able to get back and think about those things is probably . . . We don’t let ourselves do any of this in really busy lives. I mean, in our society, status is about being constantly busy, constantly dashing off to the next thing. So I don’t think most of us give ourselves any time to sit in discomfort at all to address any of those issues.

Jan Hall
I would say yes, tie in with yourself, obviously, but actually talking to other people. So, you know, if you are able to have a coach or somebody like that to bounce off — really, really helpful. And somebody that will challenge you and help you to think. But actually just seeking out people who you like and trust, who you’re prepared to share with. And I think women are actually often much better than that because they have a network of girlfriends that they’ve done that with for a long time. Men are typically hopeless at it and they’ve been in a workplace where to do that kind of thing is to show weakness quite often, particularly being stuck in the City where it’s all very competitive.

And so that capacity to just be honest and to perhaps go back to some school friends or some university friends who will be going through the same thing, or people who’ve had difficulty, you know, who’ve been asked to leave or they’ve had to leave at 60, is going to them and saying, how was it for you? What did it feel like? Because I’m really scared and I don’t know what I’m doing. So that capacity to talk to other people, which I think for men is sort of building a friendship, which is a different kind of friendship because you’ve probably all got friends, but actually have you got friends where you share?

Isabel Berwick
Thank you. And Ana, I wanted to ask you about the intergenerational piece of this, because I imagine that in your cohort, I don’t know if you’re the oldest person, but I imagine that a lot of your fellow students are younger. You know, is there something exciting and rewarding about intergenerational conversations, which I don’t think we have enough of?

Ana Baillie
Oh, it’s brilliant. I love being . . . I don’t know if I’m the oldest. Probably. My cohort’s amazing. There are school leavers who are wise and smart and sweet and fantastic, and there are many, many of us who have changed careers. So and they’re not all late forties, early fifties. There are people who are scientists, dancers, recruitment consultants, actresses. I mean, it’s very varied and the age range is probably from 18 to 50-something. It’s a joy being part of that group. I’m as proud being part of that cohort as I was working for any of the shiny FTSE 100 companies that I had the pleasure of serving.

Isabel Berwick
I’m gonna hand it over to the audience in a minute, but I just wanted to ask all the panellists if they had a, you know, just one thing they wanted you to leave today with. Jan, I’m gonna start with you.

Jan Hall
Actually, this is the hardest thing because when Camilla said it to me, I think, damn, it’s the aerobic exercise bit. (Laughter) Getting out of bed in the morning and just having — even if you can’t really run fast — a slow run or even just a fast walk, but getting out of the bed in the morning, or people swim. But that thing of setting up your day by putting your heart rate up and getting the dopamine into your brain sets you up for a lot of the rest of the stuff that’s to come. So it would be that horrible thing that we have to do.

Isabel Berwick
It’s all uncomfortable, isn’t it? Ana?

Ana Baillie
I would say it’s about muscles. Using your muscles. In this job, as a student midwife, I use the muscles of kindness and compassion a lot and I love it. I probably didn’t use that so much in my old role, but I have lost skills I think that I had when I worked in the City. And when Isabel asked me to join the panel, if she’d asked me two years ago, I’d have said, yeah, sure, you know, of course. And now I was a bit like, oh, I’m not sure. So I think I’ve lost some of my kind of corporate swagger or confidence, whatever you want to call it. And so, you know, we have many strengths, but you’re not playing to them all the time, and that should be fine.

Isabel Berwick
Camilla?

Camilla Cavendish
I think it’s probably about just sounds a bit hokey. I mean, trying to connect with your inner sense of purpose because we are all different than we were . . . you know, if you believe we are all put on the planet for a reason, you need to think about what your reason is. And all the kind of self-help books say, think about what you want on your gravestone. So it seems a bit, you know, but actually there is some truth in that. And just stop for a minute in your busy, status-conscious life and just think what do you want that to be.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, the time thing is very potent, actually, I think. Thank you. Right. I’m gonna hand it over to the audience. We’ve got some mics. Gentlemen, here.

Audience member 1
Yeah, thank you all. And Ana, I think what you’ve done is actually a really fantastic thing in terms of a real, if you like, a practical answer as well, which is we talk about the long . . . everybody’s living for much longer and we accept that at the age of 18 or 19, it’s fair enough to spend three or four years in education to have a career. And these days that career might last 25 years, it may last 30 years. So at 50, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take the view, I’ve got a long time to go, I can afford two years, three years to learn something new. And I think that to me is the big lesson from what you’ve done. And it does raise a general question, which is about ageism. There’s ageism in policy here, which is that we support people who go to university at 18, but not at 50 or 55. And if that was available, people would find there was a route into doing other things. It wasn’t just on them to use networks and negotiate their way around. There’d actually be some sort of pathway back into something different.

Camilla Cavendish
Singapore has created exactly that pathway. So the government of Singapore has given a voucher to every single one of its citizens to go back to school and they’ve got a series of accredited courses and you can do them at 60, 70, 80, however old you are. It costs a lot of money. But it’s that principle.

Ana Baillie
And I’ve got a student loan and it’s not easy studying again. My 50-year-old brain is not as sticky as my teenage 20-year-old brain was. But then I’ve got other life skills that I didn’t have then that make it easy to be a student. And it’s such a joy going back and learning a whole new area of interest. It’s so good for the soul, it’s liberating, it’s energising. But yeah, I’m a student with no income for three years and a family, and it’s not always easy to juggle.

Isabel Berwick
Thank you. I think we had one on the front row here.

Audience member 2
Camilla mentioned that there were several organisations in the States encouraging people into all sorts of areas of social work and whatever. I don’t think you can overestimate the value of that sort of organisation. I am one of the people who read Lucy Kellaway’s column six years ago. I’ve never dreamt of being a teacher, but now I am. (Applause) And I think the value of Now Teach is two. Firstly, I never thought that I was 65. I never thought they would take me even if I ever considered it. And then also this sort of in the training year, which was quite hard, and in a London school, the sort of esprit de corps that you had from being a group, very disparate group, all of us. I was one of the oldest, but most, a lot of people in their fifties were there, from all sorts of backgrounds. The fact that at least once a week we would meet for our sort of classroom sessions, share stories, have a moan about things, made it a hell of a lot easier.

Isabel Berwick
Can I ask what you did before?

Audience member 2
Lots of things. (Isabel laughs) I did a master’s degree many million years ago, which is why they want me as a maths teacher. I’ve worked in computing. I worked in the City, then I ran my own business.

Isabel Berwick
Thank you. Any more questions? One on the front over here? I think this might be the last question now.

Audience member 3
Thanks. Thanks. I mean, Jan, I loved your book. I didn’t realise that you were the author. And I think I’ve given away at least 10 copies, including to our outgoing chief exec, who I said to her, she needs this. But I’ve got a question for the panel. And that’s . . . I think you’ve alluded to the kind of gender differences. And how do you recommend men deal with the competitive nature that they’ve enjoyed and succeeded as at work, and then suddenly stopped?

Camilla Cavendish
So you’re looking at me? (Laughter) OK. I think it’s fine to be competitive. And I think it would be completely wrong to say that suddenly, you know, you’re incredibly competitive, you’re a hard-going guy, and suddenly you have to become all floaty and kind of giving back. I mean, that’s not what I meant. One of the many people I interviewed in the US was a guy who’d spent 10 years out of his job. He’d got to a very high level of seniority and he’d basically had plenty of money. And his wife was an artist and he was very happy. And he began to get bored. And she said, for God’s sake, can you just go and find something to do? He is now running a national park in the US through one of these wonderful organisations I mentioned. But the truth is he’s just as competitive, you know, he’s using exactly the same skills that he brought to his previous job and he’s feeling absolutely great about himself. And one of the things he said to me, and I always ask these people, I say, what are your friends doing? He said, well, a lot of them are just sitting on the couch and they’re drinking more wine. And I can’t kind of convince them. I can’t convince them. The truth is he’s just more of the same person he was. Maybe that’s part of the answer.

Jan Hall
I do think there are different ways of use of the competition coming out. So some sport is a way where it keeps going. And I’ve, you know, I’ve got friends who have taken up bridge in some column, both men and women, hugely competitive and terrifying idea of joining that. But, so there’s partly sport and there’s partly, as Camilla says, using it in the job. And there’s partly embracing a slightly different way of being as well some of the time.

Isabel Berwick
Thank you. I think that’s a wonderful way to end. I’d like to thank the panel. Camilla, Ana and John, thank you all for coming. (Applause)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This episode of Working It was produced by Misha Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. Manuela Saragosa is the executive editor and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.

[MUSIC PLAYING]