Nicky Lowe [00:00:00]:
Hi, it’s Nicky Lowe and welcome to the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast show. I’m your host and for nearly two decades now I’ve been an executive coach and leadership development consultant. And on this show I share evidence based insights from my coaching, leadership and psychological expertise and inspiring interviews that help women like you to combine your work, life and motherhood in a more successful and sustainable way. Join me and my special guests as we delve into leadership and lifestyle topics for women, empowering you to thrive one conversation at a time. I’m so happy that you’re here and let’s get on with today’s episode. Hi, it’s Nicky here and welcome to my annual end of year reflections. And these are my life lessons from 2025.

Nicky Lowe [00:00:55]:
And if you’re listening to this episode when it goes live, it’s New Year’s Eve 2025. So let’s just pause for a moment. We made it to the end of another year, another year lived, another year navigated. And if you’re listening to this at any other point in time, just know reflection is never time bound. So hopefully these lessons will be useful to you because actually, lessons are always available to us. And I started these end of year reflection episodes during the Pandemic, unsure whether they might feel a bit self indulgent, like who wants to listen to my life and my life lessons? But year after year, I receive messages from you as listeners telling me how much these reflections resonate. Not because my year is special or extraordinary, but because taking time to mine for the gold in our lives is something so many of us rarely give ourselves permission to do. And I know that I’m naturally very future orientated.

Nicky Lowe [00:01:59]:
My instinct is to always move on to what’s next and what’s coming up next year. How do I want to be next year? But if I do that without looking back, I miss the wisdom. This year has been quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, offering me. And if I’m honest, I risk leaving all that wisdom on the table. So this has become kind of like an annual tradition and having you as a podcast listeners actually holds me accountable to do that. So today I’m pressing pause to honor and kind of go mining for the gold from this year. What are the lessons and to consciously decide what I’m carrying forward and what I might be leaving behind. So in this episode, I’m sharing three core life lessons from 2025.

Nicky Lowe [00:02:49]:
And as I said, my hope is that as you listen, you’ll also reflect on your own year and notice what this year has been teaching you. So let’s start. Lesson one is stepping into my magician era. So 2025 has actually been my best year in business yet. And the thing that surprised me most is this. I don’t feel like I’ve worked as hard as I have in previous years, so that kind of blows my mind. And it’s not that I’ve cared less. It’s not because the work hasn’t mattered.

Nicky Lowe [00:03:27]:
It’s because I fundamentally changed how I work. For years, I’ve operated with what I now recognize as the mule mentality. So the mule is reliable, conscientious, hard working, like a workhorse, really, that just carries the load. She gets up when the sun rises, she does the work in front of her, she keeps going, and she’s rewarded based on her effort, like, how much she’s carried, how many fields she’s plowed. And to be clear, there’s, like, dignity in that. Many of us were raised to believe that this is what good work looks like. But there is another way of working, and I’d like to share with you the fable of the mule and the magician. And in this story, a magician arrives into the village, and she works deep differently to the mule.

Nicky Lowe [00:04:19]:
She works less. She focuses on outcomes rather than output, on leverage rather than load bearing, and on value created rather than effort expended. And she works with clarity, with skill, with intention, from her expertise, not her endurance. And it looks effortless from the outside. And I think this story landed for me this year because I realized how long I’ve been equating worth with effort. And 2025 has been the year I’ve consciously stepped away from that mule identity, the one that believes success must be hard won through, like, constant effort and sacrifice. And I’ve stepped into my magician era. And in that fable, the mule watches the magician come into the village.

Nicky Lowe [00:05:09]:
And the mule has plowed those fields every day from sunrise to sunset and gets paid at the each week. And then the first week that this magician is in the village, the magician’s just kind of transforming value. And at the end of the week, gets paid more than the mule. And the mule kind of goes, that’s not fair. I’ve worked harder. But actually, when we recognize that people value us based on the value we create for them, it shifts everything. And what that’s meant for me is focusing on where I can create the greatest impact, working at almost, like, the right altitude. In my business, it’s meant leveraging the brilliance of my team and letting go of work that no longer requires me.

Nicky Lowe [00:05:57]:
It’s not about doing less, it’s about actually doing what matters. And I think last year’s mantra as I came into this year was all about protecting the lights. And that has been the backbone of this shift because it’s all about protecting my energy, protecting allowing my light to. To cast where it’s going to have the biggest impact. And I think another important part of that magician era has been getting more comfortable with delivering difficult feedback. For years, one of my biggest regrets, both in my career and in my personal life, has been about not having the honest conversations that were needed. I told myself that I was being kind, I didn’t want to hurt people or I didn’t want to offend or create conflict. But what I came to understand the hard way, believe me, is that this often slipped into what Kim Scott, who wrote a brilliant book called Radical Candor, she calls it ruinous empathy, that in trying not to upset someone, actually I’ve damaged the relationship, including the relationship with myself, because avoiding the hard conversations doesn’t make the issue go away, it just delays it and usually creates an increased cost.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:09]:
And I’ve learned that taking the easy option in the short term almost always leads to more hardship in the long term. So this year I’ve been practicing more radical candor about being clear, being boundaries, and being willing to say the things that feel uncomfortable in service of the truth and respect and my own integrity. And a moment this year really stands out to me about where I’ve grown into that space. And I was working with a client in organisation and it started to feel genuinely quite tricky. The relationship was becoming negative, I wasn’t enjoying the work and if I’m honest, I wasn’t feeling valued. And I knew that I had a choice. I could tolerate it, keep going quietly accommodating at all, or I could risk the work by being honest. And I came to a very clear kind of conclusion in all of this.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:59]:
If the energy continued like this in the dynamic, I didn’t want to do the work and I needed to protect my energy. So I leaned into a very difficult conversation, one that genuinely felt risky. And I can’t tell you how transformational it was. The feedback I gave was actually received with goodwill and I wasn’t expecting that. And the dynamic shifted and the relationship really reset. But the biggest win wasn’t with that external piece. It was like an internal feeling, like my self esteem, my self respect, the feeling of knowing God honored myself by saying what needed to be said. And that for me is that Magician energy too.

Nicky Lowe [00:08:40]:
Not avoiding discomfort, but using like clarity and courage and boundaries to create better outcomes without burning myself out or like dishonoring myself. So if you’re listening and you feel exhausted by carrying everything yourself, I want to gently offer you this. What if your next level isn’t about working harder, but about stepping into your own magician mindset? And that leads me nicely onto lesson two, which is about owning my ability to build high performing teams. And for years I’ve been fiercely curious about what it really takes to build a great team. I think that curiosity was born early in my corporate career where I found myself leading global teams and quietly asking questions I didn’t have the answers to. Like what am I actually meant to be doing as a leader? What makes a team not just functional, but truly like high performing. Is there a formula or is it just luck? And at the time it often felt like I was working through it, through sheer effort, trying things, reflecting, learning the hard way, watching other people. But what I can see clearly now is that I’ve spent two decades studying, experimenting and living the work of team effectiveness.

Nicky Lowe [00:10:00]:
And that curiosity has become capability. And today I’m incredibly lucky that high performing teams work sits at the heart of what I do with my clients. But what shifted for me this year is a quiet but important realization that building high performing teens is something I’m actually really good at. And I don’t think I’ve ever really owned that before because for a long time it felt like conscious effort, like not a natural strength. And yet, one of the things I’m most proud of and deeply grateful for is the team behind luminae. I genuinely feel like I have a dream team. People who are values aligned, brilliant in their zones, a genius, committed not just to the work, but how we work together. And if you’re curious about that, stay tuned for early 2026 because I’ve got a special behind the scenes episode coming up with my team where we’ll explore how we work together.

Nicky Lowe [00:10:58]:
High performing team model I use in my leadership work. But I think this lesson didn’t just stop at my business. I been preparing for my hysterectomy operation in January and that deepened this kind of lesson even further because I realized I haven’t just built a high performing team in my business, I’ve built a high performing team around me, like for my hormone replacement specialist who understands cancer risks and complexity because I’ve got a high risk of cancer in my family and I’m obviously going to go into the medical menopause. So I felt like I need the best support around me to understand how I navigate that. I’ve got a recovery and body alignment expert, my physio and my scar tissue expert, and I’m going into surgery genuinely feeling really supported about the journey ahead. And I can’t tell you how good that feels. And I think seeing this so clearly has helped me kind of own something important. I’m pretty good at spotting what’s needed from people and I’m good at finding the right people and I’m good at creating the conditions where they can thrive in their zone of genius and actually support what works.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:10]:
And I, for a little while, I thought that was luck. I was starting to realize it was like, oh, that’s just luck. But I think I’m becoming to realize that’s leadership. And for so many of you listening, this really matters. Because strength is often mistaken for doing everything alone. But high performance, whether it be in work, in health, in life, is rarely a solo sport. So as you reflect on your own year, I want to leave you with this question. Have you shifted from hyper independence into your own high performing team area? If not, what might be possible if you did? And that leads me on to lesson three, which is about crossing the threshold into my sage area.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:54]:
And there’s a word that keeps coming to me as I reflect on this season of my life. And it’s like a threshold. Because this year hasn’t felt like a dramatic change. It’s felt like standing at the doorway of something new, aware that I’m no longer who I was, but not quite fully who I’m becoming either. And what I can clearly see now is that 2025 has been the year where something has been quietly forming. Not loudly, not visibly, not deeply, but like it has been quietly forming. And as we enter this New Year into 2026, I begin it with a hysterectomy in January. And it feels like a moment I’m crossing this threshold.

Nicky Lowe [00:13:44]:
As I’ve been preparing for this next chapter, I’ve been reflecting on something that’s been quietly shifting inside me for quite a while. So early in my career, I was almost always the youngest person in the room. And I think for years that identity stayed with me. Even when I wasn’t the youngest person in the room anymore, even when I had more experience than many people sitting around the table, I still felt that. And as I’ve moved through my 40s, there’s been moments where I’ve realized I’m actually the oldest person in the room. And yet that same Internal feeling has lingered until this year. And this year something crossed, like, it’s like I’ve crossed a threshold. There’s been an up leveling, not just in my leadership, but in my, like, internal identity.

Nicky Lowe [00:14:31]:
I found myself owning my experience, like updating my internal self image, allowing myself to see and be an older woman who carries lived experience, expertise and wisdom. And you may have heard of the archetypes of the maiden, the mother, and the sage, and they’re often used as a way of understanding. Like the natural seasons of a woman’s life. The maiden represents beginnings. So like learning, striving, proving, becoming. She’s kind of full of potential and possibility, but still gathering her sense of self. And the next transition is into the mother. And it represents creation and responsibility, not just through motherhood, but itself, but through this energy of holding, nurturing, building, carrying, others and systems.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:28]:
And then the next transition is the sage. Like the wise woman, traditionally, she was the woman in the village that people went to for perspective, not because she had all the answers necessarily, but because she had seen enough. She understands patterns. She knows when to act and when to wait. She offers insight rather than instruction. And the sage isn’t driven by, I suppose, urgency. She’s guided by, like, this discernment. And when I look back, I can clearly see how these archetypes have mapped onto my own life.

Nicky Lowe [00:16:03]:
So in my early career, very much in my maiden energy. And in recent years, I’ve linked strongly at that mother energy, not only as an actual mother, but in the way I’ve created, held, nurtured, taken responsibility. And this year I feel like I’ve been crossing the threshold into my sage era. And that feels really significant as I enter my final year of my 40s and the year I begin major surgery. My hysterectomy put me into a medical menopause, a hormonal shift that makes a real movement into a different season of life. But the sages and like, invisible. She isn’t diminish. She doesn’t prove, she doesn’t push, she chooses.

Nicky Lowe [00:16:47]:
And that comes a shift in perspective. And I think that shift is like fueled a desire to share what’s been learned not just from theory, but from lived experience. So as I step into 2026, I feel a strong pool to share more of my wisdom with more people in a way that feels accessible, grounded and spacious. And that’s why you’ll start to see more master classes and, and I suppose, teachings appearing on my website. And they’re going to be a passion project of mine as we enter the new year. This is the knowledge that’s really been earned, distilled, and I’m ready to share it without burning myself out to deliver it. And I’m wondering, what season of life are you in right now? Are you in your maiden, your mother or sage? And what is that season asking of you? And perhaps thinking about what wisdom have you already earned that you might be ready to own, trust and share more fully? Or perhaps where in your life do you sense that you’re standing under threshold, no longer who you were, but not yet fully who you’re becoming? So as we close this episode off, if you’ve listened to my previous end of year reflections, you’ll know that I’ve created a bit of a tradition. Each year I choose like a mantra or a saying, something I want to carry with me into the year ahead.

Nicky Lowe [00:18:15]:
Not as a pressure or as an expectation, but like as a guide, guiding principle. So this year I want to share my mantra with you, but before I do, I just want to pause and bring this all together. I hope these three, I suppose my life lessons have helped you reflect on your own year. So lesson one was about stepping into my magician era, moving from hard work and effort to working with clarity and leverage and courage. Lesson two is about owning my ability to build these high performing teams in my business and in my life, and letting go of hyper independence. And lesson three is about crossing the threshold into my sage era, earning my experience, my wisdom and the season I’m entering. And one thing I’ll share in case it helps you to reflect in a way that feels true for you. I’ve learned over the years that I’m an extroverted reflector.

Nicky Lowe [00:19:15]:
So I don’t tend to do this work best when I’m on my own or quietly in a journal. I’ve reflected on these lessons in conversation with the people who are closest to me, thinking and kind of feeling them out loud. And that’s very different to perhaps people like my business manager, Lauren, who she’s an introverted reflector. She makes sense of her life and lessons with journaling, and I’ve always admired her for that, but it just doesn’t work for me. That’s not me. So if you’re similar and you’re an extroverted reflector, please feel free to reach out and share your reflections with me. And if you’d actually like a safe, supportive space to explore your own life lessons, I suppose more deeply, you can always book a coaching session with me. That’s exactly the kind of work.

Nicky Lowe [00:20:04]:
I love to do so. As I close this episode, I want to leave you with this blessing. May you stop proving and start choosing. May your energy be protected and your wisdom be heard, and may the life you’re building no longer require recovery or escape from it. And my mantra as I enter into 2026 is this. I lead from wisdom, not willpower. I’ve earned this wisdom and I’m no longer my burning myself out to deliver it. That’s the mantra I’m carrying into 2026.

Nicky Lowe [00:20:41]:
And I’ll leave you with this question. What would your mantra for this coming year be? Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope this new year brings health, happiness and fulfilment for you and your loved ones. So until next time, thanks for tuning in and take care. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Wisdom for Working Mums, I’d love for you to share it on subscribers, social media or with the amazing women in your life. I’d also love to connect with you, so head over to Luminate where you’ll find ways to stay in touch. And if this episode resonated with you, one of the best ways to support the show is by subscribing and leaving a review on itunes. Your review helps other women discover this resource, so together we can lift each other up as we rise. So thanks for listening.

Nicky Lowe [00:21:34]:
Until next time, take care.