At 45 I Googled:“Am I too old to become a personal trainer?”
I was 45 and I remember thinking: if I live until I'm 90, I potentially have another 45 years ahead of me, half my life. If I wanted those years to look the same, I could keep doing the same things but if I wanted something different, I had to be willing to become someone different.
Natasha Evans, founder of Power to Pause™
So I changed the rules
I started running. First 5ks, then 10ks into half marathons, and eventually the London Marathon, followed by another marathon just eight days later. At the same time, I stepped away from the corporate career I'd known and into the fitness industry at 45.
I thought I was upgrading my body. What I was really upgrading was me! My confidence, my beliefs about what I was capable of and the identity I'd been carrying for years and it worked. Until, at 47, my body changed the rules again.
Then perimenopause sideswiped me
I was fitter, stronger and building a completely new career, I was the woman other people came to for advice but suddenly, things that had always worked stopped working.
My body changed, I started experiencing symptoms that I hadn't at that stage joined the dots with. My sleep changed along with my recovery which felt alien to me. My brain changed, I started to notice little differences to how I thought and acted.
It hadn't even occurred to me that I was entering perimenopause, so I just did what so many capable women do when something stops working: I tried harder.
More discipline. More training. Less food. More pressure but effort wasn't the missing ingredient.
That's when the real work began
I started learning everything I could about menopause, behaviour, nutrition, recovery, fitness and the nervous system, while living it myself and evolving from a personal trainer into an online coach and something became increasingly obvious.
The physical changes of menopause were only part of the story. I noticed from coaching other women that underneath so many of our behaviours were patterns we'd carried for years: the achieving, the caretaking, the perfecting, the surviving.
Patterns that had once helped us cope, succeed and keep everything moving but didn't always serve the woman or body we'd become. So the answer wasn't to push harder.
It was to pause long enough to notice the pattern, understand what was driving it and choose a different response.
That work eventually became the P.A.U.S.E. Method™ and Power to Pause™.
I now realise menopause didn't end the woman I had been building at 45, it asked me to upgrade her again.
You are not broken. You may simply be running old patterns in a body that has changed the rules.
Power to Pause
Power to Pause™
LIVED IT. LEARNT IT. NOW I TEACH IT.
Everything I teach sits at the intersection of lived experience, specialist menopause education and years of coaching women through the physical and behavioural changes of midlife.
I don't coach women to fight their changing bodies by pushing harder. I teach them the power to pause, which enables them to upgrade to their next best version.
Why women trust me
Everything I teach is built on lived experience, specialist menopause education and coaching hundreds of women to their next best version.
Every woman I work with starts the same way.
Not with a plan. With recognition naming the pattern that's quietly stealing your power.
Your upgrade is waiting
Ninety seconds, ten questions, and a much kinder explanation than “it’s just your age”.