Mapping the New Q3: Leaping

What will you build and become from there?

ELDERBERRIES · MAPPING THE NEW Q3 · WEEK 8

From my book Thriving to 100, written six years ago.

The leap is not a single moment.

You don’t always know when it happens. There is no announcement, no clean before-and-after. Looking back, you find it was more like a slow accumulation — of choices, losses, yeses, and arrivals — that eventually revealed itself as a life.

That illustration above comes from Thriving to 100, the graphic book I published six years ago. A small figure, holding an acorn up to the vast oak she is standing beneath. I chose it instinctively. I didn’t know, then, that I was drawing myself.

The leap is what you discover you have been building all along. It’s a whole new life.

The personal - love & loss

A few years ago now, I lost two beings who had been by my side, one through life, one through loss.

My ‘Ma’ — ‘By My Side, In My Genes, At My Back’ — died in 2022. She was indomitable, until she wasn’t. I wrote about her, and I still feel the shape of what she left behind. Not just grief. Something more like a baton, passed. A matriarchal legacy she carried so powerfully. Single-handedly. She isn’t really gone, of course. Her voice is in my ear every day. And her formidable judgements too.

Poppy, my beloved puppy, brought in to comfort, was lost the year after at just one year old — killed, with terrible absurdity, by a horse’s kick. If you know dogs, you know what I mean when I say the mornings were suddenly loud with her absence. (Although my wise Indian friend Nilima suggested that it was my mother’s spirit that had come back briefly in dog form to ensure I was OK).

In that same period: a granddaughter arrived. Then another. They are, of course, unbelievably adorable, loving and joy-generating. After a decade globe-trotting, my daughter moved to London to live, an unexpected gift. I’m now blessed with generations of young women growing all around my tiny nuclear family.

Grief and new life don’t take turns. Sometimes, they arrive together.

I had not expected this. The Q3 literature talks about loss as something to prepare for, to process, to metabolise. What it doesn’t quite capture is the simultaneity of it — the way the world keeps adding at the same time it takes away. All this happened in the years between 60 and 63. The leap, I discovered, happens in many directions at once. A cast of characters exits stage right, and a new group arrives, tracing their footsteps, stage left. You have little time to digest the plot. It propels forward, regardless.

The professional - layers, legacy, longevity

I have spent the last several years building something I couldn’t have named when I started.

It began with a conversation with my now-good-friend, Céline Abécassis-Moedas — a former participant in the Midlife Rethink who was Dean of Executive Education at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics, now Pro-Rector. We saw the same thing: organisations were completely unprepared for longer lives. We decided to do something about it.

That conversation became the Longevity Leadership Programme, now in its 3^rd year (next is June 22-26^th, there are just a couple of seats left). This successful initiative became the catalyst for Europe’s first Centre on Longevity Leadership, at Católica. Which became a new discipline. We’ll be presenting it to a global gathering of business school leaders this October.

In parallel: teaching at Oxford Saïd. Running the Midlife Rethink for INSEAD Lifelong Learning. Coaching midlifers navigating Q2/Q3 transitions. Speaking around the world on what the longevity revolution means for organisations, careers, and the humans inside them.

None of this was planned. Each piece followed the last.

This is, I have come to believe, how Q3 professional lives are often built. Not with a five-year plan. With a thread. You follow it, sometimes barely seeing ahead of you, and one day you turn around and see what happened.

You plant an acorn. One day you admire the size of the oak it becomes.

The home - heart/ hearth of Q3

I wrote about the new home last week. The finding of it — the long search, the deliberate design, the environmental credentials, the extraordinary walking, the two-hour train ride that drops me almost at my door on either side.

What I want to say now, from the other side of the leap, is this:

The right container changes everything.

Not because of the house itself. Because of what the house makes possible. The study. The quiet. The morning light. The view that meets you when you sit down to write.

The view from my study.. The oak I drew six years ago, waiting outside the window.

I didn’t choose the house for its tree. But this tree has turned out to be the thing. The name of it, for one: Oakdene. The symbolism of the strength and sheer spread of oak trees, with their massive trunks and delicate leaves.

The tree was here all along. It just took me a while to find it – and understand it was mine.

What are you building — that you might not yet be able to name?

Next week: The Q3 Career. The ladder is not being disrupted. It is being replaced. What comes next is messier, more interesting, and a far better fit for the lives people are actually living.

Want to join our June Longevity Leadership Programme in Lisbon: June 22-26, 2026? Click here to apply and register. It’s an amazing deep dive of a week, with leading-edge faculty from around the world, and a super-engaged community of change agents attending to design the next chapter of our demographic era.