Here’s something nobody tells you about menopause: it might be the most important biological adaptation in human history.

Not a mistake.

Not a malfunction.

The reason we exist.

I recently met Dominique (and I fell in love, so wise, delightful and inspiring). She's a nutritional chef, a producer, and someone who went through menopause and - instead of accepting the cultural narrative that her best years were behind her - asked a different question:

What if menopause isn't the end of something? What if it's the beginning of something more important?

That question became a documentary. Wise Women: Humanity's Untold Origins.

I watched it. Then I watched it again. Now I’m telling everyone I know.

It starts with fire.

About 1.8 million years ago, our ancestors discovered they could cook food. And that one shift set off a chain reaction that literally changed the shape of the human body.

Cooked food is softer. Sweeter. Easier to process. Which meant less chewing - and jaw muscles that had been huge, anchored all the way up the sides of the skull, began to reduce. And as those jaw muscles reduced, the skull could expand. The brain had room to grow.

At the same time, cooking dramatically increased the calories the body could extract from food. All that energy previously burned on digesting raw matter? Redirected. Into body growth. Into brain growth.

Homo erectus appeared around 1.8 million years ago and shot up a full head taller than the nearest ancestor almost overnight (in geological terms, anyway).

But here’s the part that’s super cool…

Fire required stopping.

You cannot tend a fire while walking. You build a fire and stay. You cook the animal you caught there and stay for days, because that’s where the food is. And the moment a group of humans stopped moving, everything got more complex.

Who sleeps where? Who watches the children? Who manages the stores? Who keeps the peace between the person who wants to leave and the person who thinks they should stay? Who remembers which plants are safe and which ones aren’t?

Social complexity is one of the strongest drivers of brain size we know of. Groups that could manage it, thrive. Groups that couldn’t, didn’t.

And across ethnographic evidence, across cultures, across time - the people managing that complexity were predominantly women. Tending the fire, cooking the food, holding the relational fabric of the camp together.

Then something remarkable happened.

Lifespans extended. And women who had completed their reproductive years didn’t disappear. They stayed. Present in the camp. Free from the cycle. Free from pregnancy and nursing. Clear-headed. Steady. Carrying decades of accumulated pattern recognition about how people work, how seasons work, how survival works.

This is not a biological oversight. This is a selected-for adaptation - something so useful to early human groups that it was reinforced, generation after generation, for two million years.

And what did these women bring? Long vision. Hard-won wisdom. The forthright, say-the-actual-thing energy (that younger women spend years suppressing). These were the women the community turned to. The ones who had seen enough to know. The ones whose counsel mattered.

They knew how to manage the complexity of families and communities - which, let’s be honest, has never been a small thing. How to care for the ones who needed it. How to hold people together when things got hard. How to keep the peace, share the knowledge, and make sure nobody got left behind.

Yes, elder women enabled higher birth rates by supporting younger mothers. The ‘Grandmother Hypothesis’ is real and important. But the film argues it goes much further than that.

Post-reproductive women were the social intelligence of early humanity. The ones who held it all together. The ones who made fire-based civilisation actually work.

Not the footnote. The foundation.

Sound like anyone you know?

This phase is not a winding down. It's an arrival…

Into an era of joy, clarity, wisdom and leadership that you were built for. The world doesn’t need you to fade gracefully into the background. It needs you thinking clearly, speaking freely and showing up fully.

And if you’re sitting here thinking - I’m not sure I have that much to offer, I’m not sure this is my moment - watch this film. Because it will reframe everything.

Your wisdom is needed. Your leadership is needed. The world is at a point where it genuinely needs women like you to rise, connect, and shape what comes next.

Not someday. Now.

Less relevant? Not even close. You’re just getting started.

Watch Wise Women: Humanity’s Untold Origins and share it with every woman you know who is navigating this transition - or about to.

Rent it for $6.99 USD → bingeable.net/Coachdebking
Would love to hear your thoughts…

Cheering you on!
Deb x

P.S. One hour. That's how much menopause training doctors get in medical school. This documentary is 90 minutes long and will teach you more than any of them were ever taught.

I am 53 years old. I did my first coach training in 2003 - back when most people hadn’t heard of it.

In the twenty years that followed, I trained with some of the world’s best coaches, mentors and transformational leaders. Read the books. Did the courses. Worked with hundreds of clients. Built a business.

And for most of that time, I genuinely did not think I had wisdom.

I thought what I shared belonged to the people I had learned it from. I was passing it on, sure. But it was theirs. I was just a good conduit.

It took my business partner Gabby, in 2020, to point out what I had been sitting on for seventeen years.

Wisdom is not what you learned.

It is what happens when everything you have learned gets filtered through your own experience, your own failures, your own way of seeing things - and comes out the other side as something only you could say.

That is yours. It has always been yours.

Psychologists call it ‘crystallised intelligence’. It builds slowly over decades and peaks in your 50s, 60s and 70s. It is the difference between knowing something and knowing it in your bones. Between having a framework and knowing instinctively when not to use it. Between understanding grief theoretically and having sat with enough people in it to know what they actually need.

It cannot be downloaded. It cannot be shortcut. It takes time - and the particular kind of attention that only comes from actually doing the work.

Seventeen years on other people’s shoulders. It didn’t occur to me to check my own pockets.

I am not saying ignore your teachers. The people who shaped your thinking deserve their credit - and their frameworks belong to them. What belongs to you is what happened after. The way you applied it. What broke, what worked, what you figured out in the gap between the theory and the reality. The clients who changed how you saw everything. The version of the teaching that only exists because you lived it.

That part is entirely yours.

And here is the thing about this moment in time: we are the last generation who built our expertise the slow way. Without Google shortcuts or AI or a thousand courses at our fingertips from day one. What we know, we know for real. It is integrated.

That is worth owning. Worth expressing. Worth charging for.

If you have ever felt like what you know somehow belongs to the people who taught it to you - this is your sign.

It doesn’t. Not the part that matters most.

Time to own it, embody it, and let it shine.

Deb

ps. lets take this further - join me in Warmspace - a gathering for wise women, heart to heart … send me a message for the dates and link.

The past couple of years have been a lot.

Family health challenges that took priority over everything else. The kind that don’t ask permission and don’t care about your content calendar. Juggling more projects than felt manageable, and underneath all of it, that familiar comparison trap - because I love AI, I use it, we teach it, Gabby’s research has distilled genuinely practical wisdom about AI for coaches and still I’d find myself watching certain ‘AI experts’ seemingly doing everything at warp speed and wondering why I wasn’t moving that fast.

I know comparison is the thief of joy. I know that yet I still found myself holding my behind-the-scenes up against everyone else's highlight reel.

There’s a word for where I was. I just didn’t have it yet.

This week, inside our Coach Training Campus Inner Circle group coaching session, we shared a visual model with the coaches we work with and asked them what they saw.

One of them said: “It’s me. That’s just... me.”

Another said she wanted to print it out and put it on her wall.

One of the women, who is in her 80s and one of the wisest people in any room, mentioned she’d had weeks of feeling completely flat. Couldn’t get started. Couldn’t get traction. Then yesterday, something just emerged. A piece of work she’d been circling for months suddenly came together.

“Maybe it was smouldering rather than flat,” I said to her.

She went quiet. Then: “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what it was.”

That word matters. Let me explain why.

Earlier this year, Gabby and I fed over a year’s worth of data from our work with coaches into AI and asked it to find the patterns - what was actually happening beneath the surface.

One sentence came back:

Every one. Not most. Every single one.

I put my hand up immediately. I’m in that group too.

We built a framework around it. We’re calling it The Real Progress Framework. Check out the visual, and I’ll share more about the 3 phases…

The Three Phases

🔥 Ignite

Ignite is the phase the personal development industry sells as the only acceptable state.

New ideas. Growth. Visibility. Momentum. The fire is lit and you’re rocking it, you are ‘on fire’.

It feels extraordinary when you’re in it and it’s real. It moves things forward. It’s where a lot of the exciting, obvious progress happens.

You can sustain it for a period of time. You cannot live there permanently. No one can. Not you, not the coaches and gurus promising 6 figure results in 24 hours, not the wildly successful people with the podcasts and the perfectly curated feed. No one.

🪵 Stoke

Stoke is the maintenance phase. Less glamorous, almost invisible to anyone watching from the outside.

The fire is burning. You’re tending it - consistency, connection, keeping things moving. It doesn’t look dramatic and it doesn’t make for a great caption, but it’s solid and it’s forward, and the coaches who stay the distance are almost always brilliant at this phase, even when nobody’s watching.

🌫️ Smoulder

Smoulder is the phase most of us judge ourselves hardest for.

The fire looks like it’s dying. Nothing seems to be happening. Flat, stuck, behind - and here is what I want you to hear: the fire is preserving itself.

The embers are staying alive. Think of trees in winter - bare, apparently doing nothing, while the root system deepens underground. Or as one of the coaches in this week’s session put it so perfectly:

“Nothing in the natural world goes full bore all the time. Anything that sustains has cycles. Anything that doesn’t, burns fast and dies.”

The smoulder is not failure. It is the intelligence of a system that knows how to last. It is your system doing exactly what it needs to do.

Life Happens is not a footnote

Life Happens is not just a reminder that things are hard, or that we should be gentle with ourselves. It is something more structural than that.

Life is what moves you between the modes. A family crisis doesn’t sit alongside your progress - it is what shifts you into Smoulder. The grief, the health scare, the week where the business simply has to wait - these are not interruptions to the cycle. They are what generates it.

The Real Progress Framework doesn’t pretend life pauses for your plans. It puts Life Happens at the centre because that’s where it actually lives - as the force that moves you, not just the backdrop you’re working against.

What this actually means for you

We have been sold a story about achievement built entirely on the Ignite phase.

Keep the fire raging, do more, go harder, show up every single day - and if you can’t, if life intervenes, if your energy drops, if you need to restore and reflect and just be still for a moment - that’s a discipline problem. A mindset issue. Something to fix.

It isn’t. It’s biology. It’s seasons. It’s the natural intelligence of a living system doing exactly what living systems do.

The Real Progress Framework doesn’t ask you to stay in Ignite. It asks you to:
* recognise which phase you’re actually in,
* respond with the right energy for that phase, and
* stop reading the smoulder as evidence that something has gone wrong.

Because here’s what I’ve seen without exception across every coach and leader we’ve worked with, and in my own experience too:

Smoulder is not a character flaw. It’s not failure. It’s not time to throw in the towel. It is the appropriate response to what life just handed you.

You are not behind or broken. You are in the phase that life moved you into - and the only thing the cycle asks of you right now is to be in it, without making it mean something negative about who you are or what you’re capable of.

The work you have done is not undone. The goals are not gone. Everything you built in Ignite and Stoke is still out there, still yours, still waiting for you. Ignite will come back - because that is simply what cycles do.

They move. Life moves them. And when the cycle brings you back to Ignite, you’ll likely find you come back stronger and clearer than you were before - and things begin to move in ways you genuinely couldn’t have predicted from inside the Smoulder.

Sitting in this week’s session, watching these women name their phases out loud and feel the relief of having a word for where they were, I thought about the past couple of years.

The family health stuff, the juggling, the comparison, the moments where I genuinely couldn’t tell if I was failing or just smouldering.

Smouldering. That’s what it was.

There is something genuinely freeing about having a name for a thing. It moves it from “what is wrong with me” to “oh - this is just where I am right now.” And from there, you can be kind to yourself. You can tend the embers with a little more grace. You can trust the cycle.

So wherever you are right now - rocking the Ignite, quietly Stoking, or deep in the Smoulder with the root system doing its thing underground - you’re not behind.

You’re just in a phase.

And that’s gold right there.

I’d love to know what phase you’re in - vote above and leave a comment if you want to say more. Your perspective might be exactly what someone else needs to read today.

Cheering you on,
Deb

Co-founder, Coach Training Campus
coachtrainingcampus.com

P.S. Know a woman who's been hard on herself lately? Send this to her.

Maybe someone shared it with you. Maybe you’ve been quietly feeling like it’s time - time to stop waiting, stop shrinking, stop doing this alone. Maybe you just know, somewhere deep down, that your wisdom and experience deserves to be expressed more fully in the world.

Whatever brought you here - welcome. You’re in exactly the right place.

What this is…

Women on the Leading Edge is a publication, a podcast and a growing community of wise, experienced women who are done playing small.

We’re not here to fight against anything. We focus on what we want - because what we focus on expands.

What we want is this: experienced women, leading from who they actually are. With joy. With play. With the kind of deep connection that only happens when you’re in a room (virtual or otherwise) with people who genuinely get it.

The “leading edge” isn’t about being ahead of anyone. It’s about following your own inner knowing - your wisdom, your creativity, your genius - rather than running on autopilot through someone else’s playbook.

Some of what we share here isn’t mainstream yet. Some of it will be soon. That’s how leading edges work.

What you’ll find here…

Weekly articles - fresh thinking on wisdom, leadership, visibility, AI, business and what it actually means to show up fully right now.

The podcast - conversations between me and my business partner and co-founder Gabby Button, plus inspiring women from around the world who are living on the leading edge in their own way.

Real conversation - this isn’t a broadcast. Comments are open. Questions are welcome. Your perspective belongs here.

Community - a growing group of like-minded, like-hearted women who are here to cocreate, not just consume.

Who I am…

I’m ‘Coach Deb King’ - coach, facilitator, co-founder of Coach Training Campus, and someone who has spent 20+ years helping experienced women see how magnificent they already are.

This publication is me walking my own talk.

I believe we are all magnificent. And I think it’s time we expressed that more fully - out loud, in real time, together.

So here I am. Giving it a crack. And genuinely delighted you’re here.

Your first step - come and meet us live online…

The best thing about this community isn’t the content. It’s the people.

Every Monday at 10am Sydney time (Sunday 8pm New York), I host a free live ‘Warmspace’ gathering

What is ‘Warmspace’? It is a video meeting platform that is not zoom, not a webinar or a typical networking call. It’s an uplifting experience genuinely unlike anything you’ve tried before. It’s built on the science of cooperation and deep human connection - and honestly, it gives me hope for the future of humanity. (Big call, I know. Experience it and tell me I’m wrong.)

Here’s what to expect: you’ll be gently guided through a series of flows - breathing together, appreciating what’s good, and sharing equal time on what matters most to you right now. No performance. No agenda. Just real humans showing up for each other.

Whoever can come, comes. No agenda, no performance. Just real connection with remarkable women. You can join for just 15 minutes as an energiser, or stay a little longer. Bring an open mind and an open heart.

Come Join me at the next Warmspace Gathering
(USA Sun 8pm ET/ Australia Mon 10am Sydney)
→ Access the session directly via this link here

Can’t make that time? Message me and we’ll find another way/ time to connect.

See you on the leading edge.

Cheering you on,

Deb x

Co-founder, Coach Training Campus | coachtrainingcampus.com

P.S. If you know a wise woman who belongs here - share this with her. The more magnificent women in the room, the better.