Written by Karen Shenton.

Regular readers of Tales from Wonderland will know I have a habit of finding compliance lessons in the most unexpected places – a stowaway mouse, a dodgy roof, a caravan winter. Today’s tale is a bit closer to home, and it’s one I’ve been putting off writing for a while. Not because I didn’t have anything to say. Quite the opposite, I had too much to say, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to say it out loud.

But here goes: I’ve been through the menopause. I’m on HRT. And I don’t mind admitting it – in fact, I think we need to talk about it a lot more than we do.

Curiouser and Curiouser

If you’ve ever read Alice in Wonderland, you’ll remember the bit where she drinks from the bottle marked “Drink Me” and suddenly nothing about her body behaves the way it used to. She shrinks, she grows, she cries an entire pool of tears, and everyone around her is far too busy with their own nonsense to notice she’s having rather a wobble.

Honestly? That’s the most accurate description of perimenopause I’ve ever come across, and it was written in 1865.

There was the White Rabbit energy — “I’m late, I’m late!” — except it was me, standing in a meeting, having completely lost the thread of what I was about to say, brain fog rolling in like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, there one second and gone the next. There were the Mad Hatter’s tea party mood swings, where I went from perfectly calm to ready to flip the table over one lukewarm cup of tea. And there were the “growing and shrinking” moments too, except mine came with a hot flush at 3am and a duvet that couldn’t decide if it was friend or enemy.

The difference between me and Alice, though, is that eventually somebody handed me a bottle that actually helped — HRT — and things got a lot less chaotic. But it took a while to get there, partly because, like a lot of women, I didn’t want to make a fuss, and partly because nobody around me was really talking about it either.

Why I’m telling you this

Here’s where the Wonderland tale meets the real world of insurance and compliance, because it always does eventually.

Around half of the workforce will go through menopause at some point, usually right in the years when people are at their most experienced, most senior, and most valuable to a business. Yet it’s still one of the things we’re least likely to talk about openly at work — up there with money and other people’s marriages.

That silence has a cost. Staff who are struggling quietly are staff who are more likely to leave, more likely to be signed off, and less likely to perform at their best — not because they can’t, but because nobody’s asked if they’re okay, or built a culture where it’s safe to say “actually, I’m not.” And if we expect our people to look after vulnerable customers with empathy and understanding under Consumer Duty, we have to start by looking after the people doing that job, because a business that doesn’t take care of its own staff will find it much harder to genuinely take care of its customers.

That’s exactly why we’re not putting a price tag on this one.

Join us down the rabbit hole — free of charge

We’re running a wellbeing session called Menopause Uncovered: Serious Talk, No Sweat — because we care about firms and their people, and because this is too important to sit behind a paywall. It’s an open, honest, and yes, genuinely fun look at menopause: what it is, how it shows up at work, how colleagues and managers can support each other through it, and why it deserves a proper seat at the table alongside every other wellbeing conversation we have.

Serious talk. No sweat. No judgement. Just an open conversation that’s long overdue.

If you’d like to book your firm and your team onto the session, get in touch with Karen Shenton at karen@createsolutions.co.uk or call 0161 870 6637.

Contact us or Book online

And if you’re going through it yourself right now — you’re not falling down the rabbit hole alone. Come and talk to us.

Stay tuned for more Tales from Wonderland…