Beyond Titles & Targets: Karen Muldoon’s Midlife Shift from Corporate to Functional Health

Karen Muldoon spent her career rising through the ranks of the tech industry, building a reputation as a leader who delivered results in the high-pressure world of sales. When the pandemic took away the commute and travel, she was able to address a reality she could no longer push through: her energy was gone, and so was her alignment. What followed was a return to an earlier interest in nutrition, a life prioritising health and a business to match.

A career built on resilience

Karen’s career in tech has been defined by resourcefulness and resilience. From coding in the late 1980s when few women were in the field, to riding the waves of Y2K, the dot-com crash, and the global financial crisis, she built a career by adapting to each new shift. She rose through the sales ranks, spending nearly a decade at Salesforce during its heyday, later holding senior leadership roles that demanded constant focus and delivery.

On the outside, it looked like success: senior titles, generous packages, global travel. Yet beneath the surface, she often felt a quiet dissonance with the compromises required to close deals and meet targets. “I wasn’t always comfortable with some of the decisions we had to make in sales,” she recalls. “But the money was good, the perks were there, so I ploughed through.”

That ability to keep going through restructuring, through targets, through pressure became her default. Until, one day, it just wasn’t right.

The unease: when the call came

By late 2019, Karen began to notice something was off. Despite her long-standing commitment to fitness and health, her energy had shifted dramatically. “I just felt like I was off my game,” she says. “I was running sales teams, leading forecast calls, travelling constantly, but I’d show up to meetings and feel like I wasn’t really there.”

At first, she did what she had always done: pushed harder. But the harder she tried, the worse it felt. The pandemic only magnified what was already stirring. “In that stillness, I found the time to take action.”

The pause that opened a door

In the quiet of lockdown, a memory surfaced. As a teenager in Dublin, Karen had wanted to study dietetics. She was fascinated by health, the kind of teenager who brought an orange to school instead of crisps. But exam scores, limited options, and the pull of emerging tech had diverted her path into coding.

As she approached midlife and into her fifties, journeying through perimenopause, and with the corporate armour slipping, health was at the centre of her thoughts, and that early dream returned.

A restless career, a restless heart

To understand the weight of that moment, after Karen left school in 1988, she landed a spot at a technical college on Ireland’s west coast just as coding was taking off, and she thrived on it, building a global career at a time when women were just coming into the workplace full-time and were not associated with tech at all, so this is an incredible career journey.

She reflects. “I liked being the VP of sales in tech,” she says. “It sounded good. It looked good. But deep down, it never fully aligned. There were times I thought about changing,” she admits. “But fear always pulled me back. Fear of failure, fear of financial insecurity, fear of being seen to have made the wrong move.”

The pandemic cracked that façade. Suddenly, the value of titles and perks seemed fragile compared to the value of health, purpose, and alignment.

Back to the body, back to herself

Karen invested in a functional nutrition training, and spent nights and weekends buried in coursework for over a year and went on a journey.

“It wasn’t just about fixing myself,” she explains. “It was about finally giving myself permission to do what I’d always wanted, to understand health, food, and the body in a deep, integrated way.”

The study coincided with her growing disillusionment in tech. She even joined an early-stage start-up in 2020 in the hope that a change of environment might solve her unease. It didn’t. “Everywhere you go, there you are,” she says. “The job can change, but if the deeper issues aren’t addressed, nothing really shifts.”

The start-up experience confirmed what she already suspected: she was no longer willing to mould herself into a culture of constant pressure and self-preservation. “I’m not built to only care about myself and my role,” she says. “That’s what the start-up demanded, and I couldn’t do it.”

By the time her division was acquired and eventually cut in 2023, Karen had already begun to envision a new path. Redundancy, rather than a loss, felt like a sign. “I’d almost set myself up mentally for it,” she admits. “When it came, I knew: this is the moment.”

The pivot: learning to begin again

She couldn’t do it alone. “I’d never built a business before. I didn’t know the steps, the systems, the marketing. I just knew I wanted to help women at this stage of life.” So she did something she had rarely done in her corporate career: she asked for help.

She invested in a business coaching programme. “I basically said: you’ve done it, teach me A to Z, and I’ll follow it,” she laughs. It was a steep learning curve. “I'd never written copy before. I’d never run a Meta ad in my life. But I learned.”

It was also humbling. After decades of being the expert in the room, she was suddenly the beginner, learning new skills, facing rejection, and putting herself out there publicly.

At first, she hid on Instagram, posting to strangers rather than colleagues. “It was easier to be vulnerable to people who didn’t know me,” she admits. LinkedIn, where her entire career history sat for her network to see, felt daunting. “The fear of failing publicly, of people seeing me try and not succeed, was huge.”

But little by little, she did it anyway. She ran masterclasses. She wrote posts. She shared her story. Clients began to come. Testimonials gave her credibility. Each step chipped away at the fear.

Editor’s reflection

Karen’s shift did not begin with a grand plan. It began with a pause. The pandemic removed the noise and revealed the signal. Perimenopause brought the signal closer. The call was not catastrophic. It was a steady message that the way she had worked for decades no longer made sense for the life she wanted to live.

Her journey shows how childhood passions don’t disappear, they wait, sometimes for decades, until circumstances and courage bring them back to the surface. It shows how fear, armour, and titles can keep us trapped, but also how those same years of resilience can equip us to begin again.

Most of all, her story challenges how we think about midlife. It is not an ending or a slow fade, but a moment of possibility and a chance to trade status for authenticity, fear for alignment, and exhaustion for energy.

Karen’s choice to realign was personal, but the lesson is universal: midlife clarity is powerful. It can reshape lives, careers, and workplaces if we are willing to listen to it.

You can connect with Karen on LinkedIn or at KarenLouiseMuldoon.com

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