Lucy Standing

As a chartered psychologist, Lucy has always been drawn to employability - helping people build agency and make confident decisions about their working lives. Over time, one gap became impossible to ignore. The careers landscape overwhelmingly focuses on those under 25, leaving little structured support for people navigating midlife transitions.

So she founded Brave Starts to address that gap. Set up as a non-profit, its purpose is to offer accessible, evidence-informed career development for people in midlife and beyond, without commercial or sponsor bias. The approach is deliberately experiential. Clarity, Lucy argues, rarely comes from introspection alone.

Programmes are group-based, recognising that peer support significantly strengthens confidence, motivation and accountability. Success is not defined by employment status, because circumstances vary too widely for a single "ideal" outcome. Instead, Brave Starts measures four indicators that genuinely matter: clarity on next steps, confidence or perceived employability, the usefulness of one's network, and optimism about the future. Improvements across all four are statistically significant. This is not a hopeful assumption, but an evidenced one.

A powerful example of how this works in practice is Graham Heddle.

After more than 20 years as a partner in a private equity firm, Graham stepped back, knowing he wanted change but unsure what that should look like. Highly capable across many areas, he explored options ranging from non-executive roles to executive coaching and emerging interests in AI. None quite clicked.

What ultimately unlocked clarity was action. Graham took on a six-month chair role at a charity, which helped him realise he did not want a major governance commitment. He leaned into his curiosity about AI, running workshops on using AI in career development, which led to a project developing AI-enabled recruitment tools. Alongside this, he trained in executive coaching and now earns a core part of his income through that work.

Perhaps most transformative was an opportunity that emerged through networking: collaborating with a psychologist to pitch leadership development programmes to private equity clients. The work was energising, stretching and deeply aligned with Graham's experience.

Today, Graham has a fulfilling portfolio career combining coaching, AI-related project work and leadership development. Each strand provides stimulation, variety and purpose. Crucially, by trying things rather than overthinking them, he now feels firmly in control of his direction - exactly the outcome Brave Starts was designed to support.