Adios office, hi vineyard: career change replaces midlife crisis

Sunday, 4 January 2026

Mid-life crisis is out. Mid-life career change is in - some are quitting boardrooms for vineyards, TV roles for real estate, or changing up old routines for new passions.

For some, like executive high-flier Jo Cribb, it’s about taking stock and making a 90 degree turn in life. For others, like personal trainer and gym owner Mish McCormack, it’s about adding another string to your bow.

But what both cases show is that there is more than one career path in life.

More than half of us regret our work choices, employment website SEEK’s Evolving Working Life Report released in 2025 showed.

Of 1045 respondents, 54% had work regrets - 50% said ‘I don’t earn enough’, 36% said their interests and passions had changed, 24% said the work was dull, another 22% gave a poor work-life balance as the main cause.

But while 41% were open to the idea of a career change, only 6% were actively moving towards one. Money worries, cited as the main cause of career regret, were also the greatest barrier to career change.

While Stats NZ does not publish “career change” numbers by age, those who have taken the leap in midlife have no doubts that it’s worth it. And they have tips on what to do, and what to avoid.

The executive pivoter

Career-changing former civil service high-flier Jo Cribb understands the money thing … and dismisses it. She sees herself as a constant pivoter: if you’ve done it once, you are inclined to keep evolving.

From 2012 to 2017 she was Ministry for Women Affairs chief executive, a job she now labels as a “70 hour-a-week cage”.

When she opted out - prompted by a life-shattering bout of cancer - people told her she was mad. One senior figure (a man, of course) asked if she was menopausal.

Eight years on she is not mad, but happy, motivated and more in touch with her family - she has since bought a vineyard, started a bnb and published books on business and technology, amid consulting work.

“Life is way too short to be out, to be miserable at your work, And if you are, if you have a job, and you are valued in that job, you can be valued somewhere else,” she says.

The big career switch

Shane Cortese prefers to be known as a real estate auctioneer, than TV star actor. He was once the very identifiable face of Nothing Trivial, the Almighty Johnsons and Outrageous Fortune.

He was runner-up in the first season of NZ Dancing with the Stars in 2005, but success and visibility proved a millstone in a profession where uncertainty is regular, and money less so.

With sons Jett and Kees to support, Cortese was prompted to look elsewhere. His career transition was tricky, he made mistakes, but it was the best decision he’d ever made, he says.

“I loved my time in the entertainment industry. I got to a reasonably good level, and played some pretty good roles,” he says.

“But it got to the stage where I was finding reasons to say no to things, and there were a couple of occasions when a role would come up … and they didn't want to see me for it, because I'd been on television too much.

“I get it. I understand that - overexposed faces on television - but it seemed to be the more that I worked, and the better I was, the less chance I had of moving on, which was kind of sort of what work should be.

“It got to the point where life was changing for me, and we had to put some things in place - I couldn't keep working out how to pay the mortgage next week.

“Financial distress cost me a lot in my life, and it was just a bit of a worry.”

The portfolio career

For business owner Mish McCormack the motivation was very different; as a busy company director and personal trainer she already had a fulfilling life and career - but she had long hankered to do more by becoming a wedding celebrant.

“I've got such a strong love for love and I'm a real romantic. I couldn’t think of anything more fulfilling than bringing joy to people's lives in a world where there's so much sadness and disasters going on. And it feels like it's my little touch of magic that I can add, while sharing in the joy of someone's special day.“

Critically, McCormack didn’t swap dumbbells for wedding rings; she integrated them; it’s known as “the portfolio” approach to career progression.

Leveraging her business acumen, she created a unique niche in the market: wedding packages that combine officiating with pre-wedding personal training.

'I have a lot of brides come to me to get ready for their wedding,' she explains. “So I thought, why not put that into a package where the bride and groom can exercise together and get in the best shape of their lives?”

Wellington psychologist Marc Wilson says how smoothly people navigate midlife career change often depends on personality, and what prompted the move.

There are what organisational psychologists call 90-degree changes - jobs that have little in common with what came before - like Cribb and Cortese, he says. Mish McCormack’s shift is closer to a 45 degree turn, because both roles involve helping people.

Money is part of it, but not all: about a quarter of people move to make more family time, while roughly one in five change for better pay or location.

“Three-quarters of people who change careers do so because their old work no longer aligns with their values and priorities,” Wilson says.

He identifies four types of career transition:

• Drift-out: Content enough to stay, not especially motivated to move.

• Opt-out: Satisfied but itching for change.

• Force-out: Change is thrust upon you - redundancy, life upheaval.

• Bow-out: Pressure and personal motivation push you to change.

“Force-outs” often feel unprepared and struggle to adjust quickly. “Bow-outs” are motivated and capable - but ironically, they may end up in roles too similar to their old ones, so remain dissatisfied. “Opt-outs,” by contrast, are guided by values, almost always learning new skills, and tend to be the happiest in the long run.

Wilson draws a parallel with Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Just as those who sought purpose in concentration camps fared best, career changers who pursue meaningful work thrive

“You might just really like wine - or olive oil - but if you’re coming from business or government, these are sea changes,” he says.

Change often comes after reflection, a health scare, or a nagging sense of dissatisfaction.

So what motivates people to seek out change? We asked three mid-life pivoters.

Jo Cribb - CEO, consultant, TED Talks, author, columnist, winemaker

When Cribb wanted to step out of her CEO role people thought, “I was mad because I had this carpark job. Had I lost my mind? And was asked was this a sort of early menopausal, weird woman-shit thing - that I needed somebody to sit me down and say `have a good night's sleep’.”

The catalyst? Around her 40th birthday she was hit with “quite serious bowel cancer”, then 18 months of just trying to stay alive. It caused her to question everything about her work: where it was, with who, doing what?

“I asked myself, if I knew this was my last few months … is this what I’d want, and the answer to every question was no. So for me, it wasn't even a choice. You had to, I had the mortality kick up the arse, essentially.”

She had a long resignation, time to set up business, time to ask what saleable skills she had, how she’d go without a salary. What she didn’t expect was all the positives that followed moving from an office tower to the corner of a spare bedroom.

“What I found was, I was home most afternoons when the kids came home from school, they'd come and sit down with me and tell me about their day. I'd never had that, and it was one of the best gifts we had as a family,” she says.

“I was there, eyeballing. I was open. They'd grab some biscuits, and come and download their day. And ‘wow’. I thought of that as a cool consequence of being around.”

While cancer pushed her, Cribb felt she was likely to have changed at some stage, only her upbringing of always doing good and being rewarded for it had stopped her thinking more broadly.

“Had I not had cancer, I would have probably kept on doing what was expected of me. And so when you have a small CE job, you go and get a bigger CE job, right? And then another one. So I was doing what was expected.

“I was in a locked cage of sorts. I set out to make my own job, rather than try to jam myself into somebody else's box, I’d been doing that for a very long time.

“The thing that really interests me, is how much of our identity is tied into your work … and it's how we judge each other and put each other into boxes as well.

“I guess all value, unfortunately, is mediated through how we choose to value people … how much we pay them. That led me to the future of work, which has completely changed, because we have so many more options and ways of working.”

Shane Cortese: actor, to real estate, to auctioneer

A public face as an actor - once recognised in public by All Black great Dan Carter (“that made me feel as big as Tane Mahuta”) now finds he’s being recognised as an auctioneer.

He loves that, and prefers it. If you’re going to change, make sure you do, he says. He swiftly found trying to balance acting and real estate didn’t work

“[Acting] is a relatively selfish industry. When you get a role, you're wrapped up in that, you're self absorbed, you come home and you're learning lines,” he says.

“When I was first selling real estate, I'd made the mistake of not fully committing. And when you change your career, you change your career, that's the mistake people make.

“I was trying to keep a foot in each camp. But if you're selling a million dollar home, people want your total commitment.

“When I got into auctioneering, I changed to the point that after a very short amount of time, I'm now running the auction division of Harcourts, because that became my every day.”

His career switch in a bid to raise his boys in financial security worked for him, with the switch to auctioneering a life changer.

“It was the best decision I ever made … I was only in real estate selling for a very short amount of time before they picked up that auctioneering might be a relatively strong forte for me,” he says.

He entered competitions and did well, and his actor’s nose for what the audience wants worked well when making real estate deals. The stressful bit was going from pretending to be a character, to being deeply involved in real people’s lives.

“You've got to be absolutely in a moment with them and listening and empathetic and solution oriented … acting gave me the opportunity to make people feel very comfortable in a very stressful environment very quickly. And that's the bonus of it.”

Mish McCormack: personal trainer, gym owner, and now wedding celebrant

McCormack was already running at full capacity. The Greytown-based mum, businesswoman and successful personal trainer - she was three times New Zealand personal trainer of the year, and with husband Greig Rightford owns gyms in Wellington and Greytown - her professional life was thriving.

But around the time she turned 50, McCormack decided it was time to pursue another years-long dream, to be a wedding celebrant.

She didn't want to leave the fitness industry - but to add another string to her bow. A self-confessed 'real romantic', she believed she could bring a 'touch of magic' to people’s lives in a world often dominated by bad news.

'I wanted to share in the joy of someone's special day,' McCormack said. 'Love is my game. It makes me feel so fulfilled and happy.'

She could also see how it would integrate with her work as a personal trainer; she designed a wellness package as an extra for couples who wanted to feel their best on the big day.

McCormack registered for a celebrants course and completed 12 hours of study to ensure she could structure a ceremony correctly.

She spent another 20 hours writing her first script, working on it late at night and on weekends when she wasn’t at the gym.

'I just fit it in because it’s something I feel really excited about,' she says.

In her case, the transition wasn't about escaping a midlife rut, but about professional expansion.

After officiating at her first wedding - held on a Martinborough sheep station for Australian-based couple Tesh and Jesse Gerritsen - McCormack knows she made the right decision.

“It just made me feel so fulfilled and happy to be part of someone’s special day; and you form such a special bond with the bride and groom in the planning process. That’s a beautiful part of it that I didn’t necessarily expect, that you get to meet these amazing people, and form new friendships.”

For Tesh and Jesse, asking McCormack to officiate at their special day was an easy decision; they were looking for someone who would be able to tell their story “in a way that was ‘us’”.

Tesh’s mum had been a client of Mish’s from the gym and knew she was that person.

“Humour, professionalism and a genuine passion for love is what shone on the day.”

So mid-life career change isn’t a crisis meltdown but a recalibration.

It might take a health scare, a mortgage scare, or simply a quiet realisation that there is still more you want to do. . But for these three the verdict is clear - their leap into the unknown was worth it.

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