Is This It?: North Shore Woman’s Midlife Reckoning

A North Shore woman’s burnout led to a bestselling book on navigating midlife’s hardest questions.

There’s a particular kind of question that tends to arrive uninvited, usually on an ordinary evening, usually right when life looks fine from the outside. For Nikki Taylor, it landed on the couch, moments before dinner, after another long day where she’d stayed at her desk until 6.30pm because, well, others on the senior leadership team did too.

Is this it? Is this what the rest of our lives are going to be? There has to be more than this.

That question became the title of her debut book – and, in a roundabout way, the whole reason we’re sitting across from each other at Store Beulah Cafe in Birkenhead, on Auckland’s North Shore, on a Friday afternoon before I head off to school pick-up. It’s a relaxed, unpretentious kind of spot, and it feels right for the conversation we’re about to have: one about slowing down, taking stock, and starting again.

Nikki has spent much of her adult life doing the opposite of sitting still. A global gal by any measure: she spent seventeen years living abroad in Australia, Dubai and London, building a career that’s taken her across nearly every continent and through HR, leadership, and learning and development – from start-ups to corporations. It’s the kind of CV that looks, from the outside, like a life fully arrived at. Which is exactly what made the question on the couch so unsettling.

She calls it what a lot of people privately call it: a midlife confusion, though she’s quick to reframe the term. “Everyone’s making it up. We’re all just human, winging it. And no one ever really told us that.”

“I think we have life in seasons,” she tells me, wrapping both hands around her peppermint tea. “First you’re told what to do, you go to school, you get a job. Then you come up with something you want: I want to travel, I want to buy a house, I want kids. And you spend your twenties and thirties building a life based on dreams you had as a young adult. Then all of a sudden you hit this point and you’re like, hang on. Who am I now?”

The moment that crystallised it for her was almost mundane: turning 35. “I was just as close to 50 as I was 20,” she says. Suddenly retirement, finances, and old, unprocessed patterns from childhood were all turning up at once. Questions nobody had taught her generation to ask, because the instruction, growing up, had simply been: get on with it.

The moment she truly understood how depleted she was came, unexpectedly, at a retreat in Fiji. During an exercise asking participants to visualise the future they wanted, she drew a blank. “There was nothing about my current career at all,” she says. “And then I thought… oh.” She came home and within weeks left her role.

Central to her book – Is This It? Essential Lessons for Navigating Midlife Confusion with Confidence – and Nikki’s own story, is burnout. Not the trendy, watered-down version, but the kind that reshapes a life. “This was the third time I’d had it,” she says. “For three years I don’t think I was even present. I put on twenty kilos in six months. I ate my feelings.” She describes a slow accumulation: a demanding job, ageing parents both hospitalised within days of each other, and caregiving responsibilities she says are too often overlooked as a driver of burnout in their own right, separate from, but compounding, the pressures of work – and worthiness.

It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to walk away. Years earlier, she’d attended an Unleash the Power Within Summit in London, walked out inspired, quit her job the next day, and then, without quite meaning to, drifted back into the same kind of role. This time was different. She gave herself six months off before starting her own consultancy in HR and coaching, doing the fractional, project-based work she says she should have trusted herself to do all along.

If there’s a single thread running through Is This It?, it’s permission. Permission to admit things aren’t working, to change course without a plan, to grieve, to rest, to ask for help. “We were never taught to go, ‘Hang on, I’m feeling like this – why?'” Nikki says. “We were just taught: get on with it, make it look like you’ve got it together. But everyone’s making it up. That’s what you realise at this point in life – everyone’s just human.”

Her book moves through chapters on burnout, gratitude, grief and loss, friendship, and career reinvention, each ending with short, practical exercises rather than sweeping advice. “There’s no one solution,” she says. “It’s practical things that have actually helped me.” Photographs and blank note pages sit throughout. One American reader told her the short chapters made the book easy to pick up even mid-overwhelm, which, she says, was exactly the point.

Friendship gets its own chapter, and Nikki calls it her favourite to write. “It’s so underrated. I wanted to give back to the people who got me through some really trying times, and through writing this book.” The cover carries its own quiet symbolism: a spiral, echoing the way growth and setback both move in circles rather than straight lines, and a koru representing new beginnings and a connection to nature that became part of her own healing, namely long walks on Takapuna Beach and quiet hours at Birkenhead Library.

Though the book’s natural audience skews toward women in their late thirties through fifties – the demographic she says carries much of this particular collision of ageing parents, changing bodies, teenage children, and quietly cracking careers – she’s had men read and message her too. “This is really helpful,” one former colleague from a job in Dubai told her, after experiencing burnout of his own. “It’s a different perspective.”

That ripple effect is, in many ways, the point. Midlife change doesn’t happen in isolation: it affects relationships, workplaces, and families. Is This It? helps readers understand what the people in their lives might be navigating beneath the surface: shifting priorities, burnout, identity questions, and the desire for more meaning. For anyone wanting to support a partner, sister, colleague, or friend with empathy and insight, the book offers the language and perspective to do exactly that, opening the door to better conversations, deeper connection, and a greater understanding of this powerful life stage.

Alongside the book, Nikki is building out her leadership and HR consulting work and taking on more speaking engagements, helping businesses strengthen leadership capability, enhance workplace culture and address burnout before it costs them their most experienced people. Underneath all of it is the same argument the book makes: that reinvention in your forties isn’t starting from zero.

“Because you’re not starting from zero,” she says, “You’re starting from everything you’ve gained.”