When Experience Stops Opening Doors
How to Navigate Age, Authority, and Overqualification Without Losing Yourself
This guide exists because many women reach a point in their careers where experience—the very thing that once created opportunity—begins to quietly limit it.
If this is happening to you, it is not because you failed.
It is because systems struggle to value depth once they stop equating potential with novelty.
This guide is meant to help you make sense of what you’re experiencing, so you can move forward with clarity instead of self-doubt.
If your experience has started to feel harder to place instead of easier to trust, you don’t have to navigate that shift alone.
Created by a Woman Who’s Been There
Dana Kirchmar has spent 35+ years in aerospace and aviation, holding VP-level roles and leading major programs in technical, product, and leadership domains. She founded The Elevate Initiative to help women rise in systems that weren’t build for them and win anyway.
“You don’t need another workshop. You need a guide who knows the way out.”
