Cover star Stephanie Ness once thought she might become a plumber.

Instead, she became a nurse.

Then a prescriber. A leader. A clinic owner. And now, a founder building the next stage of her business.

On paper, those things might look like completely different chapters. But when we talked, one thread ran through all of them.

Independence.

Stephanie told me that, even when she was young, what she really wanted was to build something of her own and there's something in that a lot of women will recognise.

Because our lives rarely follow the neat route we thought they would, do they?

We change. Our ambitions change. The things we are willing to tolerate change. Success starts to mean something different from what it did ten or twenty years ago.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, life gets very, very full.

There are businesses to run. Careers to manage. Children who need us. Parents who begin to need us more. Homes to organise. Relationships to nurture. Bodies that are changing whether we have made room for that or not.

Then November arrives. The year begins to close. Christmas creeps into the diary. There are presents to think about, plans to make, people to see, work to finish, loose ends to tie up. And before we know it, we are carrying everyone else's expectations alongside our own.

It's easy, in a life that full, to keep moving without ever stopping to ask: whose terms am I actually running on?

That is the question sitting underneath this issue.

Last month, we talked about rethinking the rules. This month is about deciding which ones you want to live by.

The theme of Issue 70 is On Your Own Terms.

Not louder. Not harder. Not according to somebody else's timetable, definition of success or idea of who you ought to be.

Yours. Because so many of us are living by terms we never consciously agreed to.

What success should look like.

How ambitious we should be.

How visible we need to become.

What strength is supposed to look like.

Who manages the money.

How leadership should sound.

What our bodies should look like.

How much of ourselves we are expected to give away in order to keep everything moving.

This issue asks what happens when we start examining those assumptions properly.

Elaine Parker talks about ownership, trust and why you should always hold the keys to the things you have paid and worked for.

Ilana Jankowitz explores the money conversation so many accomplished women are never properly invited into.

Shauna Moar holds a world record in strongwoman, yet grew up believing she was the opposite of strong.

Dr Selen Atasoy challenges the "strong woman spell" and asks what happens when the version of strength that got us this far starts disconnecting us from ourselves.

Elsewhere we look at why calm leaders can be the most magnetic, why introversion was never something that needed fixing, why substance matters more than endlessly producing content and, from me, why being everywhere is not the same thing as being worth finding.

Different stories. Different voices. But the same underlying idea.

Living on your own terms does not mean doing everything alone. It does not mean refusing to compromise, ignoring advice or setting fire to every expectation anyone has ever had of you.

It means knowing what belongs to you.

Your choices. Your definition of success. Your money. Your voice. Your body. Your story.

And then acting like it.

So before this year closes, before the Christmas lists get even longer and before January starts jumping up and down at you about everything you should become next, pick one part of your life that is still running on somebody else's terms.

Just one.

And take it back.

Enjoy Issue 70.

I believe in you (always),