There are silences that speak louder than years of career. Lorène Cazals' silence lasted fourteen years.
For over a decade, her face was familiar to M6 viewers, where she worked as a journalist and presenter. Then, one day, she left. Heading for London, where she chose to start her family and put her career on hold to focus on raising her children. No press conference, no solemn announcement: simply the chosen, accepted decision to change her life.
This choice is made by millions of women every year, for reasons that have nothing in common other than their outcome: a suspended career, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for years. An expatriation. Motherhood. Accompanying a loved one through illness. A life accident. A reconversion matured in silence. Or, quite simply, a life choice that no one needs to justify.
What few women experience, however, is what happens afterwards. The return. The moment when you close the parenthesis and discover, often with shock, that the professional world has not kept a warm place for you.
It is this journey – the return, its doubts, its obstacles, its small victories – that Lorène Cazals has chosen to tell. No longer as a subject, but as a journalist. In September 2026, she is launching "Bienvenue dans ta Suite", a podcast based on a simple intuition: the most inspiring journeys are rarely the most linear.
The Return, This Chapter We Never Write
When Lorène Cazals is asked what prompted her to pick up the microphone again, her answer remains the same: it was her own return to France, fourteen years after leaving, that triggered everything.
"We talk a lot about motherhood, career breaks, and career changes. But we almost never talk about what happens afterwards, when you have to find your place again," she confides. "I experienced that moment when you find yourself facing a changed job market, facing recruiters who look at a CV with a gap of several years, and facing yourself, with that question that never leaves you: do I still belong here?"
This moment, many women go through it alone. Without a manual, without a testimonial to cling to, without the certainty that the story will end well. Lorène Cazals wanted to fill this void with the tools she knows best: listening, interviewing, storytelling.
"Bienvenue dans ta Suite" is not just another personal development podcast. It is a space where women with unconventional backgrounds tell, unfiltered, what no one has ever asked them to tell: how to start over after 45, how to change paths without permission, how to turn a forced break into a springboard, how to learn to sell yourself again in a job market that doesn't wait.
Stories, But Not Only
The format Lorène Cazals has devised is based on a simple principle: each episode combines an intimate testimonial with an expert's perspective.
On one hand, women who have experienced this turning point – returning to a career after 45, starting a business after a career change, returning to employment after a life accident or a break dedicated to a sick relative. Stories of resilience, doubt, and bouncing back, told with the sincerity of those who have nothing left to prove.
On the other hand, recruitment, HR, professional coaching, and labor market experts are invited to decipher these journeys and draw concrete lessons from them. The podcast's stated ambition is not only to move but to equip: to give listeners real avenues to turn their own parenthesis into a new chapter.
"I wanted to avoid two pitfalls," explains Lorène Cazals. "The first is the testimonial that remains a simple life story, however touching, but which does not provide tools to those who listen to it. The second is cold, theoretical expert advice, which never takes into account the lived reality. I wanted the two to respond to each other, episode after episode."
This dual perspective – the personal and the expert – is not a casting coincidence. It is the natural extension of the job Lorène Cazals held for years on television sets: showing human stories while putting them into perspective, without ever losing sight of the usefulness of the narrative for the listener.
A Societal Issue That Transcends Women Themselves
While "Bienvenue dans ta Suite" primarily addresses women who have put their careers on hold, the subject it tackles goes far beyond this audience. It directly questions our collective relationship to work, age, and success – three notions that French society continues to articulate in often rigid ways.
The French job market has long valued linearity: a continuous path without gaps, steady progression, loyalty to a sector or company. Yet, this demand for continuity corresponds less and less with real lives. Careers are fragmenting, career changes are multiplying, breaks – chosen or imposed – are becoming the norm rather than the exception. However, recruitment criteria are still struggling to integrate this reality.
It is precisely this gap between real-life journeys and the still-dominant recruitment criteria that "Bienvenue dans ta Suite" highlights. By giving a voice to women who have started over after 45, the podcast also questions an often implicit, rarely named, but very real professional ageism: the misconception that a career is made before 40, and that everything after is off-track.
"I'm often told that 45 is a difficult turning point in the job market, especially for women," observes Lorène Cazals. "But what the journeys I've collected show is that this turning point can also be a starting point. It's not the same thing to tell someone 'you're starting from scratch' as it is to tell them 'you're leaving with fifteen or twenty years of experience that no one else has'."
This way of reframing the narrative – from a forced break to accumulated experience, from a gap in the CV to the richness of an atypical journey – is undoubtedly the podcast's strongest common thread.
From the Bright Lights of the Studio to the Silence of the Microphone
There is something almost symbolic in the choice of format. After years spent in front of cameras, embodying current events live, Lorène Cazals has chosen the podcast: a slower, more intimate format, where the voice alone must carry the narrative, without the support of images.
This choice is not insignificant. Podcasts, by their very nature, are often listened to alone, in a car, while walking, while doing the dishes – in those everyday interstices where one has the time to ask questions about one's own trajectory. It's a format that accompanies, rather than exposes. A choice consistent with the subject matter: an inner, often solitary journey, which "Bienvenue dans ta Suite" aims precisely to break open.
"The microphone allows for a form of intimacy that television, with all its constraints of rhythm and image, doesn't always permit," notes Lorène Cazals. "Here, we have time. Time for silence, time for hesitation, time sometimes needed to tell a difficult story."
A Title That Is Also a Program
The podcast's name, "Bienvenue dans ta Suite" (Welcome to Your Next Chapter), is more than just a play on words. It encapsulates the program's proposal: what comes after the break is not an end, but a continuation – both literally and figuratively. A continuity of life's narrative, in which the professional parenthesis erases nothing of what came before, but rather enriches it.
This idea of continuity contrasts with the often anxiety-inducing vocabulary surrounding career breaks: the 'gap', the 'void', the 'pause' perceived as a lack. "Bienvenue dans ta Suite" offers a different, more generous grammar, in which every stage – even non-professional ones – has its place in the overall life story.
A Project That Speaks to Our Times
The launch of "Bienvenue dans ta Suite" comes at a time when questions of career change, mental load, and work-life balance are increasingly prominent in public debate. The multiplication of career changes, the rise of self-employment, the questioning of professional paths imposed by default – all are underlying trends to which Lorène Cazals' podcast brings a human and concrete perspective.
In an audio landscape already rich in podcasts dedicated to careers and professional development, "Bienvenue dans ta Suite" stands out for its dual approach: never separating the personal narrative from expert analysis, never opposing emotion to utility. A way of saying that the two feed each other, and that one without the other would remain incomplete.
See You in the Fall
"Bienvenue dans ta Suite" will be available from September 2026 on major listening platforms and on YouTube. A launch timed for the special back-to-school period, when many personal and professional paths are reshaped – returning to work, new projects, resolutions mulled over during the summer.
For Lorène Cazals, this launch is both a personal and professional return: that of a journalist reconnecting with her first profession – telling stories – after having personally experienced the turning point she is now preparing to share with her listeners.
"I didn't want to make another podcast about success in the classic sense," she concludes. "I wanted a podcast about detours, about what we learn when we doubt, when we start over, when no one is expecting us at the finish line. Because deep down, perhaps these are the stories that most resemble us."
--- *"Bienvenue dans ta Suite", available from September 2026 on major listening platforms and on YouTube.* Find Lorène Cazals on LinkedIn. *Sponsored content — This article was published in partnership with the podcast "Bienvenue dans ta Suite".*
