A smaller role can give you a better life without being a smaller achievement.

A step sideways or downward is read by other people as a loss, and that reading can drown out your own experience of it. What you traded for may be substantial: evenings that exist, work you can do well, a body that is not permanently braced. Choosing that takes more judgement than carrying on upward out of momentum. The size of a life is not set by the title sitting inside it.

Write down what the smaller version gives you in hours and days rather than adjectives. Read it back when someone asks what happened to your career, and answer plainly without apologising.