I was very good at being who everyone needed.

For about twenty years. Calm, capable, unbothered. It was a performance and I was excellent at it.

Here's what nobody tells you about being the reliable one.

You don't notice it happening. There's no moment where you decide to shrink. It's incremental. You soften one opinion because the room went quiet. You laugh off a comment instead of naming it. You take on the thing nobody else will, because you can, and because being useful is easier than being known.

Do that for two decades and you end up somewhere strange. Everyone thinks you're fine. You're competent, you're capable, you're the one people ring when it's gone wrong. And underneath all of it there's a woman you haven't been in years, who you'd struggle to describe if someone asked.

I was told I was too much a lot. Too intense. Too direct. Too ambitious, too emotional, too sure of myself. I heard it often enough that I believed it, so I built a smaller version and sent her out instead. She was very well received.

That's the part that keeps you there. It works. The smaller version gets on well with people. Nobody ever sat me down and said "we prefer you like this." They didn't have to.

I wasn't giving from overflow. I was giving from the bone.

What I found underneath wasn't a crisis. It was worse in a way. It was recognition. The sense of having known for a very long time and having decided, repeatedly, not to look.

So I looked.

I wrote Too Much For Them because I went hunting for the book that would help and couldn't find it. Everything I picked up wanted me calm. Grateful. Manageable. Full of gentle language about self-compassion and holding space, which is lovely if what you need is comfort, and useless if what you need is the truth.

None of them wanted me honest. So I wrote the honest one.

It took about a year, mostly privately, mostly at hours I should have been asleep. It is blunt, it is not always kind, and I stand by every word of it.

I write for women who are done playing small in their own lives.

Not women in crisis. Women who are functioning beautifully and quietly running on empty. Women who've read the gentle books and found them patronising. Women who understand their own patterns perfectly well and keep running them anyway.

The book is the map. The SHIFT Method is for the women who want someone in the room while they walk it, and who'd like that someone to notice when they start performing again.

I'm not interested in telling you you're doing great. I'll be kind. I won't be soft. There's a difference and most of the industry has lost it.