She Built Her Entire Career Around Never Being Called "Too Much"
Being told you were "too much" as a child often leads to building an entire professional identity around never earning that label again, editing yourself down in meetings, in writing, and in every room that matters. This strategy started as genuine self-protection, but understanding where it came from does not undo it. The work is not becoming louder. It is recognizing the pattern is still running long after the room that created it is gone.
👉 Were you ever told, growing up, that you talked too much? Felt too much.
👉Took up too much space in a room that wanted you smaller and quieter than you actually were.
Most of the women I work with were told some version of this before they were old enough to argue back. And most of them did the exact same thing in response.
They built an entire way of showing up, in meetings, in writing, in every room that mattered, specifically engineered to make sure nobody could ever say that about them again.
It works. It works so well that by the time she's sitting across from me, she is polished, articulate, completely in control of every word before it leaves her mouth.
Someone could spend an hour with her and learn a great deal, and still have no real sense of what it actually feels like to be in a room with her at full volume.
The most compelling parts of her were edited out before anyone got close enough to experience them.
Here's what I want you to actually understand about that, because it matters more than the pattern itself.
That strategy was never a flaw. It was a solution. Somewhere young enough that you don't remember choosing it, some part of you noticed that being fully yourself cost you something, and it built a smaller, safer version of you to send out into the world instead.
That part of you was trying to protect you. It did exactly its job.
The problem is it never got the memo that the room changed. It is still running the same protective strategy at forty that it built at twelve, in rooms where the stakes, and the people in them, look nothing like the ones it was originally built for.
Too much.
Too direct.
Too emotional.
If you have heard any version of those words, know this. It was never actually about you. It was a room that had already decided what the right amount of woman looked like, and you spent years making sure you never crossed that line again.
Knowing where the pattern came from does not undo it, by the way. You can understand the entire origin story and still feel yourself shrink the sentence right before it leaves your mouth.
Insight was never the finish line. It is just where the actual work starts.
The work is not becoming louder. It is going back to the part of you that built the strategy in the first place, thanking it for keeping you safe for as long as it did, and letting it know it does not have to work this hard anymore.
That is the exact work inside Inner Compass, a twelve-week small group, capped at eight women, opening mid-September. Six spots are still open.
If you have spent years making sure you were never too much again, and you are tired of it, I would love fifteen minutes with you.
Comments