“Off with her head!”
When the system has it wrong and you fell for it
I want to talk about editing - and I don’t mean the words kind (even though that would bring me joy).
I mean the editing you do BEFORE you speak, or post, or pitch. The automatic censorship that happens when you sense that the full version of you might make someone uncomfortable. So you trim and soften and make yourself palatable.
I’ve done it for a long time, so I know the signs. Somewhere along the way (early on), I’d learned that saying it with the volume at max-Michelle had consequences. In New Zealand, where I grew up, we have a name for it: Tall Poppy Syndrome. Don’t wave your beautiful blooms around too freely in the breeze, or someone will come along and cut you down to size.
So you learn to stay low. You learn the acceptable height. And you tell yourself it’s fine. You pretend you’re just being considerate, just reading the room, just not making it about you.
What nobody tells you the cost of doing this. The cost of holding your breath before you hit publish. The tight throat that stops you saying the thing you actually think. The background blurgh of discomfort that comes from spending years in a body that’s been straightjacketed into “appropriate”.
Putting yourself on mute is literally killing you. It causes dis-ease - in your body, your mind, and your relationships. And the conditioning to keep everyone else comfortable? It followed me into my business. I guarantee it’s in yours too.
Compartmentalising
When my children were younger, I lost myself in the way a lot of mothers do - little by little, and with the best of intentions.
I tried to claw my way back to work: several times. I was desperate to reclaim a piece of myself, to feel the particular kind of value that comes from work and from being paid for what you know, what you think, what you can do. But every attempt failed. I kept getting pulled back into the Mummy Zone, recalled by the gravitational field of everyone I’d been keeping comfortable for years. And, I let it happen - you don’t get recalled unless you’re still answering the phone.
What changed wasn’t timing, permission or a strategy. It was the revelation that I was unwhole.
I had been living in compartments. Singer over here. Copywriter over there. Graphic designer in that corner. Mother (consuming, devotional, identity-reshaping mother to two gorgeous, challenging, neurodivergent beauties) in a world of her own, sealed off from the rest. As if the only way to be taken seriously professionally was to present one clean, tidy, contextually appropriate slice of myself at a time.
The day I stopped doing that was the day things started to gel.
I was settling down to write, when I automatically did a calming, grounding breathwork. The nervous system regulation tools I’d built as a singer, using breath to regulate a body that knows how to perform under pressure. The precision with language from years in copywriting and corporate marketing. The visual instinct from graphic design. And the emotional intelligence, the deep listening, the radical respect for another person’s inner world? This came from motherhood. From paying close, devoted attention to two people who needed me to really, truly hear them.
All of it was me. And when I stopped editing myself down to the part I thought the room wanted, I was finally able to build something that was gloriously mine.
The mute button didn’t just cost me time. It cost me years and angst, and the very silver hair I now wear with pride.
Turning down the volume
It’s so incremental, you don’t even know it’s happening.
A thousand tiny recalibrations across a lifetime. The first time the room went flat after you spoke and you adjusted your temperature to match. The time you softened a pitch because the energy shifted - you clocked it and scaled back. The post you wrote that you were genuinely proud of, that got two likes, and you told yourself you weren’t worthy.
None of these moments feel huge on their own do they? They’re just small, insignificant adaptations. Reading the room. Being professional. Not making it about you.
But over time, the editing becomes automatic. You stop noticing you’re doing it - or allowing it to happen. You just write the safer version. You post the blander thing (which is why so many people feel safe writing with AI). You describe your offer in language that doesn’t quite commit to what you actually believe, because committing fully makes you vulnerable.
You turn down the dial so gradually you don’t notice the silence. Until one day you look at your content and you genuinely hate it.
What it’s actually costing you
The business cost is real, and we should absolutely name it.
Every post you didn’t publish because you edited yourself out of the conversation, was a conversation lost. Every offer you haven’t named out loud is still sitting there… waiting… for no one. Every time you posted the polished, palatable version instead of the true version, you made yourself harder to find. Because the person who is needs your specific voice, your specific angle, your specific truth, can’t hear you. The client who would have said, “That’s her, she gets it, I need to work with her.”? She can’t see you. Because you didn’t show her who you are.
But let’s not stop at the business cost. Because the health cost is real too, and we don’t talk about that either.
I got really sick. I was ready to walk out of my life. That’s how much I hated the person I had become.
Years of not taking up space, takes up residence in your body. You carry it in the tension between your shoulder blades. The shallow breathing that gives you enough oxygen but not enough expansion. The exhaustion and fatigue of constant self-monitoring.
And it carves a particular kind of loneliness. You’re in the room but you don’t feel seen. And loneliness kills.
The cultural bit we have to name
To be fair, we were not taught to take up full space. By we, I mean women specifically. We were taught to perform niceness. To be professional, which is code for controlled. Controlled enough to get the job done, but small enough to not make anyone uncomfortable.
That conditioning doesn’t stay at the door of your business. It doesn’t sit outside the building while you write your Instagram captions and name your pricing and describe what you do. It comes with you and it whispers in everything you write.
The voice telling you to soften your message? It’s not your editorial instincts. It’s not perfectionism. It’s conditioning masquerading as professionalism.
So let’s name it because you can’t change what you haven’t named. You can’t challenge what you don’t own.
Baby steps
I’m not going to tell you it’s an easy fix - it’s the safety blanket of a lifetime.
But I am going to hold up a mirror. A mirror that I have absolutely seen myself in. Because in my experience the women who are most muted are usually the ones with the most to say. The clearest thinking. The sharpest perspective. The voice that, if it came out unedited, would make people stand up and listen.
The first step isn’t a content strategy. It’s not a new system or a better funnel. It’s just noticing. Recognising this in yourself. Tracing it back to where it began. Understanding that it isn’t the real you. You just internalised being palatable so completely, that it feels safe.
You can’t change without the information. And now you have it.
So here’s my challenge
Be yourself. Do what you can to get regulated and get real. Integrate the disparate, disconnected, inner parts of yourself so that you honour everything you know, everything you’ve lived, everything you are.
The tall poppy isn’t the problem. The problem is systemic strimming.
And you get to decide how high you’re going to grow.
Ready to find out what your voice sounds like when you’re not being edited? [Book a discovery call.] That’s what I do - work past the barriers to the voice you already have, already are, and have always been and help you build an expression framework that honours all of you.
Your Channel Rules. Because your voice is your channel.