You were never too much. You were just in the wrong system.

I'm from South Shields. A small seaside town in the north east, working class roots, and a very early understanding that the world wasn't built for someone like me.

Too much. Not good enough. This isn't available for someone like you.

I heard those words more times than I can count.

As a woman. Pansexual. Someone who was late diagnosed with ADHD and spent decades not understanding why everything felt like a fight. I have spent so long battling against systems that were never designed for me and somehow, becoming very good at navigating them anyway.

I have worked in male dominated industries my entire career. I was told my hair colour needed to be normal. That I needed to conform. That unless I changed and fundamentally changed who I was, I wouldn't have a place.

And I did change. I conformed. I made myself smaller, quieter, safer. And I didn't realise how much I had sacrificed. I had become so many things to so many people that I had stopped being anything to myself.

I wasn't lost. I had been replaced. By roles. By expectations. By survival.

That was until I started doing the work on myself in 2020.

That's when everything shifted.

I have lost myself more than once. I spent years attracted to who I was attracted to with no language for it. It wasn't until I discovered pansexuality existed that something finally clicked into place.

I became a parent at 36 and I lost myself completely. I didn't just take on a new role, I became his mum, and somewhere in that becoming, I disappeared.

I battled to find myself underneath it.

I returned to work nine months later, desperate to feel like myself again. As if having a baby wasn't hard enough, we'd married during maternity leave so I arrived back with a new name, in front of people who had never known the old one.

So the woman who walked back through that door was a stranger to everyone, including sometimes herself. There was no one to reflect back who I'd been before. I went back to find myself and found I had to build her from scratch.

Then at 44 an ADHD diagnosis reframed every single struggle I'd ever had, suddenly the cost of everything made sense. The hours nobody saw. The burnout behind the delivery. The complexity of a brain that was never the problem, just never understood.

Each time I thought I knew who I was, life handed me a new question.

Who are you now?

I have answered that question more times than I can count. That's why I know how.

I invested in my own coach. I started to see how much I had been impacted by years of being told I was too much and not enough simultaneously. As I began to do the work things started to move.

I was approached for roles that didn't exist yet. I was recognised for what I had always been capable of. I created an entire business area from nothing, leading sustainability across Europe in a team and a role that had never existed before.

I navigated complexity, led transformation and sat comfortably in the most uncomfortable uncertainty, in a way that nobody else around me quite could.

That's when I understood what I was.

I went deep. I started collecting the qualifications and certifications that gave structure to what I had always done instinctively. PMI PMP, APM PMQ, Agile, Scrum, Prosci - because I knew the human side of change mattered as much as the methodology, I also trained as a Mental Health First Aider to level 3. Not to collect letters after my name, but because I needed to understand the systems I was navigating well enough to take others through them too.

I am a system navigator. I always have been. I just didn't have the words for it.

The chameleon is my PI profile and it feels the most accurate description of how I move through the world.

Adapting. Seeing in every direction at once. Thriving in the environments that overwhelm everyone else. Not because it's easy. Because it is who I am.

I got into this work because I knew I could have an impact.

I was told I had a magic for connecting to people, and now, holding someone within their greatness when they can't yet see it themselves, co-creating something with them, watching them move - is the most meaningful thing I have ever done.

I understand complexity because I have lived it. I understand identity because I have fought for mine. I understand what it means to be lost in a system that wasn't built for you and I understand what it feels like to finally find your signal.

I work with people who are in the middle of becoming. Who've outgrown a version of themselves but haven't yet found the next one.

Who are asking, quietly or desperately “who am I now?”

If that's you, you're in the right place.

I hold the light.

You find your way.

Nicki x