About Maryanne
I almost didn't make it here.
A few years ago my body stopped me, suddenly and completely. It had been telling me the truth for a long time, and I just hadn't been listening.
For most of my life I could see clearly into other people. I could feel what was happening in a room before anyone said it out loud. I could sit with a person, a leader, a team or an organisation and pick up on the adaptations shaping what everyone could feel but couldn't quite explain.
What I couldn't do, for a long time, was turn that same clarity on myself. I'd become very good at reading the world around me while staying completely blind to the adaptations running my own life.
The environments I moved through taught my nervous system something very early: stillness wasn't safe, and slowing down meant being exposed. So I became capable, productive and reliable, always moving, always useful, always one step ahead. From the outside it looked like success, and privately it was survival.
I was adapted.
I just didn't know it yet.
I told myself I was just driven. Stopping felt like disappearing, so I didn't stop. What I wanted underneath all of it was to be able to sit still and have nothing fall apart because I did.
That adaptation carried me through years of leadership and business, and a relentless drive to keep moving no matter what. It also carried me through four miscarriages, a divorce, real loss, and relationships that slowly dismantled parts of me I hadn't realised were only being held together by sheer effort.
Eventually my body did what my mind never would.
Those months of stillness gave me the space to recognise what had been shaping my life the whole time, just underneath everything else.
The gift and the wound turned out to be the same thing. I'd spent years helping other people see clearly while barely able to see what was driving me. The work I was here to do needed me to close that gap first, and honestly, it still does.
Long before that moment, I'd already started searching. I moved interstate to study. I went through a profound spiritual awakening. I trained as a kinesiologist after seeing what it did in my own life.
What started as a personal search for healing turned into years of working with people in some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
I wrote my first book, Heroine, in 2014, because I wanted people to know that cycles can be broken, and that what keeps repeating doesn't have to define the rest of your life.
Each chapter gave me another piece of the puzzle, and none of them on its own explained what I was seeing. That work shaped how I see people and adaptations, but it's not what I do today.
When I finally stepped back and looked across my own life, it was impossible to miss.
Whether I was working with leaders, organisations or individuals, I kept running into the same thing. The people and situations were different, and the same invisible force was organising everything underneath.
People were limited by the adaptations they'd built to survive, and had eventually mistaken for who they were. That became the foundation of my work.
These days..
I work with individuals, business owners, CEOs and boards. I speak on The Greatest Limitation, I host More Than You're Saying, and I'm writing my next book. Each one is a different doorway into the same question.
Who might we become if we stopped mistaking adaptation for identity?
I'm still learning, still noticing my own adaptations and finding out what becomes possible as they loosen. I write and work from the middle of the path, and every conversation I have starts there.
If something in this story felt familiar, that recognition is usually where the work starts.
I Noticed Something
I write about the habits we picked up to get through life, and what happens when they start making our decisions. It arrives every second week and it's meant to be read slowly, so come in whenever you're ready.