Simple. But Not Easy.: Can You See Me?

She is the most prepared person in the room. She is one of the last to be heard.At 7:51 in the morning, a forty-two-year-old Senior Director sits in a parking garage practicing her face. Not too big a smile too big reads desperate. Not too small — too small reads angry. Her name is Ida. But at work, for twenty years, she has been Elaine. Easier in the room. Easier for them to hear.If you know that woman — if you have been that woman — this book was written for you.In Simple. But Not Easy., corporate leadership trainer and certified hypnotherapist Alaina McMurtry names the invisible glasses we don’t know we’re wearing: the lenses, built quietly from a lifetime of wounds, that we mistake for the truth. The silk press before the big meeting. Your idea that comes back to you in someone else’s mouth. The name you made smaller so a room could hold it. The exhaustion no amount of therapy, affirmations, or “self-care” ever seems to reach.There is a reason nothing has been sticking. The work has been happening in the wrong room of your mind.Drawing on thirty years training leaders inside companies like Toyota, Morgan Stanley, Abbott, Allstate, and Delta — and on her own painful experiences, — McMurtry weaves story, science, and scripture into a clear-eyed guide for the woman who has done all the work and is still tired. She shows how the subconscious keeps you safe by keeping you small, and how to finally reach the part of you that’s been running the show.This is a book about code-switching and what it costs. About hair, and armor, and the angry-Black-woman trap. About the day you stop performing and come home to the woman you were before the world taught you to manage her.It is for the woman who has been told she has too much executive presence and not enough — in the same career, by different people, neither of whom could say what either phrase actually meant. And it is for the leaders who manage her, who are ready to build the kind of room she can finally be herself in.The work is simple. It is not easy. But it is possible — and she is going to walk it with you. Read more