And that’s the best news you’ll hear—because if you’re the problem, you’re also the solution. Maybe It’s Me shows you how to turn pressure into peace and finally achieve satisfaction without sacrificing results.
Leaders, high performers, and ambitious achievers can often feel crushed by the weight of the world on their shoulders. As a result, they may push harder, believing that doing more is the answer. Yet this approach only amplifies the pressure, adding to the chronic state of being overcommitted and unsatisfied.
It doesn’t need to be that way.
It’s not about controlling imperfect circumstances. It’s about facing the uncomfortable truth: You’re getting in your own way. The beliefs and patterns that once helped you succeed are now sabotaging your results, your peace, and your relationships.
In Maybe It’s Me, certified coach and facilitator Erika Alessandrini introduces seven conscious questions and a framework for making conscious choices designed to help readers create results that last by overcoming their biggest self-sabotaging beliefs— those that can lead anyone to a breaking point.
Whether you are striving for success in business or your personal life, this book will provide you with the tools you need to give the people who matter the best of you, rather than what’s left of you.
You deserve to have more, do more, and be more— and it doesn’t have to come at the expense of your relationships or your peace. In Maybe It’s Me, readers will be equipped with the tools to break free from the cycle of being busy and woefully unsatisfied, helping them to finally feel like they’ve done enough, they have enough, and that they are enough.
The Discipline of Carrying Less “Maybe It’s Me” is a clear, candid workbook for high performers learning that responsibility has a boundary – and that peace begins at that edge. By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 26th, 2026
The frightening thing about being the person who can handle everything is that people eventually let you.
Erika Alessandrini’s “Maybe It’s Me” is written for the capable overcarrier: the one who answers the email, patches the leak before anyone else sees water, rescues the project, absorbs the disappointment, remembers the deadline, misses the vacation, and then wonders why everyone nearby seems either grateful, wary, dependent, or quietly gone. This is a book for the high performer who has mistaken exhaustion for devotion, urgency for purpose, and control for leadership. Its title sounds like a confession. Its better move is to turn confession into discipline.
Alessandrini’s provocation is blunt enough to make half its intended audience lean forward and the other half summon a defense witness. Maybe the problem is not the calendar, the boss, the incompetent team, the ungrateful family, the merger, the client, the spouse, the market, the children, the weather, or the inbox.
Maybe it is you.
But she does not leave that sentence sitting there like a brick through the reader’s self-justification. Her real claim is more humane, and more demanding: if you are contributing to the problem, you have some access to the solution. The book’s best idea is not self-blame. It is right-sized responsibility.
That idea comes into focus through the seventh of Alessandrini’s “conscious questions”: What does it look like to take 100 percent personal responsibility, no more, no less? The final clause does the saving work. Without it, “Maybe It’s Me” could become another tasteful room in the house of self-improvement where people already carrying too much are instructed to carry themselves more attractively. With it, Alessandrini has something sharper to say. Her reader’s trouble is often not too little responsibility, but responsibility seized, inflated, misassigned, and then converted into resentment. The book understands that overresponsibility is not nobility. It is frequently control wearing a clean shirt.
The structure is so plainly marked that the reader is never in danger of getting lost. Alessandrini first diagnoses five self-sabotaging beliefs: you believe you know what is right; you believe the ends justify the means; you believe you can do things better than others; you believe you are helping; you believe it is temporary. Then she offers seven questions meant to interrupt those beliefs in real time, guiding the reader through emotion, thought, perspective, truth, desire, impact, and ownership. The sequence is not decorative. The first half shows the reader how competence can turn corrosive; the second half gives the reader a way to pause before doing more damage.
This is binder logic, but not hollow binder logic; the tabs lead somewhere. The diagnostic chapters are organized around composite portraits. Tony believes he is right, and his marriage and career buckle under the pressure of his certainty. Jeremy wins, sells, charms, pushes, and rationalizes until the people around him become instruments. Ellie is brilliant and exhausting, measuring her worth through performance while making others feel inadequate. Dana “helps” everyone into helplessness with an arsenal of shoulds and shouldn’ts. Nina keeps saying the strain is temporary, though she has been postponing her actual life for years. These figures are broad by intention. They are mirrors with name tags. Their purpose is not psychological surprise, but recognition: oh no, I know this person; oh worse, I have been this person; oh absolutely not, I may still be this person before coffee.
Chapter 7 is where the book stops pointing at the reader and walks into its own evidence. In a postacquisition corporate role, Alessandrini is exhausted, overextended, protective of her team, and convinced that the scoreboard justifies the strain. Then, while reviewing 360-degree feedback in the Tampa airport, she learns that the same behavior her loyalists experience as advocacy has registered elsewhere as something much uglier. Some praise her. Others describe her as a “Bitch” and say she thinks she is “the VP of the world.” The scene earns its sting because Alessandrini does not make herself instantly noble in response. Her first interior move is defensive, wounded, furious. One can hear the internal legal team opening its briefcase.
What follows is better than a tidy conversion scene. Alessandrini realizes, slowly and painfully, that some colleagues do not know her because she has not let them. She has become so devoted to getting things done that she has made herself into a machine with a moral alibi. Her attempt to repair connection through homemade, hand-wrapped caramel candies could have become precious in a lesser book. Here it is modestly awkward in just the right way. It is not a grand leadership initiative. It is a human being trying to re-enter the room as a person.
Then the book gets quieter, and better. Alessandrini’s son remembers that being around her felt like walking on eggshells. He saw the money, the status, the executive demands, but he also saw the cost. This is where the leadership book comes home. Work does not stay at work. It comes home bitter, distracted, overlit by urgency. It misses pickups. It barks when a child needs softness. It teaches the people nearby that success may require emotional weather they must learn to survive.
The opening scene of Alessandrini staying on an urgent after-hours call while her son waits to tell her he wants to transfer schools is one of the book’s most effective moments because the urgent work itself has vanished from memory. She cannot recall what the call was about. She can remember what it cost. That is the argument in miniature: so much of what demands us in the moment proves forgettable; the person left waiting remembers.
Alessandrini writes best when the advice has a bruise. She is not a sentence-maker in the ornamental sense. Her sentences are plainspoken, explanatory, and built for use. She writes like a coach who knows her client is already negotiating: name the pattern, anticipate the objection, offer the reframe, hand over the exercise. That rhythm can be bracing. Elsewhere, it can feel as if every paragraph has arrived with a clipboard and a pen that clicks too loudly.
Her diction blends corporate leadership language, self-coaching method, Christian-inflected testimony, Gen X bluntness, and the polished idiom of the self-help shelf. She can write about prayer, peace, purpose, and alignment, then tell the reader, in effect, to stop being an asshole about the spreadsheet. This mixture gives the voice its personality. It also gives the book its occasional wobble. Alessandrini is better than her most shelf-polished phrases. Language about unlocking potential, transformation, and the best life is less compelling than her own sharper distinctions: intention versus impact, control versus power, true versus truth, responsibility no more and no less.
Each chapter arrives with handrails: vignette, diagnosis, costs, strategies, reflection prompts, application. This makes the book built to be used, not admired from a distance. Readers can return to the “true versus truth” table, the SBIC feedback model, the values compass, the boundary exercises, and the blame-to-responsibility rewrites. The book becomes more than a pep talk with chapter numbers. It gives the reader small disciplines for the heated moment before the ruinous email, the icy silence, the unsolicited lecture, the heroic rescue, the family dinner taken hostage by one more work call.
Still, the method begins to show its seams. Because the chapters so faithfully follow their pattern, the reading experience can become predictable: here is the belief, here is the cost, here is the strategy, here is the reflection, here is the encouraging final tap on the shoulder. As instruction, this repetition makes sense. Habits rarely vanish after being elegantly introduced to their consequences. But as reading, it can sand down surprise. The book’s order is its achievement and its cage.
For orientation, “Maybe It’s Me” shares the question-driven practicality of Michael Bungay Stanier’s “The Coaching Habit” and the conscious-leadership discipline of Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp’s “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership,” but Alessandrini’s book is more domestic than either comparison fully captures. Its drama belongs not only to the meeting room but also to the kitchen, the passenger seat, the soccer schedule, the marriage where one partner has fallen in love with the other’s potential, and the child who has learned to enter the house carefully.
The book is most persuasive when office behavior crosses the threshold and starts rearranging the house. It understands that the always-on workday is not just a scheduling problem; it is an atmosphere problem. It changes the emotional climate around the person who is always needed. The phone lights up, the adult disappears into importance, and someone nearby learns that being loved may still mean waiting until the call ends.
Alessandrini sees external pressure; she simply refuses to let pressure become the whole story. That refusal is both the book’s power and its risk. “Maybe It’s Me” is best suited to readers who do have agency but are spending it badly: leaders, managers, parents, partners, fixers, rescuers, and overfunctioners whose capability has become a social tax. It is less complete for readers whose distress is rooted primarily in coercive workplaces, discrimination, poverty, trauma, abuse, or a genuine lack of power. Alessandrini distinguishes coaching from therapy and makes room for imperfect circumstances, but the book’s weight still falls inward. To its ideal reader, that inward turn will feel less like blame than a first clean breath. To another, it may feel like being handed a mirror while the room is still on fire.
The best sections anticipate the book’s own possible misuse. Near the end, Alessandrini asks whether she is helping a client stay or go. This is a bracingly useful question. The book does not convert responsibility into endurance theater. It does not say that every job, marriage, friendship, or circumstance must be endured with improved breathing. If you stay, make peace with what is real instead of trying to perfect everyone else. If you go, do not imagine that geography has solved your habits. Wherever you go, your old filing cabinet comes with you unless you learn to open the drawers.
The ending also contains one of the book’s best warnings: practice, do not preach. Alessandrini knows her audience. The person who loves a framework may immediately want to diagnose a spouse, boss, child, coworker, or mildly inconvenient barista. The book shuts that door. The work is not to read “Maybe It’s Me” and discover that maybe it is everyone else after all. The work is to become less defended, less reactive, less addicted to the ego reward of being right, needed, indispensable, and exhausted.
One of the book’s cleanest distinctions is also one of its simplest: a boundary governs your behavior; an ultimatum tries to govern someone else’s. This corrects a great deal of contemporary boundary-talk, where “my boundary” can become a velvet rope around another person’s autonomy. Alessandrini’s version is cleaner and less theatrical. If someone smokes near you, your boundary is not a lecture on their lungs. It is leaving the space. If someone sends an invitation into a packed calendar, your boundary is not an office-wide policy about respecting calendars. It is declining the invitation. The distinction sounds obvious until one remembers how much of adult life consists of disguising control as principle.
The “true versus truth” exercise is just as easy to carry into a hard conversation. What feels true deserves attention; it does not automatically deserve the status of fact. Jane arrived at 8:13 for an 8:00 meeting. That is truth. “Jane is disrespectful” is the little novel your nervous system wrote on the commute between irritation and certainty. For a book addressed to people who can build a federal case out of a late email and a suspiciously brief message, this is no small mercy.
If there is one sentence of the book’s argument that should survive beyond the exercises, it is that control cannot be shared, but power can. Control centralizes. It bottlenecks. It makes others smaller, then complains that they are small. Power, in Alessandrini’s better sense, can be distributed through trust, clarity, questions, boundaries, responsibility, and the willingness to let others own their own lives. This is the leadership claim that lasts after the worksheets are closed.
My rating is 82/100, which translates to a Goodreads-compatible 4/5 stars: strong, coherent, useful, and willing to stand in its own evidence, but not fresh enough in prose or supple enough in form to reach the highest tier.
“Maybe It’s Me” is not a graceful little essay wearing leadership shoes. It is a coaching manual direct-mailing itself to the part of the reader that secretly believes nothing will work unless they personally supervise the universe. It repeats because its reader repeats. It overexplains because its reader negotiates. It presses because its reader is talented at escape. The book’s limitation is that it sometimes sounds like the category it belongs to; its achievement is that, underneath the familiar phrasing, it has an uncomfortable question: what happens when the person everyone counts on becomes someone everyone has to recover from?
Alessandrini’s invitation is not to become softer in the decorative sense, nor to resign from responsibility, nor to turn ambition into scented mist. It is to stop confusing force with care. To stop calling absence provision. To stop treating other people’s lives as problems awaiting the benefit of your supervision. To stop waiting for the future to hand you the peace you are actively refusing in the present.
The person who can carry everything may indeed be impressive. The harder question, and the one this book keeps asking until the reader runs out of hiding places, is what becomes possible when that person finally puts down what was never theirs, owns what is, and notices who is still standing there without the weight between them.
This book felt like a conversation I really needed. Maybe It’s Me does a great job of calling you out in a productive way without feeling judgmental or preachy. I loved that it focused on how high achievers can accidentally create their own stress and pressure while thinking they’re just “doing what it takes.”
The writing is super easy to read, relatable, and full of moments that genuinely made me stop and reflect on my own habits and mindset. I highlighted so many parts because they hit a little too close to home lol.
If you constantly feel like you should be doing more but still never feel satisfied, this is definitely worth the read.
Thank you NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
This book and the concepts in it have changed my life. It sounds grandiose but it’s simply true. This book houses the wisdom and tools we all need to be better leaders, parents, friends, and partners. It has profoundly changed how I show up at work and at home and helped me spot where I contribute to my own dissatisfaction and chaos. 10/10 — if you’re even slightly intrigued, read this book.
Thank you, NetGalley, for the gifted copy. I enjoyed this one and it will be in circulation monthly so I can stay on task with myself. because it might just be me!