The Honest Voice
A conversation on playfulness became something deeper: an inquiry into the “honest voice”—the part of you that knows what’s true before it’s been edited for approval. Drawing on clinical insight, relational psychology, and lived experience, this piece explores how we lose that voice in the name of connection, and how we begin to reclaim it—not alone, but in relationships that can hold what is real. Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, Atherton, Woodside
The Quiet Cost of “Should”
High-achieving women often don’t arrive in crisis—they arrive quietly burned out. This piece explores how the internalized “should” voice fuels exhaustion, self-neglect, and pressure, and how shifting from obligation to choice can restore clarity, agency, and energy.
Why High Performing Women Lose Touch With Desire
You can close the deal, run the meeting, hold your ground with anyone in the room — and still go quiet the moment it's just you and your own body. That's not a desire problem. It's a voice problem, and it shows up here first because this is the one place performance stops working.
The Last Hiding Place: The critic, the quieter voice, and the triangle inside
A practical, clinically grounded essay for high-achieving women in Silicon Valley on the inner critic, invisible labor, and how to reclaim your voice without losing your competence, care, or edge.
Nicole Ohebshalom writes for high-achieving women, founders, executives, and leaders in Silicon Valley on psychotherapy, executive coaching, invisible labor, self-silencing, boundaries, resentment, and the inner critic.
How to Stop Absorbing Everyone Else’s Responsibility
Why high-achieving women often become the backstop at home, how that pattern turns into resentment, and the simple practice that creates a different choice. A clinical, practical look at why the load feels uneven at home, how meaning gets attached so fast, and what changes when you stop absorbing everyone else’s responsibility.
The Triangle You Didn't Know You Were Standing In
Maya founded her company seven years ago at a kitchen table in Palo Alto. Today it employs fifty people. On a Tuesday night at 10:40pm, she is rewriting the strategy document her VP of Product was supposed to finish — and she said "No worries" when he sent it late. What happened in that moment was a leadership decision, even though it didn't feel like one.
Neurodivergent Women Leaders + Perimenopause in Silicon Valley
She built the systems that made her brain work in Silicon Valley leadership — then, around forty, they stopped working. For neurodivergent women in Palo Alto's tech world, perimenopause isn't just hormonal. It's a scaffolding collapse. Here's the neurobiology behind it, and what actually helps.
What the Erotic Actually Is and Why Couples Lose It
Most high-functioning people are using the word to mean something far too small. The erotic is the aliveness you bring to your work, your love, and your own body — and the very competence that runs your life is often what quiets it.