I help women with PMDD catch the beliefs their hardest weeks have been shouting, the undercharging, the over giving, the waiting for a good week before feeling allowed to lead, and see clearly that loud isn't the same as true.

Every belief that says you're not enough has a pattern. And once you can see it, it loses its power over you.

I was Sales Executive for Porsche for a decade.

I was good at it. Really good. in 2011 I won an award for Best Salesperson in the UK. I hit targets, broke records, got the recognition. From the outside, I was the definition of capable, and successful.

But on the inside... it was one big performance.

I wasn't being intentionally dishonest, but the version of me that showed up in that showroom was built on something very fragile. On needing to prove. On earning my place one sale at a time. On the quiet, constant belief that if I stopped achieving, stopped delivering, stopped being visibly excellent - the whole thing would unravel.

I didn't know that then. I just called it ambition.

And then I became a mum, and decided to do something completely new - I started a cake business. I knew I wanted to be around for my children, to take them to school, be there for sports days and Christmas concerts. A corporate job meant none of these were promised.

Alongside the ambition there was something else. Something I wouldn't have a name for until my early forties.

Through all of it, the showroom years and the cake years, my working life ran in fortnights. Weeks where I could sell anything to anyone, followed by weeks where I couldn't open my laptop, couldn't face a simple enquiry, couldn't understand where the capable me had gone. I never saw the pattern, because I was too busy explaining each crash the only way I knew how: "I'm lazy. I'm too much. Other women manage."

Early in my forties, I was diagnosed with PMDD, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, a severe cyclical condition affecting an estimated 1 in 20 women. I sat in the car park afterwards and cried with relief, because one diagnosis had just explained decades.

I understood something almost immediately, and it went on to become the heart of my work.

The diagnosis explained the hard weeks. It didn't un-write what those weeks had taught me to believe. Every crash had added its own loud, convincing evidence, and I'd spent years treating that volume as fact. PMDD didn't invent those beliefs. It turned them up, and kept gathering proof for them, month after month.

That's the work I now do, every day.