You are not here to shrink - you are here to rise.

Your Monday Morning Happiness Prompt 🧡

This month, I made a decision to say goodbye to my blue hair. If you know me, you’ll know it’s been part of my identity for a while now — a bold splash of colour that’s sparked compliments, conversations and often, quiet confessions from women: “I wish I had the courage to do something like that.”

Isn’t that interesting?

How so many of us crave visibility… expression… bigness… and yet are terrified of stepping into it.

How we admire boldness in other women, yet police it in ourselves.

How easily we equate ‘toning it down’, smallness, and silence with goodness.

And how often we’ve been taught - explicitly and implicitly - that our value lies in shrinking. Physically, emotionally, energetically.

We shrink our opinions to avoid seeming “difficult”.
We shrink our desires to avoid seeming “selfish”.
We shrink our bodies to avoid “judgment”.
And we shrink our dreams because they feel too big.

And yet, there’s a wild, radiant part of you that wants to rise.

You can feel it in your bones when you see another woman fully claiming her power. Something stirs — awe, admiration, and maybe even a tinge of jealousy. Because deep down, you know: you want that, too. Not necessarily hair of radiant blue, but to look in the mirror and see someone confident, proud to be herself, and right at home in her being.

That part of you that feels “too much” for some people? She is exactly the part that will set you free.

It hasn’t always been easy to walk around with hair the same colour as Marge Simpson’s. There have been times I’ve felt exposed — overly seen — when I didn’t necessarily want to be. But maybe that was the point.

The blue hair made it hard to shrink. It projected confidence, boldness, strength - even if I felt exactly the opposite. And maybe now I don’t need it in the same way. It doesn’t serve me any more.

Because rising doesn’t have to be loud or performative.
It can be quiet. Soft. Soulful.
It’s not about being seen by the whole world.
It’s about refusing to hide from yourself.

So if you've been holding back, if you’ve found yourself whispering when you want to roar, here are 3 gentle, grounded ways to begin…

1. Ask yourself: Where am I playing small out of fear not preference?

We’re allowed to love stillness, solitude, softness.
But shrinking out of fear is not the same as choosing stillness from strength. What areas are you silencing yourself in, or making yourself smaller because you’re scared to step into your full power.

Journal it. Whisper it. Name it. It starts there.

2. Do one thing this week that invites visibility.

Identify an appointment, meeting, task where you feel yourself shrinking away. And decide, in all your power and flow, to do one thing that helps you gently feel more visible, more powerful, more risen.

That might mean wearing the bold eye shadow.
Saying the idea in the meeting.
Speaking your truth in the group chat.

Visibility (rising!) is a muscle and you strengthen it one rep at a time.

3. Create a “Too Much” folder.

Mentally collect the compliments you’ve been tempted to deflect. Even write them down - make a list or design a personal meme!
Download screenshots of messages that made you feel deeply seen.
Words you wish you could believe about yourself.
And every time someone tells you you’re “too much” or makes you feel that way, add it to the pile. Because sometimes, too much is exactly right.

Try putting all that in a physical scrap book. Words, images, quotes - that speak to your soul.

What picture does all this paint about what the ‘risen’ you is like?

This isn’t about performing confidence or becoming someone else.
It’s about peeling away the layers of who you were told to be, so you can come home to the power of who you already are. Even if that is so deep down it feels unreachable right at this moment.

You are not here to shrink.
You are here to glow.
To claim.
To RISE.

And if today that just means standing up a little straighter, asking for what you need, or daring to believe in your own enoughness — then, my love, you’re already rising.