I get asked all the time why I wrote my book, and the truth is, it’s not the answer people expect. I never set out to be an author. It wasn’t part of the plan and honestly, it wasn’t something I thought I needed to do. But life has a way of making things very clear when you’re paying attention. The real reason why I wrote my book is layered. It comes from lived experience, from listening to other women and from realizing that what we’ve been told about overwhelm simply isn’t working. So instead of giving you one reason, I’m going to give you the real ones.
Why I Wrote My Book: Because I Needed It
The first reason why I wrote my book is simple. I needed it.
About ten years ago, I was navigating one of the hardest seasons of my life. I had just left an abusive relationship with a five-month-old baby while working as a corporate SVP. I was trying to lead teams, manage expectations and hold everything together at home.
I searched for support everywhere. I read books, listened to podcasts and invested in coaching and therapy. But nothing addressed both sides of my reality at the same time.
There were resources for personal growth. There were resources for professional success. But there was nothing for women trying to do both in the middle of a crisis.
That gap is the first reason why I wrote my book.
Why I Wrote My Book: Because Women Are More Overwhelmed Than Ever
The second reason why I wrote my book is because things are not getting easier. They are getting harder.
When I started interviewing working mothers, I thought I would hear stories similar to mine. Instead, I uncovered something much bigger. I spoke to over one hundred women who felt overwhelmed, stretched thin and unsupported.
They were not looking for motivation. They were looking for solutions.
The data reflects this reality. Women make up nearly half the workforce, yet still lack representation in leadership. At home, they continue to carry the majority of responsibilities.
This creates constant pressure that does not turn off.
That is exactly why I wrote my book. The problem is not that women cannot lead. The problem is that they are operating at full capacity without the tools to expand it.
Why I Wrote My Book: Because the Timing Is Now
Another reason why I wrote my book is because the timing matters.
The cost of living has increased. Childcare costs continue to rise. Many families no longer have the support systems they once relied on. At the same time, expectations at work have not shifted to match this new reality. Women are being asked to do more with less support.
I realized that keeping this work limited to coaching sessions or speaking events was not enough. A book allows this message to reach more women who need it now.
That urgency is a powerful reason why I wrote my book.
Why I Wrote My Book: Because You Asked For It
This next reason surprised me the most. People kept asking for it.
After events, during Q&A sessions and in direct messages, women would ask if I had a book. They wanted something they could take home. Something they could return to when life felt overwhelming again.
At first, I brushed it off. But eventually, I realized this was not a coincidence. It was a pattern. It became clear that this was how I could serve at a higher level. That is another reason why I wrote my book.
If you want to explore more about me and my work, click here.
Why I Wrote My Book Instead of Teaching Burnout Recovery
This is where my perspective may challenge what you have heard before.
Most advice around overwhelm focuses on burnout recovery. It tells women to slow down, step back, or do less. But the women I work with do not want that. They want to grow. They want to lead. They want to succeed without sacrificing themselves in the process.
That is why I wrote my book with a different approach. This work focuses on increasing capacity, not reducing ambition. It is about creating systems, boundaries and mindsets that allow you to handle more without burning out.
Why I Wrote My Book for the Next Generation
The final reason why I wrote my book is deeply personal. I wrote it for my children.
Because right now, we are modeling what success and leadership look like. And too often, that model includes exhaustion, burnout and constant sacrifice.
That is not the future I want for them.
If we do not change how we lead, we cannot change the systems around us. This is the bigger mission behind why I wrote my book.
Final Thoughts on Why I Wrote My Book
So when people ask me why I wrote my book, the answer is not just one thing.
I wrote it because I needed it. I wrote it because women need it now. I wrote it because you asked for it. And I wrote it because the current approach is not working.
Most importantly, I wrote it because change starts with us.
If you are ready to take that next step, you can learn more about the book here: https://corrielo.com/overwhelmculpritbook
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
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Speaker: So I get asked by new connections on LinkedIn or when I’m out at a networking event or at an event I’m speaking at on a regular basis, why I wrote a book. And the real reason might actually surprise you. So I decided that I wanted to go ahead and dedicate an entire episode to it because believe it or not, I never set out to be an author.
I actually never set out to be a speaker either, but either way, I never set out to be an author. It was definitely not on my Life Bingo card. Yet, my first book, the Five Overwhelm Culprits™ Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success, is coming out in a couple of weeks on May 12th, 2026.
So today I wanted to share with you the four reasons why I wrote this book. And why as well as how the content inside of it will benefit the working women in your life.
Speaker 2: So if you’re new here, my name is Corrie LoGiudice, otherwise known as Corrie Lo. [00:01:00] ’cause let’s be honest, who could spell LoGiudice? And I’m a professional keynote speaker, facilitator, executive coach, as well as author who helps leaders transform overwhelm into confident action, even in times of crisis.
So let’s dive in. When I was thinking about it before sitting down to film this episode I outlined all the different reasons why I wrote this book, and it came out to being four of them. So let’s go through them one by one. First was, and it’s really wild for me talking about this right now, ‘ cause it was pretty much 10 years ago to date, I needed a book like this, but nothing existed on the market.
So for context, 10 years ago, I left an abusive relationship when I had a five month old son and I, at the time that this happened, I was working as a corporate SVP. In fact, I even had to take my son with me to work one day after something was thrown at me and I never went back. And during that timeframe, I was doing these really, really long commutes
that [00:02:00] I was in the car over 20 hours a week. And to try to make the most out of the time that I wasn’t with my son. I started looking for books, that I could listen to audio books. I looked for books, I looked for podcasts, I looked for courses, I looked for all sorts of stuff to help me navigate like, how am I supposed to deal with this incredible personal crisis.
Which for me was obviously the divorce and suddenly becoming a single parent of an infant. So going through that huge life change, but also at the same time, I needed to show up as an SVP and lead other people. But I looked everywhere and what I found at the time, and not much has changed in 10 years is you could find hundreds of books in personal development. So for example, things like, managing a divorce or becoming a parent, parenting books or finance books or, , even housekeeping, homemaking, there are so many books on the personal [00:03:00] side in terms of personal development.
And then on the flip side, there’s the professional development. So the books on leadership. I read a lot of leadership books during this timeframe. Books on management, on operations, marketing, sales. But what I was searching for at the time was where are the books that are supposed to help folks who are in leadership roles deal with crises that affect your capacity, both personally as well as professionally and none existed.
So in the process of trying to find solutions, I spent thousands of both hours as well as dollars finding out how exactly to navigate this. What solutions, what strategies can I try.
And it was everything from probably hundreds of books no joke at this point in time on the business development as well as the personal development side. But then also I invested in therapy. I invested in various different coaches, I [00:04:00] invested in, time to develop and test different solutions.
I invested in even pre-made strategies and templates and things like that to help with things. And ultimately I did end up figuring out solutions on my own. And when it came time for me to later step down for my SVP career, which ultimately was a personal decision that I decided. That’s a story for another day.
It’s actually included in the book if you wanna learn more about it. But at that point in time when I started a coaching career and then later speaking, I started teaching what I learned from those years of my life that I was searching for solutions. And at that point in time, that was around when I discovered the Five Overwhelm Culprits™ as a self-leadership framework.
But I’ve since then been teaching and facilitating and coaching, and speaking on these topics for over eight years now so that was first and foremost. It’s like I wrote this because I needed a place that I could basically encapsulate [00:05:00] all of the information that I spent time, money and effort searching for that did not exist in book form over a decade ago when I truly needed it.
The next reason was because truth is, the timing is right. Women are more overwhelmed now than I was over 10 years ago. And I started to learn this even before I started writing the book because I had done this project where I was looking to interview working moms who were really struggling to advance in their leadership careers alongside, being mothers and at the point in time of doing the research, it was more that I wanted to understand if there were other women that felt like I did. And truth was, part of that research became the book because, I very easily ended up interviewing over a hundred working moms who were so desperate to feel seen and heard in what their experience was, as well as to communicate with somebody else who’s gone through the same thing, who truly [00:06:00] understood it.
It helped me see that there was a real need for what I’ve learned now, and the timing was right, so what good is it for me keeping all this information to myself or impacting, a couple hundred people when I do a speaking event where I could share it to hundreds of thousands of people in book form.
So it started off with that. I was doing the, interviews with the working moms, but then I started looking at statistics and truth is when you break it down, now women make up 47.7% of the global workforce currently, but we’re still only earning 77 cents for every $1 earned by men. And this is despite outnumbering men in the college educated workforce and despite outperforming our male counterparts.
Especially for those who get into fortune 200 CEO roles. Women only hold 27% of management positions across the board, but only 10% of us actually hold CEO [00:07:00] roles and it makes sense why.
Because if it was as difficult for me to hold on to an SVP job, not because I wasn’t capable, but because things like, I couldn’t make the schedule work, I needed something more flexible. I couldn’t be in a car 20 hours a week, commuting back and forth. So things like that.
So it makes sense. When I started learning all of these statistics and stuff, why, we’re in positions that there aren’t as many women leaders. And that was a reason why too. And then looking as well, even more reason why women are more overwhelmed than I was even 10 years ago. The cost of childcare currently is more than housing in all 50 states in the United States.
So this is putting women in a really difficult position where, number one, you used to have the choice whether or not you wanted to be a stay at home mom. For many, you do for a lot of households. Now, that’s not an option. Both parents need to work because the cost of everything is astronomical and childcare in particular ramped up faster than anything else.
And [00:08:00] as a result of this, for families that can’t afford the childcare, if the mother in the scenario is making 77 cents for every $1, her partner makes. Her job is more expendable. And in 2025 alone, over 455,000 women left the workforce, which is wild because I think it was 515,000 men that joined the workforce in 2025.
So there’s a disbalance, obviously women are leaving in record numbers. But a big part of this is because of the cost of childcare and because of what they’re making, it just makes their jobs more expendable. Then when you factor into this for the women who are keeping their jobs successfully and are still holding it altogether, 63% of women are doing more household labor compared to 22% of men.
And again, this is data, these are statistics, this is research. This is all included in my book if you’re looking for sources on stuff. But when you have women that are doing a disproportionate amount of household labor as [00:09:00] well as, , mental load,
all along the way, when you have 56% of mothers who feel that they don’t have the family village that they used to be able to call on for support in former decades. It’s no wonder why women are so overwhelmed right now, and I understand it intimately ’cause I was this woman 10 years ago, but I feel like it’s gotten worse.
And that’s another big reason why the timing was right for the book. We’re currently living in a world where we’re on pace for our daughters to have less opportunities personally and professionally than their grandmothers fought so hard for us to have, and that’s a very scary thought on my side. And that was one of the reasons too, why if I had this information that could help women increase their capacity so we could continue to lead, it’s more important now than ever.
So I’d actually love to know of what I listed, or maybe there’s something else that I didn’t list. If you’re a working woman right now, what are you most overwhelmed with? Feel free to drop it in the [00:10:00] comments. I would love to have a conversation surrounding this and why the timing is right now that we need to figure out solutions for this.
So the next reason why I ultimately decided to write the book, and this is kind of the big tipping point for me because I was very happy kind of going along doing my own research projects, just exploring it from a personal standpoint, looking at different solutions that I had found and like teaching and coaching on.
I was very happy just doing that. But what ultimately ended up happening was during my keynote Q&A’s or if I did an event meet and greet, or even just via emails and DM’s I started getting questions from people asking if I had a book where people were literally asking me like, “Hey Corrie, this Five Overwhelm Culprit™ thing is great, do you have it in a book that I could take it home?”
And this also came out too while I was doing the research project, when I was talking to woman about it, that they were like, “Oh, it would be great if there was a book that actually addressed everything that we’re going through right now that doesn’t [00:11:00] consider personal life to be separate from professional life.”
There are no leadership or business books that deal with that. So that was another kind of like, ” aha,” that it was time for me to go after potentially publishing the book. And at that point in time too, I went the traditional publishing route. I partnered with Health Communications Inc. to publish the book.
And they ultimately bought it this time last year, actually it was in March of 2025. And the process of doing that too. I included in my book proposal, all of the screenshots of people literally asking me for the book. So that was a huge, kick in the pants for me.
Like, “Corrie, this is what you are meant to do.” And I talk about this all the time too with my coaching clients when it comes to either pivoting careers or doing work that feels fulfilling and aligned to do work that’s aligned with your purpose. And it’s my true belief that everything you have experienced in life has prepared you for how you are meant to help and serve and lead others today.
[00:12:00] So having this many people ask me for a book, that was what I needed to see and be like, this is how I can help serve. So went ahead, sold the book.
Then, the other reason too, or the last reason I should say is this content is needed more today than ever. As I mentioned a couple of times, advice about overwhelm in both the workplace as well as at home
in particular. It’s often focused on burnout, recovery. And this is an issue and this issue came up during my interview project where women were so ticked off to be told like, “Oh, it’s okay you get burnt out. That’s fine. you need to meditate and take time off.” And women who hear this, they get especially ones who are in positions of leadership, who are advancing their career, who don’t wanna have to sacrifice one for the other.
They’re like, “Well, with what time? Why should I have to sacrifice giving up one or the other? That’s not an option.” They don’t want that option. [00:13:00] And the work that I do, and I have done as a coach and a speaker for many years now, it’s not burnout recovery at all. The work that I do, it’s capacity.
So I help leaders, especially women, because we’re the ones that are overwhelmed for all the reasons I’m stating in this video. But it is, gender inclusive. Obviously everybody experiences overwhelm at some point in time, but the strategies and the tactics that I share and that the Overwhelm Culprit™ framework helps with, it helps you increase capacity in times of crisis or when things are stressful so that you can then continue to perform at a high level and that you don’t burn out.
It’s the framework to be able to protect yourself.
So in terms of the speaking world, and even in terms of my book, this is not a burnout recovery book at all. This is about what do you do, what stop gaps do you need to put in place to protect yourself so that you could still perform at a high level, that you could increase your capacity by letting go of things [00:14:00] that doesn’t matter and reframing your thoughts and your beliefs around expectations and being able to confidently communicate with people.
It’s all about mindset versus taking time off, lighting a candle and maybe meditating in terms of burnout recovery. So that was one thing that I felt that was really important because the advice that women are seeing right now is completely not in alignment with what high performing women need. And the other thing too is if we don’t step into leadership roles.
If we don’t increase that 26% that are in management and leadership roles, we have no opportunity to be able to effectively change the systems that are running our society today. These systems that were designed for a completely different era of life. It was designed for an error where you had a, stay at home parents and you had one parent that worked and provided.
For everybody, but nowadays we can’t do that. You can’t afford it. Women [00:15:00] don’t necessarily want it but our standard nine to five workday and inflexible work arrangements and stuff like that was designed for an era that no longer exists. But until we temporarily increase our capacity to be able to hold more.
During these extremely challenging times, we will not be able to put ourselves and other underrepresented leaders into places of leadership so that we can change systems. And that is like the primary reason that I wrote this book, so that more women will have what they need to be able to step up to continue to lead not just at work, but in our communities and at home.
And so that our children will also see the incentive of doing so and be able to do so themselves.
This is something that is so, so near and dear to me. It is so important that I actually dedicated my book to my kids. It’s for my children. So you’ll never learn to confuse exhaustion with success and at the rate that we’re going, that’s what we’re modeling for the next [00:16:00] generation to the point that I believe it’s over 70% of gen Zs want nothing to do with middle management, and that’s, a scary prospect and that’s something we need to change.
But at the same time, there’s something that’s very beautiful about women, and especially mothers in this state of overwhelm in this state of chaos. In fact, this is so perfectly timed with, wanting to record this for today, but last night was the Oscars and I was watching Jessie Buckley accept her Oscar, for her role in Hamnet.
And in the speech she said, I would like to dedicate this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart. And how true is that? That makes me choke up because it is chaos being a mom and especially being a working mom. It is chaos. And it doesn’t have to be. we get to choose. And as I start off in the book too, that change starts with us, right?
So that’s where we need to start. So to recap, I needed this book 10 years ago. That’s the top [00:17:00] reason why I decided to write this book. Also, the timing was right in terms of just what’s going on in the world. Childcare is more than housing. Women are still getting paid 77 cents for, $1 by men.
It’s just the timing was perfect. Things were getting worse and not getting better based on where I was 10 years ago. Then also, people were literally asking me for the book so while I didn’t want to necessarily be an author, I decided to step up. I lead by example and answer the call that, okay, fine, I’m gonna write the book.
I’m gonna help, this is how I can help with this problem. And then lastly, the content itself is so desperately needed because of the conflicting advice that women leaders get in the workforce right now on what they actually need to do to take care of the issue. It doesn’t accommodate what they actually need.
And that’s the gap that I hope that the ‘Five Overwhelm Culprit™ Strategies To Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success’ helps with. So in closing, I’m [00:18:00] not sure if you noticed, but I’m testing a little bit of a different format for my content. I was getting really, really frustrated. I mean, AI is wonderful for certain things, but I felt like in terms of iteration for content topics and scripting and things like that, that it just didn’t really feel right.
And I was tired of guessing what people wanna hear me talk about. So instead, I decided, starting with this episode that I wanted to answer real questions that I get. And why did you write a book is definitely a real question that I get on a regular basis. So I wanna start answering your real questions, whether I get that on LinkedIn, a DM via like this one that I got.
I’m also gonna be looking at email questions as well as in detail the questions that I get during my event Q&A’s since I do speak to very large audiences on a regular basis. So if you’d like to ask me a question to cover in a future episode, please make sure anytime any of my episodes, comment below or send me a DM or even email me.
It’s team@corrielo.com [00:19:00] and I would be glad to answer your questions here and test out this format and let me know how you like it in the comments too. Also, based on what I shared today about my book that’s coming out on May 12th, if you are interested in pre-ordering it, you could find that at the link in the show notes as well.
It’s corrielo.com/overwhelmculpritbook and also in the show notes there you’ll find other ways that you could work with me and learn more about me. So all the information is right there for you. So hopefully you found this valuable. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with me here today and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
I’ll see you then.
Speaker 3: Thanks for checking out the next step with Corrie Lo. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a review. Together we’ll transform overwhelm into action and we’ll keep taking the next step towards competent leadership. See you next time.
Thanks for checking out the next step with Corrie Lo If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a review. Together we’ll transform overwhelm into action and we’ll keep taking the next step [00:20:00] towards competent leadership. See you next time.