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Louise Verrall

For the woman sitting in the car park.

You go in anyway.
You always go in.

Louise Verrall

The Fracture Line The Fracture Line: Leading from the Break

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The phone rang at 2:47 in the morning.

One hand on the phone. One hand typing to the police.

At nine o'clock, I ran the morning huddle. I ran it well.

Nobody in that room knew anything about the night.

This is a book about that gap.

Coming soon

About the book

There is a gap between being capable and being okay.

At 2:47 in the morning, you manage the crisis. At nine, you run the meeting. Nobody sees what happens in between.

The Fracture Line begins in that space. Part memoir, part leadership book, it moves from the private cost of a life spent holding everyone else together to the values that remain when the performance stops.

It is honest about the cost of holding everything together, and practical about what comes next.

Genre
Memoir · Leadership
Release
Coming soon
Formats
To be announced

Where to buy

  • AmazonComing soon
  • BooktopiaComing soon
  • Your local bookshopComing soon

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Who it's for

Written for three kinds of people.

  1. The self-leader

    The person in the car park, managing the gap alone for longer than anyone should.

  2. The leader of others

    The person who runs the rooms and decides what it feels like to work there.

  3. The person living

    Anyone who has never thought of themselves as a leader, and picked this up anyway.

Inside the book

Three parts. One becoming.

Part one

The Collapse

The life you perform.

“The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself.”

Plato

Within these pages

  1. The Competent Mask
  2. When the Body Votes
  3. Saving Everyone Else
  4. The Pendulum
Illustration: a woman sits in her car in a rainy office car park, her face reflected in the rear-view mirror.

Read a little

The Competent Mask

Chapter one · What high performance is really hiding

The Altruism–Self-Care Pendulum

Care for others. Include yourself.

The framework at the heart of the book. Move the pendulum to explore it.

You are part of the equation.

Care can include other people and you. The practice is not perfect stillness. It is noticing, adjusting and returning.

“What was underneath was not damage.

What was underneath was the foundation.”

From The Competent Mask

A note before you read

This book contains detailed and unfiltered descriptions of PTSD, anxiety, depression, disordered eating, sexual assault, family violence, suicide and ongoing threat.

If you are in crisis, please reach out. You do not have to be in the worst moment of your life to deserve support. You can reach out on an ordinary Tuesday.

Not recovery.

Becoming.

You are not going back to who you were. There is someone still to become.

Get the book Meet Louise

Chapter one · What high performance is really hiding

The Competent Mask

I want to take you back to a specific Tuesday.

Not the morning of the phone call. An ordinary Tuesday — the kind that had no defining feature except that it held everything, quietly, in the way all the Tuesdays did during those years. The kind that looked, from the outside, exactly like a competent person having a competent day.

I am in the car park.

I am always in the car park.

There is a woman sitting in a car in the space between who she actually is and who she is about to walk through those doors and perform being. Twenty metres of bitumen between the private self and the professional one. The car park smells of warm asphalt and cigarette smoke from the bus shelter at the far end.

It is the smell of an ordinary Tuesday in an ordinary suburb — the complete, indifferent ordinariness of a world that does not know what it is about to ask of her.

An excerpt from The Fracture Line by Louise Verrall.

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