A Memoir and Method for the Woman Who Saves Everyone Except Herself
Coming late fall 2026 / winter 2027
There is a version of this book Marissa planned to write.
It was a leadership book.
Organized. Practical. Evidence-based.
The kind of book organizations buy in bulk and give to their high-potential employees at the annual conference. The kind of book that sits on the shelf next to Covey and Maxwell and gets dog-eared in the chapters about strategy and execution. That was the book she had been building toward for over a decade.
This is not that book.
This is the book that happened when the life she was living caught up with the methodology she was teaching — and refused to let her keep them separate.
Make Shift Happen follows one woman’s fifty-year journey from a childhood defined by instability and inherited trauma to the discovery of a proven framework for transformation — and the moment she finally understood that the framework she had been teaching others was the very work she still needed to do herself.
This is not a domestic violence memoir. This is a leadership book with receipts.
The abuse is present — it spans nearly thirty years — but it is a subplot. The real story is about a high-achieving woman who built an impressive life above the surface while slowly losing herself underneath it. A woman who became an executive director, an entrepreneur, a consultant to hundreds of organizations, a coach to thousands of leaders — and who still had to get on her knees in a New York City apartment and ask God whether this was really the best available to her before the real shift could begin.
The methodology that emerged from that reckoning —
SHIFT 2.0
— is the culmination of over a decade of work with individuals, groups, and organizations navigating significant change. It works because it was built from the inside of a life that needed it, not the outside of a theory about it.
Change is inevitable.
Growth is possible.
SHIFT is intentional.
Who is this book for?
This book is for the high-achieving woman who has built something impressive and is privately wondering why it doesn’t feel the way she thought it would.
She leads organizations, runs businesses, raises families, serves communities. She is competent and capable and quietly exhausted. She has read the leadership books. She has attended the conferences. She has done some version of the work. And she still feels like something essential is missing — something she cannot quite name because naming it would require her to stop moving long enough to hear what the silence has been trying to tell her.
She is also the woman who has survived something. A relationship that cost her more than she has fully accounted for. A career that built momentum while something else eroded. A pattern she can see in retrospect but could not see while she was inside it.
She doesn’t think of herself as a survivor — that word belongs to someone else’s story. But she is. And she is ready, finally, to understand what surviving actually produced in her and what it is going to take to build something new on that foundation.
is the first book in a series built on the SHIFT Methodology™.
Book 1
Make Shift Happen®
The memoir-methodology hybrid.
Coming 2026/2027.
Book 2
The SHIFT Methodology
The formal methodology and workbook for individuals, coaches, and organizations.
Book 3+
SHIFT Applied
The methodology applied to specific contexts: divorce, entrepreneurship, organizational change, ministry, and more.
Be the first to know.
Join the waitlist for release date announcements, pre-order information, and early access. And if you’re dreaming of hosting a Make Shift Happen Book Club — tell us that too. We’re planning something big.
Buying for your organization?
Looking to purchase books in bulk for your leadership cohort, ERG, women’s program, or conference? We’d love to talk. Volume pricing is available.
