Being "High Maintenance" Might Be Your Secret Weapon
There's a term that gets thrown at ambitious women as though it's an insult: high maintenance. If you ask to be paid what you're worth, expect clear communication, refuse to settle for mediocre service, uninspiring relationships or vague answers in a business meeting, someone, somewhere, will inevitably decide that this is a personality defect rather than a reflection of your standards.
As someone who works in PR and personal branding coaching, I've seen this repeatedly, particularly among high-achieving women. The women who are the most visible, the most accomplished and the most self-assured are often labelled "too much" simply because they refuse to accept less than they deserve. I want to challenge that narrative. What if being "high maintenance" isn't a flaw at all? What if it simply comes down to perspective?
When people call you high maintenance, what they often really mean is: your standards require more effort than I was prepared to give and that makes people uncomfortable.
The truth is that standards and boundaries create friction. People become unsettled when they realise they cannot access you, your time, your talent or your energy on terms that solely benefit them. Think about the people we admire most in business and in life. The people who built influential brands, negotiated significant deals, protected their peace, created wealth and shaped culture. Almost every one of them would have been called difficult, demanding or intimidating by someone who expected them to be more accommodating. The world rarely rewards women for being easy. Yet history tends to remember the people who had the courage to honour their value and stand firmly in it.
I know this isn't easy, particularly if you were raised to follow the rules, keep the peace, fit in and avoid disappointing others. Many women have been socialised to equate likeability with worthiness. But if you want to build something meaningful, create real impact or become the person you know you're capable of being, there will come a moment when you have to choose between being comfortable and being courageous.
Perhaps being called high maintenance is not an insult after all. Perhaps it is simply evidence that you have standards, boundaries and a clear understanding of your value. And in a world that often encourages women to shrink themselves, that may be one of the most powerful things you can be.
A lot of us, particularly women and especially Black women are raised to equate being "easy" with being liked. Don't ask for too much. Don't take up too much space. Be grateful, be flexible, be low-cost to deal with. It's a survival strategy that gets handed down, often with good intentions, because the world hasn't always made room for women who ask for more even though they deserve it. But there's a cost because every time you shrink your standard to make someone else comfortable, you train the people around you - clients, peers, partners, employers - to expect less of themselves when dealing with you. You become the path of least resistance. And the path of least resistance rarely leads anywhere impressive.
Here's the shift I want you to make: stop treating your standards as something you need to apologise for and start treating them as a filter that does useful work for you.
In business, being "high maintenance" (or another way of putting it “strict”) about deadlines, communication and quality weeds out the clients who were never going to value your work properly anyway.
In relationships, having standards around how you're spoken to and treated filters out people who were only ever offering you the bare minimum and who don’t respect you.
In your career, refusing to accept vague feedback or being overlooked without explanation forces the people around you to actually engage with your growth.
The people who stay after you raise your standard are the ones worth keeping. The people who leave were never going to serve you at your full value anyway.
This isn't a call to be unreasonable or unkind, there's a difference between having standards and being difficult for its own sake. The goal isn't friction for the sake of friction. A few ways to practise this without it feeling like conflict:
State the standard plainly, once. You don't need to justify it three times or soften it into oblivion. "I need 48 hours' notice for changes" is a complete sentence.
Let the reaction tell you something. If someone bristles at a reasonable expectation, that's useful data about how they'll treat you going forward.
Stop pre-apologising. Notice how often "sorry, but…" creeps in before a perfectly reasonable ask. Drop the sorry.
Expect the same standard from yourself. The credibility behind high standards is that you hold them for your own work and for who you are too not just for what you feel like you’re owed.
Being called high maintenance by the wrong person is often a sign you're doing something right. It means you're no longer negotiating yourself down to be palatable. It means your time, your work and your presence have a price and you're not discounting it to keep the peace. So I want you to remember that the next time someone uses that word like it's a warning label, take it as a compliment instead. It usually means you already know what you're worth. Now the only job left is making sure the people around you catch up.