Available now
Have you ever read a clinical chart?
Perfect-bound · 64pp
I’m Verena, a clinician. Sixteen years in, still practising. I assess and treat people, and I read the body before I read the chart. The chart says functioning. The body says otherwise: the jaw clenched tight enough to bring on migraines, the digestion that has been off for months, the sleep that comes apart at four in the morning, the blood pressure that creeps up, year by year. On paper, the person in front of me is fine.
There is a name for what I’m reading. Overfunctioning. Carrying more than your share, running on a system that has been bracing for years. The highest performers are often the ones who complain the least. They don’t seek care. They’re assumed to be well. We are conditioned to celebrate high performance without ever supporting it, and so the cost is praised, and never counted.
Medicine names the symptom, treats it, and sends them on their way. I built my career on the opposite instinct. I turn toward. I put words to what healthcare lacked language for, and I help people feel and face what they have spent a lifetime avoiding.
The Cost of Capable™ is a framework for the individuals and institutions contending with the cost of contingent belonging. This book is its beginning. It is for the people inside those charts, and for everyone who learned that belonging had to be earned.
A clinically informed, research-based framework on the hidden cost of high performance.
Prices in CAD, plus tax · print includes the digital edition · compare the two editions →
An Evening with Verena Rizg: The Cost of Capable™ Live
August 22 · Halifax Central Library, fifth floor — after the library closes to the public, with views of the city and the harbour at dusk.
I’ve kept my spoken word close these past few years, sharing it only in private spaces. On August 22, I’m bringing it back for one night only. One stage, one room, and I don’t know when I’ll do this again.
Live and unfiltered. The story behind the book, the pieces that didn’t make the page, and what it cost to write them down.
Your ticket includes a signed colour copy placed in your hands that night, and the digital edition the moment you reserve. $111 — the book alone is most of it.
Seventy in the room. Intimate, intentional, and only once.
The same person. Both technically accurate.
“Patient presents with low mood, fatigue, and disrupted sleep. Denies suicidal ideation. Functioning at work.”
“Patient runs a team and was promoted twice in three years. Answers email at eleven at night and again at five. Apologized twice before sitting down. When asked about sleep, laughed.”
The first note keeps you at a distance. The second reached somewhere you weren’t expecting. That is the difference between describing a person and seeing one.
It is also the difference between a wellness book and this one.
The risk of being named
Visibility is dangerous.
Name a person precisely, the promotions, the apology, the laugh, and you take a risk. They might recognize themselves and feel exposed. They might close the book. Or they might keep reading because, for the first time in years, someone described them without trying to fix them.
Naming the real condition instead of gesturing at “burnout” has a cost. It loses the readers who wanted a softer mirror. It finds the ones who have waited a long time to be described accurately.
The Cost of Capable™ is written intentionally. It won’t be for everyone.
What The Cost of Capable™ does
This isn’t ten steps. It’s a clinical map, and a beginning. If you already know something is wrong but can’t find the language for it, the language is here.
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Occasional letters from Verena — the work, the writing, and what comes next. You’ll be the first to know.
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From sixteen years of practice
I built this framework from inside the systems where the cost runs highest. Federal corrections, migrant health, community health, acute care, occupational health. I built the first clinic of its kind in Canadian Armed Forces history.
I have watched capable people come apart while the chart read “functioning.” This book is what I wish I could have handed each of them, and what I wish someone had handed me, earlier than they did.
For some of us, the cost compounds. If you were useful before you were allowed to be a person, if your belonging was always conditional, you are in here too. Plainly. Without coding around it.
What’s inside
A perfect-bound, 64-page book. Full-colour interior, editorial layout, designed to be read slowly.
- A precise vocabulary for what many capable people experience, including terms you have likely been searching for without knowing it.
- A scored, five-domain self-assessment that shows where the cost is gathering, and how much it is already taking.
- The three pillars of the framework — Invisibility, Overextension, Isolation — in language you can actually use.
- The four behavioural patterns capable people fall into, and how to recognize your own.
- Reflection pages built to be written in. The work happens with a pen in your hand.
- Clinical grounding throughout. Every observation anchored to the literature.
“Well shoot. That’s what I’ve been carrying.”
“There are very few resources that make me stop and think, ‘Well shoot. That’s what I’ve been carrying.’ The Cost of Capable was one of them. After years of working in systems that quietly rewarded over-functioning, self-abandonment, and carrying more than any one person should, Verena Rizg’s framework gave me language for patterns I hadn’t fully recognized in myself (turns out ‘being capable’ isn’t always the flex we think it is). The more I’ve understood those patterns, the more intentional I’ve become about how I show up for myself and for the people I sit alongside every day. It’s also changed what I notice in the therapy room, helping me recognize these patterns with more curiosity, compassion, and a little less self-blame. This is one of those resources I’ll keep coming back to, both personally and professionally.”
— Hannah Cavicchi, MSW, RSW, Clinical Social Worker
This book offers it: language for what you carry without a name, a map of where it gathers, an honest look at what you can and can’t change.
You were taught your worth is your usefulness. Setting it down isn’t indulgence. It’s refusal.
This book moves you from insight to action.
Two editions
Read the same words; hold them differently.
Digital
- Sixty-four-page PDF, sent within minutes
- Prompts you can fill in on screen or print
- The full clinical map — all three pillars
Perfect-bound print
- Perfect-bound, full-colour interior
- Built to be marked up by hand and returned to
- Includes the digital edition at no extra cost
- Delivered in 9–11 business days in Canada, 11–15 in the US
Bring The Cost of Capable™ to your organization
Leadership teams, clinical services, cohorts, conferences. Volume orders for teams and events — digital, print, or both — with the option to pair the book with the flagship keynote, so every seat leaves with the language in hand. For keynote engagements, signed copies for every attendee can be part of the arrangement.
Inquire about team & event orders →