It’s Not What You Think: Why Mindset Work (Alone) Won’t Resolve The Obstacles In Your Business
“You need to change your mindset” is the go-to refrain of all manner of coaches, business coaches especially, to explain away the otherwise completely mysterious reasons why their clients seem to be self-sabotaging. In a culture that loves to look to the brain and cognitive function as both the cause and the cure to pretty much everything that ails it, this appears to be a solid guess. If our thoughts create our reality, then it makes sense to assume that changing our mindset will finally manifest the results that have been eluding us. Right?
At first, it even appears to work! A new insight or mindset does seem to make a difference for a bit, to create more ease, to move us in the direction where we’re wanting to go. We’re cautiously excited and more than a little bit relieved: something is working at last, we’ve finally landed on the right solution after months, if not years, of searching. Maybe, just maybe, there isn’t anything wrong with us…
NOT ALL THAT GLITTERS IS GOLD
Eventually though, the shine wears off, and we find ourselves pretty much where we started: stuck, giving ourselves a hard time about it, and a bit closer to being fully convinced that we are, in fact, fundamentally fucked up. We feel broken, bad, and irredeemable.
What was once the bright and shining promise that a fresh mindset is going to lift us out of the doldrums and into the light of the sun where we belong ends us convincing us anew that there is something fundamentally wrong with us instead.
Spoiler alert: there’s nothing wrong with you. Never was. You just brought the entirely wrong tool for the job. You brought a weed eater to put out a fire. You brought a colander to use as a parachute. It was never going to work.
It was never your thoughts or your mind that was the problem, and so there is no way that mindset could solve a problem that it never caused in the first place.
YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY
If mindset work is doing it for you, if it’s yielding the results you want, and your work is abundant and flowing, great! Amazing! You don’t need this blog post. Carry on doing awesome world-changing work for your clients and forget I ever brought this up. Go forth and prosper. No need to @ me with your disagreements and rebuttals.
But I suspect that if you’ve read this far, you’ve experienced firsthand the sting of discovering that mindset work failed on its shining promise. I see you. I hear you. I’ve really, really been there.
I’m going to confess something to you: what I’m about to propose might not be the magic bullet for you, either. It really truly was for me, and I absolutely, fervently believe that it can be for you, too. (So long as your definition of magic includes really fucking arduous, long, and messy work.) We each need a multiplicity of tactics, deployed in a specific, unique order tailored to our individual circumstances, and this approach may be one such tactic for you.
I do think that what I'm going to offer to you in this blog post might just be the ticket to access the kind of ease, flow, and success in your work that you haven’t given up on because part of you is convinced that it’s possible.
I am firmly convinced that that part of you is absolutely fucking right. It is possible.
MINDSET: CURE-ALL, OR RED HERRING?
Mindset work (and its close cousin, mindfulness) are the darling approaches to solving problems of a colonialist, white supremacist, patriarchal society that is mired in toxic individualism, and which overvalues intellectual and cognitive processes at the expense of what is embodied, felt, intuited, and relational.
But mindset work can never be the true solution of a problem the causes of which its proponents have never accurately assessed. We assume that we either don’t have enough information about the situation, or that we haven’t thought hard enough about it to really understand what’s going on. In either case, the solution is more–or better–thinking.
And that’s a very handy solution in late-stage capitalism, because information is so easily sold.
What’s really going on, the reason that we feel stuck and can’t seem to move forward towards our dreams and desires, is that we don’t feel safe. It’s not our brain that’s holding us back, it’s our nervous system that’s hitting the brakes. And there’s no amount of thinking that can make us feel safe. None. Believe me, I HAVE TRIED. And so, I am sure, have you.
The biggest (and, arguably, the hardest) part of running a business is making decisions. In order to make the kind of decisions that are grounded and values-based, that will move our business in the direction of our dreams and desires, and help us embody a just and liberated world for all bodies, we are going to need to feel safe in ours. Making decisions is about seeing clearly, and we can’t see clearly when we don’t feel safe. We can’t skip nervous system regulation and jump to choice; choice is the essence of regulation.
SYMPTOMS VS ROOT CAUSES
One of the most compelling reasons why mindset works feels like it’s going to be the magic bullet to solve our woes is that, so often, our thoughts are so painful to bear. There’s a loud and rude peanut gallery up in our brains pelting us with trash and insults, and those words are so harsh and cutting, we’d give everything to make them stop. It makes sense to assume that if we switch the script the voices are acting out, that if the lines we feed them are kinder, more confident, more full of self-love and abundance, then we’d be able to act the part out as well.
The flaw in that reasoning is, we assume that because our thoughts are experienced at the level of cognition, their roots originate in the mind as well. But that would be like mistaking a flower for the whole plant: because we can see and smell the bloom, because it’s so showy and desiring of our attention, we completely fail to notice the stem and the roots, and assume the bloom is all that there is, when in fact, what dictates the fate of the flower is buried deep into the ground.
Do we need to stop and smell the roses? Absolutely, no question. I’m in no way suggesting that we pay no attention to our thoughts.
But if you want a lush and colorful garden whose scent makes you swoon, you’re going to need to be mostly concerned with the quality of of the soil, and the strength of the roots, because if your garden is failing, the flowers are only going to be able to show you symptoms, not the root causes. If you want to find out what’s really going on in the garden of your mind, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty and dig down.
DIGGING IN THE DIRT
It’s easy to understand the lure and the appeal of cognitive approaches to getting unstuck, because they appear so straightforward, almost clinical: extract bad thought, implant new, better thought, stand back and enjoy results. No muss, no fuss. That’s certainly the promise of the “you just need to change your mindset” crowd.
In truth, what IS going to yield the kind of revolutionary and lasting change that you’re really about is going to require digging into the dirt, exposing the roots, and finding out what’s causing your thoughts to be so harmful in the first place. I’m going to save you the suspense: I have a pretty good idea of what you’ll find in the muck, and it’s more than likely developmental trauma.
I define trauma as a rupture in the relationship with the self that occurs as a result of our fundamental, biological need for relational safety not being met in the early years of our life. We respond to this rupture by developing what in NARM is referred to as adaptive survival strategies that will help us get our needs met, and our thoughts, or mindset, are the foot soldiers of these survival strategies: they make sure the commands are executed.
Once we uncover that the root cause of our struggle is developmental trauma, then we can get to work and actually repair the rupture. But to do so we’re going to need a new set of tools other than mindset and mindfulness, because trauma isn’t a cognitive process: it’s embodied, relational, systemic, and ongoing.
THE ISSUES ARE IN THE TISSUES
It makes sense that mindset work is the go-to in a dominant culture where the body is vilified at every turn. Our relationships with our bodies are fraught at best, and billion-dollar industries (and the entire structures of white supremacy and capitalism) are designed to make sure it stays that way.
But the truth is: we are, first and foremost, embodied creatures. Our bodies are how we connect with each other, how we experience the world around us, as well as the source of both pain and pleasure, and the keeper of our medicine. We can’t feel safe without feeling, and we can’t feel without our bodies.
We like to think (ha! See what I did there?) that the mind reigns supreme over our bodies, but our brains are evolutionarily much, much younger than our nervous systems, and as such, don’t exert as much control over our behavior as the nervous system does.
Also, it’s more than likely that any developmental or attachment trauma you’ve experienced occurred well before the full development of your own prefrontal cortex, which doesn’t fully mature until the age of 25. So any embodied feelings of lack of relational and emotional safety get programmed into your nervous system (and deploy their own set of protections and strategies) well before your thinking brain comes online.
There is also the issue of communication between the nervous system and the brain. About 80%-90% of nerve fibers travel from the nervous system to the brain, while only 10%-20% of nerve fibers travel from the brain to the nervous system. This means that it’s pretty much impossible for the thinking, rational brain to convince the body that it is safe; and that signals of danger coming from the body are going to be taken as gospel, even if the brain holds a different story.
The root cause of developmental trauma is embodied: since it happened before language, before thought, before explicit memories could form, all that we had was a felt sense that we were in danger. And since the job of our nervous system is survival, if we felt in danger because we were alone with our needs and feelings, our nervous system is going to make this information high priority, and is going to flag whatever circumstances were perceived as a threat so that next time we experience something similar, our adaptive survival strategies can be deployed to make sure we survive.
It’s our bodies–via our nervous systems–that decide whether or not we feel safe. And it’s only when we feel safe that we can think clearly and make choices based on our values and desires. Mindset work can’t do jack shit to make us feel safe–and when we don’t feel safe, our power to choose goes right out the window.
NO HUMAN IS AN ISLAND
Another beloved fiction of our dominant culture is the idea of the rugged individualist pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and needing help from no one. Part of the allure of mindset work is that it should involve no relational input: just me and my brain, swapping out thoughts I don’t like with thoughts I do like.
But again, this ignores a fundamental truth about who we are: as much as we are embodied creatures, we are relational creatures as well. Whether we feel safe or unsafe is going to be experienced in the context of relationships, and we are in relationship with everything–with ourselves, with each other, with our communities, with nature, with Source of Spirit–whether we like to think so or not.
Developmental trauma always occurs in the context of relationships, usually our earliest relationships: those with our parents, or caregivers. We don’t feel safe in our bodies because, on some level, we didn’t feel safe with our caregivers.
(This has nothing to do with whether our parents loved us, provided for us, or wanted the best for us, and has everything to do with our parents’ own nervous systems–whether they themselves felt safe, whether they were regulated and available to co-regulate with us.)
If trauma occurred in relationships, then trauma repair must happen in relationships as well. The good news there is that the repair doesn’t have to happen in the same relationship as the rupture. We don’t need to repair in the relationship with our parents: we can repair in the relationship with our bodies, with another safe person or community, with nature, or with Source or Spirit. For most of us, true, lasting trauma repair is going to involve all of these relationships.
In any case: it’s not going to be a matter of just me and my brain. I’m going to have to involve at least my body. And since our early trauma hinges on the fact that, as young children, we felt alone with our pain, we’re going to have a really hard time doing trauma repair outside of safe community.
Mindset work sells us short by convincing us we don’t need anyone else, when the truth is, we cannot learn to feel safe again on our own.
FUCK THE SYSTEM
There is no such thing as a purely individual creature in nature: every plant, insect, animal, fungi is part of a complex, interwoven system of relationships, and the same is true for us. We cannot heal and repair our nervous system without considering the health of the larger systems that influence it, any more than you can grow a healthy, thriving flower in toxic soil.
Outside of the circle of our closest, earliest relationships, the systems of oppression whose weight is borne by our bodies are the next biggest influence on our nervous systems and whether or not we feel safe.
The systems of colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, antisemitism, ableism, and more, are designed so that no one that lives inside of them feels safe. When we, the intended victims of these systems, do not feel safe in our bodies, we cannot feel safe with each other. When we don’t feel safe with each other, we cannot organize to either provide mutual aid to our communities, or mount protests against said aggressors. All this keeps us feeling alone and broken, which ensures that we can be controlled and exploited for the gains of the few (rich, cis white males) at the top.
Our minds alone are no match for these systems. In fact, more often than not, our thoughts (including any fresh new mindset that we try to employ) actively reinforce the tropes of the system, working against our best interests to serve the agenda of those who benefit from oppressing us. The ubiquitousness of toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing in the very spheres that tout the benefits of mindset work & mindfulness are proof that our thoughts can easily be manipulated to make us feel unsafe and gaslit.
When it comes to the harm caused by these systems, more often than not, the call is coming from inside the house.
I really understand the appeal here. We feel so powerless in the face of these oppressive forces that we’re looking for any means of control to bring us relief, even if this relief comes at the cost of negating our own pain. Pretending that there is no pain at all is an attractive alternative to having to deal with our pain (ouch), and perhaps this kind of denial is the mindset work OG.
To quote the late, great James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The more we deny our pain and refuse to face it, the less we are likely to mobilize to change the structures that cause it. In this way, our mindset busywork of swapping thoughts and beliefs serve the interests of the aforementioned systems of oppression by ensuring what we never address the root causes of our stuckness, that we never learn to feel safe again, and therefore that we stay pliant and docile.
Mindset work is not how we get free. Many of us entrepreneurs have a deep desire to see the work that we do be an agent of change, justice, and transformation for our world–and I truly believe that it is not only possible, but imperative, that we make it so. Which is yet another great reason why mindset work isn’t going to solve our business problems: we cannot hope to be saved by the tools owned by the masters whose house we’re trying to tear down. (To adapt Audre Lorde’s powerful quote.)
THE ONGOING SAGA OF TRAUMA
The last characteristic of developmental trauma that we’ll explore is the fact that trauma is ongoing. Because the events that imprinted in our bodies as trauma happened long ago, it’s very common to mistake trauma as being a thing that’s fixed in the past, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Trauma is a living, adapting, ongoing reality in our bodies. It’s not a one-and-done thing: it’s an everyday thing.
The proponents of mindset work love a good epiphany. The assumption is that one perceptive or mindset shift can have a cathartic and irreversible effect on our reality. I call this the “yoga retreat effect.” When I taught and studied yoga, I attended and facilitated countless workshops and retreats, each of them offering some kind of transformation. Don’t we engage in this kind of thing because we’re seeking some kind of change? Then what could be better than the feeling of a lightning bolt striking us from on high with insight and poignancy, all the while our bodies are feeling warm and limber, and we’ve formed an instant bond with our fellow retreatants whom we are now instant besties with?
There’s not a thing wrong with this kind of experience: in fact, it’s one of my own personal favorites, and one that I have yet to stop chasing. The problem is when we expect these rarefied and spectacular moments to create instant and lasting change. The gift of these kinds of moments is to show us an embodied sense of what is possible for us. But it would be a mistake to confuse the revelation for true transformation.
Because of trauma’s ongoing nature, it cannot be resolved in an instant, no matter how dramatic or profound. (A possible exception to this are mystical experiences–but those aren’t specifically what I’m talking about here.) Relying on epiphanies to transform our trauma is setting ourselves up for a lifetime of self-gaslighting, as we attempt to convince ourselves that we can’t possibly still be hurting because we had that big cathartic moment of release at that cacao ceremony. (Sound familiar?)
Feeling safe in our bodies is a moment-to-moment process that occurs within the confines of the relationship we have with ourselves, and we’ve been in this relationship (or running away from it) for exactly as long as we’ve been alive. The stories, patterns, and strategies that we’ve developed over the years run in deep and stubborn grooves inside our nervous systems. These hardened furrows are not going to budge overnight.
Adaptive survival strategies eat your affirmations for breakfast. They don’t care. They’re in it for the long game and they’re not looking for a quick & cheap way out. They’re invested in staying hidden, and they’re sneaky AF, so they’ll always find some other new spot to pop up in. Until you start the process over again in your next workshop.
Again, from the perspective of capitalism, this makes sense: it’s easier to sell retreats and workshops when you promise a dramatic transformation. And when people experience big moments that feel life-changing, they may feel like they got their money’s worth. But what happens when everyone leaves the rarified atmosphere of the wellness retreat and goes back home, and the rubber meets the road? Your toughened old patterns will be waiting for you at the door, and you’ll return to blaming yourself still being stuck, and start looking for the next shiny thing. It’s a vicious cycle that makes you very profitable.
OK, SO WHAT NOW?
Simply put: in order to get unstuck in your business, to be able to make the choices that will move you in the direction of your dreams and desires, what you need isn’t to shift your mindset, what you need is to learn to trust your body and to feel safe. Because the root cause is developmental trauma, not your thoughts and beliefs, you’ll need a solution that is embodied, relational, systemic, and ongoing, not a flashy and cathartic braingasm.
In order to heal trauma, we need to go back to the roots: we need to dig down to find what was missing in our early years, what nutrients the soil that we were grown in was lacking, and we need to add those elements back in. We need to bring witness, validation, tenderness, compassion, gentleness, steadiness, kindness.
Is some of this process going to involve new language, new concepts, new beliefs, and yes–possible even, new affirmations? No doubt about it. Are we going to be able to repair our trauma entirely without the support of our brains? Absolutely not. That would be impossible.
But what we’re not going to do is to ask an anvil to do the work or a reciprocal saw. We’re not bringing a sack of potatoes to a pillow fight. We can only change what we can face, and what we’re facing is an issue of safety, not mindset.
Don’t try to do it alone. This is not your fault. It never was your fault. It should've never been yours to fix in the first place, and while it’s your responsibility now, you shouldn’t try to bear it alone. I’ve recently heard developmental trauma being described this way: it’s like trash that’s been thrown in your yard. It’s not your trash, but it is your yard. And while it’s (unjustly, sadly) your responsibility to clean it up now, that doesn’t mean you have to do the dirty work by yourself.
I’m teaching a free training on September 15th at 12pm Pacific/2pm Central/3pm Eastern titled How To Rewire Your Nervous System for Success. I’ll teach you how to learn to feel safe in your body as your business grows, so that you can make grounded, values-based decisions to move you closer to your vision, and so that your nervous system doesn’t throw on the brakes when you start to get really successful. (Because it’ll tend to do that. Your nervous system doesn’t give a shit about your business.)
I believe that we can feel safe & repair our trauma as we grow our businesses, and that businesses that are run by people who feel safe in their bodies can and will change the world. If you do too, then join me on September 15th and let’s co-create a safe and just world for everyone, one embodied entrepreneur at a time.