The Missing Ingredient in Your Mindset Work

For two years, Monica was a rock star at her company. Then she started missing deadlines, forgetting conversations, and seeming scattered in meetings.

Her boss’s first thought: She’s gotten complacent. She’s checked out.

She hadn’t. Her nervous system had.

In this episode, I share Monica’s story. She's a senior leader who hadn’t lost her skill or her drive, but had lost access to her own regulated nervous system after a series of events in her personal life collided over the same six weeks. What looked like disengagement from the outside was overwhelm on the inside, and no amount of accountability or performance conversation was going to reach her there.

I get into why mindset work, the tool most of us reach for first, only works when your nervous system is regulated enough to use it. I walk through the difference between mindset work and nervous system regulation, why one sits on top of the other, and the predictable reasons high-achieving women who lead stay stuck trying to think their way through a state their body hasn’t caught up to yet.

I also share the specific practices I use before, during, and after hard conversations to check my own state first, drawn from years studying embodied processing and root cause therapy.

In this episode: 

• Why dysregulation looks like disengagement from the outside, and what’s actually happening underneath it 
• The moment a “what’s wrong with her performance” conversation has to become a “what’s happening to her capacity” conversation instead 
• Why mindset work depends entirely on your current state, and what happens when you try to use it without one 
• The four reasons high-achieving women who lead stay stuck applying mindset tools to a nervous system problem 
• The real distinction between mindset work and nervous system regulation, and why one can’t do the other’s job 
• My own before, during, and after practices for checking my nervous system state before a hard conversation

This week’s permission: You don’t have to think your way out of a nervous system in crisis. Before your next hard conversation, stop asking what you should say and start asking what state you’re actually in. Regulate first. The strategy will still be there.