The Missing Ingredient in Your Mindset Work

Issue #17

By Debbie Lawrence

Read Time: 9 minutes

For two years, Monica had been a rock star at her company.

As a senior leader, she was organized, proactive, and unflappable. Her boss, Elena, barely had to think about operations because Monica had it covered. If you’d asked anyone on that team who they’d want running the ship in a crisis, they would have said Monica without hesitation.

Then, over a six-week period, everything changed.

Monica started missing deadlines. Not by a lot but consistently and small mistakes were creeping into her work. She seemed scattered in meetings and forgot conversations she and Elena had just had.

Elena’s first thought was: She’s gotten complacent. She’s checked out.

“I’ve noticed some things slipping. What’s going on?” Elena asked her.

Monica apologized and said she’d do better but nothing changed.

Elena got firmer. “This isn’t like you. The quality has to come back up.”

Monica teared up, apologized again, and worked late all week. The next week, similar problems surfaced.

Elena brought it to one of our coaching sessions. “Before you decide she’s the problem,” I said, “have you asked if something’s affecting her capacity?”

Elena hadn’t.

At their next one-on-one, she tried a different approach. “I’m seeing changes in your performance. Before we talk about a plan to address it, I need to ask if there’s something happening that’s affecting your bandwidth.”

Monica broke down.

Her son had been diagnosed with autism six weeks earlier, the same week her mother fell and broke her hip. Monica was managing therapies, medical appointments, and insurance battles, all while trying to look normal at work because “everyone has stuff going on.”

She’d been averaging four hours of sleep a night and was having panic attacks in her car before walking into the building each morning.

What neither Elena nor Monica understood was that Monica hadn’t lost her commitment to her role or her drive. What she’d lost was the benefit of a regulated nervous system.

Monica knew how to produce results. She was highly skilled and wired to keep performing. She was the kind of leader who kept her personal business out of the workplace and intended every day to show up by bringing her highest and best. What she was missing had nothing to do with capability or willingness. Her nervous system was in constant crisis mode, and no amount of mindset work was going to reach her there.

That’s because dysregulation looks like disengagement. Think of it as overwhelm wearing a disguise.

You can’t coach someone out of a capacity crisis with more accountability or asking her to reframe her thoughts, and she can’t will her way out of it either. What Monica needed wasn’t more pressure. It was support and accommodation, starting with someone naming what was really happening in her body.

A pattern I know from both sides

This pattern is one of the most common and least understood patterns I see with high-achieving women who lead. I am especially attuned to it because for years I saw it in myself.

We’re taught that changing our thoughts changes our life, and there’s truth in that. I’m a certified coach trained in tools grounded in cognitive and behavioural psychology, and they’ve served me well, both personally and professionally. Mindset work is a real strategy but it depends entirely on your current state, and that’s the part almost nobody tells you.

Regulated vs. dysregulated

When your nervous system is fully regulated, you have access to your critical thinking functions. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for problem-solving, strategic thinking, and language, is online and running at capacity. As a result, decisions feel straightforward. Follow-through feels doable. That’s the comfort zone of your autonomic nervous system  where you’re in a state of being cool, calm, and able to comfortably connect with the people around you.

When you are triggered or activated, your nervous system becomes dysregulated and none of what happens when you’re regulated is available to you, or available at full capacity, no matter how strong your mindset tools are. You can read every book, take every course, enroll in every coaching program, and still feel stuck, because the problem was never your capability or your willingness. It was your capacity.

The excuses that sound reasonable

The staying-stuck happens for predictable reasons. Here are a couple of the more common ones I hear (and before I studied the autonomic nervous system, I said them myself):

“I just need to think about this differently.” Reframing a thought works beautifully when your system is regulated. It does nothing when you’re in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, because the part of your brain that processes a reframe has gone offline. In other words you can’t think your way through it. You have to feel your way through it.

“Everyone has stuff going on. I need to push through.” This is the belief that kept Monica silent for six weeks. It sounds like resilience when it’s actually a nervous system running on fumes while making it look on the outside like you’re performing just fine.

“If I were more disciplined, I could handle this.” High-achieving women who lead default to this one fastest. It puts the failure on character instead of capacity, which means the fix always looks like more effort instead of more regulation.

“Slowing down isn’t an option right now.” This is often true in the moment but a nervous system in chronic crisis mode doesn’t distinguish between giving from a full cup and giving from an empty one. It just registers the load, and eventually the body adapts by shutting things down.

All of these sound reasonable. All of them keep you managing symptoms while the real issue, a dysregulated nervous system, goes unnamed.

Mindset work vs. nervous system regulation

For the past three years I have been immersed in studies related to embodied processing and root cause therapy. Here’s the distinction I wish someone had given me years ago that I gained through my studies and application: mindset work and nervous system regulation are not competing strategies. One sits on top of the other.

Mindset work looks like: examining a belief, reframing a thought, setting a goal, building a strategy, holding yourself accountable to a decision.

Nervous system regulation looks like: noticing what state you’re actually in before you try to think your way anywhere; recognizing and normalizing fight, flight, freeze, or fawn in your own body; and doing something physical to signal safety before you attempt anything cognitive.

The difference is that mindset work assumes your prefrontal cortex is already online. Nervous system regulation is what gets it back online in the first place.

Without regulation, mindset work is a tool with no power source. You can have the best framework in the world and still not be able to use it, because the part of your brain that applies frameworks isn’t available to you yet. I think a really good way to think about it is that the work that you need to do to regulate your nervous system is within your body. We call that embodied processing. Trying to do mindset work requires a cognitive application so we are trying to think our way through. The problem with this approach is that thinking is done with our brain which is disembodied.

Don’t go to the post office for milk

There’s a saying I grew up hearing: “Don’t go to the post office if you’re looking for milk.” It’s not a knock on the post office, it’s just not what a post office is built for. You can ask louder, wait in line longer, come back tomorrow but none of that changes what’s on the shelves, because stocking milk was never its job.

Your nervous system works the same way. When you’re dysregulated or activated into fight-or-flight, or shut down into freeze or fawn, your body has rerouted its resources toward survival. Think of it as scanning for threat, mobilizing, and bracing. Rather than looking at this as a malfunction, think of it as the system doing exactly what it’s built to do under perceived threat because it concludes that you are not safe. But it also means the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for strategic thinking, perspective-taking, and weighing trade-offs, isn’t well resourced in that moment. You’re asking a system that’s currently provisioned for a different job to hand you something it doesn’t stock right now.

So when you, as a leader, walk into a hard conversation, a high-stakes decision, or a conflict already activated and try to think your way through it, that’s the post office moment. You’re standing at the counter, frustrated that the milk isn’t there, when the real problem isn’t the thinking. It’s the state you’re trying to think from.

Here’s where the metaphor has to bend, though: the post office will never sell milk. That’s permanent. Unlike the post office, your nervous system isn’t in a permanent state. Once you’re out of threat mode and you’ve regulated, that same brain that couldn’t access strategy ten minutes ago is fully capable of it again. The work isn’t forcing yourself to think harder in the wrong state. It’s learning to recognize which store you’re standing in before you decide what to expect from yourself and knowing how to get to the one that carries milk.

What I do differently now

Once I understood this, I altered my approach. I used to start by planning my strategy. Now, before a hard conversation, whether it’s a performance discussion, a client call, or a tense moment, I check my state first.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Before: I do box breathing, four counts in, four counts hold, four counts out, four counts hold, five rounds. Or I do bilateral stimulation: tapping my knees left, right, left, right for thirty seconds. Both  signal to my nervous system that I’m safe before I walk into the room.

During: If I feel myself getting activated, I say out loud. “Can we pause for a moment?” If I can I leave the room so I can collect my thoughts. I try to get outside to be in sunshine and ideally around nature, both of which are antidotes for dysregulation. Plus there’s a real benefit in physically moving my body. I uncross my arms, plant my feet, and slow my breath, because slow breath signals safety faster than any thought does.

After: I decompress on purpose. A few lines in a journal, chanting (I love to chant), listening to music created for nervous system regulation, or calling a trusted friend. And I make myself acknowledge the hard thing I just did instead of rushing past it to the next task.

None of this replaces the mindset tools I’ve built over years of training. It’s what makes them usable because now I understand they will only take effect once I am in a state of regulation, which is code for safety.

Monica’s story isn’t really about Monica. It’s about how many women who lead are running their entire leadership on a nervous system that’s never been taught to regulate, and mistaking the resulting overwhelm for a personal failing.

Your turn

Before your next hard conversation this week, whether it’s a performance discussion, a difficult client call, or a moment with your own team, pause before you walk in and ask yourself one question: what state am I in right now?

Not: what should I say? Not: what’s my strategy?

Just: am I regulated or dysregulated?

If you’re dysregulated, do one thing to shift your state before you try to think your way through anything. Box breathing, a short walk, thirty seconds of bilateral tapping. Then have the conversation.

Comment below and tell me: where in your leadership have you been applying mindset work to a nervous system problem? Then when the opportunity presents itself, do something that leads to regulation. I want to hear what you notice.

I read and reply to every response. And I love hearing from you.

P.S. Nervous system regulation is foundational to the coaching work I do with women who lead, both one-on-one and inside the Clarity Cohort. If this issue named something you’ve been carrying without a word for it, that’s exactly the kind of pattern we work through together.

P.S.S. You can also listen to this issue on The Compassionate Leader School podcast episode, which drops the same day on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms. Click here to explore all the episodes.