When I was ten years old, my mum asked if I wanted to learn tennis.
I said no.
I told her I was too old.
Ten years old, and I had already decided who I was and what I could not do. I had a rule, though I would never have called it a rule. It was simple. If I was not good at something the moment I picked it up, there was no point starting. Better to not try than to try and look like a fool.
I carried that rule quietly for years. I gave up on music, because I had decided I "wasn't naturally musical." I stayed away from anything that might make me look like a beginner. I built a long, quiet list of things that simply "weren't me."
None of it was true. I had just believed it for so long that it had stopped feeling like a belief at all. It felt like a plain fact about the world.
I have spent more than twenty years now teaching and coaching people. And in all that time, the single thing I have watched shape a life more than any other is not talent, or luck, or circumstance. It is which of two beliefs a person holds about themselves. One of those beliefs builds a life. The other one quietly ends one. And most people never even know they are holding it.
The Two Mindsets
A psychologist named Carol Dweck has spent her whole career studying this. Decades of research, gathered in her book Mindset. What she found is that almost all of us lean toward one of two ways of seeing ourselves.
The first she called the fixed mindset.
The fixed mindset is the belief that you are what you are. Your intelligence, your creativity, your talent, your nature, all of it is set. You were handed a certain amount at birth, and that is the hand you play. In this mindset, life becomes a long series of tests, and every situation is secretly asking the same question. Am I good, or am I not? Because the answer feels permanent, the stakes feel enormous. So you spend your energy proving you have "it," and you quietly avoid anything that might reveal you don't.
The second she called the growth mindset.
The growth mindset is the belief that you can change. That your abilities are not a fixed hand you were dealt, but something you can develop, through effort, practice, good guidance, and a willingness to learn. In this mindset you no longer have to prove anything. You get to do something far better. You get to grow. You can try. You can be a beginner. You can fail, learn from it, and come back stronger.
Here is the part I most want you to understand, because it is the reason this belief is so dangerous and so invisible at the same time.
The fixed mindset does not feel like fear. It feels like a fact.
It does not announce itself. It never says "I am afraid." It says, calmly and reasonably, "I'm just not good at that." It says "that's not really me." It says "some people can do this, and I'm not one of them." And it sounds so much like simple honesty, like you are only being realistic about yourself, that you never once think to question it.
That is how it wins. Not by frightening you. By disguising itself as the truth.
The fixed mindset puts you in a cage. The growth mindset hands you the key.
How Carol Dweck Discovered This
Dweck did not begin with a theory. She began with a puzzle of her own.
Decades ago, early in her career, she was studying how children cope with failure. She would give ten-year-olds problems to solve, and she made some of them slightly too hard. She wanted to watch what happened when a child hit something they could not do.
She expected what most of us would expect. That children either cope with failure or crumble under it. Two types of children.
That is not what she found.
One ten-year-old boy was given the hard problems. Instead of shrinking, he pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and said, "I love a challenge."
Dweck was stunned. She has said she did not know what to make of it. Here was a child who, faced with something he could not yet do, was not failing at all. Not in his own mind. He thought he was learning. He thought the hard problem was the good part.
The more she looked, the clearer it became, and it had nothing to do with how clever the children were. Faced with the hard puzzles, one group of children decided the puzzles were simply beyond them, and asked to go back to the easy ones. The other group looked at the very same hard puzzles and wanted more time, because they were sure they could get them.
Same puzzles. Same age. Same ability. A completely different belief about what was happening. One group felt difficulty and heard "I have reached my limit." The other felt the identical difficulty and heard "I am about to get better."
That was the beginning of a lifetime of research.
The Praise That Backfired
One of Dweck's most famous studies showed how easily one of these mindsets gets planted. It is a quiet warning for every one of us, because we plant it in the people we love without ever noticing.
She and her colleagues worked with a large group of fifth-grade children. Every child was given a set of fairly easy puzzles, and every child did well.
Then each child was praised. But the children had been split into two groups, and the two groups were praised with one different sentence.
Half the children were told: "You must be smart at this."
The other half were told: "You must have worked really hard."
One sentence. That was the entire difference between the two groups. And from that moment on, the children began to behave like different people.
Next they were offered a choice. A harder set of puzzles they could learn from, or an easy set like before. The children praised for being smart mostly chose the easy puzzles. Of course they did. They had just been told their worth was their cleverness, and the only way to protect that was to not risk looking stupid. The children praised for effort overwhelmingly chose the hard puzzles, around nine in ten of them. They had been told their worth was their effort, and a hard puzzle is simply more of that.
Then every child was given a genuinely hard test, hard enough that most of them struggled.
The children praised for being smart took the struggle badly. To them it was not a hard test. It was evidence. Evidence that perhaps they were not so smart after all. And when they were finally given one last test, back at the easy level of the very first one, their scores had fallen.
The children praised for effort did the opposite. They had been told effort was the thing, and a hard test simply calls for more of it. Their scores on that final test rose.
There is one more detail, and it is the one that stays with me. Afterwards, the children were asked to report their scores to another child. Nearly forty percent of the children who had been praised for being smart lied. They reported a better score than they had really earned.
These were ordinary, good children. They lied because they had been handed a fixed mindset, in a single sentence, and a fixed mindset cannot afford the truth. When who you are feels like it is on the line, you protect the image instead of the person.
That is what this belief does. And almost no one ever chooses it on purpose. It gets installed, quietly, one well-meaning sentence at a time.
The Power of "Yet"
So if a fixed mindset can be installed that easily, the real question is the hopeful one. Can it be changed?
Dweck's whole life of research says yes. And she found one of the simplest tools for it in a high school in Chicago.
At that school, when a student did not pass a course, they did not receive a grade of "Fail." They received a different grade. The grade was "Not Yet."
Dweck loved this, and when you sit with it you can feel why. "Fail" lands like a verdict. I'm nothing. I'm nowhere. It is finished, and so are you. But "Not Yet" is not a verdict. It is a location. It tells you exactly where you are on a path, and it quietly promises the path keeps going.
This is the heart of the growth mindset, and it lives in one small word. Yet.
"I'm not good at this" is a closed door. "I'm not good at this yet" is the same door, standing open. "I can't do this" ends the story. "I can't do this yet" is the middle of a story that has not finished.
Dweck also points to what is happening underneath, in the brain itself. When you struggle with something hard, when you push at the very edge of what you can do, your brain is not failing. It is forming new connections. The struggle is the sound of you growing stronger. The fixed mindset feels difficulty and hears "stop, this was never for you." The growth mindset feels the exact same difficulty and hears "keep going, this is the part where you change."
Three Real People Who Almost Didn't Make It
I have told you about Dweck's children and Dweck's research. Now let me tell you about three real adults. They are students of ours, and these are their own words.
A man named Bryan came to us after years of searching. Here is how he described himself when he arrived. "Over the years I've taken countless courses and trainings, read 100's of books about spirituality, productivity, and self improvement, and, though I got insight on the intellectual level, none of it really grounded in my practical life. I was still stuck, not living the life I wanted, making just enough money to get by, and feeling like something was missing."
Read that slowly. Hundreds of books. Countless courses. Still stuck. That is what a fixed mindset looks like inside a thoughtful, spiritual person. It does not look like laziness. It looks like endless learning. But underneath the learning sits a quiet belief that the stuckness itself is permanent, that it is simply who he is, and so he keeps gathering more information instead of changing. Bryan could have decided, very reasonably, that he had now tried everything, and this was simply his lot. Many people decide exactly that. It even feels like wisdom when you decide it.
He didn't. He kept going, and did the work slowly, in his ordinary life. Here is how he describes his days now. "Each and every day, I'm living a life I love, evolving, growing, working less and achieving more of what I really want."
A woman named Milla told us, very plainly, "I felt stuck and incapable of finishing anything in my life." She had things she needed to complete, and, in her words, zero motivation. You can feel the logic of the fixed mindset right there. If you are simply a person who cannot finish things, then starting is pointless. Why begin a thing you already know you are not built to complete?
She tried one small, structured thing anyway. And something moved. "I had lots of resistance to face," she said, "but being aware of it quickly made it weaker. I realized that my resistance had been the enemy all along." Then she said the line that holds the whole of it. "I now identify as a person who succeeds in everything I set my mind to."
She did not get smarter. She did not get more talented. She changed one belief about who she was, and that one belief reorganized her life.
And then there is Rita. When Rita came to us she was a corporate lawyer at one of the biggest law firms in Macau. By her own description she was a depressed woman living a life that, from the outside, looked like a success, and from the inside did not feel like hers at all.
Rita's story matters most for one reason. She did not change in a clean, straight line, and she has been honest about that. In her own words: "There were moments along the journey that I felt I wasn't making progress."
Sit with that sentence, because it marks the exact place where lives are decided. There were moments she felt she was getting nowhere. Moments when the fixed mindset would have had every reason on its side. See? You have been at this a while now. Nothing is really changing. It was a nice idea, but it isn't for you. That voice is never louder, and never more convincing, than in the middle, after you have started but before you can see the result.
She kept going anyway. And here is what that invisible "middle" was actually building. Within about two and a half years, Rita had left corporate law. She moved her children home to Portugal. She bought a farm with a salt water pool, ten minutes from her parents. She wrote a book. She lost the weight she had wanted to lose for years. She began a coaching practice. "The depressed person I once was," she wrote, "has gone."
None of these three people were more gifted than you. I want to be very clear about that, because the fixed mindset will try hard to tell you otherwise. They were ordinary people who, at the exact moment it counted, refused to believe that "stuck" was the final truth about them.
The Story I Cannot Tell You
You may have noticed something. I have told you about people who made it. I have not told you about the people who didn't.
I want to be honest with you about why.
The people who give up do not write to me. They do not send a testimonial two years later. They simply go quiet. They drift away, and I never hear from them again, and so I cannot tell you their stories, because I never get to learn how they end.
But I have watched the moment. Many times, over many years. And here is the truth I have learned, and it is not the truth you might expect.
The woman who gives up is not a different kind of woman from Rita, or Milla, or Bryan. She is not weaker. She is not less gifted. She is not less spiritual, or less called, or less deserving.
She is the same woman. Standing at the very same moment. In the middle of the thing, where it is hard and the results have not come yet, hearing the very same quiet, reasonable voice say "maybe this just isn't for me."
The whole difference, the entire difference, is what she does with that voice.
One woman hears it and believes it is telling her the truth about who she is. So she stops. And it does not feel like quitting. It feels like accepting reality. It feels mature and wise.
The other woman hears the very same voice, and recognizes it. She has met it before. She knows its name. It is not the truth, and it is not wisdom. It is just the fixed mindset, an old and tired belief, doing the only thing it has ever done. She feels it fully, and she takes one more step anyway.
That is the whole game. That is what the two mindsets come down to in the end. Not talent. Not luck. What you do with that one voice, on the day it comes for you.
Why This Matters Most If You Feel Called to Coach
Everything I have said is true for any person and any dream. But I want to speak now, directly, to one person.
If you have felt, perhaps for years, a quiet pull toward this work. Toward coaching. Toward guiding people. Toward helping others heal and find their way. If some part of you has always known you are here to do something like that. Then there is something specific you need to understand.
The fixed mindset is more dangerous for you than for almost anyone.
Because the work you feel called to do asks you to do the exact things a fixed mindset cannot survive. To build a coaching life, you have to be visible before you feel ready. You have to be a beginner in front of other people. You have to hear the word no. You have to ask to be paid for your gifts, which can feel almost impossible when the work feels sacred to you. You have to invite feedback and use it. You have to sit with a real person, not have every answer, and stay in the chair anyway.
To a growth mindset, those are simply the steps. Every one of them is a "not yet" on the way to a "yes."
To a fixed mindset, every one of them is a test of your worth. A quiet launch is not information, it is proof you are not good enough. An awkward first session is not practice, it is evidence you are not a natural. So the fixed mindset does the logical, protective thing. It keeps you safely away from all of it. It keeps you reading one more book, taking one more course, waiting to feel ready. And a woman who never becomes visible, never makes the offer, never has the awkward first session, does not have a coaching practice. She has a certificate in a drawer, and a calling she never answered.
Rakhee nearly lived that life. She was a pharmacist for seventeen years. Seventeen years. And the whole time, in her words, she "always felt that even though I was helping people with their health and medications, that I could be helping them in a more profound way." She could feel the calling clearly. She just also believed, for seventeen years, that it was not really available to someone like her.
Then she "mustered up the courage," left, and trained. She now works with three coaching clients a day.
Seventeen years is a long time to keep a calling waiting. But here is the part that matters. She was not behind. The day she finally began, she was exactly on time. You cannot be behind on your own life. You can only stand at the door, deciding what the voice means.
How to Build a Growth Mindset (Start This Week)
None of this is theory to admire from a distance. The growth mindset is not a personality you were or were not born with. Dweck's entire body of work says the same thing. It is a belief, and a belief can be practiced and changed. Here is how you begin. Start this week, and make it small on purpose.
Catch the sentence. For the next few days, simply listen for the moment you say, out loud or inside, "I'm just not good at this." Do not fight it yet. Just catch it. For most people who feel called to coach, it shows up around being visible, around selling, around the belief that they are not far enough along. Find your version of the sentence, and name it.
Change the sentence. When you catch it, add one word to the end. "I'm not good at this" becomes "I'm not good at this yet." It will feel like a small, almost silly change. It is not. You are doing exactly what that Chicago school did. You are turning a verdict back into a path.
Take the smallest real step. Not the whole plan. Not the funnel, not the launch, not mastery. One post. One honest conversation. One offer to one person. Five real minutes. The fixed mindset wants the step to be big, because a big step is easy to be too afraid to take. Make it so small you cannot talk yourself out of it.
Do it again tomorrow. This is the part nobody finds glamorous and almost everyone underestimates. Small, real, repeated. That is the whole engine. It is not the size of the step that changes a life. It is the fact that there is another one tomorrow.
Measure the right thing. At the end of the day, do not ask "did it work." That is the fixed mindset's question, and it will punish you for an honest answer. Ask two better questions instead. "Did I practice?" And "what will I do differently next time?" A result you did not want is not a verdict on you. It is simply information, and information is the raw material of everyone who has ever become good at anything.
That is the practice. Catch the sentence, add the word, take the small step, do it again, and measure effort and learning instead of outcome. It is quiet and unglamorous, and from the outside it does not look like much. It is also, without a single exception, how every real person in this article actually changed.
A Last Word
You are not fixed. You are not finished.
The story you have been told, and the story you have been telling yourself, about who you are and what you are capable of, is only a story. It is not a fact about the world. It is a belief you have rehearsed for so long that it learned to disguise itself as the truth.
But you have changed before. You learned to read. You learned to do the work you do now well enough to be paid for it. You have already proven, many times over, that you are someone who can learn hard things. You simply stopped applying that proof to the parts of your life that frighten you most.
The person you can feel yourself becoming, the coach, the guide, the one who finally does the work you came here to do, is not a more gifted woman waiting somewhere out of reach. She is you. She is just you, further down the road of practice. The only thing standing between you and her is one quiet belief, and today, having read all of this, you finally get to decide whether you still believe it.
If reading this stirred something in you, please do not let that feeling pass quietly. It usually means there is something real and true that you have been circling for a long time.
You can book a free Sacred Session with our team. It is a real conversation, not a sales pitch. We will listen. We will help you see where you are actually stuck. And we will help you see, clearly and honestly, what is genuinely possible for you.
There is no pressure, and there is no script.
Lots of love 🙏 Michael
