Thought Patterns That Quietly Hold Us Back

We move forward when we change the stories we tell ourselves about our circumstances

Most thought patterns don’t announce themselves or arrive loudly and dramatically. They settle in quietly, disguised as logic, practicality, or even humility, until one day you realize that the same invisible wall has been stopping you for years. The tricky part is that these patterns feel true and even reasonable, and that is exactly what makes them so powerful.

As someone who has spent decades observing human behavior up close, I’ve come to understand that the mind is extraordinarily good at protecting us from discomfort. No one wants to be uncomfortable, well, maybe a Buddhist monk sitting in the same position for hours on end; instead, we can’t always distinguish the difference between genuine danger and the healthy discomfort of growth. This makes the growth default to caution, self-doubt, and familiar narratives, even when those narratives keep us small.

Here are the five thought patterns I see most often, and what becomes possible when we start to notice them:

The Inner Critic

The inner critic is perhaps the most relentless of them all, telling you that you’re not smart enough, experienced enough, or ready enough to take up space. It critiques before you’ve even begun and judges after you’ve already tried; I know this voice well. When I went to college at fifty, surrounded by students thirty years younger than me, my inner critic was loud from the start. At first, I felt like an outsider until I reminded myself that we were all beginning from the same place with the same material. One would think that the better I did, the quieter the criticism would become. The exact opposite happened; it became louder, and with each A grade I earned, my feeling of a fraud intensified. I kept reminding myself that I had been an average student in high school, that I couldn’t possibly sustain this, and at some point, everyone would figure out I didn’t belong. When I graduated with the highest honors and was nominated for the best thesis, I realized that the inner critic was not 100% correct, but it never stopped trying to convince me of it. Deep down, I know the inner critic is a protective habit formed early in life that never learned we no longer need its services.

People-Pleasing

People-pleasing is another pattern that wears a convincing disguise. It looks like kindness, generosity, and selflessness from the outside. For me, it runs much deeper than that because I was born with a genetic bone disease, which resulted in many breaks throughout my life. My body has always carried a physical vulnerability that I had no control over, and somewhere along the way, I decided that if I couldn’t protect my body, I would protect my image. I would accommodate, adapt, and make myself relatively easy to be around. I would give people what they needed before they ever had to ask. People-pleasing, at its core, is often protective armor useful for maintaining in a world that feels unpredictable or unsafe. It quietly teaches us to make ourselves smaller so that others feel more comfortable, and over time, it creates a life that looks fine to everyone else but feels hollow on the inside.

All-or-Nothing Thinking

All-or-nothing thinking is the pattern that turns everything into a victory or a failure. If you can’t do something perfectly, there’s no point in starting, or you ruin the effort if you slip up once. This kind of thinking is exhausting because it leaves no room for the messy, nonlinear reality of how humans actually grow and change. Progress rarely looks like a straight line, and all-or-nothing thinking struggles to recognize anything in between.

Catastrophizing

Catastrophizing is what happens when the mind races ahead to the worst possible outcome before anything has even occurred, taking a realistic concern and amplifying it until it feels inevitable. The new venture becomes a guaranteed failure, the difficult conversation becomes a ruined relationship, and the bold move becomes a public embarrassment. Catastrophizing is often the mind working overtime to protect us from being blindsided, but when we live there permanently, we stop taking powerful risks that change everything. I often turn to a simple reframe that asks, what if this turns out better than I imagined? That one question doesn’t erase the fear, but it cracks the door open just enough to let possibility in.

“I’m Not Ready Yet”

The quiet belief that you are not ready yet is one of the most stubborn patterns of all, because it sounds so reasonable from the inside. I launched my coaching business in August of 2025 while still working full-time as a hairstylist, a career I have built over 39 years, but I didn’t hit the ground running. I moved slowly at first, and it wasn’t until January of 2026 that I began showing up consistently. Building something entirely new, without a roadmap, in an industry that relies heavily on social media presence and digital visibility, has been genuinely disorienting at times. I know how to connect with people, hold space, ask the right questions, and help someone see themselves more clearly, but what I am still learning is how to translate all of that into a business that finds the people who need it most. The uncertainty of not knowing which direction will work isn’t the same as not being ready, and I’ve come to believe that is a very different and important distinction to make.

What all five of these patterns have in common is that they operate best in silence. The moment you name them, something shifts. You create a small but significant distance between yourself and the thought, and in that space, you get to choose what you actually believe and what you’re ready to do next. That is not a small thing, but it is the beginning of everything.

If you recognize yourself in any of these patterns, I want you to know that noticing is not the same as being stuck, but means you’re already moving. If you’d like to explore what’s quietly holding you back and what’s waiting on the other side of it, I’d love to have that conversation with you.

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Lessons From the Chair-Part 1

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

APPEARANCE CONFIDENCE & INNER CONFIDENCE

What I’ve learned after decades behind the chair is that the confidence people ask for isn’t always the confidence they truly need.

There’s a moment at the beginning of every new client appointment that fascinates me. They sit down a little cautiously, describing what they want to change on the outside: the hair, the style, or the image they hope to project. It’s polite, friendly, and transactional, yet underneath that exchange, I always feel something deeper is happening. Most people think they’re talking about appearance to reach a certain level of confidence, but in reality, they’re often talking about inner confidence.

Watching this unfold has made me reflect on my own relationship with confidence and where it began. When I was younger, I could entertain myself for hours without anyone else around. If I wanted to hang out with a friend, I simply walked across the street and asked if they could come out and play. I didn’t fear rejection, I wasn’t shy, and I didn’t assume people were judging me, at least not until they did. Over time, I’ve realized that my inner confidence flourished from the steady love and support of my immediate and extended family. I knew where I came from. I knew our culture, our traditions, and the feeling of belonging. That quiet inner confidence carried me until around age ten, when I discovered that not everyone saw me the way my family did. That was the moment appearance confidence began to replace something deeper.

Inner confidence is the sense of safety within yourself, your internal anchor. It’s the knowing that your worth isn’t up for negotiation. It comes from self-trust, self-efficacy, belonging, and feeling grounded in who you are, even when no one else validates you. Appearance confidence, on the other hand, derives from the feedback we receive from the outside world. It grows from how others see and judge us, which is why it can feel strong one moment and uncertain the next.

I’ve noticed patterns in the way people carry confidence when they sit in my chair. Some clients, often in midlife and beyond, arrive with a grounded ease. They seem less concerned with how others judge them and more interested in what feels authentic. There’s a steadiness in them that speaks to inner confidence, the kind that comes from experience and self-acceptance rather than approval. They have done the work of shrugging off the judgment shawl.

Others spend much of the appointment studying themselves in the mirror, focusing on what they see as flaws. The conversation sometimes drifts toward fixing, improving, or buying something new in hopes that it will finally create a sense of satisfaction. What I often see underneath it is a deeper discomfort that no product or external change can fully resolve.

Some clients arrive with striking honesty. They talk openly about their struggles, their hopes, and the parts of themselves they are still learning to accept. Their vulnerability reminds me of the openness we have as children, before we learned to protect ourselves behind image or performance. Those are the moments that always feel the most real to me, and they continue to shape how I understand confidence in my own life.

What I’ve come to understand is that all of these clients are looking for the same thing, even if it shows up differently. As a hairstylist, my work is absolutely about enhancing someone’s outward appearance, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel good about how you look. The difference, at least from where I sit, is the intention behind the change. I want the transformation to feel like an expression of who someone already is, not a reaction to what an influencer or someone else says about how they should look. What if we flipped the mindset from dissatisfaction with our appearance to honoring ourselves as we are? Making peace with our forehead lines, sagging neck, and thinning hair may be what allows a deeper, more lasting inner confidence to grow.

I think many of us, myself included, spend years believing confidence is something we earn by improving what we and others see on the outside. We chase the right look, the right weight, expensive dinners, trips, and over-the-top celebrations, all in the hopes of quieting our inner critics. Sometimes it does help for a moment, but the feeling rarely lasts. Real confidence seems to arrive when we stop treating ourselves as a problem to fix and start relating to ourselves with the same kindness we so easily offer to others.

I feel incredibly lucky to learn from the experiences I share with my clients. They have offered me so much, allowing me to reflect on my confidence while feeling deeply connected, heard, and understood. I’ve noticed that the more vulnerable I am, the more they open up, and conversations move beyond appearance into the things that make us feel both strong and uncertain. Each time we speak honestly with one another, something shifts. Inner confidence grows quietly in the space of connection, reminding us that it isn’t something we create in the mirror, but something we recognize within ourselves.

If this speaks to you, I’d love to continue the conversation. Exploring confidence together is some of the most meaningful work I do.

FOOD & MY BRAIN

For nearly four decades, I was a sheep, blindly following diet culture’s herd mentality. I counted points, logged calories in apps, and readied my restaurant menu order, even before walking through the doors. I clung to the hope that the next diet would finally unlock lasting health and happiness, and I tried to control my body by controlling food.

Over time, points, calories, and “good” and “bad” foods became a constant tug-of-war between control and chaos. I told myself it was discipline, but really it was just mental noise. I’ve been overweight for a long time. The weight didn’t come on from a hard year or a loss; it accumulated through seasons of stress, boredom, and the relentless background chatter in my brain. Thinking about food, planning it, avoiding it, and negotiating with it built into a cacophony that never seemed to quiet. For years, that was simply my normal.

That cycle defined me. I might have stayed on that yo-yo rollercoaster, but something shifted when I went back to school at 50 to earn my psych degree. School became more than an academic pursuit; it became a mirror that showed me that dieting was never the answer for me. As I moved through my program, I started to see a clear pattern in the papers I researched and wrote, always circling back to how food influenced my brain, body, and mood.

The science stopped feeling abstract. As I studied how protein provides the amino acids that build serotonin and dopamine, shaping mood and motivation, I stopped treating it as theoretical information and began to ask what this meant to me. I learned that stable blood sugar and hormones regulate emotional steadiness and satiety, and I couldn’t ignore that I had watched my diabetic parents struggle with mood highs and lows for decades without applying that awareness to myself. I had to look honestly at the ultra-processed foods I was eating, the poor sleep I was normalizing, and the chronic inflammation I was living with. The real epiphany came when I understood that stress elevates cortisol, increasing cravings and fat storage, and I finally realized that my body wasn’t broken but adaptive.

That realization changed everything. For years, obnoxious doctors, trainers, or social media reels insisted it was “calories in/calories out,” and that I simply lacked willpower. What I really lacked was understanding. I hadn’t yet grasped that food didn’t have to be only emotional coping; it could be nourishment that supported my brain and resilience. I know some of you might be thinking, “No shit, Sherlock,” but truly, it was mind-blowing to me. When I began eating with that awareness, I noticed subtle but powerful shifts. My mood steadied, my focus improved, and I no longer felt exhausted all day.

For a while, that awareness felt like enough. Then a prescription for a GLP-1 entered my world, and the background chatter of food noise stopped. It felt like winning the lottery or discovering a cure. If that sounds hyperbolic, trust me, when you’ve lived with constant food noise for decades, its silence feels miraculous, spacious, and calm. What I didn’t anticipate was that the quiet would carry its own tension.

The silence didn’t just quiet cravings; it also quieted hunger itself. I barely eat now. The medication makes my hunger cues faint and mutes my desire to eat or even drink water. I find I have to remind myself to consume enough protein, vitamins, and calories to support the very brain and body I care so deeply about protecting. I’ve worked hard to move away from restriction and toward nourishment, and I don’t want to swing from overeating due to stress and boredom to undereating in control. It would make me feel disconnected from my body again, only this time in the opposite direction.

Even with this tension, I’m grateful for the relief from food obsession and more aware than ever that biology matters. I keep reminding myself that nourishment still matters even when hunger’s volume is now at a whisper. The truth is, I don’t have this figured out. Most days, I feel full, heavy, and uninterested in food, as if I’ve finished a Thanksgiving dinner twice. That sensation makes it difficult to trust my body’s signals. Am I nourished, or just suppressed? Am I listening, or overriding? Is quieting the food noise worth the risk of not eating enough to support my health?

With those questions in mind, I’m experimenting with intention rather than control, restriction, or force. I try to prioritize protein, and I mean try. I aim for small meals instead of waiting for hunger cues that may never fully arrive, learning to fuel my brain proactively rather than reactively, and to approach hunger with curiosity instead of judgment.

If my appetite is loud, I try to ask what it is really asking for, and if it’s quiet, I ask what it might still need. When stress, boredom, hormones, or medication are shaping my hunger, I try to respond with awareness instead of shame. These are not questions with clean answers, but they are the ones worth asking

I offer these questions to anyone who knows food noise, knowing that health is rarely a straight line but an ongoing adjustment, a recalibration, and most of all, an act of paying attention. Right now, I’m learning how to nourish a body that no longer shouts, and maybe you’re learning how to nourish one that does, in which case I’d welcome the conversation.

The Imposter and The Obnoxious Foe

There’s a particular kind of self-doubt that shows up when I start something new at this stage in my life. I expect it to feel exciting, like stepping into unfamiliar territory with excellent GPS and a lifetime of experience behind me. So, in my mind, I should be able to cruise into the new endeavor I’ve trained for with the utmost confidence. It occurred to me about a week ago that being competent for many years doesn’t inoculate me against fear and doubt; it just makes the arrival more surprising and changes the way fear shows up.

When I was younger, I never feared success. Perhaps it was because I started my career as a hairstylist so early, having grown up around the industry, and never seriously considering the possibility of failure. Without that awareness, there was little room for the kind of negative brain chatter that fuels self-doubt. I built my identity around my competence in business, technical skills, creativity, and client satisfaction to such a degree that I rarely stopped to think about what it actually takes to be successful.

So, as I skipped along my familiar, confidence-filled path, I eventually arrived at a fork in the road. The path to the left was clearly marked: Continue Down Known Road. The one to the right might as well have read: Pandemic- Pull The Rug Out From Under Yourself and Stumble Across Uncertain Ground.

Can you guess which path I chose? If you guessed the stumbling one, you win best guesser. I chose the one cluttered with too many directional signs, new technological skill sets to master, and an acute awareness of time, visibility, and reinvention. The vulnerability of it all was so palpable, it felt dizzying.

Almost overnight, the quiet hum in my mind grew louder. The brain chatter shifted from a hushed voice of encouragement and support to skeptical, then from skeptical to harsh. It began whispering, and sometimes shouting, phrases like, “You’re not good enough,” “You have no idea what you are doing,” “You’re not smart enough,” “You should quit before you embarrass yourself.” Before I fully realized it, the imposter became my obnoxious foe with a microphone.

The real self-doubt set in after finishing school. I had the knowledge, the degrees, the certifications, and the accolades, yet very little direct experience, which suddenly made me feel frustrated and invisible in the workforce. Not one company would take a chance on me, leaving me to ponder what experience really means and realizing what the imposter’s amplified voice conveniently ignored: I was not starting from nothing.

I am bringing decades of emotional intelligence, pattern recognition, and hard-earned clarity about my core values into this new chapter. Emotional intelligence has taught me how to regulate fear without letting it dictate my decisions. When my mind dreamed up catastrophic questions like “What if this goes wrong,” I practiced reframing it with “ What if everything goes according to plan?” or “What if the plan turns out even better than expected?”

Pattern recognition allows me to see that this surge of doubt is not a prophecy but a predictable and natural response to growth. Let me say this clearly: all-encompassing doubt is what often accompanies expansion, reinvention, and the decision to bet on yourself. It's not incapability or misalignment; it’s stretching beyond boundaries.

I also recognize that my core values of integrity, justice, resilience, and service could serve as anchors whenever my confidence wavers. These capacities didn’t disappear simply because I chose unfamiliar terrain; they came with me. I may be new to the role of life coach, but I’m not new to myself. This realization quieted my overbearing brain enemy long enough for me to remember who I am and what I am capable of becoming.

Digging down deeply to reach the core of who I am feels a bit like backing up in my first car, a Toyota Celica with a manual transmission. At first, I struggled to see clearly and couldn’t keep the car in a straight line. As I continued to reverse slowly and intentionally, the lines came into focus. I began to trust my knowledge, my skill, and the quiet steadiness that comes from experience. Eventually, I realized that to move forward with confidence sometimes requires you to back up long enough to recalibrate.

Living with vulnerability and trusting my intuition works much the same way for me. When I pause and return to my center, the noise in my head softens. The doubts do not disappear entirely, but they lose their urgency. I’m reminded that growth asks for participation, not perfection. That effort matters more than ego, and forward motion matters more than hesitation.

Beginning again in midlife is not a step backward but a deepening. The imposter may still speak, but I no longer confuse its volume with truth. I know who I am, I know what I value, and that’s enough to keep me moving.

Go away, imposter; you are not needed right now.

Integrity Needs Protection

This might be uncomfortable to say, but it matters.

I don’t move through the world by cutting other people down, nor do I steady myself by questioning someone else’s confidence, minimizing their work, or quietly undermining their presence. When this happens to me, it creates a feeling of emotional vertigo, like being T-boned and shoved off my path, which is genuinely surprising, but I also know that disparagement is not a part of my relational language.

I tend to assume good faith in others and that people say what they mean. I also assume that there is room for more than one person to stand tall, and at the same time, relationships don’t require subtle power plays to function. Because I move through the world this way, it’s deeply disorienting to realize that not all of your relationships follow suit.

In my experience, when people feel insecure, threatened, or out of control, they sometimes search for relief in subtle, indirect ways. It doesn’t always look overt or cruel, but can appear as concern that doesn’t quite feel caring, feedback that lands with a thud rather than support, or questions that feel more like tests than genuine curiosity. At times, these actions have made me question my own morals, intentions, and truth, which eventually leads back to the emotional vertigo I mentioned earlier: I feel a sense of confusion when I don’t operate that way myself. I believe that this isn’t about bad people; it’s about unprocessed insecurity and nervous systems attempting to regain steadiness with the tools they have available.

In my experience, women in particular are often taught to compete quietly, to compare without naming it, and to diminish it indirectly rather than confront openly, and to smile or laugh while feeling smaller inside. Naming this pattern isn’t anti-woman; it’s pro-awareness. Everyone’s motto should state: what remains unnamed has a way of repeating itself.

The hardest part of these experiences for me is not the behavior itself, but the confusion that follows. I replay or reread the conversations, search for clarity, and wonder whether I missed something important. I’ll check myself to see what my part was in their behavior.

I realize that the way out is not fighting back, proving my worth, or hardening myself in response. It’s also not shrinking or learning to play the same game more skillfully. The way out is discernment.

Discernment allows me to recognize that not everyone shares my operating system and to let that realization inform my expectations without requiring me to abandon my values. When I trust my own read on reality and stay anchored in my core values, I stop personalizing behavior that was never about me. I stop seeking validation from places that cannot offer it honestly, which makes it possible for me to remain open-hearted while also protecting my dignity, and to stay kind without staying unguarded.

Once I come to these conclusions, I realize that kindness doesn’t require self-erasure and integrity doesn’t need defending; it needs protecting.

When Fear Is Rational, Choose Resilience

This year, my fear doesn’t feel abstract but specific, political, and most of all embodied. I am angry, scared, and I’m no longer interested in softening that truth for the sake of sounding neutral.

I am afraid that democracy is slipping closer and closer toward authoritarianism. I see leaders dismantling the guardrails that once felt sturdy, and they are doing it in plain sight. I am afraid that wealth and power have concentrated so intensely among a small group of white men that the laws are becoming optional for them and rigid for everyone else. When the highest court in our land grants extraordinary protections to one individual to reign, it doesn’t feel like balance; it feels like permission. “Reign” is the language of kings and unchecked rulers, and it has no place in the United States of America.

Rhetoric and party politics don’t unsettle me as much as the actions leaders are taking. I am watching the normalization of state violence and the murdering of innocent citizens while accountability evaporates. I’m seeing immigrants detained and families torn apart in ways that feel more like abduction than due process. It is the quiet creep of white nationalist ideology into positions of authority and the message that some lives matter less and some men answer to no one that continually spikes my adrenaline. These are not dramatic metaphors to me but lived fears.

As someone trained in psychology, I know that fear can either distort our perception or inform it, and anger can signal that something sacred is under threat. When systems that are meant to protect human rights begin to erode them, the nervous system responds. I feel my body responding in a negative way, along with my friends, family, and coworkers. I see it in their exhaustion, I hear it in their guarded voices, and I feel the heaviness that comes from feeling powerless against powerful forces. The heaviness is frustration and anger, followed by hopelessness when people begin to believe their voices don’t matter.

History has shown us how fragile democratic systems can be, but it has also shown us that humans possess an extraordinary capacity for resilience when they anchor themselves in meaning. The Holocaust psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived by finding meaning in the suffering he endured. He didn’t deny the brutality he and millions suffered, nor did he sanitize oppression. What he observed was that even when circumstances stripped of fairness and humanity, individuals retained one irreducible freedom: the ability to choose their stance. The idea that people have a choice in how they respond to unimaginable circumstances holds a tremendous amount of strength.

Frankl’s theory doesn’t erase injustice, fix corruption, or undo harm; however, it does preserve agency. I cannot control court rulings, single-handedly dismantle concentrated wealth and power, rewrite immigration policy, or guarantee free elections. My anger tells me that I value justice and freedom, but my grief tells me I value human life. What I can do is choose who I become in response to fear. I can choose to stay informed without surrendering to despair. I can choose to vote, to speak, to organize, to support leaders and policies aligned with dignity and equity. I can choose to resist dehumanization in my own language and relationships and to care fiercely about democracy rather than withdrawing from it. Choice doesn’t eliminate fear; it gives it direction.

Resilience, for me, is engagement with clarity. It is refusing to let authoritarian energy dictate my character. It is refusing to let Aryan ideology define the moral center of this country, and it is choosing participation over paralysis. On days when resilience is small, it may mean calling a representative, donating to organizations protecting civil liberties, or supporting immigrant families in tangible ways. It looks like having difficult conversations instead of staying silent and grounding myself in community, so the fear and anger don’t isolate me. I don’t know exactly what lies ahead, but I do know that surrendering to helplessness ensures nothing changes.

As long as we retain the capacity to choose integrity, align with our values, and stand for human dignity, authoritarianism has not fully taken root in us. For now, this is where I find hope, and from that hope, my resilience grows.