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.
