🧠Weekly MindSweep No. 201 | Manage Your Mind | Shame
🎉 Chickbook Creative is celebrating 5 YEARS! 🎉
Five years of brain-based strategy, creative clarity, and helping heart-centered entrepreneurs build purpose-driven businesses with a touch of neuroscience.
My idea of connecting creativity, cognition, and commerce has grown into a community of thinkers, doers, and dreamers who lead with both heart and mind.
For everyone who’s read a Weekly MindSweep, MindSweep Mapped an idea, or shared their story—thank you.
You’re the reason this matters.
Here’s to five more years of clarity, courage, and creativity — turning ideas into impact and energy into alignment.
With gratitude and so much love,
Jamie Chapman
Founder, Chickbook Creative 💜🧠🧡
November 2025
Week 198: Curator’s Perspective: The Unmasking
Week 199: Curated Conversation: Shame
Week 200: Mind Your Business: Shame
*Week 201: Manage Your Mind: Shame
Week 202: What’s On My Mind: Shame
Let’s sweep the brain…
🎬 Rather watch or listen instead of read? Now you can!
In the MindSweep this week:
Weekly MindSweep: with curated GIF’s & puns (for your entertainment).
Jamie’s Second Brain Corner: Links to references. Need a map? I’ve got you!
What’s Inspiring Me: Whale Eyes: A Memoir About Seeing and Being Seen by James Robinson, Brian Rea (Illustrator). A very special thank you to Kate Hollis. Writer. Editor. Librarian
Collaboration: with Shannon Giordano and the MetroWest Chamber of Commerce (First Friday of every month)
Massachusetts Business Network: Did you catch our Curated Conversation on Discernment? I expanded on our discussion in a new guest blog post!
My face đź’ś and a link to schedule your free consultation.
The Shame Flood: Why Explaining Your Work Feels Like Defending Your Worth
A few months ago, I was at a networking event for local businesses. You know the kind with the fancy name tags, high-top tables with white linen tablecloths, and polite conversations that feel like small talk, wearing a blazer?
I introduced myself the way I always do:
“I’m a brain-based strategist helping creative and neurodivergent entrepreneurs build businesses aligned with their wiring.”
The person across from me nodded, smiled, and tilted their head.
“So… is that like coaching? Or consulting? Or something else?”
The pause between their words and my response lasted one second.
But that one second was enough for my entire nervous system to fall through the floor.
My chest tightened.
My breath thinned.
My thoughts scattered like loose papers in a gust of wind.
That familiar heat rose up my neck.
A shame flood.
It was a sudden realization that I wasn’t in a casual conversation anymore; I was in a silent battle to justify my work, my value, and my right to be there. Before I knew it, I was over-explaining.
Defending. Adding layers of detail that no one had asked me for. Offering frameworks, methods, and neuroscience examples.
Not because they needed proof, but because my brain was convinced I did.
When they didn’t immediately “get” what I do, my nervous system didn’t interpret it as curiosity. It interpreted it as a threat.
And at that moment, I wasn’t answering a question. I was trying to protect my legitimacy.
The Neuroscience: What Happens During a Shame Flood
Shame hits fast because it lives in the survival circuits of the brain — not the logical ones.
Here’s what happens under the surface, especially for ADHD and creative entrepreneurs:
The Amygdala Sounds the Alarm
This peanut-sized part of the brain detects anything that feels like disapproval, confusion, or misunderstanding and flags it as danger. I’m not talking about emotional threat, I’m talking about survival danger.
The head tilt wasn’t a threat. But my brain registered it as one.
The Brain Feels an Identity Threat
When your work is tied to who you are, and for creative entrepreneurs, it always is, questions about your work feel like questions about your worth.
This activates the brain’s default wiring for:
Perfectionism
Over-explanation
Self-doubt
RSD (Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria)
And people-pleasing
The Prefrontal Cortex Goes Offline
You lose access to:
Clarity
Language
Perspective
Emotional regulation
The ability to pause
This is why you can feel deeply competent one moment and suddenly unable to form a sentence the next.
The Fight/Flight/Fawn Response Takes Over
For many ADHD creatives, the response is often fawn or fight:
Fawn: “Let me prove, justify, and over-explain so you’ll see why I belong.”
Fight (inward): “Why can’t I explain myself better? Why am I like this?!”
Your brain isn’t malfunctioning here; it’s overprotecting the parts of you tied to your creativity and identity.
Creativity & Confidence Shut Down
Your brain shifts from innovation mode to protection mode, blocking the exact brilliance you’d normally use to articulate your work with ease.
This isn’t character. This is chemistry.
You’re Not Broken — You’re Wired for Meaning, Visibility, and Connection
If you take nothing else from the neuroscience, let it be this:
There is nothing wrong with you. Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The shame flood feels so overwhelming, not because you’re fragile, inconsistent, or overly sensitive, but because:
You care deeply.
Your creativity is tied to your identity.
Your work is personal.
Your brain is wired to scan for belonging.
ADHD makes emotional experiences more intense and immediate.
Being misunderstood has been a lifelong pattern, so your brain reads it as a familiar danger.
Of course, your thoughts race.
Of course, your nervous system reacts quickly.
Of course, the urge to justify yourself floods your body before your logic has time to weigh in.
You’re not dramatic. You’re not overreacting. You’re not “too much.”
You are a creative entrepreneur whose work comes from the inside out.
And when your work gets questioned, confused, or misunderstood, it makes sense that your brain responds as if you are being questioned, confused, or misunderstood.
Because for creatives, the work is you.
And, for neurodivergent entrepreneurs, that connection is even stronger. Your ideas, intuition, vision, and lived experience are woven directly into your offers and your impact.
So when a moment like that networking head tilt happens, your brain isn’t telling you you’re inadequate.
It’s telling you:
“This matters.”
“I want to be understood.”
“I want to belong.”
“Please protect the parts of me I made visible.”
That is human.
That is normal.
This is not a character deficiency.
This is your brain’s natural response to a perceived threat, and wiring for connection and belonging.
The Shame Loop of Over-Delivering, Over-Explaining, and Underpricing
There’s another layer of this that nearly every creative entrepreneur knows intimately:
The moment you start adding more and more value to justify your price.
It’s subtle and fast:
You send a proposal, then immediately add a bonus.
You offer a package, then pad it with extra sessions or deliverables.
You lower the investment before anyone asks.
You rewrite your description to “make it more clear” because you’re afraid they won’t see the value.
Not because clients need more. But because you don’t feel like enough.
This is the same shame flood just expressed in business decisions:
Price low for safety
Over-deliver to compensate
Burnout from doing too much
Feel resentment or doubt
Shame yourself for the resentment
Repeat
ADHD intensifies this cycle:
We feel emotion fast and fully.
We anticipate rejection before it happens.
We assume others need more proof than they actually do.
We chronically underestimate our own value.
Pricing feels like personal worth, not a neutral container.
Under-pricing is not a money problem; it’s a shame problem.
Over-delivering is not generosity, it’s a nervous system coping strategy.
You don’t need to shrink your price to be valuable. You don’t need to build a 10-layer offer to be respected. You don’t need to defend your work to make it digestible.
You need a pause.
You need awareness.
You need a strategy that honors your wiring.
And that’s where we go next.
A Strategy: Working Through These Moments with Awareness + The Power of the Pause
If shame-flooding is fast, your strategy needs to be simple, accessible, and somatically grounding.
Here’s how you move through the moment without spiraling:
STEP 1: Awareness — Name What’s Happening
The moment you feel the heat rising, the breath tightening, or the rush of over-explanation? Pause internally and name it:
“Ah. I’m shame-flooded.”
“This feels like a threat, but it’s not danger.”
“My brain thinks I need to prove myself.”
Naming it moves the experience out of the amygdala and into conscious awareness.
This is your first lifeline.
STEP 2: The Power of the Pause — Slow Your Response by One Breath
You don’t need a long pause; you just need a beat.
Before answering, take a small breath through your nose and soften your shoulders by 2%. This micro-pause:
interrupts the automatic fight/fawn cycle
Re-engages the prefrontal cortex
gives your nervous system a micro-dose of safety
It resets your brain just enough to choose a grounded response instead of a defensive one. (It’s also OK for you to take all of the time you need to reset.)
STEP 3: Curiosity Over Proving
When someone asks a question about your work, shift out of performance and into conversation:
“That’s a great question! What part are you most curious about?” or
“It overlaps with coaching and consulting, but tell me what you’re trying to understand.”
This moves the moment out of shame and into connection. Now you’re not defending your work, you’re guiding the narrative.
STEP 4: Anchor Back to Your Value
After the conversation, return to this grounding truth:
“My work is legitimate because it transforms people, not because everyone instantly understands it.”
Originality is often misinterpreted before it’s valued. Your work isn’t to be immediately understood. Your work is to make an impact.
Your Value is not Dictated by Someone Else.
That networking moment wasn’t about someone questioning my work. It was about my brain misreading curiosity as a threat. Because that’s what shame does:
It rushes in to protect the parts of ourselves that feel exposed.
It convinces us we need to perform, prove, or over-explain to belong.
It mistakes not being immediately understood as not being enough.
I’m here to remind you of the facts:
Your work is not less legitimate because it needs context.
Your worth is not something to defend; it’s something to inhabit.
Your value is not dictated by someone else’s comprehension speed.
When you notice the shame flood, pause, and choose curiosity over proving, everything shifts.
Your voice, clarity, and confidence return. And what remains is not the panic of needing to justify yourself, but the grounded knowing that your work matters.
Because it does.
My questions for you this week:
When was the last time you felt the urge to over-explain your work or your worth?
What stories does your brain tell you during a shame flood?
Reply and share with me!
✨ Work with me
The over-explaining, the proving, the tightening in your chest when someone doesn’t “get” your work?
I want you to know you don’t have to untangle that alone.
A MindSweep Mapping Session gives you a safe space to understand the emotional loops, protective patterns, and meaning-making your brain runs in the background. Together we’ll map how your mind processes information, rejection, visibility, and worth — and translate that into clarity, language, and strategy you can actually use in your business.
Your work doesn’t need more justification. Your brain just needs more understanding.
🧠Your brain. Your business. Mapped.
👉 Book your free MindSweep Chat: www.chickbookcreative.com/mind-sweep
Book a free consultation to learn how I can support you and your business.
Was this blog forwarded to you? Sign up!
Jamie’s Second Brain Corner:
The words in bold within the Weekly MindSweep are all topics we’ve covered in Curated Conversation. You can dig into them here:
Did you miss our month on Self-Worth?
Did you miss our month on Consistency?
Did you miss our month on Curiosity?
[X] Did someone say MindSweep MAP?!
[X] Follow Chickbook Creative on Substack!
[X] NEW>> Now on Apple Podcasts!
MONDAY: 8 am - Curated Conversation - Zoom
Changing the world, one Monday Morning at a time. Learn more + Sign Up for a Monday morning reminder!
What I’m reading
Whale Eyes: A Memoir About Seeing and Being Seen
by James Robinson, Brian Rea (Illustrator)d
My friends, Kate Hollis does it again.
Kate is a dear friend, a brilliant librarianist, and a phenomenal writer. When she comes across a book she knows will speak directly to my soul, she lands it—every single time.
From Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker James Robinson comes a breathtaking illustrated memoir for readers ages 10 and up—inspired by the viral, Emmy-nominated short film Whale Eyes.
Told through an experimental mix of intimate anecdotes and interactive visuals, this book immerses readers in James’s experiences growing up with strabismus, allowing them to see the world through one eye at a time.
Readers will get lost as they chase words. They’ll stare into this book while taking a vision test. They’ll hold it upside down as they practice “pretend-reading”…and they’ll follow an unlikely trail toward discovering the power of words.
With poignant illustrations by Eisner Award–nominated artist Brian Rea, James’s story equips readers of all ages with the tools to confront their discomfort with disability and turn confused, blank stares into powerful connections,
Find it where you browse for books. Check out James Robinson’s website.
Collaborations!
Join us on Friday, November 7, 2025 from 9am-11am.
Join us Friday, December 5th, 2025 from 9am-11am.
Join Shannon and me at the MetroWest Chamber of Commerce for an inspiring session with Andy Hoffer, a former rocket scientist turned mindset mentor.
Andy helps professionals and entrepreneurs identify and overcome the mindset blocks, self-limiting beliefs, and money stories that hold them back from success.
Discover how shifting your perspective can open the door to greater confidence, clarity, and abundance—in business and in life.
This event is free; REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED
Did you catch our Curated Conversation on Discernment?
I expanded on our discussion in a new guest blog post for the Massachusetts Business Network, exploring how intentional decision-making can sharpen both your business and your peace of mind.
👉 Read Choose Better, Not More: The Business Case for Discernment
In other news…
Feeling #FOMO about Curated Conversations? Join us!
