🧠 Weekly MindSweep No. 223 | What's On My Mind |Tolerance
April 2026
Week 220: Curated Conversation: Tolerance
Week 221: Mind Your Business: Tolerance
Week 222: Manage Your Mind: Tolerance
*Week 223: What’s On My Mind: Tolerance
New to the Weekly MindSweep? Past issues live here.
Let’s Sweep The Brain!
🎬 Rather watch or listen instead of read? Now you can!
Subscribe to YouTube @chickbookcreative
In the MindSweep this week:
Weekly MindSweep: Past issues live here.
Jamie’s Second Brain Corner: Links to references & MindSweep Mapping
What’s Inspiring Me - Into The Magic Shop by James R. Doty M.D.
My face and a link to schedule your free consultation.
The Magnifying Glass Doesn't Lie: Four weeks of tolerance and what we couldn't unsee
There's a moment in every Curated Conversation where someone says a thing, and our room falls silent.
This month, that moment came when someone quietly offered: "What I've tolerated most of all is the ways that I have not been true to myself. And, in practicing that, it allowed me to tolerate a lot of other things. When in reality, I get to choose."
The room went still in that way it does when something lands too accurately to argue with.
That’s what happens after four weeks of focusing on tolerance. It begins as a topic and soon turns into a personal magnifying glass.
And magnifying glasses are really uncomfortable.
How We Got Here
This month’s focus has made it clear: tolerance is not a gentle subject. For those just joining, here’s a quick recap.
In Week 220 — Curated Conversation: Tolerance — we opened the door by asking where tolerance actually lives in the body and in the business. We explored how tolerance is not one thing but two — the tolerance to stay inside discomfort when it's asking something of us, and the tolerance to leave when staying is just another word for shrinking.
That conversation established what would become the month's central tension: the difference between tolerance as wisdom and tolerance as surrender.
In Week 221 — Mind Your Business: Tolerance — I brought that tension directly into our creative, entrepreneurial work. What are you tolerating in your business right now — and is it moving you forward or keeping you small? We looked at the shapeshifting that happens when we contort ourselves to fit what we think the market wants. We named the restlessness that lives underneath intolerance, and what it might actually be asking for.
The thread that stayed with me from a Curated Member: we all sell something that asks people to grow. That means we are constantly navigating two nervous systems — our client's and our own.
In Week 222 — Manage Your Mind: Tolerance — the magnifying glass turned all the way inward. We stopped talking about what we tolerate out there and started looking at what we tolerate in here — the stories we carry about our worth, our strengths, the way we show up. This is the week cognitive tupperware entered the conversation, and this analogy will live with me forever.
And the week someone said, with the particular exhaustion of a person who has done this work before: dammit, I thought I was done with this.
All of this leads us to where we are now.
We Are Never Done With This Work
I want to speak directly to that feeling of exhaustion, because I think it deserves more than just reassurance.
Over 4 years and 223 weeks, our community has explored 46 topics together.
Perspective. Choice. Trust. Ego. Capacity. Boundaries. Shame. Belonging. Value. Intuition. Resistance. And now Tolerance.
Every month, without exception, I notice how these topics keep finding each other.
Tolerance came up during our talks about resistance. Resistance was part of our work on intuition. Intuition was woven into our discussions about value. None of these ideas stand alone. They’re all rooms in the same house, and that house is you.
The group said it themselves this month: I thought I was done with this. But also, in the same breath: I need the reminders. I cannot hear them enough.
That is not a failure of growth. That is what growth actually looks like from the inside. Your brain doesn't update its operating system once and move on. It updates through repetition, through revisiting, through the slow accumulation of new experiences that gradually replace the grooves worn down by old ones. The fact that tolerance keeps showing up is not evidence that you haven't done the work. It is evidence that the work is alive.
We’ve been building this path together for four years.
The Magnifying Glass Doesn't Lie
We didn't start April thinking we'd spend a month staring at ourselves. We started by talking about the tolerance it takes to stay in the discomfort of creativity — and the tolerance required to walk away when something no longer serves. That felt manageable.
Then the magnifying glass got closer.
By week three, our focus shifted from what we tolerate in our businesses and relationships to what we tolerate within ourselves — the stories we carry about our self-worth, our strengths, the way we show up, and whether any of it matters. The stories we've been quietly agreeing to for decades without ever signing the contract.
You cannot unsee what the magnifying glass shows you.
What became clear this month is that most of what we tolerate on the outside starts inside us.
The difficult client, the underpriced offer, the situations where we make ourselves smaller—none of that begins outside. It starts with a story we chose to believe, often a long time ago, usually before we knew better.
Your brain is a prediction machine. It builds models of reality based on past experience, and then it runs those models forward — not to help you grow, but to keep you safe. The story "this is just how I am" is not a personality trait. It is a threat-reduction strategy your nervous system developed so it wouldn't have to keep recalculating risk. It is efficient. It is also, in many cases, a cage built by a younger version of you who no longer calls the shots.
Unless we choose to let that younger version keep influencing our choices.
Cognitive Tupperware and Missing Lids
A client in our group this month said she needed the strategy work we do together to keep her out of her “Cognitive Tupperware with the missing lids.”
I have not been able to stop thinking about that phrase.
Cognitive Tupperware is where we put the things we've half-processed. The realizations we had but didn't sit with long enough. The patterns we noticed but filed away before we finished reading them. We stack them in the back of the refrigerator of our minds, and because the lids don't fit, nothing stays contained. It leaks into how we price our work. It leaks into the clients we say yes to. It leaks into the Monday morning dread that has nothing to do with Monday.
The real work isn’t about adding more containers. It’s about going back to what we’ve already stored and dealing with it.
"Dammit," someone said. "I thought I was done with this."
That is perhaps the most honest thing you can say about personal growth as a creative entrepreneur. You are never done with the themes. You only get better at noticing them faster, sitting with them longer, and choosing differently with what you find.
Tolerance isn’t a problem to fix, but a signal to notice and a practice to refine.
Love or Fear
At the core of everything we discussed this month is an idea we often repeat in Curated: at the root of it all, everything comes down to love or fear.
I believe that is true. And I think it has a direct application to how we run our businesses.
Every time we underprice our work, we’re acting out of fear—fear of rejection, fear of being seen as too much, or fear that our worth depends on what someone else will pay. When we take on a client our gut says no to, we’re dealing with a fear of scarcity. When we say "this is just how I'm wired" and stop asking questions, we’re protecting ourselves from the discomfort of what we might find if we looked deeper.
Fear is not the enemy. Fear is data. Fear is telling us where to pay attention.
The problem is not that fear shows up. The problem is when we mistake fear for fact.
The Crone and Wisdom
There is a kind of tolerance that isn’t about giving in. It is something closer to wisdom.
Our group talked about this last week when someone mentioned becoming a crone—a word that, in older traditions, meant not a loss but a new beginning.
She’s the woman who has lived enough to know which battles are hers and which she can let go. She’s earned the right to be careful with her energy, even if her younger self might have called that selfish.
This is what's on my mind.
There’s a difference between tolerating everything because you haven’t decided what matters to you, and choosing, with intention and clarity, what deserves your full attention and what doesn’t.
The first is exhaustion. The second is authority.
The path from one to the other goes straight through the magnifying glass. You have to be willing to look—more than once, and not in a hurried way.
The looking is the work.
What I watched this month in our Curated Conversation group was a room full of women doing exactly that. Letting go of things that were scaring the $h*t out of them. Sitting with the discomfort of realizing that the stories about their worth were not facts. Asking — some of them out loud for the first time — what do I actually want for me?
That last question is deceptively simple. It sounds like self-care.
It’s actually an act of courage, because answering honestly means you can’t pretend you don’t know anymore.
What I'm Choosing to Carry Forward
This month, I’m holding onto a few things I don’t want to lose.
Embodying something is different from thinking about it. You can understand the concept of self-trust with your whole intellectual mind and still not trust yourself when the invoice needs to go out, or the boundary needs to be spoken. The gap between knowing and embodying is not a failure of intelligence. It is a gap that only closes through practice, through repetition, through letting the experience live in your body long enough that your nervous system stops bracing.
That’s what I am choosing—courage, again and again, until my choices become my evidence. The magnifying offers clarity. May we dare to keep looking, to keep questioning, and to move forward with intention, knowing that each step is the work—and the way home to ourselves.
Non-attachment and curiosity are not passive. They are the most active choices available to us.
This is the discipline and devotion that will move you forward: to keep looking, to choose with intention, and to meet what arises with an open mind. This is how the work continues—alive, spiraling forward, shaping who you become. Tolerance is not an endpoint. It’s an invitation to stay awake. Carry that with you, into every conversation and every choice, this month and beyond.
When I can see data as just data—a client who didn’t respond, a post that didn’t work, a conversation that went wrong—without making it about my worth, I create space. Space that allows something new to come in.
And finally: what if I choose to do this as a playful experiment?
Someone asked that question near the end of our last session, almost as an afterthought. But it stayed with me because it holds something important. Play asks us to hold outcomes lightly. It asks us to be okay with not knowing what comes next, and to stay in that uncertainty without rushing for answers.
That’s exactly where I find myself now—at the end of a month full of tough questions, standing between what we’ve been working through and what’s coming next.
Before We Turn the Page — a Curator's Note
April has five Mondays this year. That fifth Monday is something I've come to think of as a gift — a week that doesn't belong to our new topic yet, a week that belongs to the threshold itself.
Before we turn the page, next week I’ll share a Curator’s Perspective—my personal reflection on what tolerance has brought up and what I think it’s preparing us for. Here’s what I’ve noticed for myself: when you spend a month honestly looking at what you’ve been tolerating—the stories, the fears, the half-processed realizations—you don’t end up with answers.
You arrive at questions you can no longer avoid.
And sitting inside a question you can no longer avoid, without immediately reaching for an answer?
That’s not just tolerance anymore.
That’s something else entirely.
I’ll meet you there next Monday in Curated Conversation.
My questions for you this week:
Looking back across these four weeks, where did the magnifying glass land hardest for you? What did you see that you can no longer unsee?
Tolerance as exhaustion. Tolerance as authority. Where are you right now? What would it look like to move one degree toward authority?
Reply and share with me!
✨ You Belong Here. I can help.
If this month left you staring at something you can no longer ignore — a pattern you keep returning to, a story about your worth that isn't serving you, a question you've been quietly avoiding — that's not a problem. That's a signal and starting point!
A MindSweep Mapping Session is where we take what the magnifying glass showed you and figure out what to do with it. No more cognitive Tupperware. Just clarity, and a path forward that's actually yours.
Curated Conversation
You Read It. Now Come Sit In It.
Four weeks. One magnifying glass. A room full of people willing to look.
There's a moment in every Curated Conversation where someone says a thing, and the room goes still.
This month, that moment came when someone quietly offered: "What I've tolerated most of all is the ways I have not been true to myself. And in practicing that, it allowed me to tolerate a lot of other things. When in reality, I get to choose."
That's what this community does. We show up, we read together, we ask the hard questions, and sometimes someone says the thing that lands too accurately to argue with.
If you've been reading the Weekly MindSweep and wondering what it looks like to go deeper, this is it. Curated Conversation meets live every Monday morning. We read the current issue aloud, sit with two discussion questions, and close with a five-minute guided meditation.
It's the work, in community, in real time.
If you’ve never joined us, your first month is free.
You've been reading the room for weeks.
Come sit in it.
Listen if you want. Speak if you’re ready. Stay if it feels like home.
Mondays at 8 a.m. EST. Start with coffee. Belonging included. 💜
Was this blog forwarded to you? Sign up!
Jamie’s Second Brain Corner:
Words in bold within the Weekly MindSweep are all topics we’ve covered in Curated Conversation. You can dig into them here by searching for the word.
What I’m reading
Into the Magic Shop. A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart
by James R. Doty M.D.
I’m inspired by the idea that the words we choose, especially the ones we quietly repeat to ourselves, are more than just thoughts.
They’re instructions that shape what we believe is possible.
In other news…
Feeling #FOMO about Curated Conversations? Join us!
