🧠 Weekly MindSweep No. 235 | Mind Your Business | Tending
July 2026
Week 234 | Curated Conversation | Tending
*Week 235 | Mind Your Business | Tending
Week 236 | Manage Your Mind | Tending
Week 237 | What’s On My Mind | Tending
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🧠 Weekly MindSweep No. 235 | Mind Your Business | Tending
Tending Is a Verb
What happens when you stop calling it unfinished
Monday morning. 8am. Curated Conversation Evolution.
We had just closed with our grounding practice of five minutes of stillness, and my shoulders had finally dropped away from my ears.
And then I did the thing I’d asked everyone to do.
I made a list of every idea I’m tending right now.
I’ll spare you the full inventory, but let’s just say there may have been too many seedlings. A whole tray or three of tiny green things, all needing water, all needing light, all looking at me.
I paused, closed my eyes again, took a breath, and noticed.
The thing actually demanding my water wasn’t on the list at all. It’s a big, scary, audacious idea.
A Curated Conversation retreat.
This idea has been circulating in this group for over a year now.
Members bring it up in conversation, and I get a little breathless about it, so I change the subject. Do I want to gather people in a room with real chairs, real coffee, and real conversation? The kind we have on Monday mornings, but with nowhere else to be afterward. Just each other, listening, tending, supporting, and taking small steps together?
Heck yeah, I do.
This isn’t a small idea, and when I picture it, I don’t see a seedling. I see the whole forest. The venue. The dates. The pricing. The who-do-I-invite. The what-if-nobody-comes.
After decades in small business entrepreneurship, I’ve learned something about my brain and big ideas. The moment I put a big idea on paper, my brain doesn’t see the seed. It sees the entire harvest I haven’t grown yet, all at once, with no visible first step between here and there.
And then it shuts down. Quietly. Politely, even. It just closes the fancy new notebook I bought specifically for this project and hands me something easier to do. Yes, Walter, going for a walk is a fantastic idea!
Taking a baby seedling of an idea, sketching it on paper, and bringing it to life is the hardest form of creativity I practice. And it’s exactly why it didn’t make the list. I hadn’t forgotten it. I’d just buried it under a dozen other seedlings that were easier to water.
It can’t come to life in the dark.
Maybe you know this feeling. Maybe your version isn’t a retreat. Maybe it’s a book, a course, a second business, a big pivot you keep almost saying out loud. Whatever it is, I want to name what this actually feels like from the inside.
Because this week is where it gets real.
Three conversations at once
Last week, we planted July’s theme: Tending. The idea that our ideas are living things. That they root before they rise.
But I need to take a moment to name what tending feels like when you’re an ADHD creative entrepreneur trying to run a business.
It feels like trying to have one conversation while three other people are talking to you at once.
You sit down to work on the offer you’re building. And the podcast you’ve been wanting to start taps you on the shoulder. And that overdue rebrand whispers from across the room. And the book you’ve been dreaming about writing pulls up a chair, leans in, and says, “What about me?” And they don’t just show up and quietly tap you and politely ask if they can interrupt what you’re working on. They’re more like a bull in a china shop wearing a red dress with bells on its feet.
One of our community members described it as "skiing backward," and I could totally visualize it. You’re moving. There’s real momentum. You just can’t see where you’re going, and you’re not entirely sure you chose the right direction.
Yep, that about sums it up.
The multi-passionate brain is abundant. And abundance without tending becomes overgrowth, and overgrowth is where good ideas go to get lost.
So what do we actually do when the pull gets that loud? I’ll tell you what I do. And I’m guessing it might sound familiar.
The busyness that isn’t tending
When the pull gets loud, most of us don’t freeze. We do the opposite.
We get busy.
We reorganize our Google Drive. We tweak the Canva template for a social media post, again. We review the analytics from our last email and trash-talk ourselves over the open rate. We research the new shiny thing instead of doing the uncomfortable, uncertain thing.
Prepare yourself, I’m about to say something that may come across as rude. Are you sitting down?
We busy ourselves with tasks because we can, not because they serve us.
And that behavior is learned.
Somewhere along Evolution Way, our brains figured out that busyness gets rewarded because it looks like productivity. Busyness feels like safety. Nobody stops and questions the entrepreneur who’s doing all the things.
But busyness is how the thing that actually needs tending fails to make the list.
The idea that’s genuinely pulling at you usually asks you for something harder than motion. It asks for stillness. Presence. It asks you to sit down in the garden before you touch anything and simply notice what’s actually thirsty.
And for our spicy brains, stillness can feel like the riskiest move on the board, which is precisely why it’s the nutrient we’re most often missing.
Noticing is the first step. The next step is quieter. It’s what we say to ourselves about the ideas that are still sitting there, waiting.
Tending is a verb
I used to call my “someday” folder, my paused ideas, my projects hiding under the dropcloth behind the curtain by one name: unfinished.
In my old language, every one of them was evidence. Look at all these piles of unfinished work that “someone else” would have put out into the world already! To my brain, this was proof of my personal failure. Proof that something was wrong with me because the systems that work for everyone else don’t work for my brain.
Now I call it tending. And look, I’m not trying to be cute with a rebrand of procrastination. I’m creating a functional shift.
Not finishing is a verdict, and a verdict ends the story. Tending is a verb, and using a verb keeps you in it.
When I say I’m tending an idea, I’m saying it’s still alive, I’m in relationship with it, and little steps still count. I went from doing nothing to doing more than nothing. With this shift, it’s no longer failure. It’s watering.
That shift matters for the big, scary idea too. Remember what my brain does when it sees the whole forest? It shuts down. But tending doesn’t ask me to see the forest. Tending asks one question: what’s the next small thing this idea needs from me? Not the whole launch sequence. Not the life changing plan. Not this year’s full harvest.
The watering can.
How we speak to ourselves isn’t rainbow sprinkles on top of the work. For brains wired with a lifetime of “why can’t you just,” the language is the work.
Before we do anything, before we fix anything, I want us to notice. Because we can’t tend to what we haven’t noticed.
What to notice this week
The pull. When do you feel the three-conversations-at-once sensation? What are the voices actually saying?
The decoy busyness. Which tasks do you reach for because you can, not because they serve?
The uninvited idea. What keeps showing up even though it never makes the list?
The shutdown. Notice the moment a big idea makes your brain quietly close the shiny notebook. This is not being lazy; it is your brain seeing the whole harvest rather than the next seed.
The verdict language. Catch yourself saying, “I never finish.” Notice how it lands in your body.
The system shame. Notice the thought “something is wrong with me because this doesn’t work.” That thought is a mismatch talking, not a diagnosis.
Once you’ve noticed, here’s what to do with it. Five small, purposeful watering steps.
Five action steps for the week
Sit in the garden first. Before you touch your task list, take five minutes of stillness. Ask: what’s actually thirsty?
Make the real list. Write down every idea you’re tending, including the one you’ve been avoiding. Especially the one you’ve been avoiding. If it’s demanding your water, it belongs on the paper.
Bench one busyness behavior. Pick one task you do because you can, not because it serves. Put it down for seven days. Notice what rushes in to fill the space.
Swap one verdict for a verb. Once this week, catch “I didn’t finish” and restate it out loud: “I’m tending this.” And yes, I need you to say it out loud because your nervous system is listening.
Water one thing, a little. Choose the idea that’s pulling you and take the smallest next step. A paragraph. A phone call. A question asked out loud to someone you trust. Every little step still counts.
And me? I’m taking my own step five.
Coming back to the garden
I still haven’t figured out where the retreat fits in my life right now. That’s honest. But it made the list this week. It got a little water when I said it out loud in our safe Curated Conversation room today. This week’s watering can looks like one conversation with one person I trust, one cup of coffee, one question: what would you want a retreat like that to feel like?
Not the venue. Not the dates. Not the harvest. Just the next seed.
And I’ve stopped calling all the time it spent buried a personal failure. I was tending. I just didn’t have the word yet.
My questions for you this week:
What is one thing you can nurture today?
What is one thing you can let go of?
Reply and share with me!
✨ You Belong Here. I can help.
If your idea garden has a whole tray or three of seedlings and you can’t tell what’s actually thirsty, that’s exactly what a MindSweep Mapping Session is for. We get everything out of your head, onto the map, and into an order your brain can work with. Learn more at chickbookcreative.com/mind-mapping.
Not sure where to start? Let’s have a conversation first. Book a free 30-minute consultation.
Curated Conversation
You Read It. Now Come Sit In It.
You don't have to do this alone.
Every Monday at 8am EST, a community of heart centered creative entrepreneurs gather inside Curated Conversation Evolution and do exactly this kind of work — naming what's hard, understanding why, and building the safety to move forward anyway.
If that sounds like the kind of room you've been looking for, come sit with us.
And if you want to be in the room where “I have a big scary audacious idea” gets said out loud and nobody flinches, join us.
July is our month of Tending. Your first month is free.
Listen if you want. Speak if you're ready. Stay if it feels like home.
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What I’m reading
Small Pleasures
by Clare Chambers
I found Clare Chambers the way I find most of my favorite books now — someone else loved something first.
Kate Hollis sent me Shy Creatures, and I fell so hard for how Chambers writes people — the quiet, specific, almost too-true details of how humans actually behave — that I went looking for the rest of her shelf. That's how I landed on Small Pleasures.
What’s inspiring me? Caring for the people we love was never supposed to come at the cost of caring for ourselves.
In other news…
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