🧠Weekly MindSweep No. 237 | What’s On My Mind | 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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What’s Inspiring Me - Small Pleasures | Author Clare Chambers
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🧠Weekly MindSweep No. 237 | What’s On My Mind | Tending
The Garden Was Never Meant to Be Tended Alone
We Bloom in Community
One new awareness. Three immediate results.
The body-doubling idea from last week started growing the way most good ideas in our Curated Community start — someone said the quiet part out loud. “I can’t make myself do this alone.”
And instead of one person disappearing into a task by themselves, a group decided to disappear into their tasks together for a Tasky Tuesday.
The next day, I watched the feedback roll in like the delicious taste of sweet and salty kettle corn popcorn. “I got the invoice sent!” “I got that doctor’s appointment scheduled!” “I got it done!” And it wasn’t because anyone tended to the work for anyone else, but because someone else was simply there.
Then there was myself, with a Friday alone to get work done, sitting there staring at my own blank screen for an upcoming event. I knew exactly what was happening: the monkeys in my brain telling me to sit and drink coffee and enjoy the morning in silence instead of facing my own creativity. I know the delay wasn’t about the tasks because it never is. But knowing alone doesn’t make the blank page any less blank.
So I gathered for an hour with a client. Our cameras on, mostly quiet, only occasionally checking in with each other.
By the end of the hour, I had sent my email. And the shame that had been sitting on my shoulders the whole time just... left. Not because I told myself not to feel it. Because I wasn’t carrying it alone anymore.
And our community bore witness and celebrated Melissa Dorsky Designs, as she nurtured and delivered her new branding and logo. Loud, proud, and full of beautiful color and design that reflects her infectious personality after tending to the steps holding her back and asking for the support she needed.
The appointments got scheduled, the email got sent, and the new branding has been launched!
Tending, with support, matters.
Three Weeks In the Garden
This month we’ve been tending an idea the way you’d tend a garden or a fire. With presence, awareness, and patience. Which can feel very unglamorous and lack the dopamine we so admire.
Week 234 — Curated Conversation (we named it): We planted the metaphor, It Roots Before It Rises. I shared with you about my notebooks full of ideas labeled “Brilliant Ideas That Will Make Me Rich!” that never actually left the page. We met three versions of ourselves — the notebook person, the builder, and the finisher — and realized most of us have been all three at different points, and sometimes we see it all in the same week. We learned it roots before it rises, but it can only root if you actually tend it.
Week 235 — Mind Your Business (we applied it): Tending is a Verb, and not a verdict. I tried to put words to what tending actually feels like when you’re a creative entrepreneur: it’s similar to 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 idea taps your shoulder, and the overdue rebrand whispers to you from across the room, and the book you’ve been dreaming about pulls up a chair and asks “what about me?” One member described it as skiing backward—the experience of having real momentum and absolutely no visibility on where you’re headed. We don’t freeze when that pull gets loud; we get busy! Yes, it is absolutely time to reorganize the Google Drive and tweak the same Canva template, again. We often mistake busyness that looks like productivity for quietly keeping the thing that actually needs tending off the list entirely. The shift was an offer for a new inner voice: trading “unfinished” (a verdict that ends the story) for “tending” (a verb that keeps you in it).
Week 236 — Manage Your Mind (we brain-geeked out): The Space Between the Forest and the Furrow. Together, we named the gap between the vividly imagined finished idea and the blank first page. We traced it to three stacked brain differences: a shorter planning horizon that makes the future feel like “not now,” an executive-function sequencing challenge that makes breaking big ideas into steps genuinely harder rather than a matter of our effort, and an interest-based nervous system that runs on novelty and intense urgency rather than importance of the task alone. Even when we care deeply about what we intend to tend, the boring middle steps can still stall out. Together we unpacked the benefits of having another brain in the room, and we were invited to borrow sequencing and urgency, and that body doubling that turns “someday” into “now.”
And now, in Week 237, for What’s On My Mind, let’s recap what we have actually learned. What I’ve witnessed watching each other tend, and avoid tending, all month long.
10 Things I’m Carrying Forward
We now have new awareness, not conclusions.
There’s no perfect five-step plan. Just what surfaced, out loud, in our Curated Conversation room, that’s worth carrying us forward. Here are 10 new awarenesses I’m taking with me to keep practicing, and I hope you do too:
Overgiving is tending someone else’s garden while yours is quietly growing wild. On the surface, it looks generous. In reality, it often is extremely generous to give away your time, energy, and attention. And it’s also, sometimes, a very well-dressed way of avoiding your own neglected patch.
The novelty-seeking brain will find you a “useful” side quest. Three hours evaporate into font research, and you hand your client something she never asked for, confused instead of delighted. Side quests feel so good for our curious brains but can often keep us from the real tending that is needed.
The ADHD tax is real. The energy cost of making one phone call can be disproportionate to the call itself. This gap is not a character flaw; it’s neuroscience, and awareness is the first step.
We can’t choose what we don’t notice. Half the work of tending is simply noticing where the wild growth is happening.
“I need seven hours” and “what’s the next tiny step” are two different brains talking. One brain is waiting for a clear seven-hour block to execute that rarely (ok, never) comes. The other just needs the next five minutes. This voice shows up quieter, and usually gets talked over. We can’t find more time; we need to let the quieter voice answer first.
We are communal creatures. We need other humans to meet us where we are. Not to do the task, just to witness it.
Accountability, not more effort, is often the missing piece. Small steps still count, even when the whole staircase isn’t visible yet — and the relief of “I’m not the only one” is doing more of that work than any productivity hack ever will.
Shame doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs company. It tends to leave the room on its own once someone else walks in.
What’s boring for one brain is someone else’s edge. When someone can’t make creative progress the same way I can’t break a big idea into steps, it’s not that one of them is more capable. It’s that tending shows up in a different spot for every brain, and that’s not a flaw to fix — it’s just where the edge is.
“I don’t know why I don’t get it done” is usually fear wearing a costume. This is not laziness or a discipline problem. This is fear, just still showing up unnamed. And naming it is the first real step toward tending. It has to come before the to-do list and before the plan.
None of these are things I’ve mastered. They’re just things I finally have words for. And having the words is its own kind of tending.
The Isolation Was Baked In.
Creative and neurodivergent entrepreneurs are often building alone, by design. We don’t have coworkers or managers checking in with us. (Ew... managers.) There is no one clocking whether the invoice went out or the pantry got reorganized instead.
For us, isolation makes tending hard.
And isolation is baked into how most of us built our businesses to begin with. We designed it that way on purpose, most of the time without realizing it, because independence feels safer. It feels like freedom from the system. It feels like proof we don’t need anyone’s permission to start. A similar structure that keeps us from someone else’s timeline also quietly removes the one thing tending actually needs: another person close enough to notice.
Our brain doesn’t distinguish between “I’m avoiding this because I’m scared” and “I’m avoiding this because I found something more interesting to do.” It just knows it found relief from the uncertainty. The relief is real. And we’ve learned it’s just pointed at the wrong garden to tend.
Willpower didn’t change the email or the body doubling hour. It wasn’t a “better system.” It was another human, present, in the room or over a screen, while the tending happened.
For creative entrepreneurs, this is crucial awareness because our work is so often invisible until it’s finished.
No one sees the roots. No one sees the watering. No one sees the tending. They only see the bloom. Which means we are tending completely alone unless we build the community in on purpose.
We Were Never Meant to Tend Alone
We didn’t leave the traditional working world because we couldn’t handle it. We left because we were not supposed to work inside a system built for someone else’s brain.
We’re meant to be outside, in the garden. Planting new seeds, new ideas, and exposing new opportunities. That’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done.
But being outside in the garden was never supposed to mean being out there alone.
A group of us, quietly working side by side, getting more done in an hour than any of us expected to. Me, eyes glazed at a blank screen, watching my own shame lift the moment someone else sat with me in it. Melissa, tending to the steps she’d been resisting, then launching her new branding loud and proud because she had the tending support she needed.
None of us did it alone. None of us were supposed to.
The garden was always meant to be tended in community by all of us, side by side, hands in the same dirt.
My questions for you this week:
When shame shows up around something unfinished, what would change if you brought someone else into the room instead of trying to muscle through it alone?
Where in your business or life are you "doing all the things" instead of asking the one question that would actually move you forward?
Reply and share with me!
✨ You Belong Here. I can help.
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Book your free 30-minute consultation and let's talk about what's actually going on in your business right now.
Ready to go deeper? A MindSweep Mapping Session is where we sit down together and map the whole picture — not just the task in front of you, but the roots underneath it: chickbookcreative.com/mind-mapping
Curated Conversation
You don't have to do this alone.
Every Monday at 8am EST, Curated Conversation Evolution is a room full of creative entrepreneurial brains that get it, and a little built-in body doubling to go with them.
It's where "I don't know where to start" gets said out loud, and where the missing middle starts becoming visible, together.
July is our month on Tending. Your first month is free. Come find out what it feels like to be in the room where it's safe to say the thing out loud.
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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