🧠Weekly MindSweep No. 244 | Curated Conversation II | Masking
October 2026
Week 242 | Curated Conversation | Masking
Week 243 | Mind Your Business | Masking
*Week 244 | Curated Conversation II | Masking
Week 245 | Mind Your Business II | Masking
Week 246 | Manage Your Mind | Masking
Week 247 | What’s On My Mind | Masking
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What’s Inspiring Me: My Friends: A Novel by Fredrik Backman
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🧠Weekly MindSweep No. 244 | Curated Conversation II | Masking
A note before we start this week: this Mindsweep is built a little differently. No numbered steps this week. No tidy template. I’ve written the Weekly MindSweep the same way for six years, and this month I’m practicing what I preach by setting the format down and just talking to you. More on why in a minute.
See a short video of where I traveled at the end!
The Mask Nobody Asked Me to Wear
I was standing in a pub in a country I’d dreamed of visiting my whole life.
The light was perfect. The lager was extraordinary. There was a conversation happening at the next table, rising and falling like music.
And I felt nothing.
Not sad. Not overwhelmed. Just... absent. Smiling in the right places. Nodding. Ordering. Moving through the moment like a very competent stand-in for myself, while the actual me watched from somewhere far behind my own eyes.
I took two-plus weeks away from real life this month. Disappeared overseas. Disconnected completely. And for the first few days, in a new country and a new time zone, my body ran on sheer survival mode, and I couldn’t be present the way I most love to experience life.
Here’s what hit me when I returned home and regulated my mind and body.
No one was asking me to perform.
What September masking missed
If you were with us in September, you’ll remember we opened our Masking topic with a story about an email I drafted six times. A thirty-minute meeting change that I padded with justifications, an apology, and a thank-you-in-advance, before anyone had said a word back. (If you missed it, or want the full foundation, here’s where it lives. It’s worth the read before this one.)
That piece defined masking the way the research does: the effortful practice of concealing or suppressing your real traits to appear more composed, more typical, more acceptable than what’s happening underneath. And it framed masking as something we do for other people. An audition. A performance to earn our place in the room.
That’s true. But standing in that pub, I’ve now realized it’s not the whole truth.
Because there was no room. No client. No audience. No one whose acceptance I was auditioning for. I was three thousand miles from everyone who knows me, and the mask was still up.
So what was it doing there?
Masking isn’t only a performance. It’s a setting.
Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t when we started this conversation a month ago.
Masking isn’t just what we do in front of people. It’s also the thing our nervous system defaults to when it doesn’t feel safe. And “not safe” doesn’t require a threat. It just requires dysregulation. A new environment. A time zone your body hasn’t caught up to. Enough novelty that your system quietly decides survival matters more than self-expression right now.
When that happens, your brain doesn’t take a vote. It doesn’t ask for your permission. It just reaches for the oldest strategy it has: get small, get agreeable, get through this. Hide the tendencies that might cost you. Go on autopilot.
And autopilot, for those of us who’ve been masking since childhood, is the mask.
The cruelest part is what it does to your own inner voice. When I’m regulated, at home, in my routine, I have a clear signal telling me what I need, how I need it, and when. In survival mode, that signal doesn’t disappear, but it drops to a whisper. There was still a faint ping underneath, telling me I was uncomfortable. It was just nowhere near the volume it would have reached if I were home and regulated.
That’s the piece September didn’t name. Masking doesn’t only hide you from other people.
It hides you from you.
So, why can’t we just take it off
Last month I asked you to start noticing where the performance runs. That’s still the work. But my trip taught me something about the limits of noticing.
You cannot notice your way out of a mask while your nervous system is still in survival.
The instrument you’d use to notice, that quiet inner signal, is the exact thing dysregulation turns down. It’s like trying to read a map in a room with the lights off. The map is right there. You just can’t see it yet.
Which means the first move was never “try harder to be yourself.” It was something quieter and, honestly, something I resisted. The mask didn’t come off because I forced it. It came off when I got home, slept in my own bed, returned to my own routine, and gave my body the time it needed to feel safe again. Only then did the real experiences of the trip start arriving- the awe and the wonder and the connection I hadn’t been able to feel in the moment, finally catching up to me when I was regulated enough to receive them.
Regulation came first. Then the unmasking happened on its own.
That’s the reframe I want to hand you this October: unmasking is not a performance you reverse by will. It’s a byproduct of safety. When you build the conditions where your system feels safe, the mask can begin to loosen its own grip.
In addition, for me, it takes the time it takes to feel safe.
Here’s the mask I’m taking off in front of you
Which brings me back to this strange for me, step-less, off-template Weekly MindSweep.
My Weekly MindSweep template is six years old. Story, recap, a numbered list of things to notice, a tidy set of action steps, a neat callback at the end. It has served me beautifully. It has also, if I’m honest, become its own kind of mask. A performance of consistency. Proof, every single week, that I have it together.
And just like the masking we’ve been talking about all along, it served a real purpose. It helped me survive the uncertainty of showing up publicly for six years and 244 blogs straight. I’m not ashamed of it. But this trip showed me that stepping out of my own comfort- the template included- is exactly where the new growth lives. The new experiences. The new stories to carry and share.
So this week, I’m doing the uncomfortable thing on purpose, in front of all of you. No numbered steps. No tidy scaffolding. Just me, regulated enough now to risk being a little unedited.
It’s dysregulating. It’s also the most honest thing I’ve published in a while.
Thank YOU for being a safe space where I can feel like I can!
Together Into October
When I returned, I knew we were not done with this topic. Not even close.
There is so much more for our community to unpack: more to notice, more awareness to gather, more tools to build for catching that autopilot setting we’ve been running for years, the one that switches on every time we walk into a room, or a new country, or a season of life that leaves us dysregulated.
As we continue this month, I want to point us somewhere we haven’t looked yet.
September asked where you perform in the obvious moments. The client calls. The networking rooms. The ask you padded with all of the apologies. Those are the masks you can feel yourself putting on.
October is about all of that, and the ones you can’t.
My trip made it impossible to see that the deepest masking doesn’t feel like masking at all. It feels like just how I do things.
It’s the pricing we’ve never questioned.
The workflow we’ve run the same way for years.
The morning routine,
The client boundary we don’t set,
The part of our business we’ve quietly organized around not being seen too closely.
We’re not performing in those places, or so it seems. We’re just doing it the way we’ve always done it.
But “the way I’ve always done it” is worth a second look. Because sometimes it’s genuine preference, and that’s wonderful.
And sometimes it’s a nervous system that slipped into fight-or-flight so long ago that the workaround *calcified into identity. (IYKYK) A safety behavior you’ve been running for so many years you stopped recognizing it as a choice at all.
That’s our invitation for practice this October. Not only to hunt for more obvious masks. But to get curious about the ones hiding in plain sight, inside the routines you’d swear are just you.
Spoiler alert: you probably can’t find these alone.
Remember, the instrument you’d use to spot them, your own clear inner signal, is the very thing that goes quiet when you’re running on survival. We can’t always see our own autopilot, precisely because it’s automatic. We need a mirror we trust.
So this is the real work for our week. Not a checklist. A single, honest question:
Who is someone you feel safe enough to say this out loud to?
Someone who could sit across from you and gently ask, “Is that actually what you want, or is that just the way you’ve always kept yourself safe?” Someone who won’t flinch, won’t fix, won’t hand you a to-do list. Someone whose presence makes your nervous system exhale a little, because that exhale is exactly what turns the volume back up on the parts of you that have been whispering.
That’s what shakes us loose. Not force. Not more noticing in isolation. A safe person, a safe room, enough regulation to finally see what we’ve been hiding, even from ourselves.
Maybe that person is a friend. Maybe it’s a fellow entrepreneur who gets it. Maybe it’s this community. Maybe it’s me.
So we’re carrying Masking from September into October. And how fitting that it’s spooky season.
Bring your mask to the table. I’ve brought mine. Not to tear them off by force- we know better than that now- but to get curious, together, about what it would take to feel safe enough to set them down.
My questions for you this week:
Where does your mask go up even when no one is asking you to perform?
And what helps you feel regulated enough that it loosens on its own?
Reply and share with me! I read and reply to every one!
✨ You Belong Here. I can help.
This whole issue circled one idea: you can't unmask by force. It loosens when you feel safe enough, and with someone you trust enough to reflect it back.
That's exactly what a MindSweep Mapping Session can be. A safe space to bring the parts of your business, and yourself, that you've organized around not being seen too closely, and gently look at what's underneath. Not to perform them better. To understand what they're costing you, and what might be possible without them.
Not sure where to start? That's okay. A free 30-minute conversation is the smallest safe first step there is!
You don't have to keep discovering the cost of masking alone.
Curated Conversation
You Read It. Now Come Sit In It.
I said the real work this week needs a safe person and a safe room. This is the room.
Curated Conversation Evolution is built specifically to not require the performance. Every Monday at 8am EST, creative, heart-centered, neurodivergent entrepreneurs gather, and say the quiet things out loud, together.
This month we're sitting with Masking: not tearing it off by force, but getting curious about what it would take to feel safe enough to set it down.
We start with coffee. Belonging is included.
Your first month is free. Come be the unedited version of yourself with people who already know what that costs.
Listen if you want. Speak if you're ready. Stay if it feels like home.
Mondays at 8 a.m. EST. We start with coffee and belonging is included. đź’ś
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What I’m reading
My Friends: A Novel
by Fredrik Backman
The mask doesn't check who's in the room. Once you learn your natural way of being is a problem, you hide it from everyone. The critics. The clients. The friends cheering the loudest.
Entrepreneurs do this with our work.
What's Inspiring Me: Who already sees the thing you're still hiding? What would you make if you let them push you?
Click image to watch a quick clip of where I visited!
Thank you Micky Guru Travel Company for all of you support in International Travel!
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