Why “Yet” Matters So Much – especially for Autistic People
For most of my career, growth mindset talks were a hard pass for me.
I would sit in a room, or on a webinar, and listen to someone explain that the only thing between me and everything I wanted was my attitude. If I just believed harder. If I just wanted it enough. It reminded me of the “Think and Grow Rich” cult that pervaded my year in a sales role in my 20s. The religion was that wealth would arrives if you just visualized it with enough conviction. My reaction was usually some version of: bullshit.
Here is the version I still hear in my head, the one that captures everything wrong with it: “I know you’re making $80k now, but if you just put your mind and effort into it, five years from now you can be as rich as Oprah Winfrey.”
That does not help anybody. It is toxic positivity dressed up as personal development, and it lands especially badly on Autistic people, because so many of us have spent our whole lives being told that our difficulties are a matter of insufficient effort.
So I want to be clear about what I mean when I talk about growth mindset, because when I went back and re-read Carol Dweck’s work rather than the motivational-speaker bastardized versions of it, I found something genuinely useful – maybe more useful for we who are Autistic than for anyone.
How Growth Mindset Can Actually Help Us
Dweck’s distinction is simple. A fixed mindset assumes ability is set in stone. You either have it or you don’t. A growth mindset says abilities can be developed through effort, strategy, and learning over time.
Notice what is not in there. No promise about outcomes. No yacht. No guarantee that trying gets you the thing you wanted. It is a claim about capacity, not destiny.
I would add that growth mindset existed long before Carol Dweck walked the earth. She just did a very good job of naming it and structuring it. And the brain research backs her up.
Neuroplasticity means our capacity to learn and change continues throughout adulthood. When I was young, the accepted science was that after a certain point your brain simply began dying off and you were finished learning anything new. I volunteer teaching continuing education courses for retired adults, and my oldest student is in her nineties. She is still learning. She is amazing.
I am not going to become a billionaire. I am not going to own a huge yacht. I am not going to run a Fortune 500 company, and I do not want to. But I have the ability and the power to develop and manage my own business and my own life the way I want to. I have challenges, as does everyone. I am simply not letting anything artificially hold me back.
That is the whole promise. It is a modest promise, and modest promises are the ones worth trusting.
Where Our Beliefs Come From
Here is why this matters so much for Autistic people specifically.
Most of us arrive at adulthood carrying a set of beliefs about our own incapacity that we did not write. We inherited them.
They came from the medical model, which frames us as having a disorder rather than a difference, and which starts from the question “What is wrong with this person?” instead of “What does this person need?” They came from school, where behavior plans were built around compliance rather than understanding, and lowered expectations were handed to us as a kindness. They came from families who loved us and did not know what to do with us.
When I was assessed for kindergarten readiness in the 1960s, my parents were told I was not ready and should be placed in special education, which at the time meant a single room where children with every kind of difference were kept together mostly so they would not distract the other kids.
My parents knew better only because I had spent enough time at my father’s car repair shop that at five years old I could take apart a carburetor and explain every piece inside it.
Later, my beliefs came from the workplace. My communication style was direct, and in organizations that valued directness I excelled. One executive vice president held me up to my peers as the person who would tell him the truth whether it was comfortable or not. In other organizations, the exact same behavior got me ostracized.
In one job I lost a quiet office because someone counted the ceiling tiles and decided my space exceeded the corporate allocation, and I was relocated to an open area directly beside the customer complaint call center. I did strategic planning and writing next to people arguing on the phone all day. I did not last long there. I did not know I was Autistic, so I did not know to ask for an accommodation. I just knew I was failing.
Add them up and you get sentences running in the background for decades. You’ll never manage people, you’re too direct. It’s easier if you don’t come to the client meeting. You should be grateful you have a job at all.
Here is the reframe that I think is the single most important sentence you can ready here:
If you have always been told you can’t,
that is data about other people’s expectations.
It is not a verdict on your capacity.
The Distinction that Changes Everything
There is a difference between a real support need and an inherited belief about incapacity, and most of us have them tangled together.
A real support need is specific and describable, tied to an actual sensory, communication, or processing difference. “I need written instructions, not just verbal ones, to do this accurately.” “I need some quiet time before I can switch tasks well.” “I need clear deadlines instead of open-ended requests.” And the fact is that most people perform better with clear instructions.
An inherited belief is vague, sweeping, and attached to someone else’s expectations. It usually opens with “You’ll never . . .” or “People like you don’t . . .” or “It’s just easier if you don’t. . .” Sometimes it is disguised as a “should.”
A late friend of mine used to say: “Don’t let anybody should all over you” – and he was absolutely right!
Support needs are real and they do not go away when expectations change. If anything they increase during change. And most of them turn out to be things that help everybody. I have had executives tell me about an Autistic employee who “needs everything written down.” Every human being on the payroll would benefit from knowing exactly what is expected of them.
Inherited beliefs are different. They were never tested. They were assumed and repeated until they felt like facts. And when you separate the two, you often find that the thing you thought was a limit was just somebody else’s guess about you.
Your Inner Voice is a First Draft
The language layer in our minds is where the old beliefs stay alive.
Brené Brown has a wonderful concept she calls the SFD, the Stormy First Draft. It is the story your brain writes the instant something goes wrong. “The client hasn’t replied, so they must hate the work.” “The proposal was ignored, so I must have overcharged.” “A competitor landed the client, so they can do things I will never be able to do.”
I had a client no-show for a meeting on a Thursday. My stormy first draft was immediate: “John is blowing me off because he’s tired of working with me.” No answer to my email or my text. Nothing over the weekend. On Monday he called, laughing, from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean. He and his girlfriend had booked a last-minute trip, and he had been on a plane during our meeting. None of it had anything to do with me.
For those of us who are Autistic, the first draft can run faster, hit harder, and feel more permanent. If you experience rejection sensitive dysphoria, one piece of bad news can feel like confirmation of everything you have ever feared, and you feel it in your body before you can think about it. That is not a character flaw. It is information about how your nervous system processes threat. Naming it does not make it disappear, but it creates enough distance to take a breath.
So the practice is three steps. Catch it. Name it. Revise it.
Catching it means noticing the draft and saying, out loud or on paper, this is my stormy first draft. You do not have to believe a sentence just because it is loud.
Naming it means asking what kind of sentence it is: a time frame problem, an identity collapse, a verdict where there should be data.
Revising it usually takes one word. That word is often yet.
“I’m bad at networking” is a closed door. “I’m not good at networking yet” is a different sentence entirely. So is “I’m currently not good at networking,” or “I’m learning to network,” or “I’m building my networking skills,” or “for me, networking is unfamiliar.”
Two other phrases can do a lot of work: “I haven’t figured out how to sell in a way that feels like me yet,” and “what would it take?”
I used that second one on my own pricing. I had been undercharging for years. A new client wanted a very large amount of work done fast, on a timeline that would cost me nights and weekends. Instead of quoting my usual rate, I asked myself what the work was actually worth to me, and quoted double my normal rate. He said “That’s fine, send me an agreement.”
None of this is sunshine and roses. It is not a feeling – it is a practice that works one small revision at a time. Remember this: The voice that runs your business or professional life is neither neutral nor permanent. It is a first draft, and first drafts can be rewritten.
Why Growth Mindset is Right for Us
I have come to believe Autistic people can be exceptionally good in business, once we figure out what actually works for us and stop trying to run somebody else’s playbook.
In my consulting work I see patterns and connections my clients do not. Things that seem completely obvious to me land as brilliant insights for them. I never learned to sell the way sales trainers taught me to sell, and I stopped trying. I found a relaxed approach where it genuinely does not bother me if someone decides not to work with me, and that took all the pressure off. Some trainers would tell me that is the wrong way to do it. It is the right way for me.
That is growth mindset as I understand it. Not the sky is the limit. Not manifest your way to a fortune. Just this: Some of what I believe about my limits was never really about my limits, and I get to find out which parts.
Come Explore and Discover with Us
If you would like to learn more about growth mindset, I invite you to check out Autistic Business Network. Everything here comes from the first two weeks of a six-week growth mindset series I teach inside the Autistic Business Network. Additional sessions will go further into strengths, goal setting, and building working practices that fit how our minds actually operate. The instruction portion of sessions are recorded so you can pause, replay, and take as long as you want with the reflection exercises. The discussion portions are never recorded, so anything you share stays in the room.
If you would like you to join us, you can learn more and sign up at Autisticbusinessnetwork.com. Before September 30, you can sign up for three free months. That gets you the full series, our learning and discussion sessions, and a community of Autistic entrepreneurs and professionals who know the difference between a support need and someone else’s low expectations.
You are welcome here. Come as you are.
Chuck Hall is the founder of the Autistic Business Network and a business coach and consultant. He is a late-identified AuDHD person.
This image is a common stunstar. I chose it because one quick look says it's cool, but there's so much more to it. Google says it is a, "highly active and vibrantly colored sea star found in the cold, shallow waters of the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans. . . Their coloration is incredibly diverse, ranging from bright red, pink, and orange to deep purple, earning them the nickname 'Snowflake Star' in some regions because no two patterns are exactly alike."