Your seventh-grade teacher called. She's still wrong about you

Is your education still running the show in your business? You might be experiencing the effects of educational trauma, let me explain…

You know that feeling when you're trying to learn something new for your business and suddenly you're twelve years old again, staring at a worksheet that might as well be written in ancient Sumerian?

Maybe it's setting up a new email platform, or trying to understand profit margins, or attempting to create any kind of system that's supposed to make your life easier. You start with the best of intentions, but somewhere between "this will only take five minutes" and hour three of muttering at your computer screen, that familiar voice shows up: Everyone else gets this. What's wrong with me?

I spent most of my school years perfecting the art of looking like I was paying attention while my brain was somewhere entirely different - either desperately wishing I could beam myself to another life where kids didn’t have to go to school or wondering why anyone thought the Pythagorean theorem was going to apply to me, a child. My teachers mostly ignored me, which, fair enough - I wasn't exactly giving them much to work with. But when I did occasionally surface from my mental wanderings to show interest in something, they usually looked at me like “too little, too late” - I got used to being dismissed.

For years, I thought this meant I wasn't smart enough, wasn't focused enough, wasn't enough in all the ways that apparently mattered for learning. Turns out that traditional education just didn’t work for me.

What I didn't understand then - and what took me decades to figure out - is that there's a direct line between how we were treated as learners and how we treat ourselves when we're trying to learn something new in our businesses today. And how we were treated as learners was deeply impacted by our gender and skin colour, aka, it wasn’t our fault.

Here's what I mean when I say your education might still be running the show in your business:

You apologize before asking questions. "Sorry, this is probably a stupid question, but..." becomes your standard opening line in any learning situation. You've been trained to believe that not knowing something immediately makes you a burden rather than, you know, a normal human being encountering new information.

You avoid anything that feels "technical" like it might bite you. Setting up analytics, understanding your profit and loss statement, learning new software - you'll find seventeen different ways to postpone these tasks because somewhere along the way, you got the message that you're "not good at that kind of thing." Meanwhile, you're running a business that requires exactly these kinds of skills.

You assume you should already know things you've never been taught. A client recently told me she felt stupid for not understanding how to read her business metrics. When I asked where she was supposed to have learned this, she paused and said, "I... don't know. Somewhere?" Right. Business school that you never attended, perhaps?

You shut down when learning gets hard. The moment something doesn't click immediately, you either shut down completely or start making jokes about how you're "obviously hopeless at this stuff." Because if you beat yourself up first, maybe it won't hurt as much when someone else points out what you're doing wrong.

You procrastinate on anything that involves learning something new. That course you bought six months ago? Still sitting in your browser bookmarks, gathering digital dust. It's not that you don't want to grow your business - it's that some part of you is still convinced that struggling to learn means you're failing as a person.

(By the way, even though I have a handful of years of undoing the harms of educational trauma, I still do all of these things)

Here's the thing: none of this is actually about your intelligence or your capability. It's about a system that taught you to see learning struggles as personal failures instead of natural parts of the process.

But here's what I want you to consider: every single one of these responses makes perfect sense when you understand that you were trained by a system that prioritized compliance over curiosity, standardization over individual learning styles, and being "right" over being willing to explore.

Think about it this way - if you spent 12+years in an environment where asking questions made you feel stupid, where learning at your own pace was seen as falling behind and where your natural way of processing information was consistently ignored or corrected, of course you'd approach new learning with caution. You're not broken; you're having a completely rational response to educational trauma.

And that word - trauma - might feel too strong to some of you. "Come on, it was just school." But trauma isn't just dramatic, obvious events. It's also the slow accumulation of messages that you're not quite right as you are, that your way of thinking needs to be fixed, that struggling means failing.

You've been carrying around someone else's definition of intelligence, someone else's timeline for learning, someone else's idea of what makes a person "good at" something. None of which has anything to do with your actual capacity to understand, create, and solve problems in your business.

The entrepreneurs I work with who've made this shift - who've stopped trying to learn the way they were told they should and started honouring how they actually think - don't just build better systems, they build better relationships with themselves. They stop apologizing for needing what they need. They stop pretending to understand things they don't. They start asking better questions because they know it’s more important to comprehend than to worry about coming off as stupid.

So how do you start treating yourself like someone whose education failed them, rather than someone who failed at education? Here are a few experiments that might help you reclaim your relationship with learning:

Option 1: The Learning Archaeology Dig (15-20 minutes) Write down one specific memory of struggling to learn something in school or in your business - not the dramatic stuff, just a regular Tuesday when something didn't click. Then ask yourself: What did I need in that moment that I didn't get? More time? A different explanation? Permission to ask questions? Now, the next time you're learning something for your business, give yourself exactly that thing. See what happens when you honour your actual needs instead of falling back into unhelpful behaviours.

Option 2: The Question Permission Slip (ongoing practice) For one week, every time you catch yourself about to apologize before asking a question, stop. Replace "Sorry, this is probably stupid, but..." with "I'm curious about..." or simply "Can you help me understand..." Notice how it feels to ask questions like someone who deserves clear answers rather than someone who should already know everything.

Option 3: The Slow Learning Experiment (when you're ready to tackle something you've been avoiding) Pick one thing you've been procrastinating on learning - maybe it's understanding your business finances or setting up that email automation. Instead of trying to "figure it out" in one sitting, try getting up and taking breaks when you feel the frustration create physical overwhelm - come back when it passes and keep going. Give yourself permission to be confused, to need multiple attempts, to learn slower than the tutorial assumes you should. Your only job is to be curious, not to become an expert.

Remember: there's nothing wrong with needing more time, more explanation, or a completely different approach than what's being offered. The problem was never you.

Let me tell you about one of my clients, we’ll call her Sarah, because her story illustrates what becomes possible when you stop carrying around someone else's verdict about your intelligence.

Sarah came to me (recently diagnosed with autism) convinced she was "just bad with technology." Every time she tried to set up a new system in her art workshop business - whether it was a CRM, a course platform, or even organizing her Google Drive - she'd hit a wall of overwhelm that felt eerily familiar. She'd start with enthusiasm, follow tutorials step by step, but then freeze when something didn't work exactly as shown. The shame spiral was always the same: I should know this by now. Everyone else figures this stuff out. What's wrong with me?

During one of our sessions, Sarah mentioned being placed in remedial math in middle school despite being obviously intelligent in other areas. Her teacher had told her she "wasn't a numbers person" and should focus on her strengths in writing instead. As she talked, something clicked. That same feeling of inadequacy, that same voice telling her she wasn't "that kind of person" - it was showing up every time she tried to learn new business tools.

I reframed Sarah’s struggle by emphasizing that she was a child with undiagnosed autism and because she had a unique brain, the institution of education was unable to accommodate what she needed in order to learn. This wasn’t her fault but now that we know this, we have an opportunity to explore what could be blocking her from this work.

Once Sarah understood that her tech overwhelm wasn't a personal failing but a response to decades of educational messages about what she was and wasn't capable of, everything shifted. She started approaching Notion with curiosity instead of self-judgment. When she got stuck, instead of assuming she was "bad at this," she'd ask herself: "What do I need right now to understand this better?" She gave herself permission to learn slowly, to need more explanation than the tutorials provided, to build something that worked for her brain rather than copying someone else's system perfectly.

Within one session, I guided Sarah to build a relationship management system that actually reflected how she thinks and works. But more importantly, she'd reclaimed her identity as someone capable of learning anything - just not necessarily the way she'd been told she should.

The stakes aren't just about getting organized or building better systems. They're about whether you spend the rest of your business journey apologizing for how your brain works, or celebrating it.

If this resonates with you - if you're tired of apologizing to your computer screen every time something doesn't work exactly like the tutorial promised - I want you to know something: you're not the problem here.

You're not broken because you need more time to understand things. You're not deficient because you ask too many questions. You're not failing because the way your brain processes information doesn't match some imaginary standard of how learning is "supposed" to work.

The voice in your head, telling you that everyone else "gets it" faster, that you should already know this stuff, that there's something fundamentally wrong with how you think? That's not your voice. That's the echo of a system that prioritized conformity over curiosity, speed over understanding, being right over being willing to explore.

But here's what I know about you: you're running a business. You're serving people who need exactly what you offer. You're solving problems and creating value in ways that matter. None of that happened by accident. It happened because you're intelligent, capable, and resourceful - even if nobody bothered to notice those qualities when you were stuck in a classroom that wasn't designed for how your brain works.

Every time you honour your actual learning needs instead of fighting against them, you're not just building better business systems, you're healing something that was broken a long time ago. You're proving that twelve-year-old version of yourself was never the problem.

Your education failed you. But you're not in that classroom anymore. You get to decide how this story ends.