You Don’t Have a Blind Spot. You Have a Blind Loop.

Why your brain treats naming the problem as solving it

Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash

Last week I wrote about blind spots: the patterns running your life that you can’t see no matter how hard you squint. Hundreds of you wrote back. Raw, specific, uncomfortable things you’d never said out loud.

One response stopped me cold.

It came from Maria. She’d done everything I’d asked: the 7-minute exercise, the blind spot inventory, the nervous system work. Her pattern surfaced in our very first session: she over-functioned to feel safe. Took on other people’s problems, said yes before she’d finished hearing the question, built entire systems around being indispensable so no one could ever leave.

She named it beautifully. Could trace the whole thing back to the exact season of her childhood where it started, explain the neuroscience behind it, draw you a map of how it shaped every relationship she’d ever had.

And in our next session, she showed up exhausted. She’d spent the week building a project plan for a colleague who hadn’t asked for help, reorganizing her sister’s finances, and volunteering to lead a committee she had no interest in.

I said: “You found the blind spot. You can describe it better than I can. So why is it still running?”

She went quiet. Then she said something that rearranged my thinking for weeks: “I thought seeing it was the same as fixing it.”

She was right. And she wasn’t alone.

Knowing why you’re stuck has become its own way of staying stuck.

After that session I sat with my laptop open, staring at the responses to the blind spots article. Hundreds of people naming their patterns with stunning precision. And I started wondering: how many of them would do exactly what Maria did? See it clearly on Monday, understand it completely by Wednesday, and walk right back into it by Friday.

That’s not a blind spot. A blind spot is something you can’t see. Maria could see hers perfectly. What she had was a blind loop: a cycle where seeing the pattern, thinking about the pattern, and reacting from the pattern all feel like different activities but are actually the same mind running in circles.

That’s when I realized something was missing from the way I’d been teaching Future Scripting. I’d been treating see it, write it, act on it as three steps. They’re not. They’re three different kinds of thinking. Three separate minds.

A blind loop happens when one of those minds is doing all the work while the other two sit idle.

The three minds

The Seeing Mind recognizes patterns. It absorbs enormous amounts of information, connects dots across disciplines, turns complexity into insight. This is the mind that reads an article about blind spots and immediately knows which one is yours, the one that names the wound, understands the neuroscience, and could explain your entire operating system to a stranger over coffee.

Maria lived in her Seeing Mind. So do I. Mine built my corporate career and this Substack. It’s the reason I can sit in a session and spot the belief someone has been organizing their whole life around.

But here’s what the Seeing Mind does when it runs alone: it mistakes understanding for progress. Maria spent years collecting insights about herself the way some people collect vintage books. Beautifully curated. Gathering dust. Her nervous system registered each insight as movement, released a small hit of dopamine, and went right back to running the old code.

This is the part no one talks about. Self-awareness can become its own addiction. Every podcast episode, every therapy breakthrough, every journaling session where you nail exactly what’s happening, your brain treats the naming as the doing. The dopamine hit from I finally understand why I do this is neurologically almost indistinguishable from the hit you’d get from actually changing. So your body stops pushing. The work feels done. You walk away from the journal feeling lighter and then repeat the exact same pattern by Thursday.

The shadow of the Seeing Mind: mistaking understanding for progress.

The Scripting Mind imagines a different future. It takes what you’ve seen and builds something new from it, writing in present tense, feeling possibilities in the body before they exist in the world, drafting the new identity in vivid sensory detail. The version of you who speaks up without hedging, lets go without guilt, walks into the room without making herself smaller.

I love my Scripting Mind. Maybe too much. I have 89 unfinished drafts in my Substack folder right now. Workshop concepts that felt world-changing at 11 PM and evaporated by morning. My imagination is so vivid that writing a future sometimes provides enough of a neurological hit that my body thinks I’ve already lived it. The script feels so real my nervous system stops pushing me to build the thing.

The shadow of the Scripting Mind: a life imagined in extraordinary detail and executed not at all.

The Acting Mind moves before it’s ready. Speaks up in the meeting, hits publish on the imperfect draft, has the conversation you’ve been rehearsing for weeks. This mind tolerates the physical discomfort of being someone new in real time in a body still wired for the old identity, surrounded by people who expect the old version of you.

Maria thought she was stuck in her Seeing Mind. Turns out the Acting Mind had been driving the whole time , moving constantly, building constantly, helping constantly. Every action wired to the old pattern. She was doing everything and couldn’t tell you why.

When the Acting Mind runs alone, you get motion without direction. Entire seasons of building systems, answering every message, showing up for everyone, without ever stopping to ask whether you’re running toward something meaningful or away from something you don’t want to feel.

I know this because I was doing it while writing this article. Eighty-nine drafts in my Substack folder. A text thread open at 11:47 PM where I was coaching someone through a career decision they hadn’t asked me to weigh in on. A workshop outline half-built in another tab. I could see Maria’s pattern, name it, teach it, write a framework about it. And I was running the exact same program, just dressed up as productivity, with the diagnosis still warm in my hands.

The shadow of the Acting Mind: impressive motion with no destination.

Which mind is running your blind loop?

You don’t repeat patterns because you can’t see them. You repeat them because one mind is doing a three-mind job.

Grab a pen. Write fast. Don’t edit.

“I know why I ___ and I still ___.”

Stomach tightened? That’s your Seeing Mind. You’ve turned self-awareness into a holding pattern.

“I’ve planned ___ but never actually ___.”

That sting? Your Scripting Mind. Your imagination is standing in for your life.

“I keep doing ___ without asking ___.”

Felt that in your chest? Your Acting Mind. Motion without a map.

The prompt that hit your body, that’s your dominant mind telling on itself.

What breaks the blind loop

I built Future Scripting as a three-step method because each step wakes up a different mind.

See it activates the Seeing Mind, you recognize the pattern, name it, feel it in your body. Then you move.

Write it activates the Scripting Mind, you draft the new version in sensory, present-tense detail. Your nervous system starts to believe it. Then you move again, because the script isn’t the life.

Act on it activates the Acting Mind, you take the script off the page and into the room. But now you’re moving with awareness behind you and a vision in front of you. The motion finally has direction.

You need all three minds. Working in that order. Every time.

The question Maria couldn’t answer

In our last session, I asked Maria something simple: “If you stopped helping everyone for one entire week, just completely stopped, who would you be?”

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

That silence is the space between seeing your pattern and actually living without it. Most of us have never been there. We default to whichever mind feels safest, call it progress, and keep running the blind loop.

Maria could see her blind spot and describe it in clinical detail. What she’d never done was sit still long enough to write a version of herself that didn’t need to be indispensable, and then walk into a room as that person. The loop kept spinning because only one mind was ever on.

So here’s the question I’m leaving with you. Just the question.

If the pattern you identified in your blind spot disappeared tomorrow, if your nervous system simply stopped running that program, who would you be, and would you recognize her?

The version of you without that pattern might feel irresponsible. Selfish. Unrecognizable. That’s not danger, that’s withdrawal. Your nervous system has been running this program so long it thinks the pattern is your personality. Letting go won’t feel like freedom. It’ll feel like freefall.

Sit with that. The discomfort of not knowing is where the next version of you lives.

Which mind is running your blind loop? Hit reply with one sentence. I read every single one.