As an executive leadership coach, I routinely encounter situations with clients where they state that they cannot do something. Whether it’s networking to a different career path or pushing back on a co-worker who repeatedly disrespects their boundaries, they tend to have the same fixed mindset about the issue. They don’t think they know how to solve the problem or they believe they lack the tools to do so.
Often the thing that helps them to discover the solution is one (or more) of the following open-ended questions:
- What resources could you tap into that you’re not currently using?
- What are you avoiding?
- Who exemplifies the kind of attitude or behavior you’re trying to exhibit?
So often, we get locked into a fixed mindset that all we know or all we have is all that there will ever be. Jerk Brain is a master of the fixed mindset. When we prod a little, we can find that there is much more depth and richness than we first believed.
All we have to do is ask.
Published by liz
From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.
View all posts by liz
Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 