May 15, 2026
When I decided to start Compassionate Math, I wasn’t sure where to begin. How does someone start a company? What do I need to do? Do I need to ask permission or fill out forms? How does this affect my taxes?
OK. To be fair, I knew some of the answers to these questions, but I wanted to learn more about how to run a business so I wouldn’t make a dumb mistake that would ruin my new company or my personal finances.
One way I tried to educate myself was to listen to business development podcasts while I made dinner. I figured this would be super efficient but it turned out I was wrong. There was a big problem.
Almost every podcast I found and listened to focused on building a business by working on my mindset. It was nearly impossible for me to find podcasts that discussed specific strategies to start and grow a business.
For months almost every resource I found had topics to help me focus on my feelings. But that’s not what I needed; I needed to learn business development strategies.
At the same time, I didn’t realize how much this issue parallels the way most people think about math anxiety, math trauma, and achieving mathematical excellence.
Fake “gurus” and a skewed sense of balance
Most business “gurus” provide content that make you feel good about setting up a business and the glories of being a boss babe, but they rarely have substantive content helps you move forward.
They don’t address the practical tactics necessary to run a business.
It turns out I fell into the fascinating world of online business coaches who are willing to take your money and tell you they will help you with your business only to blind you with smoke and mirrors and sell you a dream (thank god I didn’t buy; more on that below).
They convince you that if you can just work on manifesting your goals and get your mindset right, then you’ll quickly make 6-figures.
But that’s not true. Most small businesses fail or close in less than 5 years. Less than 10% of independent workers (solopreneurs) make over $100K.
Now mind you, mindset and perspective are really important when you’re starting a business. There are lots of ways that attitude can make a difference between success and failure.
Imposter syndrome, the feeling that you’re a “faker that will get caught” can creep in any time leaving you wondering “Who am I to think I have something valuable to offer?”.
If you fall into a mindset pitfall, you can second-guess yourself into inertia and not make any progress.
Mindset is absolutely important and necessary for success.
But do you know what else is important when running a business? Marketing, bookkeeping, cashflow, compliance, operations, etc. There are lots of practical and necessary tasks that ensure the survival of a business.
To be successful in business, I needed to understand how my messaging is tied to my marketing and how branding is different from both of those. I needed to know how to project revenue and maintain an eye on my cashflow. I had to understand contracts and how to protect my intellectual property.
Some of these things I knew; some I needed to learn. Very little of that knowledge came from podcasts and videos from people who promised that a 6-figure income is easy to achieve by anyone who buys their course and follows their method (it isn’t; it’s HAAAARD!).
By the way, did you notice that almost all these practical and necessary tasks are either rooted in math or require math to be effective?
Everything having to do with finances is clearly tied to math, that’s pretty clear. What else? My math skills (especially writing proofs) help me review and edit contracts and protect my intellectual property. Whether a marketing and messaging strategy is successful is based on analyzing various (mathematical) measures of success.
My math skills help me ask good questions and answer them using data (not feelings or mindset). How? For example, asking good questions and using math to answer them helped me create a complete profit and loss statement that drives how I make decisions around the expenses I take on.
I didn’t need to hire a bookkeeper or fractional CFO to do this. In fact, it’s not a good use of money. I don’t make enough to justify such a big expense, especially since I have the mathematical skills to manage the amount of money we’re talking about myself.
My analytical skills helped me see that there was no good justification for hiring any of the business coaches that dazzled me with big promises.
Honestly, I’m starting to think that the reasons so many small businesses fail is because people aren’t doing the math; that if they felt more comfortable with math, they’d be more successful. Strong mathematical skills can help you with reasons 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, and 8!
To be successful in business you need BOTH a good mindset AND the practical knowledge necessary to run a business.
You can’t just manifest your way into success, and you can’t work incessantly and not think about how running a business affects you emotionally (and the same is true in math class for people with math trauma!).
Actually, you can be all business and not think about your emotions; just look at how many CEOs align with the psychological definition of a psychopath that it sparked the urban myth associating corporate leaders with psychopathology. But in the end, the more I learn about the personal side of the current crop of our titans of industry, the more I feel sorry for them and those closest to them.
For most of us, we need to balance our mindset with our skills; we can’t ignore one for the other.
Focusing only on math trauma doesn’t help
This is a blog where I talk about math trauma, so why am I talking about business?
For too long, too little attention has been paid to the emotional side of learning math. Math anxiety was the first topic documented in this area (in the 1950s) and research on affect (emotions) and math has slowly grown to include other factors that contribute to math excellence and success; these factors are outlined in the Compassionate Math Framework.
More attention is slowly being paid to how our emotions contribute to learning math. That’s really great. However, the balance in how this work is being addressed and implemented in schools shifts too far on the emotional side.
The problem is I keep seeing a focus on social-emotional learning (SEL) in math without addressing rigor. Success in mathematics requires a balance in how one feels about math and how one understands and succeeds in math, the same way it does in business.
To have a transformative math learning experience, you can’t have one or the other; you need both. Work in this area has to talk about both the SEL and the rigor.
Proper balance means addressing math trauma while exploring rigorous content
If a student suffers from math trauma, their cognitive / mental load is so overwhelmed by their negative feelings that they have a hard time focusing on the content.
You need to help them work through their negative feelings and math trauma so they can move forward. However, if a student feels great about math but is taught superficial content or isn’t taught how to engage with rich, rigorous mathematical concepts, they will still fail their math class because the content is hard.
Math is hard and the student needs to be able to do the hard work, not just feel good about it. Again, we can’t have SEL without addressing rigor. We need to teach students to focus and feel comfortable wrestling with the hard mathematical content, but we need to give them the tools to be able to do so.
We must strike a balance when working with teachers and students: you can’t address math trauma without talking about content, and you shouldn’t discuss content without addressing math trauma. True compassion requires preparing students to meet their academic demands.
This means striking a balance between how students feel about math and how they engage with content. You can’t focus on one or the other; you need both conceptual understanding and emotional well-being.
The Compassionate Math Framework is the bridge that ensures feeling better leads directly to doing better.
In the end, you can do the work and spend time reflecting on your experiences learning math and get to a space where you can handle the hard feelings. But if you just focus on mindset and working your way through anxiety or trauma, know that the math will still be there.
If you run a business and have pretty brand colors, it won’t matter if your marketing isn’t analyzed to make sure you reach your potential buyers.
If you don’t focus on getting support in how to engage with rigorous content, you’ll be right back to where you started (or maybe even worse off).
To truly make a difference in student success we have to focus on both the well-being of students and their conceptual understanding.
We can’t just manifest and breathe our way out of math trauma; we still need to do the math to achieve mathematical success.
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This material is original content and was not created using AI (except for standard spelling and grammar checkers).