Most parents can name the belief that trips them up. I’m not organized. I can’t focus. I was never a math person. Deciding how much of a short day to spend on it is where people stall.
On this episode of Energy Economics for Parents, Christopher Fern talks with Alicia Cramer, a business mindset coach and hypnotherapist who has spent close to 20 years helping business owners shift the beliefs that keep them stuck. The conversation keeps returning to one practical problem: inner work costs energy, and parents don’t have much to spare.
Where the old script comes from
Alicia Cramer traces most limiting beliefs to conditioning that starts early. A kid daydreams through class, blanks on the quiz, and quietly decides something about who they are. A parent says you don’t pay attention often enough that it sticks. A professional delivers a verdict that sounds permanent. Each piece becomes evidence, and the evidence keeps confirming the story.
That’s why telling someone to snap out of it fails. Cramer compares it to telling someone who has eaten emotionally for 20 years to just stop.
Her first step with clients sounds backwards. Name the goal, then list every excuse for why you can’t have it. The excuses are the beliefs, and they have to come up before anything moves. In her experience, how heavy a belief feels depends on how intensely someone holds it, whatever their neurotype.
The fuel gauge
Christopher Fern pushed on the part most self-help skips. He describes a stretch when he’d call out of work because he knew he had personal work to do. Plenty of people get as overwhelmed by their inner to-do list as by the one on the fridge. How much should anyone take on?
Cramer’s answer is to keep most of your attention on where you’re headed and treat the recurring snag as a warning light. You can ignore a low fuel gauge for a while. Then you run out. At home, running out looks like the blowup at the kids or a partner. The outburst drops the pressure just enough to get back to normal coping, the cause stays put, and the pressure starts building again from the same spot.
The opposite trap is just as common. Fix one thing, feel the relief, and suddenly every part of life looks like a project. “You’ll never run out,” she says of the flaws a person can find in themselves. Her test for which belief deserves attention is simple: is it causing problems in your life right now? The body usually signals enough for now, the same way most people can feel which bite of food was the last one they needed.
What parents bring into the room
When the talk turns to kids, Cramer says most parents reach for something external first, and it tends to produce pushback. The work she asks parents to do is on their own state—their triggers, their fears, what they project onto a child. She asks them to hold a picture of their kid as capable and lovable, and come back to it after they slip.
Her reasoning is that a child hears the state behind the words. “It’s okay, everybody makes mistakes” lands one way from a calm parent and another way from an anxious one. Asked what she’d most want her own kids to carry, she picks two things: knowing they’re capable, and accepting themselves, bad hair days included.
Any parent who has loved their child unconditionally already knows the state she’s describing. The energy goes into getting back to it.
Listen to the full episode: members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/p/energy-economics-ep-8
About the host Christopher Fern hosts Energy Economics for Parents on the Neurodiversity Media Network. He’s an AuDHD author, inventor, and entrepreneur, and the founder of Energy Economics, a daily practice app that sorts what’s on your mind into must-do, worth-doing, and nice-to-have. He also created the ND Operating System and The Other Side of the Table, a video guide that explains neurodivergent shutdown to the partners, parents, and colleagues on the other side of it. On the show, every guest gets some version of his core question: what does it cost you?
About the guest Alicia Cramer is a business mindset coach and hypnotherapist who works with business owners to shift limiting beliefs, work through past trauma, and line up their business and personal goals. She has been doing this work for close to 20 years, and her approach draws on a background in metaphysics alongside the psychological side. She is also a parent. Website: aliciacramer.com
