Mindset and Skills Academy 2019: How a Simple Idea About Human Potential Took Root

In 2019, the word “mindset” began to appear in a lot of different places, such as LinkedIn posts, corporate training decks, and even the spines of best-selling books stacked next to airport gates. It seemed like a trend that was just getting going. But at Mindset Academy, which was started and is run by certified life coach Mendara Lynn, the idea wasn’t something new. The course was already being taught to small groups of professionals who had decided that they needed to change the way they thought in places like the Niwa coworking space in Ottawa.

When a project is just starting out, it has a certain kind of energy that isn’t polished or scaled, but is genuinely committed. That was in the 2019 version of Mindset Academy. Every Saturday, there were workshops. Their coworking neighbors told each other about them. There were only about 700 followers on social media, but the people who did show up seemed to really mean it. That’s worth some money. One thing that might have helped the early programs work was the small size of the events.

The academy says its goal is to teach people skills and the right way of thinking to use those skills. This sounds like a clear goal. In reality, it’s harder to do than most training programs make it sound. Under pressure, technical skills that aren’t backed up by a strong mental structure tend to get worse. If a salesperson knows all the right ways to close a deal but freezes up when they meet a tough prospect, they haven’t really been trained. It was Mindset Academy’s goal to create something more complete than a list of proper professional behaviors.

It was easy to see what the programs were about: telling the difference between fixed and growth mindsets, improving teamwork, and making goals that stick in real life as well as on paper. But the tone was less business retreat and more honest conversation. During that time, Mendara Lynn wrote on social media about how perfectionism hurts your confidence, how to break out of a mental loop by brainstorming instead of sitting in it, and how to set goals with your family as well as your boss. It wasn’t common in 2019 leadership training for personal and professional growth to be linked in that way. Still, it doesn’t happen as often as it should.

The timing was important. By 2019, more and more professionals were quietly doubting the old ways of training people at work, like the boring seminars, the slide decks that no one ever looked at again, and the one-day offsites that didn’t change anything by Tuesday. That’s where Mindset Academy came in. They filled the gap by providing something smaller and more personalized, with one-on-one coaching available in addition to group workshops. It was always a good question whether that model would work on a larger scale. But it was clear that scaling wasn’t the point.

In the Spanish-speaking market, Cris Urzúa’s Mindset and Skills Academy was also working in similar areas from a sales point of view. His SellingThroughService program was trying to change the negative image of selling by making it more like real problem-solving. Though the projects were in different places and had different goals, they were both a response to a cultural problem: most professional development made people feel like they needed information when what they really needed was a new way of thinking about how they worked and what they did.

It’s hard not to notice that 2019 felt like a turning point for this kind of education at that time. The years that followed, with more remote work, faster change, and a lot of burnout, made the issues these shows were raising feel a lot more important. None of those things were predicted by the Mindset Academy workshops that were held every Saturday morning at an Ottawa coworking space. Their only goal was to help. There is something quietly teaching about that.