Why I Feel Like I’m the Only One Struggling With Mentors, Peers and Support

In communities and peer environments, everyone else seems to be using their mentors effectively, building genuine peer relationships, getting real value from their support structures. They talk about their coaches and masterminds with ease. They seem to know how to ask for what they need and receive it without the internal friction you experience.

And you’re working hard just to use the support well — managing your reactions to the mentor’s guidance, keeping yourself showing up to the peer group, wondering whether you’re getting enough value from the structures you’ve invested in.

The feeling of being uniquely bad at support is one of the most isolating experiences in the conscious entrepreneurship space. And it is significantly distorted by what support environments actually surface about people’s experience.

What Support Environments Typically Surface

Most support environments — masterminds, coaching groups, peer communities — primarily surface accomplishment, strategy, and progress. That’s what the formats are designed for. Check-ins tend to be about what you’ve done. Questions tend to be about what to do next. The vulnerability about what isn’t working tends to happen at a lower rate and in more private contexts.

The accomplishment bias in support environments means that what you observe in the group is the curated version of everyone’s experience — the parts they’re willing to share in the group format. The difficulty with using support well, the internal friction, the ways the support isn’t quite landing — these stay mostly private.

The Hidden Majority

The person who feels like the only one struggling with support is almost certainly not the only one. They are observing the public-facing version of others’ experience and comparing it to their private internal experience.

The comparison between others’ public presentation and your private experience is structurally guaranteed to produce the feeling of being uniquely behind — because everyone’s public presentation is more functional than their private experience, and your private experience is the only one you have direct access to.

The likelihood that everyone else in the room is using their support perfectly, feeling no friction, getting full value from every investment — this is vanishingly small. The likelihood that most of them are having their own version of the same difficulty, and not surfacing it in the group — this is very high.

What Actually Shifts the Feeling

The feeling of being uniquely bad at support shifts in one of two ways.

The first is a single honest conversation with one other person about their actual experience with support — not the performance of it, but the real version. When someone says “I actually find it hard to use my mentor well,” the response is almost always “oh, me too” — and the revelation is immediately deflating of the isolation.

The second is time and repeated experience — enough interactions where you observe that others’ difficulty with support eventually becomes visible, because no one can maintain the performance indefinitely.

One honest exchange about support difficulty breaks the isolation more effectively than any amount of reassurance that others struggle too.

You are not behind. The person who feels like the only one struggling with support is observing a highly edited version of everyone else’s experience. The actual distribution of people struggling with support in any given community is significantly higher than what the community’s norms make visible.

If you want to find a community where the honest experience of difficulty with support can actually be surfaced, the Abundance GPS Skool community offers a free trial. Join here.