The Marshmallow Study Explains Why Entrepreneurs Struggle to Trust and Stop Carrying the Weight Alone
The marshmallow study isn't really about discipline. It's about trust. Entrepreneurs who struggle to delegate, keep hiring the wrong people, or feel alone despite their success may be running a nervous system pattern that started in childhood. Annie Carbonneau's relationship coaching addresses that.
Picture this: a child sitting at a table. A marshmallow placed in front of them. A researcher says, "If you wait until I come back without eating it, you'll get a second one." Then he leaves the room.
Some children wait. Others eat the marshmallow immediately.
For decades, the Stanford marshmallow experiment has been cited as proof of the importance of discipline, the ability to plan for the long term, and the capacity to delay gratification. We're told that the child who eats the marshmallow has failed because they lack self-control.
But what if it wasn't a failure at all? What if eating the marshmallow was, in reality, the most sensible decision that child could have made?
Trust, Not Discipline
Tali Sharot, neuroscientist and author of “The Influential Mind” (2017), offers a radically different interpretation of this experiment. According to her, the children who ate the marshmallow didn't necessarily fail due to a lack of discipline. They may have simply had fewer reasons to believe that the second marshmallow would actually come.
Sharot explains that stress profoundly affects decision-making and changes behaviour. When a child grows up in an environment where promises are frequently broken, where emotional needs are not met, or where they experience excessive control over what they can or cannot do, waiting becomes risky. If waiting for needs to be satisfied never led to safety, support, or positive outcomes, then taking the reward immediately becomes a perfectly logical survival response2.
The child is not acting impulsively. They are acting from a stress response anchored in their nervous system. Eating the marshmallow, in this context, is not a failure of discipline. It is an adaptation to a world where trust has never been safe3.
The Marshmallow Doesn't Disappear in Adulthood
What makes this interpretation even more fascinating is that it doesn't stop in childhood. Entrepreneurs often develop discipline in certain areas of their lives while continuing to struggle in others. They become financially prosperous, build something impressive, achieve ambitious goals. But in their relationships and their ability to build a support system, the same pattern persists: they cannot wait for help to arrive, because waiting has never felt safe.
Some seek the attention they never received as children. Some buy luxury goods to signal that they deserve recognition, carrying into their relationships the belief that visible success is the only way to prove their worth. Many believe they must do everything themselves because asking for help means admitting weakness. They systematically avoid emotions through excessive movement, compulsive hyperactivity, or relational avoidance.
An unhealthy behaviour may change on the surface, often through willpower or management strategies. But the unmet need hiding underneath remains present. And it reappears elsewhere, in another form.
Consider the entrepreneur who earns a good living and has achieved a certain level of visible success. On paper, everything looks fine. But in their relationships, it's a different story. They don't know who to trust. When they try to hire contractors or bring in help, they choose the wrong people, again and again. They're afraid to delegate because every time they've tried, it's backfired. They avoid difficult conversations because they don't want to seem too demanding or hurt someone. They feel completely alone, whether surrounded by people or not, and never truly supported. They've been carrying the weight themselves for years, and they've hit a ceiling they can't break through on their own.
This isn't a strategy problem. This isn't a lack of business skills. This is a problem of relational capacity and nervous system regulation. This is the marshmallow resurfacing in another form.
Hiring Wrong People: What It Looks Like vs. What's Really Happening
What It Looks Like | What's Really Happening | |
|---|---|---|
You keep hiring contractors who flake, miss deadlines, or don't follow through. | Your nervous system picks people who confirm the belief that help won't come through, because that's what feels familiar. | |
You avoid delegating because "it's faster to do it myself." | Delegation feels unsafe. Waiting for someone else to deliver has never led to safety or support in the past. | |
You conduct thorough interviews and vetting, but still choose the wrong person. | You're unconsciously drawn to people who match the relational patterns you learned in childhood, even when the red flags are visible. | |
You feel isolated and alone, even when you have a team or network around you. | You've never developed the relational capacity to co-regulate, trust deeply, or ask for help without feeling weak. | |
You tell yourself you just need better hiring systems or a stronger filtering process. | The problem isn't the system; it's that your nervous system is still "eating the marshmallow" because waiting for real support has never been safe. |
Changing Behaviour Isn't Enough
Many entrepreneurs attempt to solve these kinds of problems through sheer discipline. They read books on hiring, take leadership training, adopt strict vetting processes, sign up for personal growth programs. They consult business coaches who offer tactics and systems.
And sometimes, it helps. But often, the problem returns. Because intellectually understanding why a behaviour repeats isn't enough to change the biological response of the nervous system. As Dr. Aimie Apigian explains in The Biology of Trauma, cognitive understanding does not reprogram the body. The nervous system must be involved1. It must relearn what safety is, what trust is, what authentic connection is.
Annie Carbonneau's framework holds that this is not a question of willpower or stronger vetting. It is a question of creating an internal foundation that makes healthy relational choices not only possible, but natural and safe.
Building a New Foundation
Changing relational patterns requires working on more than one level at once. The nervous system, the identity, and the relational habits all need to shift together for the change to stick.
At the nervous system level, this means working somatically: using breathwork6, body-based regulation techniques4, polyvagal theory1, and heart coherence practices developed by the HeartMath Institute5 to help the body recognize what safety actually feels like. This isn't about relaxation. It is about teaching the nervous system, through repeated physical experience, that it is safe to wait, safe to depend on someone, and safe to let help in.
At the identity level, this means surfacing and transforming the beliefs that were formed in early relational experiences: beliefs like "I have to do everything myself," "asking for help is weakness," or "no one will show up for me." This work, informed by identity wound approaches developed by researchers and coaches like Claire Zammit, addresses the story a person carries about who they are in relation to others. Without shifting that story, behavioral change tends not to hold.
At the relational level, this means building concrete capacity: understanding one's attachment style, recognizing the patterns that lead to choosing the wrong people, learning to set boundaries without withdrawing, and developing the ability to co-regulate with others rather than always self-managing alone. This is where the internal work begins to show up in real relationships, in who gets hired, in how conflict is handled, and in whether support can actually be received.
None of this is quick, and none of it is purely cognitive. The body has to be involved. That is what makes the difference between understanding a pattern and actually changing it.
Delaying Gratification Becomes Possible When Trust Is Real
When entrepreneurs learn to support themselves, respond to their own emotional needs, and create this internal foundation, they become capable of building stronger and more lasting relationships in every area of their lives. They no longer need to "eat the marshmallow" because they know, in their body, that the second marshmallow will actually come.
This isn't naivety. This is rebuilt relational capacity. This is a nervous system that has relearned safety. And this is what makes true transformation possible, not just in personal relationships, but in the ability to hire well, delegate confidently, and build the support system a business depends on. The weight no longer has to be carried alone.
Entrepreneurs who recognize this pattern in themselves are invited to visit Annie Carbonneau's profile on Dream Coach Match.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Tali Sharot's research actually find about stress and decision-making?
Sharot's research shows that stress doesn't just affect how people feel; it fundamentally changes how they make decisions. In high-stress environments, the brain tends to shift toward immediate rewards and away from long-term planning2. This is not a character flaw. It is a biological adaptation. When a child grows up in an environment where waiting for support consistently leads to disappointment, the nervous system learns to take what is available now rather than risk waiting for something that may never come. That pattern gets encoded in the body and continues operating in adulthood, long after the original environment is gone3.
I'm not sure I can find people I trust or open up to someone. What if I can't do this?
That doubt makes complete sense, and it points to something important. The ability to trust and connect isn't a personality trait some people have and others don't. It is a capacity that develops, or doesn't, based on early relational experiences and how the nervous system learned to respond to vulnerability3. Rebuilding that capacity starts not with finding the right people, but with creating enough internal safety that the body stops treating connection as a threat1. This involves working directly with the nervous system through somatic and breathwork practices, identifying the identity wounds that drive self-reliance, understanding attachment patterns and how they play out in relationships, and gradually building the experience of safe, reciprocal connection. It is a layered process, but it is learnable.
How long does this actually take?
The honest answer is that it depends. The body adapts to safety at its own pace, and that pace is shaped by how deep the nervous system patterns go, how consistently the work is practised outside of sessions, and how much time and space the body needs to move toward new relational experiences. Six months builds a solid foundation. The transformation, however, tends to continue well beyond that as new relational habits become more natural and the nervous system accumulates evidence that trust is safe.
Why do entrepreneurs who are disciplined in every other area struggle so much with trust and connection?
Discipline is a skill that develops through repetition and feedback. When effort leads to results, the pattern reinforces itself. Most successful entrepreneurs have spent years building exactly that kind of discipline in their work: they set a goal, they execute, they get the outcome.
Trust and connection don't work the same way. They aren't built through effort and execution. They develop through relational experience: through having needs met consistently, through learning that depending on someone is safe, through discovering that vulnerability doesn't lead to abandonment or disappointment. For entrepreneurs who didn't accumulate those experiences early on, the relational "muscle" simply didn't get the same training as the discipline muscle.
This is why someone can be extraordinarily capable in their work and genuinely lost when it comes to building a team they trust or asking for help without feeling exposed. It isn't a character flaw or a gap in intelligence. It's a gap in relational experience. And like any skill, relational capacity can be built, with the right kind of practice and the right conditions for it to develop safely.
What does the marshmallow study have to do with hiring and delegation?
The connection is more direct than it might seem. When an entrepreneur's nervous system has learned that waiting for support leads to disappointment, it doesn't just affect childhood behaviour. It shapes who they hire, how they interpret a contractor missing a deadline, whether they feel safe enough to delegate a task they could do faster themselves, and whether they can tolerate the vulnerability of depending on someone else. The nervous system is pattern-matching constantly, looking for confirmation of what it already believes. If it believes that help won't come through, it will find evidence for that belief, even in a candidate who looks good on paper. Changing the hiring outcome requires changing the underlying pattern, not just the vetting process.
1: Porges, S., PMC, NIH, “The Polyvagal Perspective”, 2008
2: Ansten, A., PMC, NIH, “Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function”, 2009
3: Berens, A., Jensen, S. K. G., Nelson, C., BMC Medicine, “Biological embedding of childhood adversity: from physiological mechanisms to clinical implications”, 2017
4: Krygier, A. Et al, International Journal of Psychophysiology, “Mindfulness meditation, well-being, and heart rate variability: A preliminary investigation into the impact of intensive Vipassana meditation”, 2013
5: Thayer, J. Et al, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review, “A meta-analysis of heart rate variability and neuroimaging studies: Implications for heart rate variability as a marker of stress and health”, 2012
6: Zaccaro, A. Et al, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, “How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing”, 2018