We're going to start today's podcast off with a little bit of bad news.

It really doesn't matter how good you get at making money. If

you don't heal your relationship with money, you're not likely to hold

onto it for long. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and

money mindset coach, and welcome to the Weeniecast.

So what's actually keeping you from making money and not just making

money, but keeping it? Accumulating actual wealth.

Now, oftentimes, my clients will start with me, and we'll

talk about their business, and we'll talk about their offer, and I'll have

to coach them through not being a weenie and raising their

prices and creating offers that are high ticket. And

all of that is well and good and necessary to making a lot of

money. However, that's not the whole

story. There's actually a whole slew of other

things that can keep you from making more money and keeping

it. And today, I want to dive into these things. They

happen for so many people.

So if you're going through one of these things or multiple, know that you're

not alone. Okay. There's a reason why it's common enough that I'm bringing it up

on the weenie cast. I want to also acknowledge before

we dive into these things, that being good with money

is not a willpower thing. It's not something that you're just not trying

hard enough with. It's something that is affecting

you on a nervous system level. It's affecting you

on a subconscious level. There are things

that you learned about money before you could even speak, before you

could even crawl. There's an energetic exchange you had with

your caretakers about what it meant to have money,

and you can't willpower yourself out of that. You also can't

just simply read a book and be better at it. So have

a big old bucket of compassion for yourself. As I go through

this, if there's anything that's a little like, oh,

that's a sore spot for you, take a moment and really feel through the

feelings there. Oftentimes, you know, it's that sense of

anxiety when we talk about money that creates this barrier to

more money coming to our lives, when we don't give that anxiety

power, when we're like, oh, cool, I'm feeling anxiety. Wow. All

right, where am I feeling this anxiety in my body and what's happening for me?

And we really process it. It makes it far easier to

talk about money, to work through our money garbage. And to learn

that, like, money's not evil and being quote

unquote bad with money is not the end of the world. And to

really take the charge away from the money conversation.

Okay, so do you have your big bucket of compassion? Great.

So first and foremost, let's talk about fear of money and

dealing with money. Now, fear can show up in

two different ways depending on what your money archetype is. And if you want to

learn more about money archetypes, I did a whole bonus episode. So if you go

back to the one after episode 87, you can learn more about

that. There are two ways in which fear shows up in your

relationship with money. Number one is my favorite

avoidance. Just not looking at your bank account, just kind of

like, I'm just going to trust that everything's going to be okay and it'll be

all be fine. And just kind of like hoping and praying when you give your

credit card to the person at the grocery store. That was basically

my whole twenties. So that is one way in which

we have fear show up in our relationship with money. On the

extreme opposite side, there is a level of hyper vigilance.

So someone who has a lot of fear with their money, they're

constantly checking their bank balance, they're constantly

checking their credit card statement. They are so aware of where

each and every penny that they own is at all times.

And of course, there are elements of that that are positive, and there are

elements almost of the avoidance bit where there's a lot of optimism that is

also kind of positive. However, we want to find

a happy medium, all right? We want to take the charge away,

that anxiety, that fear, and

have our checking in on money not

elicit negative feelings. So I want to use an example here because

I know everyone gets, like, really crunchy and tight when we talk about money. That'll

also make you crunchy and tight, but hopefully won't be super relevant to what you're

doing right now. Public speaking. If you're not a

big public speaker, if you don't do it often, maybe you don't do it often

because you're afraid of getting up on stage and talking to a bunch of

people. Avoiding it is not going to help.

Avoiding it is just going to keep you being bad at it. And of course

you're avoiding it because you're afraid. You're afraid of getting up on stage and making

a mistake and looking stupid and looking out into the audience and seeing them fall

asleep or look angry. Or maybe you're really into, like,

Disney cartoons and you're afraid they're going to throw like old cabbages at

you. The only way

to deal with your fear of public speaking is to go

and speak publicly. It's the only way. You have to

desensitize yourself to it. And this is

really how we deal with that avoidant type of

fear. We have to just give you little baby steps

to go and try the thing. So, for instance, if you were wanting to

get better at public speaking, one of the exercises you might do if you were

to join, say, toastmasters, is they have all these different

games that you play where you're speaking publicly because you're answering a question

or you're following a prompt, but you're not in front of the

room speaking, you're just talking in a

room full of people who are listening. And often it's something very

silly. And I think there's this

misconception when it comes to facing our fears, that when we face our fears,

we have to go for the most extreme option. Right, when we face our fears.

If you're afraid of heights, like, we're going to go jump out of planes. No,

no, that's dumb. If you're afraid of heights, let's get you a little four foot

ladder and get you comfortable up top. Let's make you

feel like you're not going to die at 4ft, and then let's go up to

6ft. Let's figure out ways for you to deal with that fear of heights.

Let's figure out smaller ways for you to deal with that fear of public

speaking. And let's find smaller ways for you to

deal with your fear of dealing with your money.

Oftentimes, you know, people think, okay, well, if I'm so bad with

money, I have to go and get a financial advisor so that they can deal

with my money. But then the next thought immediately is like, oh, my God. But

then they're gonna know what a show I am, they're gonna see all this stuff,

and then they're gonna judge me. And of course, like, it makes logical

sense that that should be the way that you deal with your money. You should

hand it off to someone. But if that is just a

scary, if having someone else see behind the curtain

of all the things that you've been doing, you're not going to do it.

So while it might make sense, it's not good advice.

And one of the things that I work with a lot of my clients on

are what are the smaller things that we can do to

desensitize you to the fear of your money. What are the

small actions you can take? You know, for some of my

clients, it's literally logging into their bank account

and checking their balance once a week and doing so after, like,

a gratitude meditation and doing some journaling on

it. And sometimes, like, giving them full permission to give me a

call afterwards if they need to be talked off the ledge. It's not just

people who are broke who are terrified of their money. There are

some really successful people who are great at

making money, who are also afraid to check in on their money. Just

because you feel avoidant and afraid of your money doesn't mean

that you're a failure. It doesn't mean that you're not going to be successful. It

just means you have some fear. And where that fear comes from, we're going to

get into in a minute. For the hyper

vigilant fear type, the work is a little opposite.

The work is far more around. When that fear comes up, when

that urge to check your bank balance comes up,

checking in with yourself, noticing. Okay, cool. Where is

this fear coming from? Do I have a fear that I'm not going to be

able to make my rent payment this month? Okay, cool. So I have

a fear around being unhoused. Great. And then if I'm

unhoused, then it'll make it really hard for me to get mail. I

don't know. Like, our brains love to latch onto random

things that can happen in the world and just channel all of the fear

that we could possibly experience towards that thing. And for the

hypervigilant type, learning how to process that fear

without checking the bank balance is going to be the practice.

Learning to dial back to maybe just checking it once a day and then maybe

a couple times a week. For those avoidant types, it's almost like

you have, like, an overdose of optimism that has an

undercurrent of scarcity. You're just always optimistic that it's going

to work out, but you're so afraid of checking because you're, like, pretty sure

that you're really skating that line. For those who are hyper

vigilant, however, it's all about scarcity. There's not going

to be enough. There's not going to be enough. Oh, my God, there's $5 less.

And I thought, oh, that's right, I bought a coffee. Just because you have fear

around money does not in itself mean that you're bad with money. It means that

you're a human who's been raised in a world that has

literally taught you to be afraid of money. And not to

mention, we'll get to this in a little bit. If you have ADHD,

there's also been a ton of messaging about how people with ADHD are

impulsive and they're bad with money and

they're far more likely to go into credit card debt and so on and so

forth. What we're told about our own identity, we do

accept. If I tell you that you're a Gemini and being a

Gemini means this, this, this and this, you're gonna believe it.

It's just human. We love being told, you know, who we are and

how we're special and especially how we're f ed up. I want to know all

of it. There's a reason why there are so many different like which

Hogwarts house, are you a part of tests

online? Because people love to be

categorized. You take it on as identity. I'm a Gryffindor,

thank you very much. Ex speliarmus. So when someone tells you that you have

ADHD and then gives you a whole list of traits that go along with it,

one of those traits being you're bad with money, guess what you

accept as truth. And of course, I just want to acknowledge, again,

just listening to this podcast and learning about fear and oh my gosh, I'm an

avoidant fear type when it comes to money. That alone is not going to make

you better with it. It's not going to take the fear away. It's going to

give you some awareness. But there's a lot of work that you have to do.

A lot of this work is what I do in my byob. Build

your own business group programs and with my one on one clients

and it takes a long time and the work is never done.

Working on your relationship with money is kind of like being in good

physical shape. Unfortunately, you can't work out for

three months straight and be in the best shape of your life and then just

be fit for the rest of your life. There's a reason why I've decided that

if vampires are real, then I plan on devoting myself to a

very serious workout regime for several months

and then going and finding a vampire and be like, cool, turn me now. Turn

me now while I'm in the best shape. I would like to be this way

for eternity, thank you very much. Your relationship with money

is going to be something that you're going to have to constantly work on and

bad news, new level, new devil. Once you work through one thing,

there's going to be more stuff until it gets easier.

But let me tell you, it's worth it. It's 100% worth it.

Okay, so now that we've talked about fear, let's go into something that's a little

more serious. Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep

listening to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel,

squirrel.

Let's talk about trauma. There's a lot of trauma associated with

money, and I'm talking big t trauma, like

a history of financial abuse and little t

trauma, where maybe four year old, you

overheard your parents fighting about money and started feeling

unsafe. Now, trauma does not come from actually being unsafe.

Trauma like, it's not like you have to be in a hostage situation at a

bank to start feeling a lot of trauma. You know,

when we're children, anytime that we perceive

the world around us as not being safe and secure, that can cause

trauma. So mom and dad screaming at each other in the other

room about one of them making a purchase and them not

having the money to back it up, and maybe the check bounced. Your

caretakers are now very scary to you, and as a

four year old, you cannot differentiate them being mad at each

other from them just being dangerous and not

being the safe person that you know and love.

Of course, we're not going to get into a trauma healing on a podcast.

It's way too triggering for too many people. And I'm not going to go into

details, but this is something that I do with a lot of my clients. I

went through the trauma of money certification several years ago, and

it was astounding to me the things that even though I had done

a ton of work on my money relationship, that I literally

took months to be able to do because of the trauma

I'd experienced financially. The prime example of this was

the very first exercise that program had us do, and it was a very

simple exercise where you went through, they gave you a form and you had

to do an inventory of all the subscription services that you were signed up

for. So anything it could be with

your business, personal, you had to make a whole inventory of them. So

your Spotify subscription, Netflix, any

business subscriptions that you have for maybe like your email

marketing or your payment systems, your

scheduler, all of it, you had to go through your bank

balance. You had to really figure out what subscriptions you are a part of.

And then you had to assess if it was something that you still used

and if it was something that you still use, then you know, and you still

liked and you still were happy with it, then you'd keep it.

And if it was something that you didn't use, you know, you'd also ask

yourself, why am I keeping this? Why am I staying?

Signed up for this? And the answers to that question were

fascinating. Oh, you know, like, one person had a subscription to

Peloton, and they just really liked

knowing that they had the option to do workouts, even though they

used it very sporadically. Some people had signed up for stuff and forgotten. I know.

We all know that that's a very ADHD thing to do, and it's so

easy with all these apps that we could possibly sign up for. Some

people went through their subscriptions and were like, oh, my God, I forgot I signed

up to that thing. That's amazing. Yeah, I should start using that again.

And it was just a great reminder of something that had just fallen out of

sight, out of mind. When I was told that this was the first

exercise, I was like, oh, cool, this will be easy. And the next day, when

I was sitting down to do my homework for the certification, and

I looked at this sheet, and then just the mere idea

of logging into my credit card and my debit

card accounts and looking to see how much I was spending on

these subscriptions, I couldn't do it. I literally couldn't do it. I sat

there for five minutes just feeling really uncomfortable and, like,

a failure for not being able to do it. And I was certain

that I was the only person who couldn't do it. I was certain that there

was something wrong with me. I just, like, especially coming from

someone who coaches others on their relationship with money, I felt like such a

failure. Now, fast forward to the next week when we had our next call,

and the teacher of the program asked, okay, who was

able to do that? And I thought that question was really interesting, who

was able to do that exercise?

And only about a third of the class was able to raise their hand.

Everyone else, you know, didn't really raise their

hand. And some people had started it and then stopped like it was too much

for them. But a lot of other people, like me, were

not even able to start it. It

felt too scary. And one of the things that we were taught,

you know, early on in this program, is that when you have trauma around

money, you can either get hyper vigilant about it,

you can get hyper aroused. I know that that brings into mind another thing,

but, like, your fear system, your nervous system gets hyper aroused, and you just, like,

get into this, like, fight or flight mode, and that's not a great

place to be working through your trauma, that's actually just going to re traumatize you

on the opposite end, you start disassociating, you

fawn, you completely check out emotionally. And

that's also not a great place to work through trauma. Cause you're not actually working

through it. You're just numbing. Where you want to be is in this

window of resilience where your nervous system

can be activated. You can absolutely feel

unsettled, but you don't feel like you have to run away from

it. Now this exercise, I tried doing it

for, I want to say, like a month and a half I thought about it.

I like really like had to process my emotions around, like, why it was so

scary for me. Why was it so hard for me to go and do it?

And it was very activating doing that.

But going through that process where I literally was not able to do it

was all incredibly healing, you know? So just like when we're dealing with

basic fears around money, when we're dealing with trauma, we don't have

to go to the extreme other end of the spectrum and do like the

scariest thing we can think of. Literally, just thinking

about, thinking about thinking about doing the thing

can help us move towards healing. Now, if you

have a great deal of trauma around money, I urge you to go and get

some support, either from a trauma trained therapist and you want to be very

specific to find a therapist who specializes with trauma.

Or if you're. If you're curious about the trauma of money program, I'm going

to link it in the show notes so you can go to

weeniecast.com trauma of money and check

it out. I can't recommend it enough. And of course,

if you are wanting to start a business and you want to have an all

in one little package, I do all of this within my programs. I help

my clients through the trauma of money style of coaching. I

don't offer therapy.

The third thing that gets in people's way when it comes to

making more money and keeping more money is their sense of

worthiness. One of the top debates that I have with my clients is

on their pricing how much money I think they should be

charging for their work and how much money I know they

can make from their work. And oftentimes what

I'm debating with is not actually their higher

self. It's not like the part of them that understands the value they

provide. It's the part of them that thinks that there's a reason why they can't

charge more. We're incredibly good at collecting

evidence about why we're not good enough. It's kind of like

that movie mean girls. You know, how, like, the popular girls have that burn

book where they say all these nasty, mean things about everyone else.

I mean, we all have that on ourselves.

We all have a whole collection of

memories and data and proof that we're not

good enough, that there are other people who are better than us. That,

like, of all of our failures, of all the times that we fell

short. And it's especially prevalent

for folks with ADHD because we aren't just getting this

feedback verbally from people. We're not just

having very clear instances of, like, falling short on stuff like,

the world is not designed for us, you know, how the world

is designed just does not work for us. So we don't thrive in it. We

don't thrive with how other people organize their desks. We

don't thrive with how schools organize their schedules. When we

hear that being a part of the 05:00 a.m. club works for a bunch of

other people and it doesn't work for us, that is a little failure.

All these things, it's this constant gaslighting that we should

be better, that it should be easier. Why is it so hard? Oh, it must

just be your willpower. Oh, you must not be good enough. You must not be

smart enough. And all of that garbage erodes

at your sense of self worth, your sense of deserving.

And oftentimes that corresponds with what you're willing to

charge. Oftentimes it corresponds with how

much money you allow yourself to keep at the end of the day.

I've spoken with some really

talented, incredible human beings

who are kind and funny and intelligent and

have decades of experience who've

spent so much money on different aspects of their business

to prove that they're worthy of the business.

You can make hundreds of thousands of dollars in your business and spend

all of it trying to prove that you're good enough. You can also

completely under charge trying to get

testimonials to prove that your work

is good enough before you raise your rates. And if

you're guilty of that, know that you're not alone. Most of the people who sign

up for my programs do that in the beginning, but don't do it, because all

it does is train people that you're really cheap.

The last little bit here is I want to talk about your track record. You

know, all the things that you've done in the past that, like, quote unquote,

mean that you're bad with money. Maybe you're an impulsive

shopper. Maybe you're one of those people who really enjoys going

to target and just letting target speak to you, and all of a sudden you

have a $300 bill. I obviously have never been there. I've

never done that myself. Just kidding. I have totally done that. Maybe

you're an emotional shopper. Maybe when you're feeling really stressed out, you learned

early on that going and buying something makes you feel better,

which, by the way, is actually a soothing mechanism. It is a

self care mechanism that you learned early on. It's actually a trauma response

in a lot of ways. Your track record of your salary up

until now, you know, if you've been massively underpaid for

most of your career, you've basically been told by every

authority figure that you've known that you're not worthy enough, you're

not worth more money. This is a big conversation that I have to have with

clients who used to be teachers when they start their own business, because

oftentimes we have to separate them from this pride

of doing more work for less money. Because, I mean, that's what

happens in the teaching profession. That's what happens in the nursing profession. Any

profession where you're expected to give more and accept less, of

course, pride is going to be associated with it because the human

spirit cannot survive thinking that they

can't be proud of what they're doing. So whether you've made really bad

money choices in the past, whether you have some

questionable spending habits, or whether you've had

a history of being underpaid, yes, it's easy to take

all that and be like, cool. Here's the evidence of how much money I deserve.

Here's the evidence of what I can be trusted with. You can

absolutely go with that story, or you can write a new

one, because I want to remind you that your past does not

determine your future. And of course, if you're struggling with any of this,

if you aren't really sure how you're being held back by your relationship with

money, if you have a lot of fear around charging

more, how to keep your money, how to really feel

safe and secure with money coming in, then I

invite you to book a generate income strategy call with me. In this

call, we'll really assess what's going on with your relationship with money, how it's

impacting your business, and really creating limitations for you in the business.

And if it makes sense, we can talk about a few of my programs where

we work very heavily on your relationship with money. If you

want to go and book that, then go to weeniecast.com

strategycallen

Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.