Transcript

Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Hey there, Brian.

Brian
Yo, Ani. Hi. How are you?

Ani
I’m very good today. How are you? Doing great. We are on episode 54, and today we’re talking about one of my favorite topics, money mindset.

Brian
Money mindset. Specifically, up-leveling money mindset for coaches, for therapists, and for wellness professionals.

Ani
I just want to clarify this is one of my favorite topics, not because money is one of my favorite topics. I do know people that just love money. It’s not that I love money so much as I love the empowerment that comes through conversations like this one, where we get to talk about transforming our lives. And since money touches so many aspects of our lives, all the aspects of our lives in industrialized societies, it can be such a super powerfully transformative topic.

Brian
Yeah, really. Yeah. And certainly, if people go back and listen to some of the really early podcast that we’ve done, hopefully it would become apparent that the journey that we’re talking with you about today, or I guess the topic that we’re talking about with you today, we’ve been on that journey. We spent a lot of time, resources, and money on our own money mindset to really uncover and unravel some really deep-seated issues. Deep stuff. That aren’t necessarily specific to us, by the way. That I think are endemic in the healthcare professionals and wellness world.

Ani
Oh, absolutely.

Brian
That’s why I’m really excited to talk about this, too. But I want to let people know, go back and listen to some of our really podcast, one, two, three, four, maybe that first handful of podcast. You hear a little bit more about our journey that we have been on and went through, specifically around abundance thinking and money mindset stuff.

Ani
We tell people all the time when you’re part of the Somatic Coaching Academy community, especially once you take the certification programs, you’re going to work on money mindset in some capacity. Now, listen, not everybody who comes into the certification programs thinks they want to work on that. Almost all the time it comes up anyway is interesting. But we actually don’t teach overtly about money mindset very often. But it comes up all the time through the course of us helping people to become these professionals who can have more clients that they’re supporting, grow a business that they love, and do masterful work in the world that actually attracts people. So it’s a function of the soup that we swim in here. Wait a minute, we don’t swim in soup. We swim in water. We can swim in soup if we want. We like soup. It’s a function of the soup.

Brian
Well, I think what you’re speaking to, Ani, is that money mindset, everything that you just said reflects the point that money mindset isn’t actually a core issue. Money mindset is a superficial issue that has deep core roots to it. The core roots can show up in a lot of different ways. For some people, the same core issue can show up in money mindset. Other people, it can show up in relationship stuff. Other people can show up in career stuff or health stuff. But it all comes back to some really deep core threads. For certain people, it just is persistent in money mindset, and especially in the health and wellness industry, we actually, in some ways, honor our lack of money mindset. Absolutely.

Ani
It’s part of being in the club.

Brian
We’re wearing this badge of honor, right? We specifically find communities where we can wear that as a badge of honor because everyone else is also, while at the same time, we’re having trouble really living our richest and fullest lives because we’re having trouble bringing in enough money. As we jump into our podcast today, as I was thinking about this podcast, I remembered something that we experienced many years ago when we were working with a business coach. Part of what we were wanting to do is to help health and wellness professionals to be able to break free of the system, have their own businesses.

Ani
Experience and internal freedom.

Brian
Experience, right. Internal, internal freedom, all these things. We really wanted to really be able to help people who had high value for helping other people create great things in the world. I remember he specifically told us, he said, “Stop trying to work with health and wellness professionals because they have such terrible lack mindset. They’re filled with a lack mindset, so just stop it. You’re never going to help them change. They’re never going to want to pay the money. They’re never going to want to do this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I’m serving and helping people that are in health and wellness and love helping other people do things in the world. But here’s the point that occurred to me is, Hey, folks, we got a reputation. What do you mean? Health and wellness professionals got a reputation.

Ani
Oh, yeah, you’re right.

Brian
We have as a group, as a club, rehabilitation therapists, like BT, OTs, like massage therapists, energy workers.

Ani
It’s Health and wellness coaches.

Brian
Hey, folks, we have a rep. And the rep is that we are lack-minded.

Ani
Yeah. Are you going to sit there and stand for that? Come on.

Brian
You’re going to take it. Yeah. There’s seriously, there’s a reputation in the professional coaching space, money mindset space that we’re like recalcitrant people. We’re hard to help.

Ani
It’s freaking so true. And one of the ways I think this shows up is all the people that want to barter with you. Hey, how often does that happen to you? People are like, Oh, I’d want to, whatever it is, get healthier, help myself sleep better, lose weight, et cetera, et cetera, whatever, get massages. Hey, why don’t we barter? It happens all the time. It’s a thing that a lot of health and wellness practitioners do on the regular. Then they’ll come to people like us and say, I’m not making enough money to support myself. One of the first questions I ask people is, How often are you bartering? It happens a lot. So there’s this expectation that we’re just going to give it away. Right.

Brian
Yeah. So let’s start to noodle into this a little bit. Let’s noodle. So as much as we’ve worked with health and wellness professionals over the decades, and our own journey as well. I don’t think that health and wellness professionals, therapists, so that’s what we’re talking about. I’ll just say health and wellness professionals right now, we’re all going to swim in this bucket together for the next 30 minutes, whatever on this podcast for. It’s not that we don’t want more money. It’s not that we don’t think money is not important or valuable because we have houses to pay for, we have kids to feed, we have school to pay for. We have things that are- We have organic food we want to buy. We want to take care of ourselves. We want to buy supplements. We want to- We want to have our own health and wellness appointment. Yeah, exactly. We want to go into nature once in a while. Take a little vacation. So all that stuff costs money. So it’s not that we don’t value money. That’s not the point. Where I think really the issue is endemic in health and wellness professionals is low self-worth.

Brian
I really think that’s at the core, at the root of it. And so hear me out on this for a second. If someone has low self-worth, and by the way, it’s self-worth, it’s not other-worth. But when someone has low self-worth or lower self-worth, and this is gradients and degrees, by the way, too, in terms of a self-worth scale, what we’ll tend to do is we’ll tend to seek validation from other people to validate our self-worth. It’s almost like we don’t have enough self-worth and we’re not giving it to ourselves, so we go seek it from other places. And what better place than health care to do that?

Ani
Why is that?

Brian
Well, because you have an endless supply of people whose lives you are impacting in very profound ways. You’re literally saving people’s lives, helping people walk again, helping people get on and off of the toilet, helping people maybe get back to work. You’re helping other people do things in lives that are so critically important for them. The thankfulness that a health and wellness professional gets from their clients is usually, at least when I worked in the hospital and I had my private practice, people are thanking me all of the time. High level of appreciation. Thank you. Thank you. Lots of appreciation. Oh, my God, you’re just gathering up all this worth that’s coming from other people that are reflecting back to you your worth from their perspective. But If you have low self-worth, it’s like an endless void.

Ani
It can never be filled.

Brian
It can never be filled. It’s almost like every day you’re getting up and you’re going to work not only to earn money, but to earn self-worth points. Then we go to work at hospitals and in health care and those types of things, where, by the way, we used to have a saying, ‘Nobody goes into Allied health care to make money.’ Like nurses, therapists. Nobody’s going in that to make money.

Ani
You’ll be teacher groups and massage therapists and healers.

Brian
We say we’re going into that to make a difference. But I think, again, what’s hiding behind that, and just hear me out for a second, is low levels of self-worth. Then we go to work and we’re like, Listen, it’s okay that I’m not getting a pay raise that’s equitable to even standard of living pay raises because I feel so grateful for being able to work with people, and I feel appreciated every day.

Ani
And I’m making a big difference.

Brian
My work matters. Right. So we’re going every day, and we’re getting fed. We’re getting paid by self-worth compliments, recognition, and appreciation. And we’re not really placing that much value on… In other words, the financial remuneration we’re getting for it is of less value to us than the appreciation and the recognition. Right.

Ani
So when we put energy out, energy is going to come back in. We put energy out, energy comes back in. That’s the natural laws. The question is, what form is that energy taking when it comes back in? And so some of the form that it takes when it comes back in is money. Some of the form that it takes when it comes back in is appreciation. And we can actually transmute the energy that we want to come back in so that we can actually bring in more money. And by the way, it doesn’t mean that we’re not going to get appreciation. As we’ve made more money in our business, we still get loads of appreciation, by the way. You can transmute how that money shows up. But I’m remembering a story with a client. She signed up with me for private coaching a number of years ago, and she was a healer person, and she wasn’t making enough money in her business. It was so hard for her to sign up because she barely had enough money. I’m sure it was on a credit card, but I don’t remember to work with me.

Ani
We had a call one time, and we were having this conversation. But I make such a difference in people’s lives every day. But she was crying when she got on the phone with me because she didn’t have $20 to give her kid for pizza that day. Her kid needed $20 for pizza, and she didn’t have $20 for pizza. That’s what you’re talking about in terms of this low self-worth, because if we had an elevated sense of self-worth, we would allow ourselves to make enough money to give our kids $20 for pizza and buy the organic food that we want, and enough money to be able to go on and do our own healing work and holistic work that we want to do. We’d have enough self-worth to be able to do that so that we could take care of ourselves in a thriving nature, right?

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
And also take care of other people.

Brian
Yeah. So that actually leads to another interesting point that doesn’t always feel good to hear about or think about. But exactly that same situation. When we have that low self-worth and we’re not bringing in enough money, it means then we have to make really hard choices, right? Yeah. And we have to sacrifice something. We have to sacrifice the thing that I wanted so I can give my kid 20 bucks for pizza.

Ani
That’s exactly what happened.

Brian
What that does, so that’s still fed by a low self-worth from underneath. But if now it’s a socially acceptable and even praiseworthy thing to do, then listen, I sacrifice for my kids. I sacrifice for my parents. I sacrifice for my neighbor. I sacrifice for my fill-in-the-blank. That’s a great way to get a lot of recognition and appreciation from other people. Problem is, it’s not sustainable. None of it’s sustainable. Eventually, people burn out. They fall off a cliff. Like you said, the natural order of things has to rebalance itself at some point. Law of polarity can’t be out of balance that long. So eventually, you’re going to have a rebalancing. And if this becomes really chronic and goes on for too long a period of time, then the rebalancing can be really seismic for people if they can even recover from it.

Ani
Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly what was happening with this client. She was trying to figure out where she could sacrifice so she could get that 20 bucks for pizza. And again, we’re talking about money mindset. So watch yourself if that’s where your mind starts to go with, how do I decrease something over here so that I can give more over here? That’s not how you have to think about it. One of the key things that we did with this client was help her actually to repackage how she was offering her services. She was offering her services in a different way. You’re going to love this from your self-worth thing. She was a master at some of the things that she was doing, but she wasn’t actually putting herself out as an expert. She was putting herself out as a healer, but she actually started to teach other people the healing methods that she so expertly knew. It didn’t even occur to her. People were even asking her to do it, but it didn’t even occur to her. And her low self-worth couldn’t allow her to see it. And see, that’s the interesting thing, because our subconscious mind is telling us, our conscious mind, how to think.

Ani
Our subconscious mind is telling our conscious mind how to think. And so consciously, we think that I’ve got to go figure out how I can spend 20 less at the grocery store so I can give my kid $20 for pizza. The subconscious mind and our programs are telling us how to think about that. We actually have to rewire and reprogram our nervous system so that our subconscious mind is telling us different things. And we can do that through the process of reprogramming our self-worth.

Brian
Yeah, of course. And a key feature of that, too, is our subconscious. Oftentimes, we’ve been taught from a long period of time that money is a finite resource. We only have so much of it. There’s only so much money, so then we have to rob from Peter to pay Paul thing. But the thing is that that’s not true. Money is an infinite resource. It’s literally money everywhere. If you just go out, just look around, go out and drive down any major city in the country, and you’ll see money everywhere.

Ani
And they just keep making it.

Brian
It just keep making it. It just keeps showing up. So there’s plenty of money everywhere. So money is not a finite resource. But when we have lower self-worth, we’ll convince ourselves that it is a finite resource because we don’t have the self-worth to go out and create opportunities to bring more money in, because then that actually invalidate the program of our self-worth, of our low self-worth.

Ani
The low self-worth program for my client was telling her that she was going to have to go out and wrestle people to the ground to pay her more so that she could have a few extra bucks rather than it was really obvious to me. She just needed to repackage how she was serving her clients and elevate some things about her business that, by the way, we see, I would venture a guess, probably 90% of our certification program students come in, and they have ways to elevate themselves as experts professionally that don’t even occur to them that we can very easily see. It’s so obvious. And what you said, I think, was so powerful because it’s not about wrestling people to the ground so you can have more money. And it’s not about even raising your rates. Yes, it’s about raising your rates, sometimes. But it’s not even about that. It’s about that self-worth. It’s about being able to create, like you said, opportunity. We get the chance to be creators. We get the chance to be creative and create opportunity. That’s a very different mindset than the lack mindset that a lot of people are coming from.

Ani
We get the chance to create opportunities all the time.

Brian
Which are plentiful.

Ani
Plentiful. They’re win, win, win. They’re great for me. They’re great for my clients. They’re great for everybody in my clients’ lives. They’re great for our team. They’re win-win-win opportunities. Why would we not want to be in that place where we get to create and have that awesome fun? Yeah.

Brian
So as we’re moving through this conversation, I just actually want to do a little plug for a past podcast that we did, too, that also segues into this is podcast number 33 we did on self-esteem and income. You can actually go back and listen to some of the statistics around how much people are losing in income over the course of their life from having less self-esteem than other people. It’s this research that was done on this thing. So far, let’s just summarize where we’ve been so we can just keep going a little bit further here to talk about up-leveling self-esteem. So far, we talked about self-worth. This is a core issue for people. When we have low self-worth or we’ve been programmed with self-worth, we’re actually going to look for situations, in this case, professional situations, in order to revalidate the low self-worth. We’re not only working for a little bit of money, we’re actually working for recognition from the outside. How do we uplevel our money mindset? It’s not really about working on the money mindset specifically so much, because for someone with… If you try to work on money mindset and you don’t elevate self-worth, you’re really going to go nowhere.

Brian
And a lot of people try to do the work there, but it doesn’t change anything because that’s the core of the money mindset issue is the self-worth.

Ani
It’s actually crazy to watch because people sometimes will bring in more money and grow things, but they grow equal proportion to the problems. And they’re still having the same, like you said, core issues. So they still have issues. I remember working with a client who was not trying to go with a somatic approach, and so we weren’t really going from a core perspective. She ended up making more money, but she was still dragging around the same old problems. Then the ups and the downs in the money. It was really challenging for her.

Brian
Core work is so important. It’s so important. We don’t have… This podcast isn’t going to solve all self-efficiencies.

Ani
It’s going to solve all the problems.

Brian
Because that’s what we do in our coaching training programs. We’re going to have people get into the core of stuff.

Ani
This stuff, you actually have to do this.

Brian
It’s a process. You got to go through it. But let’s just do a couple of tips here really quick. Hot tips? Hot tips. Here’s the thing. It’s self-worth, not other-worth. What that tells me is that we’re never going to fully grow our self-worth by 100% depending on other people to feed us.

Ani
How are we? How are we, Brian?

Brian
That’s why it’s so hard when you’re working in a job or professional situation where you’re going to work and specifically to get appreciation without realizing that’s what you’re doing, thing. Then you never are filling up your own bucket. You’re always depending on other people to fill it for you.

Ani
Yeah. So one of the things you can watch out for is how often you judge other people for being selfish or self-centered or conceited or those kinds of things, because that can be a cue that you’ve got stuff going on for you, for sure. Another one that I think is interesting, I’m like, hesitating here. How do I don’t know how to say it, but it’s interesting. When you’re more willing to ask people for a handout, a grant, a freebie, a thing like that, rather than go ask somebody for reimbursement when you add value.

Brian
Yeah, for an opportunity to add value, right?

Ani
An opportunity to add value. It really comes up all the time, so I wanted to mention it.

Brian
Yeah, it’s a good one. It’s a good one. It’s a really important one. We need a combination here when we’re growing self-worth of both self-appreciation and other-appreciation. Because as we’re building self-worth, we can’t just flip a switch and go say, I’m not going to pay attention to anything that anybody else appreciates me for or is grateful for. I’m going to shut that off completely. I’m just going to try to do it myself. That doesn’t work either. Because that’s not how that part of our- That’s not how a part of our subconscious is programmed to begin with. When we were kids, our level of self-worth was primarily predicated on getting that from other people. Then that sets a set point for us of self-worth as we go through life. If we didn’t get a lot of that of appreciation and recognition and support and empowerment when we were younger, again, it sets a threshold. It means that now we never learned how to do it for ourselves. We never taught how to do it for ourselves. We’re always seeking it from other people. That becomes a drain on other people, by the way.

Brian
It can be a huge stress point for relationships, which is why we go into health care to do it because everyone just has to be grateful. See how it works this way. It’s so true. We don’t want to cut it off from other people because in some ways we have to retrain ourselves. We want to be able to receive it from other people. But at the same time, we have to really be able to recognize and appreciate ourselves to grow our own value. That has to be done actually a couple of ways. It has to be done both in an embodied sense and also in an intellectual sense. I know a lot of people try to do mantras and stuff to grow their self-worth. There’s that old Stuart Smalley, “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!” from Saturday Night Live. So mantras or affirmations are important. But if you’ve got a subconscious threshold of a certain self-worth, those mantras or affirmations will not penetrate down somatically. So you have to work on the somatic embodiment level, too.

Ani
Yeah. And it’s the feelings we feel that make our reality seem real. So for example, we’re out there and we decide we’re going to challenge and transmute how money flows through us. And all of a sudden, we feel guilty or we feel ashamed of ourselves or fearful or whatever. Those embodied sensations, they’ll get us to get off track unless we know how to work with that as well.

Brian
Yeah. So one of the things I’m proudest about, Ani, with our training program is by the time people are done going through level one, two, and three with us, Somatic Coach Pro training, every one of our students, and I can say every one of our students, absolutely has an improvement to some degree of their self-worth. And we get different results based on lots of different factors in terms of making money and money mindset. But since everyone’s self-worth improves, everyone’s money mindset improves to a certain degree. Some people way more than other people, but that’s just people, right? But everybody has an improvement. We’re not specifically, again, working on money mindset. We’re really working on developing people’s core expression.

Ani
Yeah, exactly. Because we do work with core wounding and helping people to come from a place of core expression rather than core wounding as a general function of what we do with the content of the program.

Brian
If there’s any shortcut here to up leveling your money mindset, it’s really up leveling your self-worth. That’s it. Do work in your self-worth zone by the things that we’ve talked about that, we’ve mentioned. One of those things is adding value to other people’s lives and making a request to have that be compensated in a way that fills up your self-worth.

Ani
I’m just admiring your self-worth growth by being able to have that conversation where you can talk about the kinds of results that we get with our students. It takes a certain level of self-worth to be able to do that. Sure. Good job, Brian.

Brian
Thanks, An. Both of us have, again, been through this been through this trajectory. I’ve told my story in lots of other places, I didn’t have a lot of self-worth in my early life, much of my life. Through the process is that now we teach our students, I’ve had amazing changes in my personal life that I’m really excited about and I’m able to share now, which I was never able to do before, which is super exciting.

Ani
Super exciting. And that’s what’s possible for you, too. It’s one of the reasons I love coaching so much is because we get inspired, we hear things that are inspiring, and then as coaches, we get to say, That’s possible for you too. So if you’re listening to this episode and it sparked something for you, it’s possible for you, too. So we ask you to go and wherever you’re listening to this podcast, give us a thumbs up, give us a subscribe, give us some stars, give us a review, let people know, share with a friend. I’m just modeling that asking for reciprocity idea, right? Yeah, definitely.

Brian
Then come on over to this Somatic Coaching Academy and check out our… We do have free demos that happen almost monthly, and we also have classes, public classes that specifically support and work on self-worth.

Ani
They’re there. The public classes have been really fun. For those of you who have come, thank you for coming. It’s such a wonderful way to be in community together and to do some fun work together, even when you’re not joining the certification program. We’re hosting public classes at least once a month now. You can go over the website and check on our live events and find out when they’re happening and come on over and join us.

Brian
Please do.

Ani
Until we see you there, we will see you next week on the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Thanks so much. Bye for now.