Episode 299: Manifest Your Wealth: Money Mindset
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
Today’s episode is a bit different. Erin talks about how she renegotiated her relationship with money, receiving and abundance over the past 5 years. And how this allowed her to take her company from under 6 figures to over 7 figures in just a few short years. But don’t get it twisted - it’s not just about the money, it’s about the IMPACT that this has allowed TFN to create.
We all have money stories and narratives. We have a collective money story, based on the society we live in. We also have a personal money story, based on how we were raised, our upbringing and our own unique experiences in life. We need to look at both to understand why we believe what we believe – especially if we’re looking to create a new and different relationship with money and wealth.
There’s always room to improve your money mindset, and this episode is gonna get the ball rolling. To keep it going, join Erin in her brand new training series, Manifest Your Wealth.
In this episode:
Why are we talking about money on a health show? [2:03]
Do you allow yourself to invest in your own potential? [16:45]
Your personal money story [22:53]
How your beliefs about money are created [32:29]
Women & Wealth: our collective money story [37:27]
How to shift your money framework to reach your goals [49:27]
Resources mentioned:
Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™
Ned Natural Remedies (get 15% off your order with code FUNK)
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
Qualia Senolytic (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Learn more about Mindset & Strictly Biz
Related episodes:
296: Supercharge Your Manifestations & Create Your Ideal Year
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, where we lean into Intuitive Functional Medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet, culture, and the healthcare model. They're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the panacea that it's made out to be either. We've got some work to do, and that's why creating a new model is my life's work. I believe in the ripple effect.
Erin Holt [00:00:39]:
So I founded the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school in mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same. This show is for you. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing, please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review and share because you never know whose life you might change. And of course, keep coming back for more. Hello, my friends. Today we're going to talk about money. So let's just get that right out of the way.
Erin Holt [00:01:20]:
That's what we're talking about here. I have been going back and forth about this for over two years now. I obviously talk about money and earning and receiving in abundance with my business coaching clients and with my practitioners within FNA, the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy. But it's not a conversation that I've really brought to the big state. I recently polled my friends on Instagram. My old faithfuls, my old trustees, and everybody over there said they're into it. Well, the vast majority, not everybody, but a lot of, lot of folks said that they were into it. So we're going to do it.
Erin Holt [00:01:58]:
We're going to have the conversation about money. And I'll start off by explaining why we're talking about money on a health show. I'm going to introduce Manifest Your Wealth, which is a new offering that I have. I'll talk about what that's all about. Then we're going to get into your personal money story and how your beliefs about money are created. We'll talk about women in wealth, our collective money story, why a lot of us are kind of like effed up around this topic and why it might feel like, oh my gosh, she's talking about money. How inappropriate, how wild, how crazy that's by design. So let's talk about why we feel that way, and then we're going to talk about how to shift your money framework so that you can expand what you think is possible and reach your goals.
Erin Holt [00:02:48]:
Okay, sounds good. Let's go. Now in month six of FNA. So FNA is my Funk'tional Nutrition Academy. It is our 14 month training for practitioners. So this course is primarily continuing education. If you want to introduce, implement, or deepen your understanding of functional medicine modalities and figure out ways to get your clients real results, like actually help people, not just like 20 percenters, but like the 80 percenters of like, hey, I've tried a bunch of different things and I'm still not getting better. We teach you how to do that, but you also get access to what I call the business modules.
Erin Holt [00:03:26]:
So I always say that this program is like four in one because you get continuing education, you get business training, you get a community, you also get clinical and business mentorship. Because many of us in the health and wellness space, we didn't go to school to become business people. We went to school to become clinicians and practitioners. And yet, if the goal is to run your own private practice, hey, guess what? You have to learn business. And that's just not something that is done in a lot of continuing education to the depth that we go into it in FNA. So in FNA month six, we do this thing called 20k in 20 days, and it's designed as an expansive experience where we take a concentrated amount of time and we focus on practicing how to attract more abundance, more clientele, and more sales into our business. Some people have the goal of paying off FNA. It's a $20,000 investment, paying it off before they finish.
Erin Holt [00:04:31]:
And so I always want to give people the tools to actually do that. And we see plenty of our students and our grads actually do that. Now, the last time I ran this, the last round, I thought, why wait until month six? What if I gave everyone access to this transformative experience before? I know that a lot of folks have FNA on their vision boards. I know that because people tell me that, and I love that. What if I helped you manifest actually getting into FNA? I just had this idea, like, I don't know, in August. And I'm like, I think I could do that. I want to do that. Let's do that.
Erin Holt [00:05:09]:
So rather than wait until month six, I want to teach you how you can call in money now if you're interested in FNA. And so that was my original intention was essentially giving people the training wheels to trust themselves around big financial decisions. So I knew I was going to put together something for practitioners who were thinking about joining FNA like just a little thing that they needed to get themselves over the hump, the decision making hump. But as I talked about this, I also had some interest from non practitioners, and I realized that it actually does feel really good for me to open this up to non practitioners as well, because these principles, these concepts, these philosophies really transcend all industries. Somebody in the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective recently just said this to me. She said, I'm of the mentality that how you do one thing is how you do everything. How we show up in one area of our life is likely to be the same in another. And what's blocking us on one level, like love and relationships, can be seen in the realm of money, both places where we tend to source and measure worthiness.
Erin Holt [00:06:17]:
And I'm like, is this a poem? This is beautiful. Also, I wholeheartedly agree because we have so much that is woven into our relationship with money. Bari Tessler, who wrote the book the Art of Money, she said that money is directly tied to our most primal survival needs, food in our bellies and roofs over our heads. This is why money can be such a vulnerable part of life and why financial stress can even trigger feelings of physical peril. But safety is only one of the deeper issues we may discover when we scratch the surface of our quote unquote money stuff. Our money relationship brings us into direct contact with a whole range of deep, complex themes, including our relationship to pleasure, abundance and thriving how we access feelings of enoughness and safety our capacity to feel worthy and valuable, our self confidence, self reliance and resilience, and our ability to get vulnerable and ask for help. So, woof. I completely and I totally agree.
Erin Holt [00:07:24]:
And with that said, I do think this conversation needs to be brought to people beyond just practitioners or business owners. There's always room to improve your money mindset, no matter who you are, what you do. Most people are not immersed in having these discussions, in talking about money, and so introducing the concept of money manifestation is like a whole new world that many people don't even know exist. The energy of money, viewing money as a neutral resource that we can attach our own meaning to. I didn't know about that. I didn't know about that until I discovered it, until it was taught to me. And so I want to pay that forward and talk about it, continue to teach other people that this gets to be true for you. And I know it can be considered tacky and conceited and cocky to talk about this stuff. And we're going to get into the whys behind all of that today.
Erin Holt [00:08:23]:
There are, for sure, societal messages that tell us it's not okay for women to talk about money, but if we're not allowed to talk about money, how can we ever get good at money? So this is the biggest game changer for me, was actually putting myself in places and spaces where women were talking about this stuff, where it was safe for us to do so, where we weren't being told, like, no, that's inappropriate, that's egotistical. That's not for you. Shut your mouth. Sit down. We're not allowed to talk about that. So I got to see what was possible for me. I got to see that expanding what I believed to be true about earning, about money, about wealth, was possible for me. That was put on the table as an option for me.
Erin Holt [00:09:10]:
Before that, I felt very limited around money. I felt very uncomfortable. I felt very not capable. Capability was a big one for me. A big one for me. I felt awkward. I felt clumsy. I felt embarrassed.
Erin Holt [00:09:27]:
I felt shame. My palms would get sweaty and my heart would beat faster every time I had to talk about money. Ask for a financial exchange. Like sign a contract. Ask somebody else to sign a contract. Anytime I had to look at my bank account, I never did that. I never did that. I would avoid any and all mail that were bank statements or bills.
Erin Holt [00:09:52]:
That's a bit of a vulnerability share. I would not open my mail. I would see it and it would stack up and stack up and I would feel like an increasing anxiety just like, mount up in my chest. But I just couldn't look at it. I couldn't do it. I was running a program that said, I can't cope. I cannot cope with this. And that's exactly what's happening.
Erin Holt [00:10:15]:
The brain is running a program. And whatever program your brain is running, that will get you back to where you were yesterday. So if my brain is running a program that I can't cope, I'm not good with money, I can't handle this. Then the next day, I'm going to wake up and run that very same program unless I interrupt the pattern. We have to interrupt that program. We have to interrupt those storylines. We have to interrupt those beliefs. It will be Groundhog day every day until we choose to rewire, rewire the beliefs and rewire the programs.
Erin Holt [00:10:56]:
And this stuff takes time. Just to be very clear, reprogramming your brain takes time. It takes repetition. But the more you take in messages, the more you take in content that supports the new program, your new way of thinking, your new way of believing, your new way of seeing, then the more that strengthens the new story. So in order for me to change, because I'm not somebody who avoids this stuff anymore, it is not a source of shame for me at all. But in order for me to get here, I needed to be baked into the casserole of hearing these messages over and over and over the new story messages. And so that's exactly what Manifest Your Wealth is going to be. And I have to shout out Kara, who is an FNA grad because she came up with the name.
Erin Holt [00:11:44]:
For those of you who are familiar with my work, I have a program called Manifest Your Health. And so this was such a layup, but I didn't even see it. So much gratitude to Kara, because what an appropriate name. I love it. So Manifest Your Wealth. It's going to be a 20 day audio training series. This is by design. I do not want this to feel overwhelming to you.
Erin Holt [00:12:08]:
I do not want it to be another course that you purchase that just sits on your computer. I want this to be interactive experience. And by interactive, I want you to be able to interact with it while you're out there living your life. So they're going to be shorter lessons. It's not going to be like an hour every single day, but I do want you to come back to this every single day for the 20 days. So they're going to be shorter lessons. I don't want them to be too long. I want you to actually have time for this and to be able to integrate and implement these things now.
Erin Holt [00:12:40]:
And that's the thing, I want you to implement it now. So it is designed exactly that way. Last summer I did this. It was like a mini course and it was delivered all through podcast. And I'm like, oh, this is a private podcast feed, so you had to purchase it and you got to access to this private podcast feed. And I thought, oh, this is interesting. I wonder what this is all about. And I freaking loved it because I just popped it into my ear when I went for my walks or while I was folding laundry or doing the dishes, whatever.
Erin Holt [00:13:15]:
I don't know why I said doing the dishes. I don't do the dishes. Scott does the dishes. I never do the dishes. Cooking, that's what I did. I listened to what I was cooking. But the point is I could listen and relisten and relisten and they were like, in these little bite sized chunks. And it was amazing.
Erin Holt [00:13:29]:
And so that's what I want to produce for you because it was such a positive and enriching experience for me. So Manifest Your Wealth is going to get into the energy of money, money mindset, very specific money manifestation practices. We'll talk about specific reframes and belief shifts, how you are programmed, how to deprogram and set new programs. We're going to get into wounds, triggers, and competition. That's a big one, big one, big one, big one. We're going to get into value versus worth. We'll get into expanders, how to create your abundance anchors. So anytime you're in a moment of, oh, gosh, I feel lack, and I'm being triggered into my wounding.
Erin Holt [00:14:09]:
Okay, we've got this anchor, so we can pull up those feelings of abundance. We will talk a little bit about how to structure offers and setting aligned prices for your services. If you are somebody who does that, if you need that, there'll be a module on that. What to do when it's taking a long time. Maybe you're not new to manifestation. Maybe you're like, yeah, I've been doing this, but sometimes we're trying to call things in and it just feels like it's taking forever. Like, what gives? What is the deal? Why are some things so easy for me to attract? And I really struggle with other things? We will talk about appreciation versus expectation. That's a big one.
Erin Holt [00:14:48]:
The energy and spending or the energy of spending and investment. How to spend money without feeling guilt or shame. That's a biggie. We'll talk about money in your nervous system. And then I do want to share some very specific game changing books that I have read about money. So all of that is going to be baked into the curriculum. And essentially, I will teach you how. I renegotiated my entire relationship with money, with receiving and with abundance.
Erin Holt [00:15:18]:
Over the past, I would say, like five ish years, I've been working on this in earnest. And so this is how I took my company from under six figures to over seven figures in just a few short years. Is the work that I do good? Yes, it is. I can say that with conviction. But also I had to get my belief behind the fact that the work that I do is good, and I had to change my energy and my mindset in order to attract more abundance into my life. So it's not just about the money. I will say that not everybody is motivated by money, but a lot of us, especially in the health and wellness field, we are motivated by impact. We want to make a big difference.
Erin Holt [00:15:58]:
We want to make a change, and these shifts will allow you to do this. It's the same principles, it's the same mindset, it's the same mentality, whether you're making money or a big impact or both. So I'm going to talk about what I did and how I did it with transparency. So if you want in, get on the waitlist now. Go to thefunktionalnutritionist.com/myw for Manifest Your Wealth. We will also put a link in the show notes for that as well. So in case you're driving right now, don't try to do it while you're driving. Okay? Just catch the show notes later.
Erin Holt [00:16:40]:
But what we're going to do for the waitlist is issue a one day sale to the waitlist only. My goal for this is to keep this affordable. When I said I had to put myself in places and spaces, yeah, I have joined masterminds. I've been in actual rooms with people talking about money. But before all of that, I was investing in courses, I was investing in online programs to learn about money mindset, to learn about the energy of money, to allow myself to see money as, again, that neutral resource that I can attach my own meaning to. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you how much I've invested into changing my relationship with wealth and receiving. But it's been a lot. It's been a lot of coin.
Erin Holt [00:17:30]:
When I was trying to think about this, there's really no course that I purchased that was under $2,000. When it came to learning about money, at least from the people that I was choosing to learn from, there was kind of like this pay to play mentality. Like, if you want the keys to the kingdom, this is what it costs. And there is, I will say this, I've made a lot of bigger investments in the past few years. There is something that gets unlocked when you make a sizable investment. Like there's something that happens in your brain where you're like, oh, I'm really betting on myself. I'm really going for it. We'll actually talk about that in Manifest Your Wealth because that's kind of a big concept that I would like to talk about based on some things that I've seen.
Erin Holt [00:20:31]:
But anyway, I'm not complaining about the investments that I've made, because I see them all as very worthy investments, and I'm so glad that I made them. I always approach this little, like, secret pro tip. I always approach every investment with the intention and the belief that this will pay off. This is going to pay off. The ROI on this will be high. And because I always approach every investment with the intention and belief that this will pay off, it always does. And so that builds the confidence and the momentum to continue to invest in my own potential. You see how that works.
Erin Holt [00:21:12]:
But with that said, with all that said, I want this Manifest Your Wealth. I want to offer this really affordably, kind of for that exact reason. I want you to be able to build the confidence and the momentum to continue to invest in your own potential, whether that's your health potential or your business potential or your wealth potential or something else. So we are going to open up the waitlist to the lowest ticketed price that we will offer this, and then the price will go up for the public while I'm talking about it. And then once the program begins in earnest, once it's underway, the price will go up again. Okay, so there's going to be three prices. The waitlist will get access to the lowest price that I'm going to offer it. So get on the waitlist if you want it.
Erin Holt [00:22:00]:
Okay. So because I'm trying to keep this show to about an hour ish, I might have already blown past that. I have so much to say. I have a mouthful of things to say about this topic, but I am trying to keep this episode to an hour. So I'm not going to get into the energy and the frequency of money or specifically how to manifest and call in and attract today. That's what we're going to get into in the course. But what I'm going to get into today is more belief systems, because it is our subconscious beliefs that creates our self image, and it's our self image that creates our actions and our feelings. And it's this that creates what we attract.
Erin Holt [00:22:40]:
When we expand the self image, we expand what we view to be possible. We expand the area of possible. And so we do have to start here. So today we'll be talking about our personal money stories, our collective money stories, and why all this stuff creates the framework for what you believe around money, why you have to be aware of this in order to create a different relationship to money, to wealth, into receiving. We all have money stories and money narratives. We have this collective money story that we all sort of collectively buy into, and that's based on the culture or the society that we live in. We also have a personal money story based on how we were raised, what our upbringing was, our own unique experiences in life. And so we need to look at both of them to understand why we believe what we believe about money.
Erin Holt [00:23:38]:
Because people have a relationship with money based on what they've been told, based on what they've experienced. So we have to unpack all of this as our starting point. So let's start here. What stories are you telling yourself about money? So a little inquiry, little mini self inquiry. If you had to think about money, your beliefs about money, what stories do you tell yourself about money? What do you believe? What do you think? What do you feel about money. That can be money in general or your own previous experiences with money. Another good one to ask is, what do you believe, think and feel about people with money? It's so important that we analyze these stories. We ask, like, where do these ideas come from? And also, how are they impacting me? Are they impacting me in positive ways or are they impacting me potentially negatively? For example, if you tend to judge people with money, that is a surefire way to signal to your subconscious mind that it's not safe for you to receive it, because if you receive it, you will be judged.
Erin Holt [00:24:50]:
That's like setting up that framework. So we want to unpack what we feel about money, what we believe about money, and is that supportive of our overall experience, or maybe not so much. There's a huge list of questions that I will give you in Manifest Your Wealth, where we kind of like unpack a lot of different things and then we look for themes, and that helps us narrow down what our beliefs are and what specific beliefs do we need to rearrange? But for now, this is a fantastic starting point is these questions that I'm posing to you. You can ask, what is your current relationship with money? Describe it. This might be a good journal prompt for you. How do you feel about earning, spending, saving, giving, borrowing, loaning? It's important that we identify our emotions around money because how we feel is the point of attraction for what we're calling in. Again, we're not going to get into the manifestation stuff here, but that is a critical concept for you to understand. So not just like, what do I think about money? But when I think about these things, how does that make me feel? What's the experience on a body level? So really great starting point.
Erin Holt [00:26:04]:
Another question to ask yourself is, do you have any specific money memories, things that just occupy space in your brain or things that you just remember? Here's a great example. When I think I was, gosh, I was younger, I was probably somewhere between kindergarten and second grade. And I remember being at the grocery store in the checkout line with my mom, and she was using food stamps as a way to pay for our groceries. Now, my mom was a single mom of three children. She was raising us, she was working, and she was putting herself through school. So there was a short period of time where she was receiving assistance. And I remember at the grocery store, at the checkout line, her just like breaking down in tears and she didn't want to have to receive the support. She felt shame, she felt embarrassed.
Erin Holt [00:27:01]:
She felt like a failure. And I don't know if she said something to me, but this is like one of those memories that's like snapshot. The stronger the emotion that we feel in any experience in our life, the more the brain kind of like, freeze frames that, and it captures that as a memory. So whatever was happening there, it was a big emotion for me. It was obviously a big emotion from her. And I definitely was plugged into my mom's emotions, so I probably captured that as me. But point being, my brain went, remember this. And so what I took from that later in life is that accepting support is something to feel shame around. So every time in my adult life, every time there was a moment that I could accept support, I immediately felt shame around it.
Erin Holt [00:27:57]:
Every time I had to accept support, I felt shame. So, receiving support and shame were neurally networked together in my brain and in my little body at a very, very young age because of this money memory that I had. Another example is there was this financial cap that I had unconsciously placed on myself, and it was based on a number that I had heard when I was in second grade. You might notice a theme here. A lot of these money memories may come up from a very, very young age, seven or before. And I'm going to explain why in a second. So, again, I was not aware of this cap. It was a subconscious thing, and I didn't realize that it was, like, a thing, capital a, capital t, a thing, until I hit that number in my business.
Erin Holt [00:28:52]:
And all of a sudden, I felt super destabilized and not necessarily in a bad way. I just felt, like, turned upside down. I was just like, wow, I feel weird. What's happening? And so it forced me to look at the whys, like, why hitting this number, this random, arbitrary number? Because it wasn't like I hit six figures. I hit seven figures. It was not that it was a very random number to somebody else, but not random to me. So I wanted to understand why. Why is this so debasing? All of a Sudden, it forced me to look at all of the dynamics that were at play, and I remembered I had to ask my mom.
Erin Holt [00:29:33]:
And I'm like, hey, but I remember this number being said out loud, and I heard it, and it was kind of like the epitome of success. I had. My brain, my little seven year old brain went, snapshot, remember this number? I didn't consciously remember it, but it was back there. It was back there, and it didn't get pulled up to the surface until I hit that number. And so I had, up until that point, been telling myself that I wasn't capable with money or I was only capable of earning so much. And so when I passed this imaginary threshold that really only existed in my subconscious mind, it created a rub, it created a friction point because it was rubbing up against my belief of what I thought was capable. Like, oh, shit, I just hit that number that I have attached success to my whole life. I guess this means I am capable of success.
Erin Holt [00:30:36]:
And so it activated a wound for sure, but it also, as wounds do, as triggers do, it also created an opportunity to look at that belief, to challenge that belief, to rearrange that belief, and to choose a different path for what I thought was possible for myself. So we all have these unconscious money stories playing out all the time. And as a little refresher, I know that I've talked about conscious mind, subconscious mind, on the show before, but the conscious mind is what we're consciously aware of that runs estimated, like, five to 10% of the show, whereas the subconscious mind runs the rest of it, maybe like 90 ish percent. And it works quicker than the conscious mind. It's more automatic. It's more linked to our survival mechanism. So the example that I always use, you can be walking through your yard and you can see a coiled up green thing and jump back because you're like, ah, snake. And then when you look at it, you realize it's just a coiled up garden hose.
Erin Holt [00:31:43]:
That's the subconscious mind triggering the fear response before the conscious, logical, rational mind has a chance to catch up. And so the subconscious mind isn't sitting around waiting for your conscious mind to catch up to it. So an example of this in the money world. I go to check out at the grocery store or at another store, and I have a moment of panic that my card is going to get declined. It's not based on logic or reason, because I know I have enough in my account to cover that expense. It's that first instinct that happens before the logic can kick in. There's a program running. There's a subconscious program running.
Erin Holt [00:32:29]:
And so we are programmed between the ages of zero to seven. And some would argue that it actually happens before zero. Not the point of today's show, but I subscribe to that belief as well. But the ages of zero to seven, we are highly programmable. We are in suggestible hypnotic states. The doors between our conscious and our subconscious mind are open. There's no real system of critical thinking or discernment because the analytical mind doesn't really fully form, finish developing until the age of seven to twelve. So anything that we see, hear, or experience in the ages of zero to seven, we believe it, and we accept that information as though it's the truth.
Erin Holt [00:33:21]:
And so these messages, the things that we see, hear, sense, can come from our parents, it can come from our caregivers, it can come from society at large. It can come from siblings, friends, peers, our friends, parents, communities, school, church, religious values, teachers, instructors, coaches, tv, movie, media. So, in order for us to understand our own stories, our own programs, our own beliefs, present day, we have to look back to that time frame and say, what was modeled to us then, what was modeled to you about money, what was shown to you, what was told to you? Because whatever we were modeled from those ages, zero to seven, it's essentially going to get locked in as a program, or it's a truth to our subconscious mind. And programs are not always bad, just to be clear, like tying your shoe is a program, driving a car is a program. Imagine if we had to use conscious effort every single time we had to tie our shoes. Every single time we had to get behind the wheel. Every single time we had to make oatmeal for breakfast, right? It would take a lot of time and energy. So programs aren't always bad or always negative, but they're not so great to have in place when we're actively trying to make change.
Erin Holt [00:34:43]:
If we want to change the way that we see and experience things, we do have to understand, unpack, and rearrange our programs. Okay, so whatever you heard, whatever you saw, whatever you experienced about money in those formative years, that becomes your subconscious foundation, that becomes the program that you run as absolute truth about money. Money is this period, and it creates the entire framework for what you feel to be real and true. This is how the subconscious mind influences our reality and how we perceive the world. And it's also why that different people perceive the world in different ways and have different experiences. It's based on a lot of this stuff.
Erin Holt [00:37:27]:
Now another way that we are programmed is through societal narratives. And man, do we have a lot of societal narratives around women in wealth. So we can adopt this collective money story. And ours tends to be pretty riddled with shame. A lot of women feel shame around money.
Erin Holt [00:38:13]:
Shame about what we earn, whether it's too little or too much, about what we spend, about debt, shame around investing, especially around investing in ourselves. Or many of us feel like, I'm not good with money. That was definitely one of mine. As I've shared, I'm not good with money is like the same thing as saying I don't trust myself with money. This is a game that is not meant to be played by me. There is a tendency for many of us to go into vagueness or avoidance. That's like me not checking my mail, not looking at my bank statements won't do it. That's avoidance.
Erin Holt [00:38:56]:
There is a tendency for people to say, well, money is just not that important to me, and totally fine if money is not your primary driver, I completely understand that. But sometimes this is a bit of a defense mechanism because money can activate us directly into our wounding. And it's painful to look at our wounds. It's painful to sit in our wounds. And so sometimes saying, money's not important to me, it's not that big of a deal. That's not why I'm here. I don't ned to know about that stuff. That's not me.
Erin Holt [00:39:30]:
That's not me. Not a big deal. Sometimes that is actually just a way to avoid pain. Not always, but sometimes. Rachel Rogers said, and if you are looking for ways to rethink your relationship to money and wealth, her book is phenomenal. Rachel Rogers says women have effectively internalized the messages that our society sends them about money. And the result is that the primary emotion so many of us feel about money is shame. So what does she mean by internalized messages that our society sends us? Let's take a bit of a look at that.
Erin Holt [00:40:10]:
It wasn't until the 1960s that women had a right to open their own bank account. So before then, you weren't able to open your own bank account. 1974, women could have a line of credit on their own. 1974. Before that, you could not open up a line of credit on your own. And just for some context, my friends, my husband was born in 1976, so I know that this seems like a long time ago, but it's like, it's not that long ago. The Equal Credit Opportunity act was passed in 1974, and it prohibited lending discrimination based on sex or marital status. Before this, women couldn't start their own businesses, access higher education, make big purchases without the cosign of a man.
Erin Holt [00:41:01]:
So you'd have to have, like, your husband or your daddy come to the bank with you and be like, yep, she's legit. Otherwise, nobody was taking you seriously. Nobody. You just couldn't access money. So of course, we still carry some of these beliefs around with us, whether that's, like, consciously or subconsciously. Something that I hear pretty often, like, present day 2024, is, I just have to ask my husband first, or people, when I'm asking like, hey, what do you want me to address on the show? People will be like, how do I get my husband on board with spending money on health or spending more money on groceries or buying organic produce? So it sort of reinforces this idea that men get the final say when it comes to finances because we're not really equipped to handle it. The men make the important financial decisions because we as women can't handle it. And I totally understand wanting to talk it out with your partner, your spouse before you make a financial decision or a financial investment.
Erin Holt [00:42:13]:
But there's a difference between talking it through and permission seeking, and so just be conscientious of that. If you have a tendency to permission seek or to say like, I don't really trust myself with this decision, so I'm going to go to the big guy to see what he thinks or whether or not he's going to permit this. Because if we continue to adopt that mentality, then we're going to continue to believe that money is not really our wheelhouse, not really in our wheelhouse. It's not really our game to play. The ongoing storyline or kind of like trope is that men are the earners and women are the spenders, right? The men make the money and the women spend it. And so you can think about ways this maybe played out in your childhood home, in your family of origin, in the shows that you watched growing up, and you can even notice if it's still playing out in your current family structure present day. Again, we're not looking to judge ourselves, we're just looking to observe ourselves if we want to change our situation with money. The starting point is to observe what our beliefs are about money first.
Erin Holt [00:43:29]:
We can't change what we're not aware of. And women have been pretty historically empowered to do more with less. Like clipping the coupons, buying things on sale, saving money, whereas men have been more empowered to make the money, to ask for raises, to take financial risks, to invest. And again, head nod hat tip to Rachel Rogers because it was a lot of her work that allowed me to see this in a way that I've never seen it before or never understood it before. I just wasn't aware of it. It wasn't on my radar. Like I knew deep down I felt this way about money earning and receiving, but I didn't really understand the whys behind it. There was this interesting write up from Starling Bank that looked at how women and men are spoken to differently about money and investing in the media and 65% they found 65% of money.
Erin Holt [00:44:33]:
Articles in women's magazines define women as excessive spenders and advise them to limit, restrict and take better control of their shopping splurges. That's like the whole like stop buying lattes kind of mentality. Like oh, shoes, purses, and lattes. Oh, my. However, in contrast to that, in articles aimed at men, 70% emphasize that making money is a masculine ideal. So taking financial risks is encouraged to men being bold, and courageous, and daring with money, investing to achieve power, all of that is marketed toward men. And women are not sold these same messages. In fact, it's like, pretty much the opposite.
Erin Holt [00:45:18]:
It's like scrimp and save and hoard. And I just think this is so fascinating because, of course, all of those messages are going to bake into our subconscious beliefs as well. And then we see them play out in our reality in present time. So one thing that I'll speak into, because I see this, I'm not a financial advisor. I'm not a financial planner. I'm not an accountant or a tax professional. I'm not a financial expert. I'm just speaking through the lens of the way that I see things based on what I do.
Erin Holt [00:45:53]:
But how I see this all trickle down is that women have internalized the message that we are a risky investment. We all know that debt can invoke shame. There's some debt that's, like, totally normalized, socially acceptable, like mortgages on homes or student loans. But there is some debt that I've seen that invokes the most shame. And for women, it's often around investing in yourself or investing in your potential. So it's like, fine to invest in the american dream. It's like the college, and then you have the wedding, and then you buy the house. Like, all of that, fine.
Erin Holt [00:46:39]:
But the second that we start to think about investing in our potential, investing in ourselves, we get really derailed. And it's this type of debt that really triggers shame for people. And this is based on a lot of conversations that I have, but I really think it's steeped in this cultural or societal programming of men. Go out, ask for investments for your business that you're building. Be risky. Be bold. Women are just not receiving those same messages. We're not.
Erin Holt [00:47:11]:
And so there's this weird feelings we have, shame being one of them, anytime we think about doing that. I remember the very first significant investment I made. It was a $16,000 program for continuing education in functional medicine. And I was like, my tummy felt constricted. I felt kind of, like, sick to my stomach about it, because I'm just like, this is not what a woman in my position should do. I did it anyway. I made the money back over and over and over and over and over again, no problem. I'm so proud of myself for making that, but there was a lot of fear and just weird feelings mixed up in it.
Erin Holt [00:47:52]:
And I see this happen for folks with FNA. So, like I mentioned earlier, FNA is a $20,000 investment. That's not nothing. I mean, I stand by the price because it is four different programs in one. And if you were to go out in the world and try to cobble together everything that we offer within FNA, I can tell you what, it's probably going to be double the price, at least of what we're charging. And the price has been validated time and time and time again. So I'm good with that. I stand by that price.
Erin Holt [00:48:22]:
However, in conversations with folks, it's not always a cash flow issue that they're struggling with. It's a self trust issue, more often than not, where you actually don't see yourself as a viable investment. Because, again, we've internalized the message that we are a risky investment. And so that's the belief that I would really like to turn on its head. And there's, like, different little micro ways that I do this. When someone first applies for FNA before enrollment is technically open, we give them a 30 day window to save $1,000 on tuition through what we call early enrollment. And that is by design, that is a reward for betting on yourself, because I want you to see yourself as a viable investment. So, anyway, if you hold any of these beliefs, and I'm using air quotes when I say the words beliefs, beliefs about yourself, just realize that they didn't just pop out of thin air.
Erin Holt [00:49:23]:
We have been programmed and conditioned to think this way. Many of us do feel that building wealth is out of our league or it's impossible. So we don't even go for it. As a woman, the world is kind of designed to tell you that you can't build wealth, that you're wrong for wanting money, that you're wrong for being ambitious, that your desires are dangerous. If discussing money makes you uncomfortable, understand it's not a mistake, it's not an accident. That's by design. If we are disallowed to talk about money, if there are social restrictions around talking about money, if we're made to feel ashamed when we bring up money or we try to get paid for our labor, what that does is it robs us of power. It robs us of our ability to understand money, understand wealth, understand how to invest.
Erin Holt [00:50:14]:
It reinforces the idea that it's only a boys game, and the longer we're kept out of the boys game. The more we reinforce the narrative that women are not good with money, that men are the breadwinners, and that women are irresponsible spendthrifts. So I think women should be talking about money more as a way to counteract the messaging we hear and as a way to take back the narrative. So that's really part of the reason that I created Manifest Your Wealth and why I'm offering it to more than just the practitioners in my audience, why I'm opening it up to everybody. Because all this stuff creates the framework for what we believe to be true. It creates our beliefs, it creates the filters in which we look at the world through. It creates our perspective, it literally creates our reality. 90% to 95% of the thoughts that we think are the same thoughts as the day before.
Erin Holt [00:51:09]:
So if we're thinking the same, our life will stay the same because the same thoughts lead to the same choices, lead to the same behaviors, lead to the same experiences, and that all produces the same exact emotions. And that's going to, you guessed it, influence the same thoughts. Wash, rinse, and repeat. And all of this stuff, especially our feelings, is the point of attraction for what we're calling in. So if we're feeling the same way about money every single day, we're going to reinforce what we're calling in in regards to money every single day. So if you're tired of feeling like you're in your own way with money, or you just can't move past your current money reality, you need to uncover the subconscious programs that are running on autopilot number one. And you also have to put yourself in an environment to do something different. New experiences are going to create new feelings and new emotions, which are going to create new thoughts and new realities.
Erin Holt [00:52:10]:
So Manifest Your Wealth can be that new environment. Listen to me. Every single day for 20 days, we've got a community that you can join to reinforce the new beliefs that you want to create, rather than continuously defaulting to the old ones. Because the truth is, if your programs are not in alignment with your goals, you are going to have a problem. And so the big shift really needs to happen on the subconscious level. So how do we shift? Right? That's the big question. And that's what we're going to be doing in Manifest Your Wealth. So this is the only public podcast I'm going to be doing about this here.
Erin Holt [00:52:48]:
The rest will live in Manifest Your Wealth. If you're listening to this podcast in real time, be sure to get on the waitlist. If you are listening to this later on, the links might change and rearrange. So just a heads up there, just check the show notes. All the updated and appropriate links will be there. Last thing that I'll say is, if you're listening to this and you're like, yeah, it's easy for you to say. I'm going to tell you what it is. It actually is.
Erin Holt [00:53:15]:
All of this is easy for me to say now because I've been practicing it for a while. That's the deal. It is hard until it's easy. It's hard until it's easy. So if you want this to feel easier for you, if you want abundance and receiving and money and wealth to feel easier than it does right now, join Manifest Your Wealth because that's what we're going to help you do. All right, love you guys. Hope this was helpful. And if it was, be sure to share it with a friend.
Erin Holt [00:53:47]:
Bye. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.
