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Are you ready to feel confident with money? It’s time to address the primary issue that most people have around money: money mindset issues.

Episode 08: Improving Your Money Mindset with Chelsea Brennan

Are you ready to feel confident with money?

It’s time to address the primary issue that most people have around money: money mindset issues.

In this episode, I am joined by Chelsea Brennan from Smart Money Mamas!  We are talking all about how to create healthy money habits so we can achieve our biggest goals.

Chelsea is the founder of Smart Money Mamas and its monthly membership community, the Motivated Mama Society. An ex-hedge fund manager turned financial educator, Chelsea is dedicated to changing the way we talk about money, helping moms connect with all aspects of their money in a way that lets them overcome emotional blocks, identify what they most want, and create the healthy money habits that help them achieve their biggest goals. All while modeling positive money relationships for the next generation. Chelsea lives in Connecticut with her husband (a rockstar stay-at-home dad) and two young and energetic boys.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

  • The effect that your childhood has on your money mindset
  • Money doesn’t necessarily buy you happiness
  • Why it’s important to have a safe space to talk about money
  • An overview of the different types of revenue types you can have with digital products and memberships
  • Why women have a hard time asking for money for their products
  • Examples of root money fears
  • An exercise to feel more connected to your business and the money goals you have for it

Our ability to become the best version of ourselves is very intricately tied to our relationship with money, and I am really glad Chelsea brought light to that in this episode.

I really hope this conversation encourages you to keep working on building a positive relationship with your money!

Talk soon,

Monica

Resources Mentioned:

You are listening to the Empowered Business podcast, I’m your host, Monica Froese, a mom of two and your secret weapon to creating a six figure digital product business.

 

I’m on a mission to help 1000 women make 100000 dollars a year. That’s right. One hundred million dollars towards financial independence for women. As an online business expert, I am teaching you everything I know right here week after week so you can join us on the journey to 100 million dollars. Sound good. Then let’s jump in.

 

Welcome to today’s show. I have such a treat for you. We’re going to be talking to my friend Chelsea Brenin from Smart Money mammas Chelsea and I met oh, gosh, about a year and a half ago at Thin Con, which is a conference for financial bloggers. And I just loved her from the moment I met her and got to talk to her. She is truly a genius when it comes to helping moms in particular manage their money better. But even more than that address the primary issue that most people have around money, which is money, mindset issues. And we just had so much fun talking. So I want to tell you a little bit about who Chelsea is before we jump on in. So Chelsea is the founder of Smart Money Mamas and its monthly membership community, The Motivated Mammo Society, an ex hedge fund manager turned financial educator, Chelsea is dedicated to changing the way we talk about money, helping moms connect with all aspects of their money in a way that lets them overcome emotional blocks, identify what they most want, and create the healthy money habits that help them achieve their biggest goals, all while modeling positive money relationships for the next generation. Chelsea lives in Connecticut with her husband, a rockstar stay at home dad and two young and energetic boys. I’m so excited that she’s here today. So let’s dove right in and meet Chelsea.

 

Welcome to the show. We’re so excited to have you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how your entrepreneur journey started?

 

Absolutely. Monica, I’m so excited to be here. So anyone who’s listening. My name’s Chelsea. I’m Founders’ from Animals. And my entrepreneurship journey started when I was just about to have my second child. I always knew that my old job was a hedge fund manager. Would that be my forever job? It was just not something that was fulfilling in the way that I wanted to that had the bigger impact on the world. And so I had a very stressful second pregnancy and my job was just a stressful place to be. And at thirty two weeks it looked like we were going to deliver a preemie or not. We what happened? He stayed in, thank goodness, but in the hospital bed, I couldn’t imagine continuing to work, continuing to put myself under this much stress, especially with a new baby. I had people from work still sending me emails. Right. I’m in the hospital. I’m still getting emails. And so I looked at my husband. He and I had been planning for financial independence for several years. And so we weren’t quite there yet. But we had a cushion, we had a runway, and I had already had this hobby blog for six or seven months. It had never made a penny, but it existed. And I just looked at him and I was like, I want to quit. Like, what do we think about this? And so he and I sat together in the hospital. We ran the numbers and we said, like, OK, he’s a stay at home dad. So everything is a little bit extra scary. I quit your job, but we decided to go for it. And so I left my job right before my second child was born and we turned our hobby blog into a full time business.

 

I have so many questions. OK, I know your husband was a stay at home dad while you were deciding to quit your job.

 

Yes. So he quit his job about a month before our first was born. He always wanted to be a stay at home dad. He’s great at it. I’m not built to be a stay at home parent. And so and so it kind of worked out really well. But, yeah, when we were deciding whether or not to go from really, really good income to zero, he was a stay at home dad and was planning on continuing to stay a stay at home dad.

 

So smart money mammas was the blog when you quit. OK, so that was already in existence, but it wasn’t making you like a full time income when you had the inkling that you wanted to.

 

So it was the same blog under a different name. We rebranded later, but it had never made a penny. Monaca And so for my old job we had very strict rules about what we could do for outside sources of income, which is basically that we couldn’t.

 

And so I was allowed to have it as a hobby, but I could not make any money from it. So we had to blog. It had been in existence for about seven months, but it had never made a penny.

 

Ok, so when you’re deciding to quit. So I feel like we have similar stories, though. Different because my husband still has a corporate job and I will say building a business with the stability of a corporate paycheck and benefits. I mean, full disclosure there, because I completely recognize the differences and doing it. So you must have been saving. How long did the plan take you to execute? You knew you wanted to quit to when you actually did.

 

Ok, so this is a little bit complicated, right? Because I always knew I didn’t want to have this job. And so financial independence is the idea of saving as enough money so that you don’t have to work again. And so we were about six years away from that. We would have been able to completely retired by the time I was thirty five. This point, I’m twenty eight, almost twenty nine. And so we had been saving for years. I always knew I didn’t want to be in this career forever and I made really good money. So we always saved at least 50 percent of our income, usually 70 percent of our income. So when we decided to make this pivot in a lot of ways, it seemed really fast. So his family, my parents, like we’re a little bit flabbergasted, like I kind of hit my breaking point and quit a day later, like we had this conversation. We ran through the spreadsheets, but we had been saving for this for years. Right. Like we had this cushion that we built in. Sometimes you get people in my community who have the same question, right, of like I want to quit my job, like, can I just jump ship and know we want to make sure your family is safe. Right. So for us, we were at what I call coast level retirement.

 

So if we don’t save another penny for retirement ever, by the time I’m like forty five, forty six, we can retire. That money is already set. It’s investing. It’s doing its job. Cash. We had two years of financial runway, so even though I didn’t have the support, my husband didn’t have a job. We had money in the bank. So if the business made nothing for two years, we would have been fine. And so what we said was, OK, I’m going to take a little bit of time off with the baby and George and try to health recover. And then we’re going to give us a year. And if at the end of the year we’re not seeing signs that this is going to work, we’ll discuss either me going back into finance, my husband, part of him being a stay at home dad was I always wanted to make sure if something happened to me or something happened to us, that he would be financially secure. And so he has his captain’s license. So he used to captain yachts. He has his master’s in construction engineering. And so he could go back to work if he needed to go back to work. And so we kind of had these safety nets laid out, even though it looked like I said I wanted to quit and quit the next day.

 

That’s just not how much what I did. So, I mean, I found at my website on the premise that women’s right to work. I had a lot of people in my life that thought women should just be stay at home moms. I wanted nothing to do with it. But I’ve always been a spender. And my husband, who pitched himself in the dating years as a saver, is anything but a saver. My dad always said I was going to be in trouble if I got with someone who was a spender like me come to find out he’s a worse spender than me. You’ll admit it now, finally. And so we had no financial cushion whatsoever. So my attitude in life has always been. But he still had a job. Oh, yeah. I mean, what actually happened? The reason I ended up quitting was because he got a promotion. I didn’t know where it was one of those like cosmic things because I was really, really itching to invest more into my website. And the bump he got from his promotion covered both of our corporate paychecks. And it was really hard for me not to be contributing for a few months because, like, that’s just not my M.O.

 

whatsoever. But what’s interesting, and I’m very curious about it, so I’ve always been a spender, never been a saver. I’m working on that. As I make more money, I’m starting to see the wisdom of investing minds of money relationship issue. My dad is, like my mom always said, has the first ever made we were guiltiness kids for spending money. So I think my spending habits came out of like a little bit of a rebellion. But what drives me, we never had financial security in the sense of like savings. So I mean, I think I’m a driven person anyways. But I know, like, I don’t really have room for failure. And that really drove me in the early years for the business. So when you have a nice cushion, what drives you? Because you’ve been doing this for how long now? A little over three years. OK, obviously you’re making money before your two years ran out. Yeah, but what really motivated you knowing that you had a cushion to succeed in the business? Well, I knew the cushion wouldn’t last forever.

 

I’m also we talk about money mindset, right. We could get into this for an entire episode, but I’m a major security seeker and so I need a big cushion. And so just seeing those dollars go down in the bank month to month when we first started, that was enough for me to be like, oh my gosh, we have to fix this almost to a negative side. Right. Like the panic of not having a paycheck coming in with severe. But I also and everybody has money stories from their childhood that negatively impact them that they have to heal. One of mine is wealth equals worthiness. And so I had a father who idolized people with wealth. He didn’t manage money well himself, but like he passed that on very significantly.

 

And so something we had to work through and that I didn’t fully realize until I left my job was how deep seated that was for me. And so as soon as that paycheck went away in that status, one way of like having a really good job, I had a lot of fear around what this meant about how my husband was feeling about me, especially because we got married and we had kids under the expectation that I was going to continue to make this high money at my hedge fund job and he was going to be able to be a stay at home dad. And so now we’re talking about what are our safety nets? Could he go back to work if he needed to? And that seemed to in some ways attack my own sense of self worth of like if he has to go back to work, I have failed. And so there was a lot of working that out between the two of us for myself, because I was starting to happen really early on in the business, is I was looking for the fastest ways to earn money. I never stopped my work schedule. So part of the reason that we did this was for my health and mental health to leave. I was still working 90 hour weeks. I went from zero to six thousand seven thousand dollars a month and freelance writing income in four or five months. Because I took every client, we made this plan saying that I was going to take a couple of months of maternity leave when after I quit, I never did that. Like I signed my first freelance client, like I was still in the hospital. And so my drive was all tied to that head trash for lack of a better word. And over time, I’ve balanced it out and I now have a healthier money relationship. But that was always enough motivation for me, that drive to have a sense of security.

 

All right. So let’s talk about money mindset then, because smart money matters mainly about money mindset. Do you talk about both for your personal finances and business finances, or is it mainly for personal finances?

 

So I’m a huge believer that it’s all tied together. We talk a lot about money mindset. It’s more money Momus, but we actually talk about all areas of finance. We of course, talk about investing because that’s my background and we talk about getting out of debt. But for me, I actually think our ability to become our best version of ourselves is very intricately tied to our relationship with money and our ability to build wealth. Right. I think that it’s really, really negative when we see people in the self-improvement space that are just like pursue your passion, quit jobs and relationships don’t serve you like they spew all this stuff. That sounds really good. But if you’re a person who doesn’t have financial security, who’s, like, wondering where the next rent check, you’re listening and you’re like, yeah, what the hell? Like on I quit my job, get kids to feed. And so we talk a lot about money, mindset and fixing those old stories. But we also talk about what we call the money hierarchy of needs, which is built off Maslow’s of like how each stage of Maslow’s and actually getting to self development, self actualization is different levels of wealth. And that wealth doesn’t necessarily buy you happiness. It doesn’t necessarily make you a better person, but it does give you the freedom and opportunity to pursue and explore those things. And we can’t really talk about sense of self-worth and things like that. If you’re at the bottom of that pyramid, if you’re constantly worried about how you’re going to pay for the groceries, how are you going to pay for the rent, or if some big emergency is going to wipe you out that up or stuff that we all want. Right. We all want the fulfilled life. We all want to pursue our passions. We all want to build businesses that make good money. We need to secure our financial base first. And that’s part mindset and part just getting money in the bank and making sure you feel safe.

 

I think a lot of people don’t realize how much money, mindset and things that happened in your childhood impact. Oh, I didn’t realize it, to be honest. We always made fun of my dad for his preoccupation with money and he still has a preoccupation with money. But I never really realized it till I started making what I would call above average money. And what I realized because money was such a negative thing in my childhood, I absolutely believed that money could buy happiness. And that is not true. I tell my husband all the time, money makes our life so much easier, no doubt about that. But one hundred percent, it does not buy happiness. And a lot of ways it can make you more stressed, it can ruin relationships. I do not believe that it buys happiness at all, but it does make life easier. I think it does make life easier.

 

And I do think that the negative impacts are also all about mindset and negative mindset. Right. And so there’s an entrepreneur that I’m good friends with that has reached a certain point in her business and she doesn’t want to make it bigger. She’s above average income already, but she doesn’t want to make it any bigger because of this fear that then everything will fall apart. And she’s like anyone I know who has a bigger business than me. Their relationship is a mess. Their friendships are a mess.

 

And I just don’t want this. I just don’t want this in my life. And she and I have had to have a lot of conversations about you have this internalized view that money is evil and that money causes these situations. And you’re not seeing all the other reasons that these people that you’re pointing to, you have issues that have nothing to do with the amount their business makes. It has to do with their own internal sense of wealth, their own internal investment, their own investment in their own relationships and things like that. And that you can’t ascribe like money brings out some of the negative stories. And I think one of the things that people struggle with is they look and they do say that it hurts relationships. Right. But when you have more money, all the other things that used to fight about making the bills and getting the house clean because now you hire housecleaner, all of that stuff falls away. And all that’s left in your relationships are the actual deep issues that now you’ve got to look at because you don’t have the money stuff to worry about. And that’s not the money’s fault. That’s a fact that we didn’t fix the root cause of the relationship in the first place. Gosh, you could be a therapist.

 

I have lots of thoughts. And I mean, there are situations that happened in my family that I’m not ready to talk about in a public forum at this point. But, oh, gosh, you just brought up so many good points because I think that you said that I’m thinking to myself. Right. That’s actually a really good point, because, you know, here’s a very practical example. My cat, who’s like attached to me. Twenty four, seven, I love her to death, but she kind of drives me nuts, like she’s constantly nipping at me. It’s like, oh, my gosh, can you just go away? Well, she was sick the other day, so I’ve always been a cat lady. And I remember going out with my husband who wasn’t animal person growing up. One of the first things I told him was, if my cat will cost thousands of dollars to fix, I will fix it. So don’t like this will never be a topic of discussion. I will not argue about it. I don’t care if it goes on a credit card like I was very sensitive to it because I had family members that didn’t respect how much I loved my animals in the past. So it’s really clear about it. And I remember being very stressed, taking our animals to the vet when we had no money. It was just like an unexpected expense.

 

We had no cushion. I knew something was off with her. I took her to the vet with covid era. She goes. And so I don’t get to go in with her and they call you in the car and let you know what’s going on. And I’ve gone to the states, like since I was eight years old. So I very well. And she was nervous because she had to give me some bad news monetarily. And I remember thinking, like, oh, no, that doesn’t sound like a high number to me anymore. And it was just like, wow, it was kind of a total just mind blown situation of how much like internally I felt so different in a situation I’ve been in so many times in my life to the point where, like, I made it a stipulation in my relationship of like, tell me I can’t spend money on my cats, you know? Yeah. It’s almost like you don’t see it coming the way you teach. It sounds like you spend a lot of time helping people actually understand this. It’s not just like that accidentally happened to me in a lot of ways, like things I kind of knew because I’m a pretty self-aware person. But then you actually make us think about it and kill it. Essentially. That’s that seems to be what you’re doing. Yeah.

 

So when we talk about our core product is our our membership with the motivated society and one of the parts of that is foundations that’s broken into five courses in the first being thriving mindset. And it brings you back through your money history and helps you identify what’s going on, what’s holding you back, and then how do we actually heal it and move forward. In my opinion, there are way too many people out there who are like just create a good money mantra and repeat it every day. I’m like, no, no, no. Like, you’re not actually getting to the root part of the problem. And like, what ends up happening is, first of all, there’s a ton of spiritual bypassing that goes into that. Right. Like there’s a sense of like if you just say, I’m going to be a millionaire, I’m going to be a millionaire, and then you will become a millionaire. And if it’s not, you just don’t believe it enough. And it’s like, OK, well, there’s all kinds of systemic issues there. And you’re laughing.

 

But like, this is like actually things that I see people say, oh, I know, because it sounds crazy to me. It does sound crazy.

 

And it is because there’s so many systemic issues. There’s so many things that people have trauma around money. And like we come back to money is tied to our basic sense of safety in our society. Right. Your ability to have a roof over your head, your ability to have food in your belly, and some of us have real fight or flight fears around money because we faced that trauma, that deprivation before. And so now you have to heal that first before we can teach budgeting system. So, so many women that come into our membership have said to me, like, I have bought every budgeting course, I have bought the books, I’ve downloaded the apps, and I can’t make it work. Budgeting itself is easy. It’s this other piece that you have to heal. You said you were not ready to talk about it publicly. Part of the reason that we won with a membership is because we needed a safe space for people as they worked this stuff out to talk about it. And so we have on a very regular basis, people posting and being like, oh my God, look, I just realized this thing that has been burdening me for my entire life that I never even realized it. And so it almost sometimes feels a lot like therapy, especially early on. And then once people get through that first section, it all gets easier. But you’ve got to be willing to do that work up front.

 

It reminds me of like weight loss stuff or running, even if it’s 90 percent mental and 10 percent same thing with money. And I honestly, before I started the business, I never would have believed you about any of this. You had a really interesting point about the membership. I have a lot of questions about the membership, but the membership allowing people a safe space, because you’re right, I think the thing about talking about it publicly is my family members that maybe gave me negative opinions about money or negative feelings, and I’m not looking to publicly put them on notice or anything, but it’s nice to know that they’re somewhere. It reminds me when I like a pregnancy infertility group, like women don’t want to go out there and be talking necessarily about that. But when you’re working with other women who are going through the same thing, it’s a sense of community. It makes you feel safe. So let’s talk actually about the membership, because the membership is a digital product. Yes. And that’s what we talk about here. So it’s very useful. OK, so it’s called motivated mammo society. OK, how much is it? Twenty nine dollars a month. Wow. That’s not bad at all. And what do they get with that. What my business coach argues is too much. I’m sure that’s the case.

 

Part of the difficult part for me of teaching about money is that I think this information needs to be available and said sometimes the people who need it the most can’t afford it. And so we set a twenty nine dollar price of like, listen, this is fair. This is enough that you have skin in the game. This is enough that I can make a living. But at the same time it’s affordable for people who need it to be affordable. And so what we have is our foundation, of course at that five pieces that is very in depth. And so we tell people when you join, come in and focus on foundations, do that first, and it’s probably going to take you a couple of months to work through it the way you’re supposed to work through it. It’s a very in-depth course. But we also include we do a monthly live masterclass with either me or an outside expert. We do a monthly live Q&A and every other month we do a book club. And so we pick a book that’s either about personal finance, career business or self development and motherhood, because I am very holistic in how we look at money, and especially for a lot of people in our community. They come to the table to do this work and learn about money because they want to raise kids and. They realized that they can’t pass on healthy lessons if they haven’t internalized them, and so they’re doing that work for themselves. And so those are the main things that we do in the society. And then there’s a Facebook group that has kind of daily posts and accountability and support for people who need it.

 

Ok, so we know that the community aspect is one really great reason to have the membership. But I also know having been in the online world long enough, that memberships bring what we like to call recurring revenue to our business. So I have a couple of questions behind this. First of all, before the membership, because the membership is relatively new, you’ve only launched it once, but it’s an evergreen, which I also have questions about. So you’ve launched it once, so it’s relatively new. So prior to launching the membership, how were you making money in the business?

 

So we had digital products. Our biggest digital product is our family emergency binder, which is a printable fillable PDF. That’s all about filling the gaps between what a life insurance policy and a will would cover and what your family would actually need in an emergency situation. How to pay the cable bill, who’s your kid’s doctor? All of that kind of stuff as well. As you know, usually there’s only one person in the house that manages the money most of the time. Hopefully you and your partner talk about it, but we divide and conquer. That’s why we are in relationships. Right. And so somebody actively in it. And so there’s sections in there of laying out your investment plan, who to call if you need help investing life insurance money, things like that. And so that was our main big product. And then we ran an annual summit every October called Mammas Talk Money, which is where really the idea of the membership was born out of.

 

Ok, so when you chose the membership was recurring revenue. So when I say recurring revenue for anyone who doesn’t know, it’s when someone’s paying you month after month, it gives you a predictable baseline in your business. And when you have, I always say when your expenses are fixed, which that happens, expenses, your business happen regardless if you’re bringing in money, your software subscriptions, you’re paying other companies on a monthly basis. And so those expenses are there for your employees or contractors. It’s fixed. But if you enter every month with zero dollars, that’s an issue. So was one of the considerations going to a membership for that recurring revenue? Absolutely was a piece of it.

 

I think for me. I love live video. I love love teaching. I love doing the ongoing support. So when we talk about the summit, I’d be live for two or three hours a night answering questions. And that’s the stuff that I love to do. But that’s obviously not profitable, right, when you’re just like live on Facebook or whatever. And so we had to have a way that people who wanted that regular support and that I wanted to do the work that I love to do, compensated accordingly. And so recurring revenue made the most sense from that perspective.

 

And it motivates you to show up to I mean, because at some point showing up for free, everyone gets worn out. Absolutely. I agree. Like, we just did a free challenge leading into our big product. It was like doing a segment like it was so enjoyable. But the reality is, is I’ve done this long enough to know that it was only an enjoyable for so long, because when you’re working your butt off and there’s no return in it, like there has to be like that give or take. And I always tell people it’s all about economics and you’re not in business if you’re not making money. There’s two things to talk about. So you launched it once and now it’s on Evergreen. So I have a lot of newbie listeners. So explain launching means there’s like an open and close car. So there’s a dedicated push towards getting people in the membership. So it’s usually like a three to seven day thing. You all your emails are going out about it. You probably have some ads behind it. It’s a big push for it. And then when something’s on Evergreen, it just means you can enroll at any time. But oftentimes you have to produce some sort of urgency to get people to want to enroll. So explain how you launched once and then decided to put it on Evergreen or like, how did that work out and how is it working out? How are you getting people in there every month?

 

So we decided to go over in for a number of reasons, one of which is person. All right. Launching is exhausting. It feels like I or my kids get sick every time we go to launch something. It’s just a little bit of a hot mess. But the bigger reason for me is that when people are ready to work on their money, they don’t find you and go like, oh, good. She launches again in six months. Let me come back later. They go and find somebody who will answer their questions at that moment. And so especially because this is an emotional journey for a lot of people. I needed to be there when they were ready. The way we handle it is we have a whole nurture system funnel that goes when people join our list in every month. They are pitched the society in like one day flash sales look once a month. We work through different bonuses every month. And so as much as we don’t have a launch, the system is already sending people through these little sales every single month. Also, we get people through referrals, people invite their friends, and then we just get people who find us to the podcast and things like that. We launch, like you said, for the first time in January and so far in February, we’ve been adding like one or two people a day. Just fantastic. It’s worked well for us so far. It’s still really early to tell, but I think a lot of it is just that personally, I think launches work really well for B2B because we all understand how it works and we’re all ready for it. I think generally be to see you’re looking for an answer in that moment. You’re not like waiting for somebody else to come in and join. And so we decided to keep it evergreen and launched.

 

You can also give you that initial momentum. Imagine like that first person coming into the membership and then the lone soldier in there. The launch gives you like that start at the entry point where you have like a bunch of students and then you can kick it off well. And I think that that’s something to keep in mind, too.

 

So, like, I’ve been in business for over three years, we have an audience. And so we did a beta launch last summer, which is like we opened for like three days and we told them we take up to 70 people and we took 80. And so that we had even when we did our initial launch the first week of January, there was already a base of people in there. We’d worked out the kinks. We kind of knew what we were getting. We got a big bulk of people in in January and we did a lot of really specific things about helping a group of people all come in at once when we’re adding only one or two people a day. It’s really easy for me to send them a note, to send them a video to make sure that they’re being boarded properly. It’s harder when there’s three hundred people joining. And so that’s kind of how we’ve balanced it. But yeah, the launch, you can have people join to an empty group. It’s just really disorienting for people.

 

Yeah, for sure. So I want to circle back to mindset real quick. This is like the last major topic I want to talk about, because I find I run into it all the time and I’m not necessarily immune to it, though I’ve become more immune to it the longer I’ve been in business, which is women struggle with selling, i.e. asking for money. And I have come to the conclusion because I’ve worked with women now for five years in the topic of you can’t be in business if you’re not asking for money. It seems to be a very deep rooted issue that women as little girls were trained to be the givers. We’re trained to take care of people. So if you think about that, we’re constantly trained to give ourselves for free. We should be martyrs for our children, martyrs for our husbands, martyrs for everyone. So then you start an online business and you want to share in the whole product world. You’re sharing your knowledge and your skills with the world. And really, in my opinion, the blogging model was really founded. The modern blogging model, I will say, really got kind of twisted into this excuse for women to give everything away for free. That’s why I’m so big on digital products, because I’m like, no, like you should pay me for my knowledge. I want to help you. I have something to help you. I want to give you a low barrier to entry. That’s what product letters are. So there’s different levels you can buy with that. So I’m not trying to freeze people out of it. But still, I personally don’t have any shame asking for money. That’s one mindset thing. I worked through lots of my students, especially new ones. This is an issue. So give us your therapist here.

 

So I think you hit the nail on the head with we’re trying to be givers and we’re not good at standing up and owning our worth because we’ve never had to practice it. Right. We’ve never been told to. And in fact, when you do, especially a young girl, you get told that you’re bossy and that you’re too loud and that all the different things and so on, learning that is really, really difficult. I think the biggest thing to keep in mind when you’re new is that you do not have to sell like a man. You don’t believe me in people’s face. You don’t have to do the crazy sales tactics that make everybody cringe. Right. You can find your own way to sell. But one of the things is that you have to be in business, right? This is what you’re doing. And think about the impact this anything you’re selling has on someone’s life. Are you helping them, whether you’re helping them save money, whether you’re helping them make their lives easier, whether you’re helping them grow their own business, there’s an actual value there. If you give it away for free, the likelihood that they actually go and get that value is less than if you charge them for every piece of research on sales and whatever.

 

We don’t pay for things. We think it’s worthless. That’s just how it works. We don’t value it. We don’t value it at all. So you have to be willing to sell it and to be willing to own your power and your voice in the space. The biggest thing is practice. You just have to do it. And I wish there was an easier way. I wish I was a hack. I do think there’s a lot to be done around your personal finance money mindset. I think a lot of the similar things will come up if you are a person who has internalized that money is evil. If you are a person who has internalized that money just causes arguments, you don’t want money coming into your life, like whether or not you would say justice, that’s ridiculous. Of course, I want money coming into my life a big part of your brain, doesn’t it, because your subconscious brain is afraid of it. And so one of the things we talk to entrepreneurs all the time about is like, you’ve got to take care of your own home finances before you can thrive in your business finances. And some people will disagree.

 

Some people will tell you, like, I can just make my business make more money and I could just keep out running this for the rest of my life. And it’s like, yeah, except that’s a lot more stress and it’s probably going to make your business run less efficiently. And so figuring out you might not be afraid of selling, you might be afraid of some part of the money. And so we talk about route money fears. Right. And so money being evil is a big one. Responsibility is a big one. Someone else should just come take care of this for me. And security and lack of security and not wanting to if I’m out selling and if I’m out pushing, it means that money is controlling my life. And I don’t want to be a person who money controls my life. We all of these little things. And so going to figure out what your fears are on a general basis will make selling easier and help you communicate a little bit better and not feel like you’re selling against your will. Right. Because people can tell when you’re selling, but you don’t want to be selling it. They don’t want to buy from you.

 

I have a ton of people who have amazing digital products that have gone through my courses in. You go to their site and you can’t find them, they’re buried. And when I ask questions about it, it’s actually very common that students come to me and say, nobody bought my X, Y, Z, and I would go to their site and how do I buy it? They’re hiding it and I can’t even find it. How do you expect me to buy it? We’re expecting you to do the legwork to find it. In reality, we all know how sales work. You have to get in front of me all the things that we see every day. If you’re not putting it in front of my eyes more than once, like I’m not going to your site to seek it out. That happens a lot.

 

Think about how much you value the work that you do. Right. Like how important you think it is, why you want to share it with the world, why you want to talk about it all the time, your passion and commitment to it. The people who need your product want help with that thing. Right. That they’re already struggling. And so if you are not willing to put it in front of them, they will go find someone else who will write. And you have to tell you. So imagine your ideal customer, that person that you love and you want to help going and finding somebody else who cares less than you write that they’re actually in it for all the reasons that you think are not right or that you think isn’t as good of a system as you have or whatever, they’re going to go spend that money. They’re just not going to do it with you. If you want to have the biggest impact on their lives, you want to help them make the transformation that you’re creating. You have to be willing to put it in front of them.

 

Ok, so comparing it to the fact that you’re right, if someone’s truly looking because a digital product is simply a solution to someone’s problem, that’s what a digital product is. If someone’s looking for the solution and you don’t want to be the one to offer it to them, it’s not like they’re not going to go spend the money elsewhere. You know, there are very slimy marketing tactics out there that we get bombarded with. Don’t be a slimeball when you’re selling. Don’t do unethical things. But the reality is, is that the selling in and of itself is not bad. And if someone is coming to you to solve their problem and you’re unwilling to do it and put your thing in front of them, they’re going to go spend the money elsewhere. It’s not like you’re taking something that they’re unwilling to spend, which I think a lot of women confuse that. A lot of women I work with confuse that and think that they’re going to make someone spend money that they can’t afford. One of my mentors always says stay out of other people’s wallets because it’s really disempowering to tell someone how to spend their money. It’s not your job to tell someone how to spend their money. Your job is to offer your solution and your gifts to the world.

 

So this is very funny. So am I going to name names? Because can a thing but like there is a big person, the personal finance officer who knows. Right. This guy I could have three years ago said, like, there’s already this person that everybody like, it’s the number one person everybody goes to. And so why would I bother? I’ll all it. And if people need what I do, then they’ll find me. Right. And I could not market.

 

But what I know to happen is that they go to this person who tells them how they’re allowed to spend their money and not allowed to spend their money, who is very deprivation, focused and shame based. And not only does it not help a lot of people, there’s people it works for. But for most people, it does not work. It damages their long term money story. Right. Because now they’ve had this person in their face sometimes yelling at them to do things a certain way and now they think it’s them. Right. It’s like I just don’t have enough willpower. I’m just not good at money. And now they can’t even hear my message because they’ve had this thing shoved down their throat. We have people that come into our community who have been in his courses, in his things, and the healing that has to take place in that first mindset. Course, it’s amazing. And so while there are other really good people out there who offer the things that you do and not everybody is, you don’t want to make competition in this big, scary thing. There are times when, like even if you’re looking at somebody who is the five hundred pound gorilla in the room in your industry, there are massive benefits for you going and marketing alongside and figuring out how to take your piece of the pie, because there are people who can’t hear that person’s message. It doesn’t work for them, but you can help those people.

 

I’m one of those people that know who you’re talking about. And also, I never piece this together. You just actually piece it together. For me, his method never worked for me. And now I realized just by you talking, my story growing up was deprivation. Save, save, save, save, save, never enjoy. And very, very strong opinions about that. And no wonder why it didn’t work, because then when I try to take his personal finance advice, it was all about basically, oh, now you’re an adult and you can spend money but don’t do any of it. I don’t like you spent seven years getting two degrees, but don’t enjoy your life. You’re in student loan debt. It did not resonate with me.

 

This particular person tweeted something two weeks ago that said, if you have debt, the only reason you should see the inside of a restaurant is if you’re working in it and to talk about the levels of privilege and disgust that goes into that comment. And this is why.

 

And so this is we’re now at a totally like why I do what I do. But like, this does not help people. You still get to enjoy your life. And so this is the money mindset stuff and these are the big messages. We took it like if you’re struggling to sell in your business, you’re struggling to grow your business or you’re feeling weird about, you know, Monica, I’m sure you run into these entrepreneurs to whose business kind of quickly grew to more than they’ve ever made before and now they feel really uncomfortable. A lot of that is because the loudest voices. In the money space forever have been deprivation and shame and money is evil, and so we don’t know how to handle it in a way, like I am a huge believer that wealth can improve our communities. Right. That like we can give ourselves the power not only to be the type of parents that we want to be in lieu of the type of lives we want to be, but also pour back into the things that matter to us in our lives and our communities. And so it can be a beautiful thing. But that’s where a lot of those internalized messages come from. And doing a little bit of work on your money mindset will really help your business thrive.

 

So what I just realized probably in the last six months when I made a huge pivot, pretty much retired, everything that I was doing, I realized I was disconnected from like the bigger reason I had been pushing this elusive hit a million dollars in one year goal. And it seemed almost unattainable, like I was chasing my tail and I realized it was because of some self reflection. I was disconnected from my overall purpose. It got to the point where I knew I could make lots of money for our family. I wasn’t concerned about that. I at this point don’t have any fears about my personal security, our family’s personal security financially. And I realize that what I was missing was I started all of this because I was upset about how women were treated in corporate America. And I wanted to help more women realize that they can make money, not feel bad about it, and be the exact kind of man they want to be. Show up how they want to show up. It seems so obvious, but I was disconnected from it. And honestly, it gives me more joy to see another woman succeed in her business than it does to make another thousand dollars. I’m completely disconnected at this point. From the more money in my bank account, the better I feel about it. It’s more the impact overall that we’re making.

 

I want to give you a really quick exercise that happens in our Sarabhai mindset course, and this is related to business goals. So often I hear entrepreneurs. I want to make six figures. I want to make seven figures. I want to double my business this year. And they do feel disconnected from it. And they do get halfway through and they’re like and like, I’m close enough. Like, this feels fine. Our exercise flips things on its head a little bit. And the first question I want you to ask is, how do you want to feel? OK, pick the three feelings in your day. Do you want to feel empowered? You want to feel impactful? Do you want to feel relaxed? Do you want to feel smart? What what are your feeling? Words pick three your toplines, then look at your values. What matters most to you and your life as a family? Is it environment? Is it whatever it is, pick your values and then I want you to make a list of what are the activities that bring those three feelings into your life and those values into your life. Right. Make a list and start to identify what’s your ideal day? What’s your ideal month? It’s your ideal year.

 

How do you build your life around this and then come to the number of how much do I need to make to make that a reality? For some people, it’s way less than they think. For some it’s more. But figure out what that number is and make that your goal. Because a million dollars is so amorphous to so many of us, we don’t know what it would do for us. It feels like a lot of money, feels like we could do whatever we want. But what does it matter? Instead, start with what life is like creating and then put a number to what you want to have some number, because it gives you a sense of progress and how you’re going. But it’s so much more meaningful and you can start to build the pieces of it in early because we see this in our community as well as people saying like, OK, I have all these things.

 

And yes, some of the things on my list that tie my feelings and my values are expensive. It’s going to take some time, right? Like traveling around the world with my kids is valuable to me, but it’s going to take me a while to get there. But some of them are small, some of them are free. Like I value education and family are two of the things that matter to me. And closeness is like a feeling. I want to feel close and connected sitting on the couch with my boys every day for fifteen minutes, I take a break from my work. I eat lunch with my boys and I go read them books for a few minutes. They sit on my lap and I get that feeling of closeness.

 

I’m educating them like all the same things, even though money wasn’t even involved. And so you can start to develop that life that you want and then that desire for the money that gets you to the next stage is just way more powerful.

 

I think you really saw me on your membership because I can see like I feel like I’ve made in the last year, especially with covid. I feel like I made a lot of progress on my money mindset. But just so much of what you’re saying, like, I used to work way too much. I was working 80 hour work weeks now when I have a four hour day and it happens more often than not, actually, sometimes I feel guilty about it. And I realized listening to you that all of this is wrapped up in some warped money mindset. I still have to.

 

Yeah, in a lot of people have that money mindset to Monaco where making money is supposed to be hard. Yes. And if it’s easy, you’re doing something wrong or you’re cheating. And so we make business way harder than it has to be to, like, prove that we’ve deserved the money that we’re getting.

 

That was me for the first four years of the business. It really was. I actually it makes me think I should have a whole episode on how I actually backed away from working as much as I did and all that stuff that went into it. But we went along so. Please tell everyone how they can find you and join this membership, which sounds amazing.

 

Yeah, so I’m smart. Money mamas and mamas is my ass and everybody spells it a little bit differently. And we are smart. My mom is an all social platforms. I spent way too much time on Instagram. Come Tag Media me. I’m happy to talk about any of this stuff and be helpful. If you want to check out the society, you can go to smart money mamas, dot com forward slash join and you’ll see all the things that are involved in the society. And we’d love to have you come hang out with us, do some of this work together.

 

I’m going to join. I can take you with me too. So, Chelsea, thank you so much for being here today. I know that our moms and women, I’m sure they’ve learned so much and feel like they’re already making progress on their money mindset. Just listening to your few tips. Thanks so much for having me.

 

Thanks for tuning in to today’s show, be sure to follow along with me on Instagram at Redefining Mom. As always, you can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at Monica Fros, Dotcom, Ford’s slash podcast. See you right here again next week.

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