305: When Money Feels Dangerous Healing Your Survival Response to Wealth

The power in this work is that the moment that you choose to change your relationship to money is the moment that you choose to change every single generation ahead of you, whether you have children or grandchildren. It changes the whole narrative of wealth and money. And I just think that there's such a ripple effect in that.

Hello everyone, this is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created this show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life. To rise up, speak up, and stand up for who they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week, I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of Finding Brave and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful and meaningful life, business and career. Hey, folks, Kathy here. Are you ready for a big, positive shift in how you're working and what you're achieving today in your career? Let's make that happen for you. While you might know me best as a podcast host and a writer, a key focus in my work is helping women experience greater success and achieve their biggest goals in the quickest, most effective way possible. In my six session career and leadership breakthrough, one on one coaching program, I help women get what they want most, which includes more confidence, confidence, impact, advancement, financial reward and fulfillment. I've worked with over 20,000 women across six continents and before that I served as a therapist and before that I was a corporate VP managing multi million dollar budgets and global initiatives. I bring all of that experience to our work together, helping you build a new chapter that aligns with who you really are and what you're ready to create. Check out kathycaprino.com careerbreakthrough and I hope you'll register now. I'd love to support you. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Finding Brave. How are you? I am so, so, so excited today. First of all, this is coming to you a little later than when we record, but you might have seen, you know, I just celebrated 300 episodes and our amazing guest today, Katherine Morgan, is here, featured in that compilation of, you know, it's. It's hard to choose when you have so many amazing guests, but it was a compilation of 15 guests who moved me forward incredibly and who I. You know, they're the most downloaded episodes and Catherine's was in that. So I just want to say a big, big thank you to you all for being in the Finding Brave community and all of your interest and Support and your questions, it literally means the world you're doing this podcast is truly like a master's class in life and I'm grateful to you and I'm grateful to all my guests, including the amazing Kathryn Morgan coming from the uk. Catherine, thank you for joining me again. You were, what did we say? Episode 205 before and now we're going to be 303. And you are continuing to do amazing work in the realm of financial wealth, health, around money, healthy relationships around money. Your work is so important. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me back on the show. So fun.

Now people, I believe that everybody who passes by this is going to get something vitally important. Even if we have a lot of money in the bank, even if we have nothing in the bank, anything in between. This is such an important topic. And you know, I have not talked about this angle of this topic ever on the podcast and we are talking about when money feels dangerous, healing your survival response to wealth. I literally cannot wait because I know, you know, transparently speaking, I know I can learn and heal as well. But let me tell you about Katherine quickly. Kathryn Morgan is a multi award winning financial coach and former financial advisor. Just like a personal trainer, helps transform your physical health, she helps transform women's financial health. And men's I'm sure as well. I mean, men will get just as much out of this episode, I think. Right, Catherine?

Yeah, sorry, I was, I was so engrossed in what you were saying. Yeah, like the interesting thing is, is that, you know, I know like a lot of this work we make assumptions that it's only relevant for women and wealth, but actually no, like this is an all gender conversation.

Love to hear it. My work too. It has a lens for women, but men, you know, all over the world get a lot out of it. All right, back to this. Women's financial help by addressing both practical money management and emotional money. Right. Relationships and energetic ones we're going to be talking about. She's the creator of the Money narrative clearing method. Wow, we're going to hear about that. Host of the Top Point five percent global podcast and author of It's not about the Money. I continually see that doing so well on Amazon. Bravo to you. Wow. She works with Virgin Unite on bridging the wealth equality gap. Important work. And recently shared a glitter faced moment with Sir Richard Branson on Necker Island. Ah, I gotta hear about that as well. I'm a big fan of his work. She's focused on helping 1 million women step into their full financial power and to revolutionize financial services by bringing emotional intelligence to money conversations, creating a world where women feel safe, empowered and deserving to build and hold meaningful wealth. There's more about Kathryn's amazing bio. You'll. You can read that in the show notes, but let us dig in. Without further ado, can you tell us, I'm dying to know, kind of the origin of how you understood that money feels dangerous to people, to women. Where did that emerge and what is the most important thing people have to get out of this? 30 minutes together. Katherine, where do we begin?

Yeah, thanks so much for that question. So I guess a good place to start would be to understand, like, the connection between emotions of money and money itself, right? Because when we talk about money feeling dangerous, there may be some of you listening, listening to this, thinking, well, how do I know if money feels dangerous to me? What kind of things might I say about money or how might I feel around money? And money really is a mirror reflection of the relationship that we have with ourselves, and it's very interconnected with our identity, right? So things that we say about money, we're really saying this about ourselves. And it comes from a place of desiring and needing and wanting safety and security. Right? Our brain's main job is to keep us safe. So anything that feels threatening, that feels unfamiliar, the brain will do is up most to keep you safe. Right? And if we think about our very earliest imprints, if you like, our blueprint around money is formed way before we were even born. And many of you may have heard about, you know, how money is formed by the age of six or seven, actually, it goes even further back than this. And for me, this is where, in answer to your question, like, where did this come from? Is that when I was exploring my own relationship with money, I was doing all the money mindset work. I was looking at all the patternings and all the behaviors and the beliefs that I had around money. But what I didn't realize was the deep connection between the lineage in my ancestry line, like what was coming up and had come up around my, especially my mother's line and my relationship with my mother and the relationship between love and money. Because my belief growing up was that love gets taken away very quickly. And so it wasn't safe for me to stay in the joy of any scenario. There was a lot of patterns throughout my life where something really good would happen followed by something really bad. And I can give some examples in the podcast of how this showed up for Me and how this may show up for you, but for me, there was a really significant breakthrough in that moment when I realized that actually a lot of the emotions around money didn't even belong to me. They literally came through from generation to generation to generation. Three generations of unhealed trauma patterns. And of course, in those days, my great great grandmother didn't have the resources to. We had like we do today, we have therapists on tap, we have self help books, we have podcasts, we have all these amazing tools that we can use to try and heal ourselves, but they just didn't exist in those times. And that for me was just unlocked this whole new layer of transformation to really aid me in my relationship to money.

I have so many questions. All right, let me spit out the questions and then we can decide what. What's best. Here we are. You say that, you know, a lot of thinking is your. Your money beliefs or your energy around money is formed very early. But what struck me about what you said is, tell me if I got it right. In many situations, you realized or felt that love will get withheld or taken away quickly. And you know, if. If a lot of you have listened to this story. My parents are in heaven. I love them. They gave me everything they could give me. And blame is never where we want to go. It's a useless, damaging emotion. They did the best they. And come to think of it, both of them, you know, came from not. Not no wealth, you know, so my mother's side, they were poor. She was malnourished, you know, Greek. She was Greek. And her parents were from Greece. My dad's parents were from Sicily. So question number one. When we say we're carrying unhealed trauma, it does that mean that if they struggled with money, there's inevitably a problem? Or do some people, like. I've heard stories of my mother's cohorts where they might have been just as without means as other families, but there was a lot of joy. They were joyful, loving, generous people. Where it seems like. I'm not sure. I don't. My grandmother died when I was very young and my grandfather died before I was born. Their family really struggled, like my mother. Here's an instance. My mother, as a little child with her sister, had to walk in the dark to go get my grandfather from the taverna where he was probably drinking coffee and maybe a little gambling a tiny bit. And I'll never forget that story. Here these little girls are in the dark, walking to knock on the door to get the father to come home. So question number one, generationally, how do we even know what the heck we have inherited? Because I'm guessing assuming isn't the right idea. Just because someone doesn't have access to money doesn't mean there's trauma. Number two, when you said love gets taken away, how do you equate that with money? Because I have had everything that you talked about. Can we start with that? If you have been in unsafe situations, like when love is withheld, how does that equate to your money relationship? Are these making sense? That was a 20 minute question.

I mean, let's take that statement. So when love is withheld, right, it's not about the money. So if you take the money out of the equation, then what you're experiencing there is what happens when love is not present. Now we know when love is not present, fear is present, right? Fear shows up in the absence of love, right? And so if you think about how the nervous system works is it turns on this fight or flight response where it is not safe for us in that scenario. Right? And so we're just building up evidence in our evidence bank of times or moments when love maybe was present but it got removed quickly.

Yeah.

And that becomes the blueprint of abundance, right? Because the main contributor to our relationship, to our financial abundance is the earliest relationship that we have in life, which is with our mothers, right? How fully or not we were able to receive her love and how she was able to give love. Right? Now, my mother as an example, my mother was the like she beautiful mother, you know, she was very attentive, she was so excited to have. I'm actually a twin, myself and my brother were born and you know, my mother was deliriously happy and she was, you know, very, very present. But what happened for me at the. My very earliest experiences of love actually weren't even when I was born. It goes back to where my mum was carrying me, right? And the fears that she may have been holding energetically whilst I was in the womb, because that's where our DNA is formed. So if your mother, for example, was experiencing stress of some way, maybe a relationship stress, which my mother was, she was in a very unhappy relationship, unhappy marriage, lots of financial abuse and things going on in that time, you know, she would have been carrying some fears in her nervous system. And when we trace that back through the generational print, her mother had lots of experiences of sudden loss. So experiences where love was present and then it was taken away. So for example, my mother, mother's mum. So my Grandmother, she lost one of her children in a car accident very suddenly. She lost her husband to a heart attack while they were on holiday. She was with the five children. He'd been in the concentration camps actually in the Second World War, had survived through the concentration camps and they met post war, they fell in love, they got married, they had children and the heart attack was a consequence, we believe, of having a weak heart. So she experienced two occasions, and there were others as well, where love was present. And then suddenly, with no warning, she experienced loss. Right. And what's interesting is that she didn't receive support. There was no such thing as mental health or therapy in those days. And so you think about, well, what would have been present for her while she was growing her family and therefore what would have been passed through the genetic line through my mother and then through me, right? And we know that there's a genetic DNA imprint in epigenetics. So if you follow the work of epigenetics or you just Google epigenetics and trauma, then there is an epigenetic tag, like a DNA tag that is imprinted through those generations. So just as an example, like that relationship that we have with our ability to receive love creates the blueprint of wealth and abundance. And so for me, not only did I have that sudden loss DNA imprint through my family lineage, but also when I was born, the minute I was born, I was breach. I breathed in meconium, I was put in a ventilator. Instant separation from my mother. Now that was not out of my mother's choice. You know, my brother actually was also very, very poorly. He was whisked off to a completely different hospital. She had to go with him, you know, so lots of separation. That couldn't be. Yeah, it couldn't be avoided. Like, my mum had no choice, right? But as a newborn baby, then that love is there and then all of a sudden it is, it's gone, it's taken away. Right now you might think, well, how is this connected to money? Yeah, well, the relationship we have with money is the relationship we have with ourselves and our identity and our self worth. So in those very, very early years, my belief may have been, you know, like, I don't matter, I'm abandoned, I'm left, you know, all of these things that then we re experience other things in our life. And what the brain does is it goes, oh, hold on a second, I've got some prior experience of this. Let me just remind you what that was. And so it hooks onto everything, which is why when you look at your relationship with money. It's often mirrored in your relationship with your health and your relationships with your partners and your friendship groups and in your jobs and your careers. Like, it's not a standalone, isolated thing. It's what did you make it mean about yourself? That's the key question. What did you make it mean about yourself? And that is what creates that blueprint.

Okay, more questions. But what. What I keep writing down here is there was a book that was life changing for me, Dr. Maria Nemeth's book, the Energy of Money. And as I understand it, I should read it again. She says money is one of six energy forms. Vitality, support, support, community, you know, friendship. But. But it reminds me of Shakespeare's. Shakespeare knew everything. You know, nothing is. But thinking makes it so that money is simply an energy form. It's not. It's not what we think it is. And you, in our last talk, you were talking about shame. And if you have shame in any way, it. It will show up. But I want to ask you this so we can really make it very relevant to everyone. You gave the very strong example of when you had love, but then it disappeared for any reason we can imagine. I brought this up to Finney and Kelly on the show, and he's a healer, amazing guy, and he. He pointed out some things for me. But would you say. I think I know the answer, but with my mother, for instance, I had to be a certain kind of person and I had to think a certain way and act a certain way to be loved. I feel like that is a very similar thing that you're talking about. And would this be an accurate assumption here that, you know, it's funny that I do a lot of. I've done energy healing, I've done a ton of work on myself. But when it's yourself and you have the issues, it's a little more obfuscated, a little more confusing. But would you agree with this that if I felt I had to be a certain person that I am not in order to be loved, doesn't that make sense now that. That I have to be a different person than I am to make money?

Yeah.

I mean, tell us about this.

Just that example there. And thank you for sharing that on the show. Like, what comes up for me there, it's. It's about love can only be there if there are strings or conditions attached.

And those strings are going to be hard. And those are the hard part.

Yeah.

They're going to be something that hurts me and is dangerous.

Yeah. And that. So for you, that your brain has connected that pattern. And actually, if you think about that as a string, one of the analogies I always like to talk about is to imagine that your relationship with money is like a tapestry, like a. Or a blanket, like, beautifully woven with different threads, different colors, you know. And if you think about your family tree, for example, in terms of inherited traumas or money beliefs, you can imagine that every string or every thread is one of those pieces, one of those stories. And when you think about the strings attached, there will be multiple versions of this depending on your relationship to money. So one of those might be that when you receive money, there are strings attached. Or when you receive money, the condition is you have to work hard for it. Or it could be that there has to be a man that has to be responsible for providing that. It could be that in order to be wealthy or make money that you have to be selfish or greedy or, you know, there's. There's some kind of emotion attached into that thread.

Or be the opposite. Give everything. And you have no.

Give everything away.

Yeah.

No boundaries, people pleasing, over giving. Like, we see that a lot for women in particular. And it's actually a psychological disorder called fawning, where many people will have heard of fight, flight or freeze response in our nervous system. But fawning is a psychological disorder very prevalent, especially for women where we people please. And so we undercharge or we don't ask for a pay rise, or we don't take enough risks with our investment decisions. Because somewhere underneath or in between those threads is this core belief that money is not safe for me. And it's either not safe for me to make or ask for it, or it's not safe to keep it and hold it.

No. So. Oh, my. All right, and we. I promise you people, we're going to get to strategies, because I know, Catherine, you. You're highly trained in this, but I don't think you're a therapist. Right. So you're not. You're not working with people. Maybe you'll tell me in a minute, but I have questions before we get to what do we do about this? Are we basically saying that money reflects our entire relationship with who we are as a human being?

Yeah.

Do other things. Good grief. Oh, no. Do other things have that direct correlation? Yeah. I mean, our health does. Let's face it. I see that.

I mean, it's all like. It's all built around what feels safe.

Right.

It's about creating safety mechanisms. Whether that's in the fact that we may block financial security. You know, it makes no sense that people can be very wealthy and then suddenly it's all gone. Or you know, they have felt the need to do more or buy more or invest more because really they deep down they don't feel deserving to keep it. And so they're blocking this ability to create financial independence or security for themselves. You know, or it could be a safety pattern that we self sabotage or we just seem to repeat the same cycles over and over and over.

Right.

It's our body's ability to feel safe. And this for me was the biggest connection, if you think back to those threads, is that very often that in order to feel safe we try all these different things and we, you know, maybe try and shift our relationship with money and change what we're saying by using abundance statements or manifestation cards or you know, lots of different things that people try. But actually the piece that we're missing is the connection in the body. Because the body keeps the score. Fabulous book. The body keeps the score. And so if all the work you're doing is in the mind or the brain and you're overthinking things, you're not going to create the transformation because your body just needs to feel safe. And safe for some people is giving all your money away because that's the familiar pattern that you have experienced growing up. So I think it is really key to recognize that money and the relationship we have to it is a survival response. It's not a flaw. Like there's nothing wrong with you. It's not that you're bad with money, it's just your body's ability to create safety and survival patterns.

You know why this is so, I mean, one of the million reasons why it's so important. Doing the work I do, having written for, you know, Forbes.com and my own blog and podcasting, I have to keep abreast of a lot of trouble trans I want to keep pressed. One thing that really annoys me having been a therapist is there's so much information about just do this and you will make a million and keep a million. Just do this with your business. And there are even people that have told me you're doing something wrong here, that you're pushing away money. The problem with that is is that exactly it doesn't do what you're talking about. I mean, we aren't quite yet fully spiritual form where human in a human reptilian brain is operating. Now we can shift that and you're going to tell us how to do that energetic work or understand our body's response. But the brain is a very powerful mechanism in how we relate to the world. So a lot of these statements, I feel, do more damage. Just do this, just set up, you know, just pay off your credit first. It's almost like what I hear constantly from people who come to me for help. No matter what I do, I can't get the job I'm looking for. I get rejected. No matter what happens, I'm passed over, you know, simple platitudes. Well, just do this. They're hurtful. And I think, Catherine.

Yeah, I, I, I mean, I hear you. I feel like even just the conversations around money and wealth are very limited, especially in the online space, and we just live in this bubble sometimes. And the way that wealth has been created is not the way that wealth will be created. Right. We are shifting into an entirely new paradigm. Well, even if you just take the easy example here, right. Of AI and the way that AI is completely transforming the way that we are in the world. Right?

Yeah.

The way that money and value is exchanged is very different. And you look at how AI has increased the capacity for investing opportunities in crypto, bitcoin, all of these things that never even existed, you know, 20 years ago. And so the way that we appreciate and exchange value is changing and it's shifting, and we are going through a conscious revolution. I really believe that, you know, the way that wealth is going to be created is going to be very, very different. And so I really believe that the conversations that we are having today will be like dinner table conversations, you know, when our kids are in their 50s and 60s.

Like, how funny it was what they used to think, these poor people that, you know, oh, boy, they used to.

Fill out bank cards and pay money for food. Like, what's that all about? You know, like it, you know, and even if you look at things how, you know, banks will be decentralized, and that will create a whole shift in the way that we access money and that we use money. It, it would just be a completely different way of living and a way of life. And I think consciously and collectively, we have a whole old paradigm of beliefs to get present to, to actually start to think about. What is the new paradigm of wealth? What are the, the ways that people are creating wealth now? You know, like my children, for example, they don't want to own a house. They want to rent. They want to rent everything. They, they want freedom. They want freedom.

They're not an albatross. Yeah, yeah.

They don't want possessions. You know, like we're coming from an old paradigm where possessions were hoarded. You know, you think about your grandparents and how I remember when we cleared out my husband's parents house and you know, top to ceiling of possessions because the, the scarcity mindset was so deeply rooted through from war and war traumas that it's no wonder that they frugally, you know, just save, save, save, save, save. And then you know, died potentially with.

It and figured out my parents house too. It's like, oh no. Yeah.

And I think that we are wanting deeper connections more than anything else. And so the way that we spend our wealth and money is so different even now to how it was just 10 years ago.

It's so interesting. Like I, oh, I could talk to you for hours and I won't keep it too much longer. But I remember when I was in the corporate world, I lived for my travel experiences and my husband, my then husband was a jazz, is a jazz percussionist and we would go to amazing places, Brazil, Malaysia. And I remember mother, my mother saying you can't just live for your vacations. But, and she was right in that my corporate life was hard and I lived for. But the point was I've always wanted to spend my money on experiences that are in that are inside my heart.

Enriching.

Yeah, enriching. And, and I am so different from a lot of my counterparts who have very big homes and you know, it matters to them and I'm not putting them down. I was happy to sell our big house and not have so many possessions. It felt freeing. So I think part of what I want to share here is we're not all the same. And don't let yourself be judged. Either you judging yourself that why don't I want to own a house or why don't I own a house? All my friends do. It's really how you energetically feel, right? Would you say it is?

And I think it leads to like a really great solution or like a pattern that you can start to identify with yourself here is that if you're finding yourself comparing, you know, comparing to a friend, a colleague, a next door neighbor, Mr. And Mrs. Jones, like whoever that is, like just be really present to what is it that you're comparing yourself with? Like because really if you can take anything from, you know, even things like icky guy. The Ikigai framework is a beautiful example of how the way that we spend money, the way that we invest, the way that we save really is driven by our value. System. And so it really doesn't matter what everybody else is doing. If it brings enrichment and fulfillment to your life, then great. Right. And I think that one of the patterns that we can start to observe is how do we stretch in a small way, your ability to be able to expand and contract energetically with wealth. Right, so let me talk a little bit.

Tell us. I'm taking notes.

So if you think about expansion, if you think about expansion as your ability to receive like an elastic band, you're stretching your comfort zones. Maybe that is reaching out and hiring your first VA to help you with your business, or maybe that is reaching out to go and work with a book coach or, you know, maybe reaching out to a financial professional to get help with money. You're stretching your ability to be able to ask for help and expansion, expanding out in what currently feels safe for you. Because right now maybe it doesn't feel safe for you to ask for help because asking for help is a sign of weakness. Or I have to do everything myself, you know, or all these stories we tell ourselves. And then we have the contraction piece, which is about our ability for it to be okay to have times where we expand and we contract. So there will always be times, and you'll always find evidence in your life where great things happen, followed by things that are not so great. There will always be examples of that, but it doesn't mean that that is the way that everything will happen. And I think just being really aware of, well, what situations have I experienced where money has been abundant and then it hasn't been right? And it's, that's okay. We go through ebbs and flows with money. There will be times where you feel wealthier than others. There will be times when you're growing your family and life becomes way more expensive, or, you know, times where your business is flourishing and then everything seems to go down the pan. Like it's just okay to have those ebbs and flows. It's because we try and control the expansion, the contraction, that then we suddenly start to blame ourselves and think, well, what am I doing wrong? What's wrong with me? Rather than just accepting that flow happens, life happens. Ups and downs happen. It's not about trying to stay in this higher energy, abundant self, being rich all the time. It's about being safe to be in the expansion and in the contraction. Does that make sense?

Oh, it so does. And per what we you share in your book and what you said on our last episode, there is so much, so much shame when we hit the Contraction phase. I'm stupid. This is embarrassing. I blew it. How could I be here? Tell us how we should. When it's. When it's a little dire, when, you know, oh, no. Or if. The interesting thing is, I work with some people that if they did admit what was going on, people would judge negatively. So, you know, or maybe not hire them, or, you know, they would say, you're being irresponsible, so therefore I can't trust you, whatever it is. What would you say when the contraction piece that's generating shame is truly something that objectively people would say, that is, that is a struggle, what would you do? What would you suggest for those folks then, how to handle that? Does that make sense?

So shame is interesting to just observe in your body. There. There's a lot of research that shows that physically your shoulders curve like, it's almost like your body goes into what it wants to go into contraction, it wants to go into a ball, it wants to protect. So that's the first thing to actually observe is that when you're experiencing that feeling of shame, notice how your body reacts. Because even just that on its own is so powerful to go, this is really interesting. This is what I'm observing in my body. And then asking yourself, well, what is the emotion or the feeling that I am experiencing in this moment? Right? Because shame is attached to identity. It's, it's. It's the. It's the lowest vibrational energy out of all of the. Like, guilt is one above shame, fear is one above that. But, but, but guilt and shame is the lowest one because it's where we're attaching it to our sense of self, where we're going, I don't deserve to be here. I don't belong. Right?

Wow.

And it goes back to the hunter gatherer, you know, having a sense of belonging. So if you're experiencing shame, the first thing is to acknowledge, well, where do I feel that in the body? And there's a really easy way of whether you are experienced in body work or somatic work or breath work or anything that engages the body, just being able to recognize, right? I feel this in my throat, or I feel this in my chest, or I feel this in the bottom of the pit of my stomach, and just simply place your left hand onto that place of your body. Place the right hand over your heart, right? The heart is the most powerful, energetic center we have in our body. And just breathe into that space, right? Bring the heart in. Because if the heart could talk, it would tell you, you deserve you are good enough. You are enough. Right?

And it is exactly what it is supposed to be in this moment.

Yeah.

You didn't blow it. Yeah. You didn't waste this life. But unless we embrace and love what is, we resist it. And the movement and the expansion and the neither are the, are the right thing. They're just what we're going through. I'm guessing we're saying, but if you resist it and hate it and shame on yourself, the flow, experience, beyond or through it is going to be eclipse. Isn't that how you see it?

It really is. And if you think about, when you talk about the book, the emotions of money, Right. If you just narrow that down to two main emotions, it's love and fear. Right. And fear shows up in the absence of love. So if you get your heart involved, that, that there's some wonderful evidence from heart math, actually, which is an institution that does a lot of work around the power of heart. And it actually, I'm sure the evidence is something like when they've done energetic mapping of the human body from space, they reckon that your heart energy is seen something like 2 meters outside of your body from space. It's insane.

Right?

I'm sure it's heart math that's done that research, but we maybe need to double check math. M A T H. Yeah. And they flip over this. Yeah, that, you know, it's really using the power of the heart, which for me is love. Like, everything connects back into love. And if we can find that appreciation of ourselves and really sit in that space of gratitude and contemplation, I just think that everything can be helped if we just lean into that golden thread of love. You know, I know it sounds a little bit that simple, but it really is like love just conquers everything. And if you're feeling fear, guilt, shame and judgment, any of those emotions around money, drop into love and just remind yourself that you are not money. You are not money. It's just the belief that you are connecting to money. It's the belief that you are making about yourself in that moment that makes you feel not worthy of, of love. So beautiful.

I'm gonna let you go. But I, I, it's important to say a few things I think quickly. Number one, in, in therapy training, I learned your body says what your lips cannot. And doing that work, you will feel like so many people have chronic. I did chronic tracheitis here. Infection of the trachea. What does that mean? I can't speak up for myself.

Concentrate.

This work is so important, beyond Money beyond anything. Secondly, I want to tell people, I see this in my field and a million other fields, there are so many people who, let's say they've made a million dollars and they're telling you they can help you make a million, be very aware, beware of that, because they might have a whole different schematic from what they've brought in. And I see it even in, you know, people will reach out. I'm a CEO, I retired. I'm going to be a coach, a career coach. What do you know about coaching other people who didn't take your trajectory? It's not about just telling people what you did that worked. So I love everyone flock to Catherine's material because. And in a minute, I would love one strategy that everyone can take that's, that's concrete and practical, that. Well, these are. Don't get me wrong, I think this is the heart of it. And you and I are on the same page that if you don't get to the energetic heart of what is happening and what you feel and what you think and how you operate in the world, you are going to struggle to make the changes you want. Because a much bigger thing is going on here than most of us see. Yes. Get on LinkedIn and, you know, power up your personal brand. But if in your heart you don't believe you're worthy of being seen, it won't help you the way you dream. That's a parallel. But let me just ask this one thing. And it might be hard, Katherine, but this is your world. If you're working with someone who, in this discussion with you, they see, let's say it's like me getting a little free help. I see that it's. I do believe it came from my parents and, and their parents and their parents and their parents. And maybe even as we talked a little bit before, I believe I've. I've even seen a little bit of past lives of where I have operated with money out of fear, out of having my thumb over people. Not good. When you're doing that work with them and all of a sudden the healing is happening and they're understanding. Is there one practical piece of advice you find that you're telling everyone, like perhaps go see a financial coach or consultant who can actually look through your numbers and also help you see things maybe you're not seeing. Is there anything you tell most people that would be helpful?

I think there's this balance between being and doing with money.

Right.

And so the latter example you gave there about reaching out to a financial planner or someone that can help you with numbers, then. Absolutely. Like I think that if you can get to grips with your numbers and you can understand the context of money and in your relationship to it and how you're building your wealth, then 100. Like, I love talking about investing strategies, I love talking about how to accelerate wealth, all of those things, right? But I think the most powerful piece of work is about your relationship to money. And so it's about being wealth as well as doing wealth. And I guess if I was going to give a, an example of something that people could take away from this conversation in that space, I would say there to first of all to recognize the pattern and then gently expand your ability to hold on to an emotion that feels like one up from where you currently are. So for example, if you're feeling shame or guilt around money, for example, fear around money, let's say fear around money, then think about, well, what would be an emotion that would sit one up from fear, right? And maybe that isn't joy, right? Maybe that is acceptance, right? And doing some self forgiveness work to move you from a place of guilt and shame to a place of acceptance. Because once you get to acceptance, then you can start to think about how do I raise the vibrations and get to joy and you know, self actualization and all of these things, right? So I think don't start from where you are and try and leap up to where you think abundance actually is because it's not going to be safe for you to do that. And if you do it, you won't hold it for very long.

It'll just be too scary. Oh.

And so if your ability to, just to give it a really good example here, if your ability to receive, you know, is difficult, right? Asking for money, having the selling conversations, if you know that's difficult, then take money away and go, right? How do I practice the art of receiving, right? So next time someone gives you a compliment, like, oh, like Kathy, your hair is so glossy to be day. Like you must have put some gorgeous conditioner in. Like, but most of us would probably be like, oh, oh, like oh no, it's so stringy actually today. Exactly.

Can't imagine the conversation I had with myself at the mirror two hours ago about just that thing. But anyway, I digress, you know, it might just be.

Well, do you know what, for the next seven days, every time someone gives me a compliment, I'm gonna go, thank you so much. I'm not going to give one back. I'm not going to like resist it. I'm not going to try and justify the compliment. I'm just going to go, thank you so much.

That's so beautiful. Right.

And I think little things like that can make a big difference and it will impact your relationship with receiving wealth and money because everything's connected.

All right. I can't let you go till I ask this one quick final question then. That cheaps, we both need an apple. May I?

Of course. Go for it.

I have to say, and I'm really being transparent. The word, word wealth I struggle with. I prefer prosperity. And I would love your thoughts. Is that me resisting wealth? I, I believe that I'm resisting it because of how our society views it. Like, I believe we can be incredibly wealthy when there isn't a certain number in the bank. So prosperity allows me to define it the way it, it attaches to my heart. But I'm interested. Do you ever deal with people who say, it's not wealth I want? And what would you say to that? Honestly, Candidly, Yeah.

The question I want to ask back is like, what, what does wealth mean for you?

You know, I think it was formed a little bit in my middle class, up, maybe upper middle class upbringing. But what comes to mind is I lived in a very affluent, very affluent town raising our children and I saw things I hated. Leave it at that. Lack of love, lack of values, lack of a lot of. I don't mean to put down my town, but what I see is tone deafness. I see them in a bubble. They don't understand how the rest of the world, I, I see things, I don't respect it, not in everybody, but generally it can be that way. And it was a wealthy town.

So what's interesting for me there then is that the, what I heard you talk about here is almost like this disparity between fairness. Like what is fair that these people are living in this bubble, but yet they have no idea like how. And people are living.

Empathy is missing. Interesting that there, there's an entitlement. I earned it. I'm in this. Not everybody, please. My friends are going to hear this. Who live there. But an entitlement that blocks them off from connection to the rest of humanity. That's, I think, what, what is hard.

For me and I think that's really interesting to observe in yourself and for anyone listening to this, is that, that question, what does wealth mean for you? Which is actually the question that we ask our panel when we run our annual event. Right. That's the question we ask because what you Interpret wealth to be is what you will make it mean. Right? So whether you call it wealth or prosperity, it doesn't matter if you connect deeply into prosperity because it makes you feel more expanded. Whereas when you were talking about wealth, like, all I felt was contraction, contraction, contraction.

Right.

So it's semantics. Like, it really doesn't matter.

Like, for press. Prosperity.

Yeah, go for prosperity. Like, if that works for you and it makes your body expect. Like, even if you watch this recording about, like, look how your body responded.

Right? Like, here she goes. Yeah.

Like, if you're ex. If just hearing this conversation, if you're listening to this, if it felt expansive and you agree with Kathy to think about, you know, prosperity, then go with prosperity. Like, it really no one is telling you. Like, who is telling you that? You even have to told me I.

Have to call it wealth. I mean, if you said that, we'd have to hang up the call, you know, because so against what the hour you just said, this has been so helpful to me and I know people. I want to hear from you. What did you get from this? I mean, there's so much. There's energetic, spiritual, nuanced, deeper understanding. And the biggest takeaway for me is how you experience money is really how you're experiencing yourself in the way that you are operating and taking in the world around you. Would that be accurate?

Yeah, very much so, Catherine.

My gosh, where do we soak it all up? Where do we go? I know you're having a conference, which might be happening before this comes out. Where do we send people? What can they get from you right away?

Come hang out on my podcast. You're clearly a podcast lover, so come listen to our show. It's not about the money. We go really deep on these kind of conversations, you know, because I think, you know, anyone listening to this, that the power in this work is that the moment that you choose to change your relationship to money is the moment that you choose to change every single generation ahead of you, whether you have children or grandchildren or nieces and nephews or next door neighbors, kids. Like, it changes the whole narrative of wealth and money. And I just think that there's such a ripple effect in that. So, yeah, I would love to come.

Oh, honey, I didn't mean to interrupt. I have heard years ago, I heard when you heal, you heal generations ahead and generations behind, because we're really all connected still. I love your work. How incredibly important and meaningful. Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

All right, everyone, please tell us what you got out of this. And you know, I'm grilling my poor guests. I ask so many questions. If you don't have a question here, I'll be surprised because we're interpreting it all very personally. So we would love to hear your questions. So wherever you see it, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, X if you can share a question, we'd love to hear it because that's going to further your understanding and your growth as well. Kathryn, come back yet again and we'll do another, another deep dive. Thank you for giving me personal, you know, consulting and energy healing. I'm so grateful. All right, everybody, have a wonderful two Finding Brave weeks and I hope to see you next time. Thanks so much for joining us today. And please don't forget to check out finding brave.org for more programs, resources and tips. And tune in next time for your weekly dose of Finding grave.