Fear Your Path to a Life Fully Expressed with Farnoosh Torabi

Hey there, real quick, before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. When you have a chance to talk to someone that you've always looked forward to having a conversation with. Well, that's what just happened in the Affluent Entrepreneur show. This episode is pure gold. It is with now my friend Farnoosh Torabi. She is the author of A Healthy State of Panic. It is an amazing book and she completely turns the concept of fear on its head. And as an entrepreneur, as someone that's trying to live an affluent life, fear creeps up. Whether it's uncertainty, whether it's exposure, whether it's money, whether it's fomo. She talks about all of that. We talk about all of that and how to navigate it. Because if fear becomes the carrier pigeon of the message, you need to live the life you were meant to live. This is the book for you. All right, jump in the episode. Let me know what you think. All right? And I look forward to seeing you in the episode. Cheers. This is the Affluent Entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at. At a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom because that's what it really means to be an athlete. Entrepreneur.

Oh, my God. Parnoush, so good to have you on the show today. Thank you for being here.

My pleasure. Thank you, Mel. Anything for you. You're such a nice man.

Thank you so much. It's. It's been such a journey. You know, I. You might say that I've been a lurker in for years in the background, and you and I just had a chance to meet as a result of your new book. Now, this is the advanced copy. I got, my other copy that you signed, but.

I don't want to mess it up because it's signed. We have a rule in our house. My wife, because I have so many books and she says, just get rid of them. I said, nope, they're signed. So our rule is if it's signed, I don't have to get rid of it.

Oh, yeah, that's special. Yeah.

Yeah. So. And for those of the folks that don't know you, and Lord knows why they wouldn't, because you've, you've got one of the most popular money podcasts. So money out there, you've been on a lot of the airwaves. You've. This is not your first book. It's your fourth book that, that you've done. And, but this is a book and this, and why I think this was so important for me to get you on here that I think is going to resonate for people because it's a healthy state of panic. It's about fear. It's about, you know, how do you use fear to, to a benefit? Because too often we think that fear is a negative. It's something that holds us back. But, but the way you frame it in this book and the way you present it in this book starts to, to change that. But before I get into the book, let me ask you this. If you would just really quickly, for those that maybe don't know you, just tell them who Farnoosh is. If they really want to know, they need to read the book because you, you put a lot of you in there.

Well, professionally, Farnoosh is a financial educator whose advice is rooted in journalism and truth seeking and her own, her own journey. As I was somebody who came out of college and grad school with $30,000 in debt and making $18 an hour living in New York City. You can do the math. And as a result, I needed financial advice. I was also working as a financial journalist at the time and began to share that with my peers at the time. Nobody was caring about a 20 something in the early 2000s and her money. Everybody was focused on those who had already made money and they could sell more fancy products to them. And so I found this niche for pretty quickly where I was able to serve a very underserved and underappreciated market, myself included, young, young adults. And that was, as I said, you know, about 20 years ago. And I've since continued that. And my work has spanned writing, podcasts, television, the Stage, and my new book, A Healthy State of Panic. Which is about money. Yes, but also about so many other things, as I find that when we talk about money, we're talking about life. We're talking about how we were raised and our feelings and our goals and our businesses. And so for me, I'd like to position this book as.

A way to expand the conversations that I've really been having with people for over 20 years, but just to more intentionally go into those other pockets of life.

And I love the way you do it because you do really clearly say you can't separate money from life. They're two sides of the same coin if you truly want to live that fulfilled life. And I think it's really important. Now you say something in the book that just caught me. And if we get a chance, we'll talk about the whole.

Dropping the kids off at the wrong birthday party.

Let me tell you, when I read it, it was funny. When I listened to the audiobook, I was in tears because I could only imagine.

I actually have the video of. Of the. Of like the. The hour afterwards where I'm putting it all together, and I'm like, oh, my God, I actually dropped my kids off at the wrong birthday party, and nothing bad happened. So I think I probably landed on the best mom idea of the year. And I filmed my son, who was, I think, four or five at the time, and I was like, tell him. Tell everybody did or what I did. And he, you know, my kids know I'm. I'm a little off.

You don't know that about me. They. They haven't experienced the real me.

Well, y' all have to get the whole story. You're gonna have to get the book, because this is it. It is funny. It's exposing. It's just allows you to relate to it. But you also say something about the road to riches is paved with weirdos and misfits and this whole idea of fitting in and the fear of not fitting in and the fear of.

How to navigate that. You bring that up in the book. And I'd love to just kind of explore that process and where that came from and why that seems to be something that is so important, especially in our total social media world and everyone allowing everyone on the outside to say who you are, so how you show up. And I think it's a really important conversation for us to have.

Yeah, I consider myself a misfit and a weirdo, and now I wear those titles with badges of honor. As a kid, you can only imagine the devastation of being a farnoosh in a classroom full of Christina's and Ashley's and Jennifer's. And so the reason I think that Being an outlier, let's just say, is it. As far as those who I have seen, I think you can probably relate to this, who have really created exceptional lives. They've created really interesting things. They've made impacts. And I think it's because.

At a very early onset, we are forced to sort of deal with rejection and failure and insecurities and loneliness. And while it's hard and, I don't know, want for this for anybody, like, I don't wish that people go through this, but it is life and it is what happens. But if we could just sort of appreciate that, going through that and coming out on the other side of that and getting up, you know, the world is still tilting on its axis. Life goes on. And you choosing to still participate and show up, I feel like that is the sort of strength and muster that can. Is unmatched. And people who are different and unique, who initially aren't understood and they're not accepted and they are rejected and they do fail, perhaps more than others, because they're forced to fail, they're led to failure. I think, you know, we're still here and we're still. We're still making things happen. Let's explore that, because I think there's a lot to appreciate again and learn from that process again. As a mom, do I want for my kids to fail and be rejected? I mean, yeah, kind of a little bit. But, like, you know, I want to. I want them to, like, failure is the best teacher. So to create those artificial bound, like, you know, to encourage them to fail, like to allow them to fail, that's something that I have to get better at doing. But it's so important for them to experience at home so that when they go out into the real world, they're. They're more equipped. So that's what I mean. I think that, you know, entrepreneurs, by inherently, we are risk. We're a little risk, friendlier than others. And I think it's because we have had a very deep relationship with risk. We know the risk of being rejected and isolation and exposing ourselves, and yet we get on the other side of that. And so with all of that and all those tools and all those learnings, we can, I think, make amazing things in this world. And I think it was Chris Rock who said, like, again, I don't want this to happen to my kids or other kids, but, like, bullying, being bullied. He was like, for me, and this is just his story, like, that was like, for me, like, the impetus to success because I wanted to Prove those jerks wrong. And we all need a light, right? A fire. We all need a motivation. And sometimes it comes from hardship. Yeah.

So. Well, you grew up with a name like Farnoosh. I grew up with a name like Melvin, and I was an identical twin, so we were just such an oddity.

What's your brother's name?

Jeffrey. So I don't know how they got that. Now, my dad wanted to name us Melvin and Calvin, and my mom put her foot down, and I said, you put your foot down once. One name too late.

So you want it to be Jeffrey. Well, or something like Jeffrey something else.

And the only reason I go by Mel, now, this is not me on the interview, but, you know, the only reason I go by Mel is right after high school, I call. I met a girl, I called her up, her sister answers the phone, and I said, who's calling? And she says, who's calling? And I said, melvin. And she said, no, seriously, who's calling?

I go to pick her up, and her mom is there and says, she's just finishing getting ready. Go ahead and sit down. Make yourself comfortable. And I hear her mom go down the hall talking to her daughter that I'm supposed to take out on a date saying, you're right, he doesn't look like a Melvin.

And I go, what? Well, there's this whole section in a healthy state of panic about the Dorian Gray effect. And this is exactly it. You know, we have, as. For whatever reason, we have in our minds an image of what a Melvin, a Jeffrey, a Farnooche would look like. The thing about being a far new, though, is that there's no precedence. There's no, like, no, you know, which was. It's almost worse because you have. People have, like, all the imagination to work with, and usually it's not a friendly imagination. So. But then also, it gives you kind of a canvas to become whoever you want to be without bias, necessarily. Although people did still have bias. But, you know, it became content for me. I mean, I wrote my college essay on the impact of having a name like mine and.

Walking through life with that and all that comes with it, and ultimately the acceptance that comes with it.

But it took you a while to accept and to sit back and stand in it and say, hey, this is who I am. And I think that everyone listening, everyone watching, we're gonna find that we're gonna find that moment in our life where we're gonna have to do it, you know, somehow we're gonna have to allow our. Our real selves to expose ourselves somehow.

I think being able to know who you are and have that sense of awareness, that self awareness. A lot of people don't have that. You, you know, you, you have that guy or woman in your life who like says the wrong things at the wrong time, doesn't have a filter, think after a meeting, they think it went great, it was awful, you know, and I just always never want to be that person. So I spent a lot of time.

Being intuitive and careful about, you know, myself. Not in a way to restrict myself, but because I think it's. It is really important to know yourself first. You know, growing up, I always wanted to know what other people thought of me. And that's a shortcut, I guess. But it's not really getting to the bottom of things. It's like, well, who, who are you? Who do you think you are? That's what's really important.

And you kind of looked at this whole idea of this fear and those elements.

As not something, at least in the book you did.

It's not something to move away from, but something to highlight a journey towards, highlight.

A need to prepare. I think the words were that you used.

I think that when fear arrives in our lives, we've been conditioned to, to see and experience it as a weakness, as a negative. Well, my thesis is what if we accept fear as another part of who we are, where this is an emotion that's carrying a story about who we are and more importantly, what we want to protect. At its core, fear is a defense mechanism. It's. I mean, you and I would not be here if it weren't for fear. There's a lot to appreciate when it comes to fear, but especially in the entrepreneur space and in the leadership space, there is this negative association with fear. There are so many books about how to be fearless. Just drop the fear because it's not doing you any good. But to say that, you know, we can just be fearless without the prescription, without the how to, I think is, is. Is wrong and it's not actually right. I think that as humans we should be allowed to feel all the things and to trust that when we feel something, trust that maybe it's there to give you an important message, a deliverance of something especially. And I talk about, in the book about fear as it presents in these big crossroads in our lives when the stakes are high. I'm not talking about, you know, you're fearing fear, you're fearing. I'm not talking about when you're feeling fear and you're in an Alleyway and it's midnight and you hear some weird noises like trust the fear and leave. Run, call 91 1, something. But when you're in the crossroads of a big career decision, a professional move, a relationship that you're thinking about taking to the next level or exiting, I think it's important to take a minute or two, a beat really, with the fear to not be so reactionary, impulsively reactionary, but to say, okay, why has this fear shown up? What is it telling me about what I need to protect? Usually, fear arrives when there is a gap of knowledge, of certainty. And so the work then begins. And the book is where I guide folks through recognizing the different kinds of fears that show up too. Like, it's not just fear, this monolith, but fear. Fear of loneliness, of rejection, of my favorite chapter, exposure, the fear of losing your freedom, the fear of money and how that first of all manifests, how it presents, usually, and then what to do with it, how to actually use it as a tool to go get the information, the confidence, the understanding, the context that you need to decide what to do next. And maybe the decision is to abort me, but maybe it means to walk with more of that knowledge so that you can mitigate for risk. I feel in my life, fear has always been a tool. Not always. I mean, of course, as a young kid growing up as the daughter of Iranian immigrants in Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester, a scary place at the time, for a lot of reasons, I overreacted to fear. I was raised to be fearful, but only to kind of see, experience fear as a one trick pony. Like when you feel fear, run, you know, hide, make noise. And that was my, you know, six year old brain dealing with fear. As I've evolved and I've experienced life, I've learned to appreciate fear also as this evolutionary experience.

What you really are doing in the book and you, the nice thing is that at the end of every chapter, you walk through some things to do to navigate through that type of fear. Whether it's rejection, whether it's uncertainty, whether it's exposure and FOMO and all those things, which makes it not only.

Theoretical but tactical. It allows people to move through it. And I think that the general message across all of it is fear is the carrier pigeon for a message you need to receive.

Right?

And I think that that's really a powerful way to look at it. You know, obviously putting fear of bodily harm aside, that kind of stuff is a different kind of fear. But so many of us, like I left a big consulting job in downtown Los Angeles.

Because I realized it wasn't. It wasn't. I wasn't living my life. You know, I. I got my accounting degree, and here I am for one of the big firms in downtown. And I'm working late and. And I finally just kind of walked in and it was one of those things that I just inhaled, walked in and said, I quit. You know, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. And now I didn't. I, I probably could have been a little more methodical with it, thinking back on it, but this was, you know, obviously I was, I don't know, 20 something years old and a little, little, little more spontaneous. I just kind of. I like, I quit. And then a week later, I was in Japan for four months and.

Wow.

With no plan.

Well, I think if it was mel two years ago, maybe the calculus would have been different. I think that's okay. I think that's part of the risk assessment with fear is that I'm feeling this fear. There's all these potential consequences. But all right, let's actually worst case scenario, this if. And that's part of what one of the things I talk about in the book is like when you, when fear arrives, sometimes the next step is to map out what would happen if you did nothing or you did something that scares you. But let's, let's work. Let's like, foresee this. And I think back in your 20s, you know, you didn't have maybe a mortgage or dependence or anything that was keeping you tethered to that life and, you know, weighing you down. So the risk analysis was. Came out positive, like, go do this. You know, you don't have a lot to lose. You have more to lose if you stay. You have unactualized dreams and your health could also suffer. Whereas, you know, fast forward to maybe two years, you know, in present time, it's a. You might still leave, but you might do it again to your point, more methodically. You wouldn't do it. You wouldn't walk in and just say, I quit. You would create a plan.

You talk. And this kind of leads into one of the fears that you talk about in the book, the fear of uncertainty that y'.

All.

Uncertainty is all around us.

You know, stock markets up, stock markets down, businesses up, businesses down. You know, it just. But this idea of playing what you just talked about, this what ifs scenario, as the vehicle to start navigating through that, you, you actually give the recipe on how to, how to kind of walk through those.

Yeah, I write the book In a chronological way, not my life chronologically, but I think how fear sometimes works through our bodies and through our lives as we age. And the fear of failure and the fear of uncertainty. Uncertainty are sort of dovetail chapters because while we fear failure, what we really fear is the uncertainty that is attached to that potential failure. It's not that we don't know whether or not we're going to fail, like failure is part of the journey. We can almost always expect some kind of misstep or regret. But it's like, how bad is it going to be? Will I be equipped? Will I recover? Is this going to cancel me out forever? And so with uncertainty, I think part of the, when that fear arrives, I think that what it wants us to protect again, because fear is a mechanism to show us what it is that we care about, what our values are, what we want to protect. So it's like, okay, step one, identify what it is in this uncertain time, in this guaranteed uncertainty, like what you want the outcome to be. You can't control for everything but what do what is most sacred to you. You know, you want to be able to walk out of this situation with what, what intent, what in hand. Could it be your money? Could it be your integrity? Could it be your title? You know, whatever it is. Like, I think we all source some sense of.

We attach our sense of self worth to something and that's, that's part of the exercise. Then it's remembering that while you can't control for the uncertainties, you can control for what is certain. And I, and this is what we always skip because we think when life is uncertain, we have nothing that is in our domain and in our control. We just assume we have to give it all up or we have to relinquish to the unknowns. And I say no. There's so many things that are certain about your life that are assets that you can leverage in times, especially in times of uncertainty. So let's just like make this really concrete. If you're about to start a business and you don't know know if it's going to succeed or fail, maybe it's a restaurant, so it's probably is going to fail. And so, but you know, maybe you're starting this business not in your 20s, not even in your 30s, but maybe in your 40s and your 50s, and you've started a lot of things and you know what it takes to sort of get through the murkiness and you're coming to this project with your body of work, your resources, Your connections, your network. Maybe you do have a financial Runway. So if it doesn't make money right away, you're going to be okay. These are real concrete certainties that. Very important to take inventory of this, because this is the sort of stuff, when you look at this and reflect on this, you'll be more likely to approach that uncertain thing with more confidence and a plan, whereas you went from feeling completely despondent and completely vulnerable to failure and uncertainty. But you walked yourself through these exercises, through these reflections, through these inventories, and now you're like, oh, actually, I can do it. I mean, for me, I just launched a class, an investing class, earlier this year, and to my surprise, hundreds of people signed up. It was so far, so good. I felt really inspired. And I'm a producer by trade. I trained, and I'm a financial journalist. I worked in broadcast, so I'm trained to always think three steps ahead. And I thought I had done all of the sort of, like, troubleshooting ahead of time for this live workshop and then come to find out that I didn't know that my Zoom account only allowed for 100 people to watch this seminar live when multiple hundreds of people had signed up to watch the seminar live. So you can imagine the aftermath of that. And so I had to clean up a huge, giant mess and give refunds and all the things, but I got through it. And you know how I got through it is like, I went into immediate action mode. I could not reverse time. I could not undo the mistake. But I wanted to protect my integrity and my brand, which is always at the top of my to do list. I am resourceful. I reached out to people who I trusted, who I was, like, what do I do? How do I clean this up? And also, like, not just refund people, but I want to make people like me again. Like, this isn't. This is a. It's like, this isn't just transactional for me. And so I went through some really fast coaching, you know, within a span of a couple of hours. And then I also decided to admit my mistake publicly, which I. I hemmed and hawed about. But I was like, I think that's what's what. Because I'm also the person that I want to be known as someone you can trust and who is transparent and admits her failures because I'm a human. And I think that's part of why people are drawn to me. Like, I'm not just this robot online giving you financial advice. And so I thought it was well on brand to do that, and, you know, it ended up being such a, like at the. In the end, you know, in hindsight, what a. What, What a great outcome. I wouldn't have liked to have gone through it the way I did. But it's like again, and I wrote about this, it's like we don't know what the uncertainty is going to be. We know that things are going to fail. We don't know how bad it's going to be. But remember a few things. Which one is that you are enough to get through this because you've been through already so much, like I've been through worse things. This was not the worst of my mistakes. And so I was able to bring all that learning to this moment and rise and rise from the ashes. And so we forget about this, about ourselves. So often. We are the first to undercut ourselves. We are the first to underestimate our capabilities. And why? Because we're humans, we tend to have a bias towards recent events. And so if recently you have failed, you forget that. Well, actually, over the last 20 years, your, your, your chart has been on the, on the up and up. You know, where, where like the stock market, like, if you zoom in, there's zigzags, but when you zoom out, it's been, it's a nice beautiful upswing and we don't give ourselves enough credit and we don't take the inventory. So I think that's really what the fear wants you to do. When uncertainty knocks, when the fear of uncertainty knocks, is like, okay, this is my call. This is my nudge to identify what is certain in my life that I can leverage. That are tools that no matter what happens, I'm going to be able to walk through it. And if you don't feel like you have those certainties, then the fear is telling you to get to work. Because maybe what you need to ride out the uncertainty, especially as entrepreneurs, is financial Runway. I would never tell somebody, quit your job and just go start the business. You need to have a plan. You need to have savings. You need to make sure you're not too indebted in with credit cards because, you know, starting a business has a lot of liability. So you have insurance, you know, like, so that's the stuff. And if you fear uncertainty, maybe it's because there's legit stuff that you need to take care of.

Yeah.

To get to create those assets for yourself.

I couldn't agree more. I mean, like, you sit back and go, do not confuse what you think is committed when it's really Reckless. Don't burn the boats. Plan for it. I know you just had Noah Kagan on your, on your show and he kind of talked about this, how not burning the boats and everything too.

And so, and I really appreciated it coming from a serial entrepreneur where if you just like read the headlines, you get, you think, oh, this person just like took chances and struck gold and risked a lot. And I always tell people the reason those stories might make the news are because those are weird stories. The news doesn't report the ordinary, unusual and the normal. They report the outlier stuff. So when there is an entrepreneur who kind of like sold all, liquidated his life and started a $8 billion company, what seems to be in six months, I mean, that is not how, first of all, it should happen, not how it does happen. It's not advised. You know, the entrepreneur who slept in their car for three months and was homeless. And then, you know, I want to write that story. That's a really interesting story because that's unusual and not to be mistaken with how businesses, great businesses are built.

So good, so good. Now it wouldn't be a conversation with you if we didn't talk on money because I want to, I want to hit on the fear of money because. And there's a specific area and a specific story you tell. And I think it's really important because I tend to agree with you 100% on your perspective of a couple being together on this money journey and not one sided versus the other sided. And you came from a very traditional household where your father was the one that was kind of running the money and mom wasn't. I had the same upbringing. But I know for me, what got me to start saying, hey, we've got to do this together, is watching after my father passed away, my wife's father passed away, watching the fear in both our mother's, you know, lives of sitting back saying, can I keep the house? What am I going to do? I don't know anything. And, and all of this stuff was, it was, it was hugely impactful. And, and I just don't think that it's a silo journey. And you had a, you had a situation where you as a, as a child kind of got put in between. I mean, it was like a precursor to what you do now.

Right? No, you're right. It's an interesting. I never put that, those two together, but yeah, it's like I've been basically a financial mediator, um, for my entire life. My parents got married young, my mother especially, she was 19 when she had me and didn't came to America. Both of them came to America. My dad was here to get educated and got his PhD. That's, that was his track. My mother's track was not so defined and she came here not speaking the language, no plan, just like okay, gotta raise me. And in Worcester no less where like she didn't feel like she didn't, wasn't feeling, she didn't have a community where she could connect with people like in her life stage and going with what through what she was going. She had a language barrier, a license barrier, all sorts of barriers. And so all this to say that the, the landscape for my parents marriage was sort of built on like a lot of rickety wood and it wasn't like the cement wasn't firm. And I think my mom, I always say, you know, she did her best. And I don't, I used to feel very sad personally about this. Like, oh, I was the wedge between her and her freedoms. And that's a terrible thing for a kid to feel. But you know, it's just because I didn't. I don't think a 19 year old young woman wants to be sort of like who wants that for themselves most, not my mom at least. And I wouldn't want that for me or my daughter. And so I can understand now, years later, I can objectively feel sad for her and go, oh my God, that was hard. And so, but the arguments that she and my dad had more often than not centered around money. My dad making it and controlling it, my mother making none of it and always asking for it and feeling like a child. And so I witnessed a lot of the arguing. I was an only child for the first 11 years until my brother was born. And so I had to grow up pretty quickly. I had a lot of adult influence. I didn't have a lot of kids, you know, to talk to at home or in the neighborhood. And so I had to like get very acclimated to adult concerns quickly. And my parents, my mom would, you know, tell me to go tell your dad this, that they would have silent treatments all the time. And I was like basically like her PR person, you know, going to my dad, being like this is what we want.

And so. But really Mel, the takeaway for me experiencing all of that, so many things I, I experienced and benefited from probably. But really the takeaway was that for me as an adult woman, I was going to make my own money. Come hell or high water, I was going to make my own money. No one was going to tell me what to do. And I needed to be in charge of my financial freedom. So as soon as I could get a job, I got a job. And as soon as I could, I could invest, I started investing. Since I could buy a house, I bought a house. Soon as I could start a business, I did. And it was this drive in me that from the outside was just like, wow, she's an ambitious woman. But on the inside I was terrified. It was the fear that was fueling me to get my financial life in order. And it still is. It still is. I still. But I have a healthy way of relating to it. You know, it's like, okay, I fear what if this year isn't a good revenue year? Or what if my husband loses his job? Or what if, you know, something happens and we have a huge expense and we don't have enough in savings? So I do these, a lot of these worst case scenarios often. And it's been good for me. It's because I don't. It doesn't create anxiety for me. For me, it just puts me in solution mode.

So good. So good. Now you.

Your husband, Tim and you. You wrote, you wrote a prior book, you know about, about this. And I know it's. This isn't this book, but when she makes more. And I think it's a really interesting. And I'm going to speak as a dude, as a guy. Okay. Because I think there's a lot of men out there that will feel threatened by someone like you or like my wife who's amazing at what she does. I didn't. I actually found that I needed that to hold me to a standard, to challenge me.

But navigating that dynamic and not allowing you to put the wedge in a relationship and keep you guys close and everything is a. It's a challenging thing. I'm guessing at first. Most of my relationships prior to my wife and we'll be married now 13 years this year, wasn't necessarily that way. But when I met her was. We were even playing field and there was just none of that. And I didn't feel threatened by it. And I'm not sure. And it might have been just the way she approached it too. I feel I got a great life.

Partner, you know, so well, it's so complex, Mel. And we could do a whole other episode on this, but. And actually this is the 10th anniversary of when she makes more. I'm thinking about coming out with an audiobook who knows about that's sort of tangential to it. I feel like there's so much more still to explore. I thought by 10 years we would be like, okay, problem solved, complexities resolved. All women who make more than men are finding love and men are rising to the occasion still. It's still a problem area. And that's why I wanted to write it. I felt as though this was such a taboo topic. I was experiencing this in my own relationship at the time, and still. And as a financial expert who had felt like she had talked about everything about money with people, this was one corner of the financial conversation world that I was getting zipped lips like nobody wanted to talk to me about this. I. I also didn't feel like it was appropriate or it was. It was socially acceptable to say out loud, even in front of just a few people, that I made more than my husband, then boyfriend, that it would sort of, I don't know, make people very uncomfortable. And so then I knew I had a great idea to write about. I was like, oh, this is. This is the stuff that makes for books. You know, the things that people don't want to talk about. And as I started to explore it, I realized not only are the men generally discomforted by it, and again, we've just not been conditioned for this. Just like with fear, we're not conditioned to accept it as a healthy tool. We're not conditioned to see financially strong women.

Period. But also in relationships with men as something to aspire to and something to revere in a patriarchy still, that is very much attaching gender roles to what you do in a marriage and what you do in a relationship, that if you're the wife, you are the provider in sort of the caregiving department and the domestic department. If you're the man, you are the provider when it comes to money. And those were very, you know, those. Those roles were very divided and very strict for many generations. And for modern men today, who are, again, modern, they consider probably themselves feminists. They probably still. Part of them is like, well, what's, you know, uncomfortable with this just because of the way they were raised, what was modeled for them? We're human creatures. I mean, we gravitate towards what we know. And so this create this paradigm shift, really, with money and marriage that I'm seeing. And now it's like one in four women are the breadwinners or the primary financial providers in their households. So we've come a very long way, and yet we are still, because of the way that we've been conditioned. It's new to us, to a lot of us. And so with that comes requires a little bit of learning and acceptance and reflection and honesty communication which is hard enough as it is in a marriage and then you add to it this like layer of financial complexity. It gets real, real spicy.

It does look our first year, year and a half of marriage. Yeah. Stephanie, she would tell you we didn't think we were going to make it. I mean I got married late, I was 50 when we got married. So it was like it was a lot of learning. There was a lot of life behind us that set some things in stone. But ultimately one, I adored her. Two, I respected her. Three, I trusted her and or the biggest thing was what you just said is we needed to figure out how to communicate. We just needed to figure out what that was like. But.

I can say as a man.

Who does well with a woman who does well.

It'S a very fulfilling relationship. And I think that, that it is not binary either one or the other. There is no reason that, that a woman can't be the breadwinner, can't make money and be in a loving, caring relationship at the same time. It just does. It doesn't have to be binary.

Right. I think and my book explores all the different reasons why and it's different for every couple. Why can present as a challenge be one is like the couple might be cool with it. Like my husband and I were not bothered by it. I think partly because it was always understood that like I'm the entrepreneur, I have no income ceiling. He, my husband's a software developer, he likes to work for startups and you know he's going to have his own financial trajectory which is probably not as sort of like open ended as mine.

And.

It'S diff. More difficult for couples where let's say the husband is making more and then it flips and there was always this expectation that it's going to go in one direction. Then it doesn't and that's a little bit harder or a lot harder. But the book explores, you know, all the different reasons why couples may be challenged by it. It could just be again like you're okay with it but your mother in law is not society's not your friends at work are like weirded out by it. I remember going in for a job interview and it was for a, to be a correspondent at a network. And so I had, it was really a public facing job. The person interviewing me had like read my bio, had known I had written books on, I'd written this book about women breadwinners and he said not in a nice way. He said, well, what does your husband do? As if, like, if I'm making more. My husband's just sitting at home cracking peanuts.

Oh, my God.

That there is no world where a woman could make more than her husband and her husband could have a meaningful job and contributes, whether he works from inside the home or outside the home. That, like, it was such a zero sum game for this person. And I was like, you're going to be my boss and this is already how you're perceiving me. And I remember going to. I was at another job and I was writing the book at the time, and it was no secret to my colleagues and the person who was in charge of my timesheet and I had to put in my invoices to this person. He would see how much. And I was making quite a bit of money at the time. I was working again on camera and I was freelancing. So anyway, not to brag, but. But the point at that is that he would see my weekly invoices and he'd look at me and he'd go, your husband's a lucky man. And again, this wasn't to be nice. This was to be sort of like dismissing over my husband.

He is, but not for the reasons he said.

Yeah, it was like the men being threatened by it more than the women. You know, it's like, you're not even in my relationship and you're bothered by the fact that I make more than my husband and you're not even bothered by me. You're mad at my husband for not, like, stepping it up more than, you know. And so it was just another story. I was. I remember I was in a newsroom. Again. It's always in the newsrooms, which I write about in a healthy state of panic. It's always like, yes, you did drama in the newsroom. So much inappropriateness. But this one guy, we're sitting around chatting, and one of my colleagues, I had just started working at this network and he. I said, oh, I was living in New York at the time, and I had seen a celebrity in my building. And apparently the celebrity lived in the building, in the penthouse. And this person couldn't believe. And I wasn't making a lot of money at this job. This job did not pay well. It paid like peanuts. But I needed the job to sort of get the experience that I needed to be on camera. And he's like, how much? He said, what did he say? He goes, you live where such so and so lives in your building. What does your boyfriend do for a living? Because there's in no world could I have been the one paying the rent. And so we just. It's so funny, you know, I find myself in all these like awkward financial discussions, usually thwarted at me. And it's like people are clueless. They have absolutely no. And they just make all these assumptions about what I must make and what my boyfriend or husband must make because we are. I'm a woman and he's a man.

It's so like, like Stephanie had to deal with it in corporate. So she, we met six weeks later, she moved to the east coast for her company. So we had this long distance relationship. I would fly back and forth. And four months after we met, we got engaged. I gave her a nice ring and she had a one year contract there. And she basically went in and basically told them, hey, once this one year contract's up, I want to get back to the west Coast. And she, she was excited about being engaged. She walked in on, on folks after that saying, well, Stephanie may not need the, the job much longer. Have you seen the ring? And they put the. Someone put their iPhone on their hand because it was a big ring and it just like. And she called me like, she goes, they all of a sudden devalued me because I have a ring on my finger.

Yeah. And.

And it's just, it's, it's crazy. Not. This was not the topic of the show today, but I think it's a, it's an important thing for us to have a conversation around because those stereotypes are not going to move us ahead financially and they're not going to move us ahead societally and they're not going to move us ahead in how we experience life.

Yeah. I mean, it just really illustrates the biases that we have around money and the fears that we have tied to the realities of money that I often say. And I think this is the chapter in the book on the fear of. I think it's the fear of exposure. You know, you're afraid to maybe like your wife was afraid maybe to like after that, like, share her ring. You know, I could see a world where somebody would like, wouldn't wear their ring to work. My father wouldn't drive his German car to work because he didn't want his colleagues to judge him. You know, it's not that they. He was like making more than them. It was just that he felt, he felt like he'd be rejected because everybody else was driving Japanese Toyotas and he wanted to like finally buy himself a Mercedes. And like, he's like, no, I can't be seen at work. Like, it's like when you're 15. Or like, I never wanted to be seen with my parents at Walmart because then the kids would know that a. Like, I hang out with my parents, but also my clothes are from Walmart. So, like, that was a little thing when I was a teen. Fast forward to as an adult. Like, we have all of these insecurities and these fears of exposure, but when it comes to money and financial status, it really shows up. And that's when you really have to question your own financial biases, your own personal narratives around money. Are they doing you any good? And also, who are you hanging out with? That's what fear also tells you sometimes. Like, maybe you're not in a good place and it's not your fault. It's because the people around you are just being ignorant and creating this artificial fear. Like, you shouldn't be afraid of wearing a beautiful ring to work.

You know, maybe don't wear it in the ocean, but don't bring, you know, you can do that at work. It's fine. Yeah. So it's not you, it's them. I always say sometimes, like, that's what the fear is sometimes pointing you at.

So good God. And we've been going a little bit. I got one, one last thing that I want. I want to make sure everyone knows.

Where to get a hold of you, what where they can start to. To get in your world. Because y', all, hopefully you've. You've. You've seen and you've listened and you hear that you're one. I want you all to get this. The healthy state of paddock. And I'm actually going to ask you to do two things. I never do this, but it's because of the way I experience it. I want you to buy the book, either Kindle or hard copy, but I want you to get the audiobook at the same time. Because I read. I read the book and, and fornoosh was. Was gracious enough to send me an advanced copy, but I also have the final copy and everything. And I read the book and then preparing for this, I actually downloaded the audiobook and listened to it. And when you hear the book in her voice and in the little things, the accent with her mother and all that stuff, it comes to life in a completely different way. And so I don't often say that, but I actually think that you want to have both and go through it, because.

One of the fears More of the fears are in your life. And when you understand the recipe to navigate through them, to work through them, they no longer control you. They fuel you to where you're supposed to be. And that's really the message of this, financially, relationally, health, all of that stuff. So the one thing at the very end, you save till the end, the last chapter. And I think that it's an important thing, this idea of getting clear on, you know, the fear of freedom, the, the, the non negotiables and how to get clear on that, because too often we have fuzzy, fuzzy standards and we don't. And, and we allow them to, and we want to be flexed. And then we don't know why we're not happy, we don't know why we're struggling or you sit back and from the outside, maybe I should. I have everything. But why am I not happy? And I think some of it is because of what you talk about in that final chapter.

That last chapter is again, intentionally the final chapter. Because what could be more important than our desire to protect our freedoms, our personal freedoms? And you know, I very early on disclaim in the, in that chapter, this isn't about how to, you know, go prevent a war or this isn't about geopolitical freedoms. It's more about your own personal boundaries and what you are going to fight for in your life because it defines your happiness. And of course, like.

Freedoms that, you know, laws support, that many, many cases, so be sure to vote. But in the meantime, until the world figures itself out and laws figure themselves out, we have to fend for ourselves at work and in our relationships and we're out in society. And so it's really important to, you know, this is really the chapter that's asking you to use your fears to create the blueprint for your life. That is your blueprint. And again, blueprints, you know, it's going to work for you for 10 years and then you redesign it and you should. I think it's always important to commit to revisiting the blueprint. But for now, where do you want to be this time next year? Which is what are the things that you need to have happen? Because these are the things that are most important to you, that fuel you, that make you feel most alive, that make you feel most empowered and having agency in your life? And for me in the book, I mean, I start out with one blueprint I had to write. You know, because the blueprint, I say you have to design it because it's not like it's a given. You can't just, like, go to a store and buy this blueprint. You can't download it off the Internet. You can't copy paste it from somebody else because it's your life. And truth is.

You know, life is on a straight path. So you have to kind of create the rooms and the pathways and the tunnels and the pipelines and all the things yourself. And so when I was in my 20s, I was like, I really wanted to work and have a career that was meaningful and have a family. And I just didn't want to compromise on that. And yet I saw so many women compromise on that or try to do both unsuccessfully, and eventually having to give something up, usually the career. And I thought, well, okay, there's just. No one's going to hand this to me. There's no pathway for this. There's no paved road for this. My companies typically don't give a lot of paid leave for families. I'm not making enough to support myself, let alone a family. There's the pay gap. There's all these things. So what am I going to do? And that became a fear of losing my freedom in that way, which essentially fueled the blueprint that I created, which was that I'm going to work my tail off in my 20s someday, open a business or be freelance to a point where I don't have to ask for time off, and I'm gonna save a lot of money before I have that first kid. And you know what? My blueprint didn't include, like, getting married.

I was just like, I want to be a mom. And so I had to allow myself to, you know, say, like, marriage might not be in my cards. That's. I just saw someone talk about that the other day, a woman who was like, I've had to relinquish control over that because I feel like finding true love. Like, it's not like you can spreadsheet that. Like, you ha. You can go out there and it's maybe a batting average sort of thing, but at the end of the day, like, it might not happen for you. Does that mean that you're not going to be able to live life to its fullest? You better find a way to do it on your own. And maybe that means just, like, being really solid with yourself and still having that child if you want, or finding other people to care. 4. Maybe it's like you become an incredible godmother. Maybe it's that you.

Marry your career, you know, like, whatever it is. But I think having these.

These Thought processes and creating these blueprints early on, for me, like, it was all fueled by fear and allowed me to, you know, again, I had failure, I had uncertainty. There are a lot of things I couldn't control, but at least I always knew at the core what it was that I wanted to protect. And that was my financial livelih, my career, livelihood, and my ability to parent one day without rejection. I mean, from a boss, from my profession, someone telling me, like, you can't have it all, basically.

I love this, and I think that that is a great place for us to kind of put the cap on this. It's what ended the book you ended the book with. But I think that's the core of it. Are we living our life? Are we living it our way? Are we living by our rules? Do we even know what the rules are? And this concept of the fear being the messenger to us, understanding more about what's important to us, to live truly into what we were meant to be. I always said that. I think that we were all given a unique gift and that we have been tasked to give that gift to the world. And the only way we're going to give the gift to the world is to be fully expressed. And this book is a recipe to allow people to step into that role. Your. Your journey into this was. Was huge. The totally frank when I got to go, what is she right? In healthy state of panic. She's like, you said, the money.

Yeah. And I knew you weren't going to be alone in that confusion. So I read. I wrote about that very early on where, you know, you're probably wondering, what is up her sleeve? Like, what is going on here? And it was. It's not a. It's not a far bridge. Like, it's just. I've been talking about money, and fear is the underpinning emotion of all of the money questions I've been navigating my entire career. So let's talk about fear, because I've got a lot to bring to the table, not just professionally, but also personally.

Well, Parnoush, you did it. You did it well. You did it in story. You did it powerfully. And I think that y', all, this. This book will change lives. It needs to. It should be something that is read regularly and used when you start to feel that uncertainty or you start to feel fear welling up to go back and say, which one is it? And walk through the recipe, walk through the process, because that's what's going to keep you on the path that you were meant to be on. Um, so pranush. Where can people. Where, where can we send people to. To get all the goodness that is you?

Thanks, Mel. Well, I have a podcast, it's called so Money. You can listen to it, subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And I have a membership where if you go to somoneymembers.com you can get a lot of the great behind the scenes of working with me, learning together, there's a really robust community. Pretty soon we're going to have commercial free podcasts available to members. So it's a lot of exciting stuff. It's newly launched. So the benefit of being a founding member is that you get all these incentives. You get to grow with the community and get in, you know, as an early. Was it early adapter, early adopter?

Yep. Yeah. So good. So we'll put, we'll make sure that we have that in the description, the show notes and, and all the links to. To get there. So for me, just from the bottom of my heart, this was an interview that I've been looking forward to for a while and, and I. It's been a joy watching this book launch journey and how you've navigated it and getting a chance to know you know you better. I appreciate you for being willing to come on and share with our audience.

Thank you, Mel. I really appreciate you. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the affluent entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there.

Foreign.

And that's it for this episode of Building your money machine where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.