You started this year with an intention. Maybe it was January 1st, maybe it was sometime before the new year even started, but at some point you told yourself this was going to be the year you finally got out of debt, started budgeting for real, or stopped living paycheck to paycheck. And now we’re in the middle of the year and if you’re being honest, you’re somewhere between “I made some progress” and “I honestly don’t know what happened since January.”
This episode isn’t about your budget or your numbers. It’s about what’s actually missing, and it has nothing to do with how much debt you’re in, how much you make, or how much you have or haven’t saved.
What I want you to understand is that reaching your financial goals isn’t just about setting them, it’s about becoming someone new in the process. I’m introducing a concept I call financial emergence, which is the identity shift that happens when you stop trying to force yourself into a goal and start actually becoming the person who can hold it. Just like a caterpillar doesn’t go in the same way it comes out, you’re not going to reach your financial goals as the same version of yourself that set them, and that is the real work this episode is about.
In this episode I walk you through what financial emergence looks like in real life, not on a vision board and not in a pretty spreadsheet, but on a Tuesday when things feel hard and nothing is going as planned. I also share a three-column exercise you can do today to identify your financial intentions, name what’s most likely to get in the way, and decide in advance exactly how your emerging self responds when that moment comes.
In this episode you’ll learn…
[00:04:22] What financial emergence actually means and why your financial journey will always have peaks and valleys, and why that’s not evidence that you’re failing but evidence that you’re in process
[00:08:15] Why setting a financial goal is not the same thing as building a financial identity, and why the goal alone will never be enough to get you to the other side of where you’re trying to go
[00:12:40] What it looks like when the emerging version of you responds to overspending, shame around debt, or a last-minute trip invitation you’ve already decided your money can’t say yes to right now
[00:18:30] Why your financial journey isn’t linear and never has been, and how to use that understanding to change the conversation you have with yourself in the hard moments instead of closing the app and avoiding your numbers for two weeks
[00:22:10] The three-column exercise that helps you decide in advance who you’re becoming so that when the hard moment arrives, you already know exactly what to say to yourself and how to keep moving forward
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to understand what financial emergence is and how it changes everything about the way you see yourself, talk to yourself, and show up for your financial goals especially when it gets hard.
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
If you loved this episode on financial emergence and how it changes everything about the way you see yourself, talk to yourself, and show up for your financial goals, check out Episode191 | The Surprising Mindset Shift That Makes Paying Off Debt Easier.
Transcript for “Financial Emergence: The Identity Shift That Actually Gets You to Your Money Goals”
Intro: Hi, and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. Today, I want to just invite you in, and I want to sit right next to you and have a little heart-to-heart. At some point this year, you probably set an intention about your finances. Maybe it was January 1st. Maybe it was January 10th. Maybe it was just even before the new year started, and you told yourself, this is going to be my year. This is going to be the year where I finally get out of debt, or this is going to be the year where I really start budgeting, or this is going to be the year that I stop living paycheck to paycheck and I am going to start saving money. Where are you right now relative to the commitment that you made with yourself? We’re in the middle of the year, and I would say that for a lot of us, we’re somewhere in between, I made some progress, and honestly, I don’t know what happened since January.
So this isn’t a moment for you to be hard on yourself, but I want to give you some redirection, and I want to give you a different perspective so that in the next six months, you can see tangible progress. This isn’t an episode about budgeting or looking at your numbers. You can go back to my older episodes for that. But today I want to pull up from the numbers entirely because what I know is that you’re missing something that has nothing to do with how much debt you’re in or how much you make or even how much you have saved or haven’t saved.
So just to tell you a little story when I was thinking about this episode, is that in my first full year of business, I chose a word for the year and that word was emerge. When I thought about emerging, I thought about all the things I was going to have to be willing to do to be a successful business owner. And I later learned that there were also going to be ways I needed to be willing to feel in order to be a successful business owner because being a business owner isn’t just about establishing an LLC. I was going to have to do things I’d never done before. I was going to have to sell myself on Instagram, just even be on Instagram. I was going to have to write newsletters. I was going to have to put myself out there in ways that felt completely new. And I was going to need to emerge as a person.
And emerging means to become known, to rise from a hidden or obscure place. For me, emerging was all about newness and being willing to feel uncomfortable because I was in uncharted territories. I’ve never owned a business before, unless you count my babysitting business that I had in fourth grade. But it was going to be, like I said, a lot of firsts. And I needed to have a willingness to try, try again, and then try some more. And I think the same is true for your finances. You’re going to have to be willing to emerge. You’re going to have to be willing to become known. And it goes beyond having a budget. You also need to understand what I’m going to coin as your own financial emergence. We see this actually in nature. It’s a transformation, a becoming.
The caterpillar experiences emergence as a butterfly. They don’t go in the same way that they come out. And this is going to be similar for you. When you decide to shift things with your finances, you’re shifting your financial identity. You are going to go in one way, and you’re going to come out another way. It’s going to require that you have a shift of thinking. Yes, you might have made a budget, or you’ve committed to paying off debt. But that’s a goal that has nothing to do with your identity. It’s just simply you saying, this is the thing that I want to accomplish.
But we have to investigate how you’re going to accomplish that. And once again, that goes beyond the budget. It’s not just a matter of one plus two equals three, although those things are important. But what you also have to understand is that you are going to have to emerge. You’re going to have to go in one way and come out as someone new. And that is identity work. You are going to have to become someone that you’ve never been before. And I hear you.
Someone listening to me might be like, Keina, some of the financial goals that I have, I’ve accomplished them before. Or I’ve never been a person that’s been in debt. Or I’ve always been someone who was able to save money. I hear you. And I want to let you know that I hear you. I think the financial emergence process isn’t just a one-time thing. You are constantly going to be refining who you are because even in this situation where you feel like, but Keina, I’ve had this different financial identity, there might be a debt-free version of yourself. But has that debt-free version of you ever gone through a job loss? Has that debt-free version of you ever gone through a breakup that caused you to add to your debt or to be in debt for the first time?
Has that debt-free version of you ever started making $250,000 a year and experienced lifestyle creep for the first time? So the goal might look the same to pay off debt, save money, or get your bills on auto pay. And maybe you had that goal once in the past and you accomplished it. But you also have to consider, where am I in life right now? What new circumstances are there? What part of the story am I not telling myself? Because my brain just edits it out. Because sometimes something can come along and it can shake your financial identity that you worked so hard to build that you’ve been attached to. And now you find yourself sitting with some new version of you that is causing you shame.
It’s causing you guilt because you don’t know how you got here when you were so diligent in your path to get where you are right now. I just want to acknowledge that there are two sides to this coin. There could be the person that’s like, Keina, I’ve always had debt. It’s just the only thing I know, right? Or I’ve never had anything saved and I really want to start to save money. But then the other side of that coin is that there are people that are listening to the podcast that have been debt-free. They have had money saved. But there’s some life circumstance that could have shaken or altered their financial identity. So regardless of whether or not this feels like the first time that you’re building a healthy financial identity or you feel like you’re rebuilding one that you are familiar with in the past, you’re still going to have to go through this financial emergence. You got to go in one way and you got to come out another way.
Before we go any further, I want you to understand something that’s really, really important. When you are going through your financial journey, it’s not linear. It never has been. There are going to be peaks and there are going to be valleys and there are going to be more peaks and then there are going to be more valleys. And what we want to see over time is this consistent upward trend towards the goals that you’ve set for yourself. But it’s never going to go from A to B to C in a straight line. And so when you can see your financial journey as emergence, it’s going to reshape how you talk to yourself in hard moments. Because it’s not if you’ll have hard moments, it’s when the moment comes.
The question is going to become, what do you reach for when you’re in the valley? So I want to show you what that looks like. Maybe your intention this year is to manage your salary well because you’re the first person in your family to make multiple six figures. And let’s say you overspend one month. The old version of you would close the app. They don’t look at the app for two weeks. But the emerging version of you says, I’m in the middle of becoming someone who manages their numbers well. I’m leaving behind the version of me who avoids looking at my account. I can learn from this. I can keep making progress. It might feel hard.
So before I actually look at my account, I’m going to go on a walk so I can regulate myself. And then I’m going to check my numbers because someone who manages money well finds ways to shorten the avoidance, not eliminate the feeling. So this is what your financial emergence does for you. It changes the conversation that you have with yourself in the hard moment. It doesn’t make the hard moment disappear, but it reframes what the hard moment means. It becomes evidence that you are in process, not evidence that you’re failing.
Here’s another one. Maybe your intention is to finally talk to your partner about debt. And shame is what keeps getting in the way. Your emergence reminds you that telling the truth about your money is who you are becoming. And your partner is a safe space. They want to help. Even if that just means that you’re no longer carrying your emotions about your debt alone. Or even maybe your intention this year is to pay off your credit card debt. But one of your friends, they start planning a trip. And you can’t go. You decide that you can’t go, not because you don’t have the money, because you’ve already decided in advance that the money has a job this year and that job is paying off your credit card debt. So the old you would have gone anyway.
You would have just told yourself, I’ll figure it out later. But the emerging version of you says, I’m becoming someone who honors my choices because I know that more freedom is waiting on the other side of this decision. This is what financial emergence looks like in real life. It’s not a vision board. It honestly isn’t even a pretty spreadsheet. But it is having specific words that you can say to yourself on a Tuesday when things feel really hard and they’re not going as planned. It’s having a way to look at a situation that you’re like, oh my goodness, here we are again. How do I want to handle this situation? I want you to have your own back. You have to understand why something matters in order to reach any and every financial goal that you have.
And I can guarantee you, you’re going to have to rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat this and truly see this as a process. You are becoming someone new. You are emerging. And so in order to emerge, things have to happen to reshape you. You are going in one way and you are coming out another way. And I want you to look for evidence of how am I going in? And you might understand there are default responses that I have when I’m going in a certain way. But I want to come out and become someone new. And so how does that person respond? This is something that you have to practice. And I will not shortchange you and tell you that this is like really easy work. You might have to talk to yourself about overspending every single week in the beginning.
And that’s okay. But every single week that you talk to yourself about overspending becomes like, oh, wow, this month, I noticed that I only had to talk to myself about overspending twice. Oh, well, I haven’t talked to myself about overspending in like three or four months. You’ll see that you’re making progress and you’ll see that you’re becoming the person that manages money well. And that’s the goal. So understanding your own financial emergence is like having a hidden guide to help you become someone new. And the way that I need to talk to myself and the way that you need to talk to yourself, they’re different. So it’s one thing to set financial goals or intention. It’s another thing to decide in advance how you’ll honor your commitments with yourself.
So the exercise that I want you to do as a result of this podcast today, so you could do it in the notes app on your phone, you can write it down. I’m a writer. I’m a notebook pen girl. So I want you, I visualized this in like a three column chart. And the first column that I want you to have is my financial intentions for the next six months. So I want you to think about what are the things that you are intending to do this year, or you could even call them your financial goals. So in the podcast, as I was talking it out with you, the intentions that I mentioned were to manage my salary well, because I’m the first one in my family to make multiple six figures. That could be an intention. Maybe one of your intentions or your goals is to talk to your partner about your debt. Maybe your intention is I want to pay off my credit card by December and I want to be able to follow my debt payoff plan. So those are examples of intentions that you might have.
In the second column, you are going to write what might get in the way. And I will say that there could be more than one thing that gets in the way for one intention. So in the examples that I shared with you earlier, like managing your six figure salary, something that could get in the way is overspending. Something else that could get in the way if you were talking to your partner about debt is shame, or something that could get in the way of you paying off your credit card is a last minute trip with your friends. And then that third column is responding to the question, how does the emerging me respond? And so this is your opportunity to really think about who am I now? And the version of me that’s coming out of the emergence, how does she respond to this situation?
So it’s an opportunity basically for you to step outside of yourself and think about the discussion that you want to have with yourself when this thing happens. So when you think about just going back to when you think about what might get in the way, I want you to reflect honestly for yourself on what tends to slow you down. It could be emotions, it could be stress, and it could be happiness, it could be stress, or even happiness can trigger overspending. So just thinking about like, what are some of the emotions? It could be boredom, it could be being really tired, it could be unexpected expenses, it could be a last minute invitation from a friend, maybe a hard conversation you’ve been putting off, but like what gets in the way? So just name the real things for you. And see what comes up. You and I are going to be different.
And then for each one of those, like what gets in the way, I want you to answer for yourself, how does the emerging me respond? Not what do I want to do, but who am I becoming? How does that person show up in this moment? In the example I gave you earlier, I just said like, maybe I’m going to take a walk because realizing that I need to take a walk before I do the hard thing could just be my way of self-regulating. So you could help yourself in that way because you know a lot of things about you. And because when you know who you’re becoming, you can prepare for what I’m calling some of the valleys in this financial journey before you’re in it. And you can decide in advance what you’re going to say to yourself, and when the moment arrives, because we know it will arrive, you won’t just be thinking about like, oh my goodness, what do I want to do?
You’ll be like, oh my goodness, I talked to myself about this. So since I talked to myself about this, let me try and enact it. And listen, there’s going to be trial and error to this, but I want you to try it because in you trying it, you’re going to get better at it because this is the work of financial emergence and it’s connecting you to why this matters. Why does this even matter that I’m doing any of this? I don’t want to be the person that falls off of my intentions and my goals all the time, but I realize I have to become a different person in order to support the goals that I have for myself. This is truly the work of becoming the person who feels like I’m intentional about my finances.
It’s this work of financial emergence. It’s deciding in advance who you are and then honoring that decision, even when it’s inconvenient, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when nobody else understands why you’re making the decisions that you’re making. So you started this year with an intention and whether you’ve been consistent or you’ve fallen off or you’re somewhere in the messy middle, none of that is the final say for how this year is going to end for you because you are not just someone trying to pay off debt or save money or stop living paycheck to paycheck. You are someone in the middle of financial emergence and that changes everything about how you see yourself and how you handle the hard moments.
Yes, the goals matter, but who you’re becoming during the process matters more because your goals are going to change over time. You can be paying off debt, you could be hitting savings goals, you can reach the number, but the person that you’re becoming in the process, that person is going to stay with you and she’s the one who’s going to have your back. She’s the one that’s going to help other people figure out how to manage their finances well. So I’d invite you to do the exercise and share this episode with a friend. If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking like, oh my goodness, Keina, I would love support. Like I can see how you’re working with clients and I want to be someone who gets out of my own way. I would invite you to head over to my website and you can apply to work with me right at the top.
And we have a 60 minute consult where I just get to learn more about you. There’s no like, I promise you, it is the best conversation you’re going to have in your life. It could be the first time that maybe you’ve ever told someone how much debt you’re in. It could be the first time that you’ve ever said like your financial goals out loud, but I’m going to tell you how I can support you in my five month coaching partnership and exactly what we would do over the course of that five months. So I’ll build a custom plan for you and then we’ll talk about exactly what coaching would look like. So if that is what you are looking for next and that makes the most sense for your next step, I would definitely encourage you to go to my show notes or just go to wealthovernow.com. Click the link to apply and I look forward to seeing you on my calendar. Until next time, have a great week.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
