If you’re a type-A person like me, you probably grew up in an environment where you were praised for the ability to do things on your own instead of constantly asking for help. For me, the belief that I should be able to figure everything out by myself served me well… until it didn’t and started hindering my personal growth.
These last few weeks, I’ve been exploring what it means to embrace feelings of vulnerability and fear to move out of my comfort zone and reach out for support.
Because to say yes to myself and to become the best version of me, I have to let go of the shame and other negative emotions that tell me I should do everything by myself and build that habit to ask for the help that I need.
If this resonates with you, especially when it comes to asking for help with your finances, just know that I understand the journey, and I’m here to support you with grace and compassion. On the other side of these negative emotions is a transformation that can change your life for the better.
In this episode, you’ll learn…
- [03:33] How emotions can hold you back when you don’t allow yourself to process them
- [07:08] Why it’s necessary to embrace vulnerability and ask for help to become the best version of yourself in your personal life and your finances
- [09:53] Why I get so excited to offer help and support my clients as they shift the way they think about money
- [12:05] How sharing our struggles and asking for help builds that habit and allows us to be reach out more consistently
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to move through shame and fear and start asking for the help you need.
Are you ready to get help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
If you need some encouragement, listen to Karen’s story of how reaching out transformed her finances and her life!
Transcript:
[00:00:02] Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work every day with professional women and solopreneur is 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.
[00:00:32] Hello and welcome to another episode of Money Files. I just want to speak to you today about vulnerability and trust and fear. Recently, I will share that I’ve been coaching myself on feeling my emotions. And if you follow me on social media, I posted in my stories the stuffed animal that looks like a monster from Monsters Inc. But in my own 1 to 1 coaching with my coach, I’ve been working on processing my emotions. And if you don’t know me, I will tell you that one of my coach friends, she named this for me. She’s like, I feel like you’re just basically in a neutral space when it comes to your emotions. Like you don’t feel anything too negative or really feeling anything too positive.
[00:01:19] And that resonates with me a ton because I will tell you like I’m not one to necessarily celebrate myself and I will bulldoze through accomplishments in the same way when I look at like negative emotions, fear or whatever that is, I could sweep those under the rug as well and kind of just sit in this neutral space. So I’ve been doing a lot of work personally in terms of just thinking about like fear and what does it mean to actually allow emotions.
[00:01:50] And I am still in the midst of this work, but it’s something that I recognize that I want to name for myself. And the reason I’m sharing this with you today is because I had an epiphany a couple of weeks ago. And it’s funny to me because oftentimes what’s happening with me or like who I am also tends to show up in clients. And so I generally work with like type-A women who can do all of the things on their own. And that is something that resonates with me as a Type A woman that can generally do a lot of things for herself. And I was thinking about how just society like we are and I shouldn’t even say society, but I think about when we were growing up or when I was growing up as a as a kid, like what was I praised for? Like, how did certain things get cemented that I was definitely praised for being able to figure things out. I was praised for doing things really well.
[00:02:49] And so what that leads to, especially in growing a business and new seasons of life, is being able to wrestle with like what does vulnerability actually mean and how will being vulnerable or how will experiencing fear, like, how will that benefit me? And so I, like I said, have been wrestling with or not even wrestling with, I should say, allowing this emotion of fear. And so in a 1 to 1 coaching session that I had recently, the coach was telling me, you know, how do you allow this emotion? And I’m like, I don’t know how you would allow an emotion because for me, allowing an emotion has felt like saying to myself like, Oh yeah, it’s there, and then continuing to move through that.
[00:03:33] And so she gave me the analogy which resonated with me really well. It’s like if you had like a Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, which I don’t have kids, but I was a teacher, I have plenty of nieces and nephews and children in my life. And so if you think about a little kid coming with you to work, like how much work would you be able to get done? You would still be able to get work done, but maybe you don’t get work done to the quality in which you would get it done if the child was not there.
[00:03:59] And so she gave me that analogy for being able to allow the emotion of fear, whatever emotion it is that I want to support at that time, like being able to think about it as bringing your child to work. And so the monster that I told you about that I have in my office right now, it just is a reminder for me to process emotions and also coaching with one of my peers, like she was also telling me, like to process positive emotions and not just processing negative emotions.
[00:04:31] And once again, I’m telling you all of this because I think that you may be in a similar place. And when I think about my emotions, whether they are positive or whether they are negative, what’s been resonating for me is really identifying like when I’m in this space of fear, when I’m in this space of shame or I’m overwhelmed or I feel guilt, how does that impact what I do or don’t do? And so if you’re listening to me right now, and especially if you’re listening to me and you’re thinking about if you are on the fence and you’ve been thinking about working with me, it might be preventing you from actually like your negative emotions might be preventing you from actually saying yes to yourself.
[00:05:15] And what I notice, especially when people are on the other side of it, have they figured out that they want to work with me? But they’re really scared about working with me because they’re thinking about all the things that are going to come up. And I think it’s really about the feelings that I hear most often or that people are hesitant. They’re. Anxious there had this fear of being vulnerable. And what happens is it’s like you actually take yourself away from being able to experience a process that’s ultimately going to shift you in the most positive way possible. And like your rational brain knows that you should do the thing, but you can’t maybe get yourself through that tunnel of being able to allow yourself to feel really vulnerable. What I’ve described in another podcast episode is like being like a little chicken, little naked chicken with no no feathers, or a little naked mole rat.
[00:06:07] So I would just invite you if you’re in that place and you’ve been thinking like you have some emotions, especially when you think about reaching out and asking for help is like really be curious about what what are you making that emotion mean and generally speaking in this happens for me too is it’s we want to make it mean something about us, right? Like if I have to allow myself to if I have to show fear, if I have to show that I’m overwhelmed, that I am going to make it mean something about me. And I know for myself it’s like, well, I have a very bad habit and I’m just calling it a bad habit right now. And I should really call it just like a thought pattern for myself that I’ve noticed is that I have a thought that like I should be able to figure this out on my own and at certain times of my life that thought has served me really well. And there are definitely, I would say, within these last three years and within this year and like building a business like that, that doesn’t serve me very well and it prevents me from actually getting the help that I need.
[00:07:08] Like I could move through something much quicker if I wasn’t thinking like I should be able to figure this out on my own. Okay. So if you are in that space where you potentially think that you need to figure something out on your own, I would invite you to say, no, you don’t. And if this applies to your personal life, like take that too and just start to explore, especially find your safe places and think about like, where can I explore the vulnerability? Where can I explore this space where I can allow myself to feel the fear, the shame and the guilt and. I guarantee you that on the other side of that, there was like really something beautiful.
[00:07:52] Also I’ll name for you that the work of like feeling your feelings and getting out of thought patterns. Like I should be able to figure this out on my own. They’re not easy. I always like I’m going back and forth in between myself and paralleling it in between someone who’s on the fence about working with me. Because I always commend people and like celebrate them if they’ve booked a consult with me because I know that it’s not easy to ask for help. Like when you’re asking for help, especially when you are in this like type-A mentality that you should be able to figure it out on your own. There’s this sense of exposure there. And so as a coach, I really love to be able to create a space where people feel like they can come as they are and they don’t need to be anything other than who they are.
[00:08:41] Because just by raising your hand and saying, I need help, I know that I want to show up with a level of sensitivity and with a level of grace and compassion, because that’s also what I want to be able to help you go through and explore, because I don’t want you to have to do this process and this journey alone. And I want you to have somebody in your corner so you can figure out those hard things.
[00:09:05] And then just flipping it to the person that is currently working with me, because I know that I have clients that are working with me and they listen to my podcast. But I was actually speaking to one of my clients recently, a couple of weeks ago, and I was telling her, I said, You know, something’s coming up for me and I can see personality traits that you have and I have that are similar. And I would love to explore what does it mean for you to like ask for help? And so we were talking about how like even in our coaching container, sometimes she may be embarrassed to ask for help about something that she feels like she should know, or like we were asking the same question every single week about how do I manipulate my spending plan? Or Can we go over what we said my debt payoff plan was a gift or whatever that is.
[00:09:53] And so I was just sharing with her. I was like, I want you to know that when you’re asking me for help, I get so excited and I actually want you to use me. I want you to feel like you have me in your back pocket because this is about me being able to support you and help you shift in how you’re thinking about money, how you relate to like before you spent money. What did you notice about this time that you went to go shopping and what triggers did you notice? Whatever it is that’s coming up for a particular client, like, I want to be engaged in the work with you and I don’t want you to feel like you can’t come and ask for help. Like I want you to ask for help despite what your brain says and your brain’s like, you should be able to figure this out on your own because that thought pattern doesn’t even go away necessarily when you decide to work with me.
[00:10:46] And so it’s why I always want my clients to know is that there’s power in coaching and like raising your hand to be coached or being able to put into the Trello board. You know, here’s what I understand about what we talked about and like here’s where I’m getting stuck because it’s going to show your brain that it’s okay to be vulnerable, it’s okay to ask for help. And the result that you get is a transformation. And the result that you desire is a transformation.
[00:11:13] And so as I’ve been working with this in my own life and I was thinking about Brené Brown and daring greatly, like those are things that came up for me in terms of just being able to explore your own thoughts about being vulnerable, about asking for help, and where you are in that process with yourself. And I am just going to be fully transparent that I’m just recording this podcast off the top of my dome right now. But I didn’t want to not get it out for the sake of me wanting to be perfect. I’ve been working through different thoughts for the past couple of weeks of like, I want to share something about being vulnerable and I want to share something about asking for help because I think that it can help someone else. But I felt like it wasn’t packaged and it didn’t have a pretty little bow on it.
[00:12:05] But I think what I want you to understand most is that you’re not alone. And if this resonates with you and you are someone who when you think about asking for help or when you think about your emotions and maybe you’ve never even thought about it in an emotional place, I think I think about it an emotional place now because of the level of coaching I’ve received over the last couple of years. But I realize that I have feelings that come up for me when I’m thinking about asking for help. And so then when I’m thinking about asking for help, it can be this place of where judgment comes in. It can be a place where vulnerability and fear and shame. And so I have to practice being the highest version of myself and that highest version of myself ask for help. And once again, I am not saying that this is easy work, but is the work that needs to be done because it’s the work that is going to allow me to be the best version of myself. And so if I can show myself little glimpses of where it is safe to be vulnerable, where it is safe to explore emotions in different ways, then I know that I am going to do that more often and do it more consistently.
[00:13:14] So I hope that you take away something from this podcast episode this week. It’s very short, very sweet. And if you haven’t read Daring Greatly, I feel like I’m going to go back and do some work in this book, but I think that that’s a really great book to pair with anything that you are doing in your own life, especially what it requires that you’re vulnerable and just breaking down norms, especially when you’re in corporate spaces where you don’t want to be seen as someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Right. I think that’s that’s often the times, the thought that we have and you want to be perfect, but also just think about whether it’s exploring this book or thinking about people in your life that are examples of people that are vulnerable, people that you admire, who you can say like, Wow, they are working through shame, they are working through guilt, they are working through fear. And how has that benefited them? And think about those benefits. Think about the benefits in your own life.
[00:14:13] And you know, if you are listening to this and you’re thinking like, wow, I want a place, safe place to be vulnerable, to experience fear, to experience shame, but to also experience compassion and grace and love when it comes to money, I would definitely invite you to apply to work with me in my five month coaching partnership. And that partnership is really about you learning to have your own back when it comes to managing your finances. I want to help you make a budget, but ultimately I want to help you shift your relationship with money so everything you do from this point forward feels like it’s in alignment with who you are. So thank you for tuning in this week and I look forward to connecting with you next week. 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.
