Today, I’m relaunching my Money Files podcast with a solo episode on financial self-trust. After a year of recording client conversations, I now want to share more practical tips and become your go-to resource for improving your relationship with money.
In this episode, I dive into financial self-trust. When I work with clients, I notice they lack this foundational piece. Some of my clients even come to me believing they are inherently flawed, that they are destined to struggle with money for the rest of their lives.
In this episode, you’ll learn…
- How the emotional side of money plays into how we manage it [2:50]
- The foundations of financial self-trust and how it can help you make smart, intentional decisions [4:51]
- The common thought patterns many women and solopreneurs fall into when it comes to their relationship with money [6:30]
- The real reason you’re feeling stuck and lacking financial self-trust [8:15]
- How your thoughts about money contribute to underearning [9:24]
- How financial self-trust helps you reach and exceed your financial goals [10:19]
- My three steps to cultivating financial self-trust for your life and business [14:20]
If you’re ready to start cultivating financial self-trust in your own life and break the negative thought cycles you have around money, this episode is the place to start.
Tune in to this episode to learn how to cultivate financial self-trust and start believing you’re capable of managing your money well.
In the episode…
Most of the clients who come to me with poor money management skills fall into one of two categories: they feel they haven’t found the right systems to organize their finances, or they believe that they’re inherently incapable of managing their money well. These women come to me having read all the books, taken all the courses, and tried all the apps, but they’re still stuck.
What I tell these women is this: You are capable of becoming a person who manages their money well. There is no perfect system that’s going to ‘click’ for you, nor are you doomed to struggle with money forever. What you lack is a foundation.
Financial self-trust–believing you’re capable of managing your money well and creating more of it in your life–is truly the foundation of a healthy relationship with money, a relationship that allows you to both create and manage money well. It becomes a compass that guides you in the right direction in your business, helps you make financial decisions, and reminds you of your value.. It’s far more valuable than any app, book, or course, and it’s entirely within your power to cultivate for yourself.
If you’re ready to build a foundation of financial self-trust and radically improve your relationship with money, start with these three steps:
1. Reflect.
Grab a sticky note and a pen, and write, “I have the ability to manage my money.” Put that note somewhere you’ll see it all the time: on your mirror, in your car, above your desk. Make it something you can’t ignore, and every time you see it, repeat it to yourself. The simple act of affirming your own abilities is incredibly powerful.
2. Ground yourself in purpose.
Unfortunately, there will be days that are harder than others. You will slip up. You will make mistakes. When that happens, reconnect with your why. What role does money play in your life? Why do you desire money? What can money do for you? What are you striving for? Keep these dreams and goals front-and-center, and turn to them whenever you’re tempted to stray from your course.
3. Celebrate your wins.
Big, small, doesn’t matter–celebrate them all! So often, we focus too much on the huge goals we’re striving for and totally ignore the money wins in our day-to-day lives. Every time you choose to eat at home instead of ordering out or make a transfer into your emergency fund, you are making moves towards your goals. Celebrate that!
So here are the takeaways I want you to remember from this episode…
- You are capable of becoming someone who manages their money well. You are not destined to struggle with your finances forever.
- Financial self-trust is the foundation of a healthy relationship with money. Focus on cultivating self-trust before all else.
- When faced with a tough money decision, focus on your why. Use your purpose and your self-trust to guide you in the right direction.
Financial self-trust doesn’t happen overnight, but by taking small, intentional steps, you can learn to trust your money management skills.
If you’re ready to improve your relationship with money and start making moves towards your financial goals, apply to work with me so we can create a plan to get you there.
The Transcript
Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work every day 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.
Hello, everyone, my name is Keina, and I am the owner of Wealth Over Now. So I started Money Files, if you’re new here, Money Files was a podcast that I started to have candid conversations with clients. I recorded episodes where we really were able to pull back the curtain and show you what it was like to work with a financial coach. And I did that for two years. And really, in the past couple of months, I’ve been like, Oh, I have so many things that I want to be able to share with my audience and really have a bigger impact. Like, I want to help professional women and solopreneurs really understand how money plays a role in their life. I want to teach them financial concepts. I want to help them work on their money mindset, and I still want you to be able to hear from my clients because I think they’re like the nice little bow on this work because you’re able to see yourself in them. You will hear from people who were scared to look at numbers who would tell you they weren’t good at math. And I think that the best part of it all is like when you’re listening to those client conversations, y’all, they are telling you, like, I am not scared to talk about money, and the thing I love the most is that most of my clients, when they started working with me would have said, like, Please don’t share my story with anyone because there was so much shame and guilt and overwhelm tied into their numbers. And so I want to let you know how they got to that point by being able to share more content with you that can really help you shift where you are right now and help you feel like, you know, I have control of my numbers and I can change where I am financially with the amount of money that I have right now in my possession. As you work to create more money and just create a life that you really enjoy, a life that feels in alignment with all of the other areas of your life when you think about looking at your bank account.
Thank you again for joining me and tuning into Money Files. I’m excited to take you on this journey and join you on this journey as you change your relationship with money. So today I want to talk to you about something that I call financial self-trust, and the reason that I’m starting with financial self-trust. Instead of waving my finger at you and telling you don’t buy any more lattes, which just so we’re clear, that’s not my philosophy. But I wanted to start with financial self-trust because I think the thing that we don’t realize is that money is emotional. So many people that I work with have tried budgeting. I work with very Type A individuals who know how to fill out a spreadsheet. You guys actually do know how to do math, but what we’re missing is the fact that like money is emotional. And when we can get to the fact that we actually need to trust ourselves and we need to be able to trust in our ability to both create money and our ability to manage money and realize that like if we can shift the trust that we have within ourselves, then everything else can shift when we think about how we want to manage our finances. So just think about where you are in your money journey right now and what feelings come up for you.
So many of my clients, when we start working together, there is a lack of confidence there, there’s a lack of a belief in themselves. They don’t feel like they’re doing the right thing with their finances. And so that distrust comes up in how they make decisions about their finances. And it’s why they ultimately have the results that they have in front of them. And it’s why today I want you to be thinking about, OK, What is this financial self-interest that Keina is talking about? Because when I’m working with clients, the very first thing that I want to create within my clients is this sense of financial self-trust because I want it to show up in a positive aspect in how they show up for themselves and make decisions. Whether it’s the decision to start paying a credit card bill off early or to raise their prices in their business, or to know that they can actually recover from the fact that they overspent, say in their grocery line item, or they had some emotional spending. When you’ve created that financial self-trust, it’s your North Star to help you navigate those negative emotions that you feel when you are learning how to manage your money well, because it’s inevitable, and no matter where you are in your money journey, there’s going to be times where they think there’s negative emotions, you’re going to feel them in your body. And when you can come back to the fact that like, OK, I can trust myself and I can trust the decisions that I’m making with my finances because I’m someone who knows how to manage my money. Well, it recalibrates you, and it will help you continue to take the next step to move you forward to see the results that you actually desire to create with your finances. So financial self-trust is your foundation. It is the thing that everything else will be built upon, and it is the number one thing that I want you to learn about in this podcast episode. So it is something that you can start working on for yourself.
So you’re listening to me right now, and I want you to think about, like which bucket you may fall in. If I were to ask you today, like, Hey, you like, let’s get started. Let’s work on your finances. You might find yourself being very frustrated. You might tell me, like I’ve tried everything and nothing has worked. I like, just give up. You just really don’t even want to think about, like, what will this require of me to actually change my relationship with money? So if you like, resonate with that thought pattern, I would say that you fall into a bucket of people where when you think about like, why you haven’t achieved certain financial results, you start to think about like all of your your personal flaws, that this isn’t for you, that the idea of budgeting it like sounds nice, but it’s just not something that has ever worked because of who you are as a person, as my client Arlette in her podcast episode, she was like, You know, I just decided that maybe God was like, This is your plot in life that you are just destined to live in the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, right?
And then I think there’s another bucket of people that. When they talk about their finances, they’re talking about like, yeah, well, like the app didn’t work, I’ve tried the envelope system just like I’ve had books like I read, nothing has worked for me. And so when they talk about the reason they have the results in front of them, they are like displacing everything to a system. It’s because of the system that I don’t have results in it just like it just hasn’t connected. And no matter which bucket, you may fall into the thing that’s true and the thing that’s holding you back is that how you think about your finances is keeping you stuck. You talk about all of the things that you can’t do, the reasons it won’t work, and you think about all of the negative side of shifting your relationship with money. You think about all of the negative results that you have that say that like, it’s just can’t be true, that you can change your relationship with money.
So sit with that and think about like, where are you? And what resonates with you right now? I want you to be aware of the thoughts that you have about money. What I want you to practice inserting is, I have the ability to manage my money. Self-trust is really you creating that trust within yourself that you have the ability to manage money. It’s even having the ability, like believing in yourself and having the ability to create money.
And the reason I bring in creation is because we’re also. Which I can save for later episodes are also underearning so many of my clients are under-earning, you may be under-earning. And so it’s not just about managing money, but it’s also about having this thought that you have the ability to create money. And when I say create, if you’re working in a nine to five, it means, Hey, are you asking for a raise? Are you putting yourself out there for the jobs that you know give you the monetary value that you believe that you’re worth? So just think about that. And then I want you to know that when you have self-trust, financial self-trust, it helps you actualize the results you desire to see what I mean when I think about things like the results that you desire to see. You want to pay off your credit card debt. You want an emergency fund. You want to be able to travel without guilt. You want to be able to experience nice things without thinking about, you know, next week. Am I going to be able to pay that bill? And so in order to see your emergency fund build or to see your credit card debt payoff or to see like that highest income revenue month in your business, you need to trust in your ability to manage your finances.
Because when you’re on this journey, what’s inevitable is that you are going to fail at managing your finances. But you just told me that I have to trust in my ability to manage it. Yup. And you also have to know that you’re going to fail at the same time. And I say that because when you are learning to proactively manage your finances, there’s going to be times where you didn’t account for something or you overspend in an area of your budget that you didn’t desire to overspend. But what we don’t want is that you go back into this place where you start to spiral about like, see, I told you, I’m flawed. See, I told you the system didn’t work. So what I told you earlier was right, like you fall in two different buckets. And so if your line of thought is to take you back to like this story of being personally flawed or displacing the reasons that you have the results in front of you on this system, those things are going to keep you stuck. You have to be able to maintain your belief that you have the ability to manage your money well, the ability to create money, so that way you can use that trust with yourself to continue to create the results that you desire to see with your finances. Because ultimately, this financial self trust like this is your compass. For continuing to change your relationship with money, even when you want to quit, even when you feel like, oh my goodness, this isn’t working, this is the same thing that always happens. Financial self-trust is going to help you build financial resiliency with yourself.
So financial self-trust is like your secret weapon to get started. And then financial self-trust is going to be the thing that helps you get back up when you feel like you failed. And financial self-trust is going to be the thing that helps you embrace the person you’re becoming when you realize two months from now, three months from now, like, oh my goodness, I am managing my money well and things like start to feel a little bit uncomfortable because you see different numbers in your bank account that you’ve never seen before. You’ll be able to come back to this financial self-trust because remember, I said, it’s a foundation, so you’re building upon this, like you’re building that trust with yourself that like you are just the person that manages their money well in financial self-trust, you’ll use to make decisions that once would have scared you. So this is the reason that I want to. Have you underscored, highlighted whatever, put it on your mirror, that financial self-trust is the number one thing you want in your financial toolkit? It’s ground zero of the work that you desire to do.
So, Keina, how do I get this financial self-trust? I’m so glad you ask what I want you to sit down and do. I am a person who loves to ask my clients to reflect. And the first thing is to take a post-it somewhere, guys right on it and I want you to just put it on your mirror, put it in your car, put it in the kitchen sink wherever it is. But write that post-it note that’s like I have the ability to manage my money. That’s the first thing I want you to do because I want you to read those words every single day. I want that to be the thing that your brain marinates or not, all of the reasons why this isn’t going to work.
And then the thing that I’m going to ask you to do to create financial self-trust is to ground in purpose, discover your why and celebrate your wins. So what I’m asking you to ground in purpose. I want you to answer this question. What is the purpose of money in my life? How do I desire to use money in my life? And why is now the time to get my finances in order? So whenever you get distracted and you feel like quitting, you’re going to come back to your purpose. It’s going to help you build that trust with yourself, like, no, no, no, this is why I’m starting. This is the purpose of money in my life, this is the purpose of why I’m starting right now. Right. Because you need to always be able to connect back to that purpose.
So I kind of pushed together your purpose and your why. But that’s because your purpose and your why are the foundation of you building self-trust. When you know the purpose of money in your life, you’re going to be able to stay on the path of continuing to budget, continuing to check your bank accounts, continuing to have money dates. Continuing to engage in the work that is ultimately going to shift how you show up for the money in your account and your why is going to help you figure out, OK, when I mess up because I tell my clients all the time, you’re going to mess up when you budget, it’s inevitable. I fail at budgeting, but that’s not where we want to get stuck. We want to focus on. All right, I’ve gotten stuck. But here is how I’m going to shift, because here’s my why. This is why I started. So I’m going to get back up and I’m going to try again. When you are tackling your relationship with money, it’s like building a new muscle. You don’t get stronger overnight. You don’t go from lifting five pounds to 50 pounds. So you’re practicing new behaviors each and every week. You’re practicing new behaviors every day. I would say you’re practicing new behaviors every hour. Especially when you think about intentional decisions that you’re making and whether that is I’m going to choose not to order Uber Eats or I’m choosing to cook at home, I’m choosing to transfer money to my savings account automatically because like I am the person that has the ability to manage my money well. So first, two steps in building financial self-trust is to make sure that you are understanding your purpose. You’ve defined your why?
And then lastly, I want you to celebrate. I cannot talk enough about the power of celebrating yourself on this journey, and I don’t want you to like it. I think that I can only say this is a small win or this is a big win. No, they’re all wins. What I just said and thinking about like, I’m going to cook at home and not I’m not going to order UberEats like that is a win. You choosing not to discount your services for a client? That’s a win. These are all behavioral shifts in your thinking, in how you’re managing your finances, and these shifts are going to equate to the dollar results you desire to see. And so if that result is to pay down your debt, if the result is to increase your emergency fund, if the result is to be able to pay yourself from your business, you being able to identify the things that you’re doing differently day to day, week to week, those celebrations are going to elevate you and going to help you build that trust with yourself because you’re going to be looking for the positive things that you’re doing with your finances. Our brains are so, like, prone to go to the negative things it is always going to be, your brain’s always going to be looking for what’s not working. What am I not doing right? And so by celebrating, we’re bringing in the evidence. We’re bringing in your wins of all of the things that are going well. And so this might be something new that you have to practice. But I do want you to practice doing this. I did it with a client last week where I asked her to like, actually sit down and write down, like, what are the things that you’re proud of that you’ve accomplished since we’ve been working together. And then I just wanted her to like, breathe that in. I don’t want you to tell me about all the things that you need to be doing better because that list of things that you’ve accomplished is going to be things that you can always rely on to be the things that you know how to create time and time again.
Thank you for listening today, and I want you to practice that financial self-trust with yourself. Remember, it’s the foundation for everything that you’re going to be doing with your finances and identifying that trust might be the thing that you’re lacking, that’s keeping you from getting started. So thank you again for tuning in, and I look forward to chatting 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.
