You set a goal to get your finances together. You had a solid week or two. Then life happened and you missed your money date. Now you’re telling yourself the whole thing is ruined. In this episode, Keina talks directly to the high achievers and recovering perfectionists who can only start something if they’re going to do it perfectly. She introduces the concept of C-level work: the small, consistent actions that keep your financial momentum going even when you can’t show up at your best. C’s pass. They keep you in the game. And over time, they’ll get you further than a perfect grade you can only hit once in a while.
In this episode you’ll learn…
[0:00] The pattern Keina keeps seeing in coaching sessions — clients who come to calls apologizing for not doing their homework, and why that shame response is worth examining.
[2:45] What perfectionism actually looks like when it shows up in your money habits — and why the wiring that made you an A student is working against you here.
[5:10] C-level work defined: it’s not lowering your standards permanently. It’s having a floor. The danger isn’t doing C-level work — the danger is deciding that if you can’t do it perfectly, you can’t do it at all.
[8:30] What C-level work looks like in practice: checking your bank accounts daily, paying off your credit card at the end of the week, opening your budget for 10 minutes. Concrete examples for when your best-case scenario isn’t available.
[12:15] Keina’s own C-level work in her business (categorizing QuickBooks expenses) and why she’s learned to accept it as progress in that moment.
[15:00] Grit or grace? The question Keina’s friend asked that reframes when to push through vs. when to give yourself room. How to know the difference in your own financial practice.
[18:40] How to find your own C-level work and why Keina asks her clients to name it themselves rather than defaulting to what they haven’t done.
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to learn how to give yourself permission to do less than your best with your money without losing the momentum you’ve already built or starting over from scratch.
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 using a joy list to disrupt emotional spending, check out Episode 215 How Frictionless Spending Quietly Drains Your Bank Account.
Transcript for “Why C-Level Work Is the Key to Building a Consistent Money Practice”
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, so I’m going to have a little heart to heart with you today because something’s been coming up in my coaching sessions and I want to talk about it with you because if it’s coming up for my clients, it’s something that you are probably also experiencing or you have experienced. But when I’m on calls with clients, sometimes they lead with, Keina, I didn’t do my homework or I skipped my money date this week. And there’s this tone when they say it, like they really want a gold star. And when I say they want a gold star, I mean like they want to do their best work. They are thinking about the fact like I’ve committed to work with you for five months and I’ve made this commitment not only to work with you, Keina, I’ve made the investment with you, but I’ve also made this commitment with myself. And so sometimes I feel like they come and they’re telling me about how they did their homework or they haven’t been their best student.
And I always challenge them about what they’re saying because it’s perfectionism and it’s also this bit of shame that’s coming in and it’s telling you that you have to show up in a certain way or you are going to be seen as a failure or you are going to see yourself as a failure. One of my clients, she tells me, she’s like, Keina, I basically have this little gremlin inside of me that’s like telling me I’m not good enough, that I don’t know how to manage my money. She’s like, I have ADHD and all of these things. And every single time she celebrates herself, I’m like, please talk back to the gremlin. I hope the gremlin doesn’t talk to you as much anymore. Like, please notice all of the things that you are doing well.
I will never, as a coach, not allow you to celebrate yourself. I think that especially with social media influence or even just you comparing yourself to other people, which I’ve deemed and named situational shame, you can tell yourself that you’re not making progress. I’m not as far along as I want to be. And so you are using a benchmark that isn’t actually designed for you. And benchmarks can change based off of the season of life that you’re in. And so one of the things I’ve been talking to my clients about is giving them permission to do C-level work. So you might be the kid, which I’m assuming if you’re listening to this podcast, you are this kid or were this kid, I should say, where you might’ve been like an A student. I know I was an A student. I followed all the rules. I did what teachers told me within reason.
Sometimes I may have pushed the envelope a little bit, but I was definitely like a kid that was striving to make good grades, to do the right things. And when you come from that type of background, when you have that personality, you can get to a space where it’s like, I need to be doing my best work or why attempt anything at all? And so that wiring has served you in a lot of ways, but it’s not serving you right now, when you think about reaching out for help with a coach, even just continuing your progress that you’ve made with your finances, because you want to get an A and you want to only do the best. You only want to start working on your finances if everything is in order. You only want to celebrate when you’ve paid off all your debt. Like you have conditions that you set up and you’re what I call, you’re that A student, you’re the perfectionist. I’m here with you. There’s nothing wrong with it.
But what is so vital and so important is to be able to give yourself permission to do less than your best. Doing less than your best isn’t you slacking off. I want you to hear that very clearly. In this case, when I’m talking to you, when I’m talking to my clients, I want you to adopt a new mindset and a new way of being that allows you to show up as you are, because when you start doing something new, in this case, when we’re talking about like, you know, I’ve decided that this is the year that I want to save $10,000. This is the year that I want to pay off all of my debt. This is the year that I finally want to budget. Those are all adequate goals and results that you want to create. However, what can happen when you set those goals for yourself is that you can be met with overwhelm. You can be met with frustration. You can be met with disappointment when you fall short of the standards that you’ve actually set for yourself. Like maybe you paid off a credit card and now next week you have to charge something on it.
And so now you’re experiencing this disappointment, or maybe you actually made the budget, but you don’t know where to necessarily start with the budget so you feel really overwhelmed. I want you to be able to recognize that you are doing something new. Because you are doing something new you are going to have to also adopt a new way of being. And that’s where C-level work comes in. C-level work is the small consistent actions that you can commit to until you’re able to take the bigger action. Your C-level work is your entry point. It is not the destination, but it is an entry point. It’s how you’re going to create momentum when you’re just getting started. And it’s how you’re going to stay in the game once you’ve been in the game and you want to make sure that you keep going.
We know that if we think about C’s in school, C’s are passing. You may not have loved to take a C home, but it is passing and it counts. It keeps you in the game. It keeps you with that forward movement and momentum. It means that you showed up, you got something done, and you kept a promise to yourself. And that promise is what’s actually going to change your relationship with money over time. So let’s make this a little bit more concrete and thinking about what would C-level work look like in my life? When it comes to money, you have your best case scenario. And the best case scenario for your money habit, it might look like I’m going to have a weekly money date. I’m going to sit down. It means I’m going to look at my numbers. I am going to check in on my budget. I’m going to know exactly where I stand. I’m going to pay off my credit card.
I’m making the transfers. I’m doing all of the things. And maybe I’m doing that on Tuesday and I’m doing it on Friday. I am in the best rhythm. Maybe that’s the gold standard for how you think about how you should manage your money. But every single week, you might not be able to show up in that way. And I want to help you create space because I want you to know that you can still make progress even if you can’t show up with your best case scenario. And it doesn’t mean that you failed. It doesn’t mean that you’ve given up. It doesn’t mean that here we go again. I’m right back in the same situation. It’s just simply, you know what, this week I need to allow myself to do C-level work so I can maintain that momentum that I’ve built so that I can make forward progress. And so C-level work, it might look like, you know what, I need to just check my bank accounts. I’m going to commit to checking my bank accounts every single day this week. And not the type of checking where you’re like stressed out about it, but just like I’m keeping tabs.
Maybe I can’t get in my budget, but I am going to just check and make sure that I kind of know what’s going on. That could be C-level work. C-level work might look like making sure, you know what, I’m going to check my credit cards and make sure that there’s nothing on my credit cards or I’m going to pay off my credit card at the end of the week with the things that I put on it. But C-level work is about choosing a small action that you can take that will make you feel like I have had some type of success and some type of progress. In my own life, my C-level work in my business could be opening QuickBooks and I’m just going to categorize expenses. I’m going to take time to do that. I don’t have time to sit there and categorize expenses and reconcile. And I’m looking at my profit and loss and planning ahead. That’s my best case scenario.
But my C-level work is like, let me just stay on top of categorizing my expenses. And sometimes that’s what I need to do. It also keeps me from being in the weeds of having months of categorization to do. So I am able to accept that C-level work sometimes is my best work in that moment. And other times I want to go with my A-type work. I want to go with my best case scenario. Here’s what I want you to understand about C-level work. It’s not about lowering your standards permanently. It’s about having a floor. So the danger isn’t doing C-level work. The danger is deciding that if you can’t do it perfectly, you can’t do it at all. And that’s when weeks turn into months. And that’s when you lose the habit of checking in on your money entirely. And you have to start over from scratch.
C-level work is going to keep your streak alive of checking in on your money. It’s going to help you build momentum. It’s going to settle your nervous system. If you’re like, okay, you know what? I’ve been so overwhelmed by checking my numbers or just the thought of checking my numbers. But I’ve been checking my bank account every single day so let me add something to that. C-level work is going to give you an invitation to do more because you are going to see yourself as someone who can look at their numbers, who can look at their credit card, who can start trusting themselves. And that momentum is going to help you build a new relationship with your money.
I also want you to think about it like this. Your money plan that you have for yourself should become your own. It should be something that you own. And I tell my clients all the time, this isn’t my plan. Like this is about you. Of course, I guide, I teach how to do money dates. I teach how to manage. I teach the three money bucket system and I provide structure but my clients are all very different. They’re in different seasons of life. Some of them are parents. Some of them are newly married. Some of them just had a baby. Some of them work for themselves. Like there are so many different seasons that my clients are experiencing. So I want them to be able to own their finances so that their finances feel like this is something that I have control of.
So a lot of my clients have, I’ve been pushing this question back to them in the last couple of sessions that I’ve been doing with various clients, is like, you tell me what your C-level work is. You are telling me like, Keina, I haven’t done a money date. You haven’t done a money date. What could you do? What did you do? So I want them to not focus on what they haven’t done, but I want to focus them in on what they have done. How have they made progress? How could you show up for yourself? What is your bare minimum? What is your four? And then you can always move up from your bare minimum. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t doing the things that you need to do, but it means that you are allowing there to be space where you can have progress.
And if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, but Keina, I don’t want to like let myself off the hook and I want to make sure that I’m not slacking. I will share which my friend listens to the podcast and we’ll see if she comes back and tells me that she heard this. But my friend and I, we were talking this past week and I didn’t go to the gym. I literally, I was actually talking to her. I pulled into the gym parking lot. I parked my car. I was talking to her and I said, you know what? I actually don’t want to go in the gym. I went to the gym, scanned my parking ticket so I could get out of the parking garage and I went home. And she was like, you did not just drive to the gym and not go inside. I was like, I really don’t have it in me today. Like I don’t have it in me. She’s like, alright. You know, sometimes that happens.
So we were talking about, she asked herself, she says, in this moment, do I need grit or do I need grace? And I love this phrasing that she provided me because for me, when I think about the gym, I am someone who works out most of the time. Like I heavily identify as someone who goes to the gym consistently. And so in that moment, I was giving myself grace. And there was probably like three days that I didn’t really go to the gym. I just like, I think my body needed that space. It’s fine. And there are other times where I would have not gone to the gym for three days. And I’d be like, listen, Keina, you need to pull on your big girl pants and you have to push through. And so in that case, I need to show up with grit.
So when it comes to your finances, if you are listening to this and you’re thinking like, well, Keina, you know, when am I supposed to do this C-level work? There might be times where you’re like, dang, you know, I’ve been doing C-level work for about eight weeks. And so you might have to actually call yourself up into a place where like, as my friend was saying, you need to push through and you need to do a more extensive money date because maybe you haven’t looked at your gas prices or you haven’t looked at your utilities or you see yourself falling behind on things. So it’s not a moment in which you are maybe just allowing yourself to have some grace, but it’s a moment where you actually need to call yourself out on the fact that like, no, Saturday, 9 to 9.30 AM before you go hang out with your friends, you need to sit down and have a full money date.
And so you decide. Like, is this a moment where I am going to give myself some grace so I’m doing the C-level work? Or is this a moment where I need to push through and I need to show myself some grit? So if you are listening to me right now and you’re thinking like, well Keina, I’ve been doing C-level work, I feel like my whole life. So that could just give you a lens to decide, what is it? Is it something that I actually need to push through? Or can I be okay with the fact that I am doing C-level work because it’s allowing me to make some progress? It’s allowing me to become a version of myself who’s looking at my numbers, staying connected to my numbers. I am developing a consistent practice. And I think a lot of times, I think the grace aspect is going to be where you are going to fall and that C-level work is going to be appropriate.
So here’s what I would leave you with today. What is your C-level work when it comes to your finances? Like, get specific. What are the things that you can do? And it could be a simple task. If you’re someone who’s like, you know what, I just want a simple task, like being able to pay off my credit card. Or I want to be able to look at my bank accounts. Do a simple task. Maybe you’re someone who’s more motivated or works better with a timeframe. And you can say like, I’m going to sit down and look at my numbers for 10 minutes. And then you can choose what you want to do in that 10 minutes. That could be your C-level work. What is one small action you can commit to consistently, even on the hardest weeks?
Answer that question for yourself because that’s your four. That’s what’s going to keep you in the game. A, C, still passing work and passing consistently over time will get you further along than a perfect grade. You can only hit once in a while. So I hope this episode is encouraging and is meeting you where you are right now when you’re thinking about your finances. But have a great week. And if you are listening and you’re like, Keina, I really want to work with you. I’ve been listening to you. You’re hitting the nail on the head. I feel like, my Alexa has been telling you about what I’ve been over here doing. Apply to work with me. You can go to the show notes and you can apply there or you can go to wealthovernow.com and you can book a call with me. So have a great week. Until next time, I will chat with you later.
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.
