🏦 Heal Your Relationship with Money — Rates & Revenue with Rachel Duncan

If you like magical money conversations, this episode is for you!

Today I’m joined by Rachel Duncan, a certified Financial Therapist and Art Psychotherapist who runs a company called the Money Healing Club.

Together we talk about the psychological, emotional, practical, and magical aspects of healing your relationship with money.

Tune in to hear us explore:

• Where money meets creativity
• What financial therapy is
• Neurodivergence & addiction in relationship to money
• The psycho-emotional aspects of setting rates
• What to do when you hit a revenue plateau

And stick around to the end where Rachel guides us through a visualization for remapping our relationship to money! 🐨

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Creators & Guests

Host

Amelia Hruby

Founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio & host of Off the Grid: Leaving Social Media Without Losing All Your Clients

What is Off The Grid: Leaving Social Media Without Losing All Your Clients?

Off The Grid is a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. ✌️ Our host, Amelia Hruby PhD, shares stories, strategies & experiments for growing your business with radical generosity & energetic sovereignty. 🌐 Get the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit

Amelia Hruby [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. Hello, and welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all of your clients. I'm Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio and the host of this here podcast, where we explore ways to grow or start your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.

Amelia Hruby [00:00:44]:
If you're brand new around here, I want to invite you to download the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit. It includes the three tools that I use to leave social media and launch a business without it including my very popular list of 100 ways to share your work without social media. You can get that for free at offthegrid.fun/toolkit or at the link in the show notes.

Amelia Hruby [00:01:08]:
Today on the show, we are returning to one of the conversational threads that we have had going throughout season three. In fact, we kicked off season three talking about this topic, and that topic, my friends, is money. So because I heard from so many of you that you could use more support rewriting your money stories, unpacking your money backgrounds, and being more intentional about your spending, being more expansive about your earning, all of these things. Because I got so many requests for that, I have invited a guest on today to give us all a little of our support, and let me tell you about her.

Amelia Hruby [00:01:52]:
Rachel Duncan is a financial therapist certified in trauma of money and an art therapist. She runs a company called the Money Healing Club and her small group money coaching program called the Healing Circle takes a trauma-informed, mindful, and creative approach to money management. Her work has been featured in Bankrate and FinCon 2023. And besides hosting unique emotional money conversations, which she's here to do today, she also loves to sing for her cats, children, and other audiences in Denver, Colorado. Welcome, Rachel. I'm so glad you're here.

Rachel Duncan [00:02:25]:
Hi, Amelia. It's so great to be here.

Amelia Hruby [00:02:28]:
We got connected through a friend of mine, shout out to Stephanie, who heard the overcoming under earning episode and basically went and did a whole bunch of her own research and was like, "Do you know who this person is? It seems like she might help." And I was like, "I don't know, but I will know her soon," and hence, you're here. I'm so thrilled to learn about your work and get to know you better. What struck me the most is that you are a financial therapist and an art therapist. And I find that that feels like left brain meets right brain to me. It feels like the perfect mix of that creative spirit with that structural thinker that we need to run our businesses. And so I'm curious if you could take us in by just talking a little bit about how money meets creativity in your background, in your work, or even more broadly?

Rachel Duncan [00:03:26]:
You know, it's so funny even though this really is my niche, I still need to practice articulating it because as we get into it and every person has their own process, I just learn more and more. I was one of those kids where I was really encouraged to be well rounded, and I was well rounded. I really enjoyed art class, and I really did well in math, and I tried to do well in everything. And so I've always had, a very strong right brain, left brain thing going on and kind of couldn't find my camp in either one and ended up getting a liberal arts degree, you know, all of that, "Oh, be well rounded, be well rounded," and kind of never really niched down or followed one specific interest.

Rachel Duncan [00:04:06]:
But I think when it comes down to it, I love the literal act of creating, like working with my hands, like manifesting something that didn't exist before, and also making the vague concrete. Making the abstract real, making the implicit explicit is the fanciest word, but that is what makes sense to me. And, actually, that's sort of what therapy is.

Rachel Duncan [00:04:31]:
So when I ended up going to graduate school for therapy, I was like, oh, this is taking this sort of sense you have, this little felt sense and putting words to it and putting images to it. And so my degree was integrated with mental health therapy and art therapy. So art making image response was integrated into all of our training with mental health. And when if you ever meet an art therapist, what's kind of cool is it's not only that there's mental health training, but it's that we sit with our client as an artist ourselves. And we tend to be a pretty sensitive bunch, like, "Oh, when when this topic came up, like, oh, I just felt purple. And what is that about?" And I'm having this own internal process even if in the session we don't make art. Like art therapy isn't just about making art, it's also the art therapist is experiencing the client from the perspective of an artist.

Rachel Duncan [00:05:29]:
So I found all that really compelling and really natural for me. I didn't realize I was such a visual thinker, but, like, that just sort of made a lot of sense to me. At the same time, I'm not a very typical art therapist. I'm like, well, what's the profit margin? How are you getting your paperwork done? And I enjoy the business side of things and the tactical side of things, and I find doing my own bookkeeping an act of creativity. I love checking boxes and seeing graphs, and it just all sort of makes sense to me. I don't find it that disparate, but I can understand how, for most folks, it is.

Rachel Duncan [00:06:04]:
So when I learned that financial therapy is even a thing about three or four years ago, it was like I was handed a permission slip to integrate these things that I had had to keep really separate. So that is how financial therapy and art therapy came to be for me. And actually, it didn't seem like such a stretch. It seemed like, oh, that's kind of what I've always been doing.

Amelia Hruby [00:06:27]:
You really just blew my mind in how you connected all of that together because I've never thought of how art making is molding the raw material of creativity or source, depending on how you think of it. And then therapy is like molding and rearticulating the raw material of our emotions and experiences. And then even working in our businesses can be molding the raw material of material, like the numbers or of the things we're creating. And I had not connected all three of those as a way of, as you put it, kind of connecting these more, like, abstract things and articulating them so we can say them and share them. And, again, that's just kinda blowing my mind right now.

Rachel Duncan [00:07:19]:
Oh, I'm so glad. And isn't it true for all business owners? It's like, okay, we're taking a difficult topic, a thing that someone doesn't have a solution for because it feels scary or overwhelming or they have a problem they can't solve. And we're taking that that abstraction and in our own way saying, here's a solution. It is the act of making something clear and concrete. That is what we do as business owners.

Amelia Hruby [00:07:45]:
It's really reminding me of the tarot card, the magician. Tarot is a big part of my personal practice, and I'm just thinking about how in that card, you have this figure who has a wand at the sky and a hand pointing to the ground, and they're like drawing down this sort of, like, divine inspiration of some kind. But I'm like, oh, it's like, with our art, we draw it down from the sky, and with our therapy, we draw it out from within ourselves. And with our businesses, we we draw it out from the world around us. But it's all about making it concrete, making it real, making it understandable and clear to other people. And that just is magic to me. I mean, that's how I think about it.

Rachel Duncan [00:08:26]:
It is. It's magic. I think that what we do, especially when we're creating something new, it's magic and it's so human, it's so deeply human to do that. I was also a religion major. So there's something about like, what is this human experience? What is this thing that I can taste, but I can't quite articulate and then someone says it, and you're like, ah, that's it. Right? That's poetry. That is scripture. That is whatever you wanna call it.

Rachel Duncan [00:08:57]:
It's like when someone else can put it into words or image or an experience that, like, oh, I hear that, I taste that, I see that, and that's that thing I haven't been able to articulate. And someone else sometimes does it for us. That's the role of the artist. And then a therapist has the same thing. A therapist is only reflecting you back to you. But because they're saying it, because it's real, it's happening with a real person, oh, it's suddenly very real. "My experience is actually feeling much more real," instead of this sort of vague notion in my head or in my heart or wherever wherever it feels like it is, sometimes outside of our body, but this person is making it feel real for me.

Amelia Hruby [00:09:37]:
And that to me is the experience of resonance, which we talked about on a recent episode with Jay Acunzo and also which is a concept related to sound that I approach in my podcast editing work just the way that we can quite literally and more magically get on the same frequency or share something that has literally the same vibration as what someone else is experiencing. And I just love already where this conversation is going, and I wanna now sprinkle in some more money.

Amelia Hruby [00:10:12]:
So I feel like we're talking about the art therapy side or we're really in it together there. But can you tell me about financial therapy? Because I don't really know what it is or how it works, and I'd love to kinda get the 101 from you. What is financial therapy, and what do you do as a financial therapist?

Rachel Duncan [00:10:30]:
Totally fair question. And that's actually what I try to do is bridging this like ephemeral with a practical because that's how I live. That's where I'm at. And so I try to bring that to my clients. Financial therapy is a relatively new field. It's pretty small also. The Financial Therapy Association has been around, I wanna say, around 20 years, I think. And when someone says they're a financial therapist, it means that they have a professional higher degree in either finance related stuff or mental health and have done some cross training.

Rachel Duncan [00:11:02]:
So I recommend folks check out the Financial Therapy Association. They have a listing, but know that you're gonna get a range of finance people who've learned a little bit of counseling skills or counselors who've learned some finance skills. So knowing just sort of where people are coming from is important. So, obviously, I come from the mental health background. There are fewer of us. There are more people on the finance side who really recognize that behavioral finance and stuff like that is really important. So because it's sort of an infant field, I think it's finding its way. There are some certificates and things like that, but I will say at this point because there's so few of us, I think we're all finding our own way.

Rachel Duncan [00:11:38]:
Every financial therapist is gonna have their own flavor. How I approach it is not necessarily how a different financial therapist would approach it. We all have our niches. But I would say because I know a lot of the financial therapists who come from the mental health side, we're really bringing our therapy skills into a money conversation just as any therapist who niches into a topic or population. You know, a sex therapist, a trauma therapist is like, "Okay. This topic I know a lot about. I can hold space about that and, guide people in this very tricky topic." So that's sort of the analogous thing.

Rachel Duncan [00:12:17]:
So my clients are therapy people. They, like, love their therapy. So what's really great is, like, if someone's in therapy to maybe treat depression, anxiety, trauma, whatever that is, and money has come up in a way that the therapist can't quite go with them because a lot of therapists haven't done their own money work. That's another thing. You only go as far in therapy as your therapist has gone themselves. So often I come in for like a eight session intensive to kind of help forward the growth by bringing in the money stuff. So that's sort of like what I've ended up doing here in Colorado. I also started the Money Healing Club to just be able to reach a wider audience in a coaching and education model.

Rachel Duncan [00:13:00]:
So that's kind of a a long winded way of saying, it's a profession that is really finding itself. I think it's you're gonna hear more and more about it. There's been a lot of recent press. That's how I heard about it. I think there was a New York Times article. So there is this, like, A, I've never heard of that before, and, B, that completely makes sense, because just what we're seeing in the economy with such a disparate spread of wealth. While there is a lot of financial information and access out there that didn't exist for our parents' generation, there still isn't a way for the majority of people to kind of sit with money and learn about money, and it is fraught with systemic trauma.

Rachel Duncan [00:13:44]:
So, of course, when someone wants to avoid money and I know you really unpack that in that episode. When we avoid things, it's like, this isn't an information issue. This is like a relational thing. So for myself and other financial therapists who come from the mental health world is really, really see the systemic trauma going on and really try to help heal that so that we can approach this topic and use all of our intelligences to get around this big money topic.

Amelia Hruby [00:14:14]:
That last piece was actually really helpful for me because I think that often when we're struggling with money, what is available to us most readily would be financial literacy. That's the information problem you're mentioning. "Maybe I just don't know enough about money, and that's why it's not working for me. I don't know what stocks are. I've never bought a bond. I don't have a loan or a mortgage." Like, there are informational deficits, certainly, and financial literacy can help us with that. But as you said, if you find yourself avoiding money or for me also very anxiously attached to money. I mean, at the peak of some of my struggles, I was checking my bank balance over a dozen times a day. Nothing was happening in my bank account, but I was really struggling with just believing the money was there or noticing there wasn't enough money there, like all these things that were spiraling and spinning in my mind.

Amelia Hruby [00:15:08]:
Financial literacy can't help me with. That's a relational issue, as you said. And so that, I'm hearing, is where financial therapy comes in. When you're having those struggles with your relationship to money, which can emerge like the struggles we have with any other relationship in our life. Intrusive thoughts, anxiety, depression, avoidant attachment, anxious attachment, like whatever lenses listeners might be using to approach the relationships with other people in their lives. You can also look at your relationship with money and say, like, oh, is that happening here? And then perhaps it sounds like a financial therapist could help if you wanna unpack those. Although I'm also hearing you say find one who's a therapist first maybe if that's your biggest goal because some of the financial services first people may just be more like, "Great. Let's look at your money first." Not let's talk about your feelings first.

Rachel Duncan [00:15:58]:
I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, it's also just about finding right fit. And I do not push that vulnerability of showing your numbers the way a financial adviser might be like, "Well, send me all your numbers, then we'll talk about it." And I wanna get to know the person. I wanna have them verbalize about their money. As a financial therapist, I'm noticing how my client is talking about the money. That's more informative for me than what their money is actually at, what levels, and things like that. I mean, it's all important. It's all really important.

Rachel Duncan [00:16:32]:
So one of the things that I have found in my practice, the type of folks I attract and do my best work with are often millennials, not always, but mostly millennials, late diagnosed ADHD and autism or autism, neurodivergence for sure, and often with an experience of addiction in the past. So it's just really interesting. It's like, oh, wow. They these these themes keep coming up, and I don't have anywhere in my copy about attracting these people, but there's something about that. I think these folks have been in therapy a lot, really appreciate that experience, really need that body doubling, that experience of being with somebody, and they're very visual thinkers.

Rachel Duncan [00:17:14]:
And then the addiction part has been my deep dive of 2023. I I really hadn't done a lot of training in addiction in my graduate school and I really got into it. I'm like, oh, wow. This is so here. Especially folks who are actively sober, have gone through recovery, but found, oh, that addictive behavior transferred to money. So I'll say that is where my interest lies, and I think there's so much more work to be done in that field. Money has such a high reward experience. It's also everywhere. We have to interact with it, it has very addictive qualities.

Rachel Duncan [00:17:49]:
The other unspoken part about our money is class and how we were raised and the multigenerational experience with money. There's really something here in terms of intergenerational trauma, lessons. Really, trauma is a way of transmitting information and lessons about safety. And so a topic I often get into is exploring what we know about our grandparents and great grandparents, our people, are there stories of migration, how are they impacted by war? Both of my parents were deeply impacted by World War II. My dad was like, "Never have a credit card." The depression really impacted his family. So there's so much context and lessons about money that we learn from our family.

Rachel Duncan [00:18:38]:
And there's a lot of class identity too. I think this is one of the aspects of my own under earning, is this, I'm putting in air quotes, we're poor but proud. And there are these sometimes these family mantras that like, "Well, then if I pursue wealth, am I not part of my people anymore?" And I think this is one of those things that like, oh, we haven't talked about it, but once we start talking about it, it's so there. That's so our lived experience. I find that class and family identity and culture, culture in the greatest intersectionality you can think of, really has the strongest weight on how we are viewing our money today.

Amelia Hruby [00:19:16]:
That is so true of my experience. Like, laughing because it hurts a little bit. I'm like, "Ugh." I don't think I shared this in the overcoming under earning episode, but what was contemporaneous with me doing all that money work was me moving from Chicago to Nebraska, which is where my family has lived for generations. And I have never lived here before, but my parents are both from here. And when I moved here, I was suddenly immersed in these multigenerational narratives in a way that I never had been through, like, a much closer relationship with my grandmother, through a lot of genealogical research I was doing, and just uncovering this quite literally bone deep connection between hard work and worthiness that just lives so strongly in all these generations of my family on both sides.

Amelia Hruby [00:20:10]:
And it was actually kind of like that that got me into the money work in a certain way, or maybe I knew I was having money problems, but when I dug really deep that is the narrative that I'm still unraveling, still unpacking. And it's interesting to see that money is just like a proxy within that. Like, money is not the thing people in my family have the complex about. It's the work and the worthiness, but money is what we see as indicative of that. It's like the symbol symbolic of all of that.

Amelia Hruby [00:20:39]:
So that's just my personal experience, but I'm so intrigued that what you see in your work is working with a lot of people who are experiencing or living with neurodivergence, histories of addiction, very much these sorts of personal understandings of their psyche and how it works and their in relationship to their experiences, and then also all of the family and intergenerational narratives that come up. And I think that both of those things take us right into therapy and then lead us right to our money issues.

Rachel Duncan [00:21:08]:
Yeah. And I mean, you're right. Money is neutral. Money is a way to exchange for goods and services. It is an organizer. It's neutral, but it amplifies the issues. And like that phrase, follow the money, but, in my work, you follow the money and you end up hearing what needs to be heard. You end up getting to the nugget of what needs to be actually explored. So, people often come to me like, "Oh, I overspend. I'm a shopping addict, whatever." That's what they come to me for, and we start unpacking it. But the journey is, how do I please myself? How do I satisfy myself? How can I adjust my my money script while honoring my ancestors?

Rachel Duncan [00:21:56]:
It gets so deep and that's where the lasting change happens. You will not hear me say you gotta make a budget, you gotta get strict with yourself. My approach is completely gentle and holistic because it's an inside out approach. And then people end up, like, not only getting better with their money, but they end up trusting themselves. They end up rediscovering childhood hobbies, all this interesting stuff, they feel better in their body. It's like this ripple effect is so interesting to me, and that's why it's so important. It's like it is about the money, and it is so much bigger than the money.

Amelia Hruby [00:22:31]:
I'm really hearing you say healing our relationship with money can heal or support the healing of our relationship with self and plenty of other relationships in our lives, and that feels very related to something I say on this podcast often, which is leaving social media is really about liberating ourselves from this platform algorithmic system. And when we do that, we end up liberating ourselves from many other things in our lives. When we step away from this one thing that makes us feel really bad, it ripples into our ability to step away from other things that make us feel really bad. Leaving is a form of healing, I think, can be in the case of social media. So I just am really hearing all of this healing work that we may do with something that seems so inconsequential like social media, you're like, "Yeah, of course I need to heal my intergenerational trauma, Amelia, but heal my relationship with social media? Like, who cares?" But it matters.

Rachel Duncan [00:23:29]:
Yeah. Every no is actually a yes. Like, "Oh, I'm gonna not buy lattes this week". Okay. Fine. So what is the yes that's implicit in that? Like, there's the opposite side. And so, like with your platform, which I love, by the way, so much, it's like, "Okay. I'm gonna leave that because it doesn't serve me because I'm going towards something." So even in like a micro thing, you wanna set a little challenge for yourself around spending. Great. Like, that usually comes from my clients. I'm not going to suggest that, but what are we going towards? Oh, we're going towards feeling full in my body. Oh, I'm going towards reading more.

Rachel Duncan [00:24:04]:
Whatever we go towards when we want to stop a habit or whatever that doesn't serve us, it's like the ultimate self care. We're always going towards self care. So I try to focus on that. It's not so much what you're not doing. It's what you're going towards. It's always the best form of self care we can find, and it's unique for everybody. I'm not gonna say, like, do yoga and light a candle unless that's your thing. It could be play more video games. I don't know what it is for you, but we're going towards something.

Amelia Hruby [00:24:36]:
Oh, absolutely. And this reminds me of an essay that I wrote related to a podcast episode I had heard and will have to find and link in the show notes, but the argument of that episode was basically that budget culture is diet culture, and that really deeply resonated for me. And I've talked before on this show about how I think I was able to break up with social media because I actually broke up with diet culture before that, which felt like a much deeper, more radical shift in my life. And once I had that breakup, I was like, cool. I'm not really willing to settle for feeling bad in these other areas of my life now that I finally feel good in my body, and so that I could break up with social media and break up with budgeting. And I think what's so strong about those parallels is that budget culture and diet culture are both about restriction and deficit and saying no to yourself, and I love that reframe.

Rachel Duncan [00:25:25]:
It's white patriarchy. It's puritanical. It's all of this stuff once you start looking at it. This, like, pull yourself up from your bootstraps. When have you ever grown and learned from that approach, that highly restrictive approach? No. And so what I try to express is we're actually gonna plan for setbacks. That's part of the process. If you go through a setback, "Oh, I was doing so well with my budget. I was spending less, and then, my cousin came to town or I had a shit day, and I had that fuck it moment, and I bought a cruise or I bought that handbag."

Rachel Duncan [00:25:58]:
Everyone describes it the same, as this fuck it moment. And this is actually the diet cycle, the budget cycle, the addiction cycle where we get really rigid with ourselves. "It's never gonna be the same or I'm gonna change all this," and then we can't hold that. It's not soft enough. It doesn't grow enough. It doesn't let us have a bad day. But what happens is when we can anticipate a shit day, a fuck it moment, but you observe it happening. "Oh, this is the thing that Rachel told me might happen. And I'm going to love myself through it and be like, yeah, I had a shit day. What if I learn from it?"

Rachel Duncan [00:26:36]:
So in addiction counseling, we anticipate the, quote relapse, but recovery means you learn from each cycle. You'll never step out of the cycle, but the cycle will get less intense. It will get less dramatic if you will learn from it each time. It won't turn out to be a straight line. It just won't, but you'll spiral upwards.

Amelia Hruby [00:26:56]:
Yes. Absolutely. And my phrasing around the show is also how I think of energetic sovereignty. It's not about control. It's about our ability to surf the waves. The waves are gonna keep coming. Sometimes they're gonna be really big. Sometimes they're gonna be come from the inside. Sometimes they're gonna come from the outside. And we're strengthening our ability to surf them no matter what the wave conditions are and to recognize that we're gonna wipe out sometimes. But energetic sovereignty is not about controlling all the energy. It's not power over. It's about being with it all and being able to stay with yourself through it all, which is exactly what I'm hearing you describe.

Rachel Duncan [00:27:38]:
And money work is boundary work. We talk about boundaries all the time, boundaries of yourself, social boundaries. The boundaries are endless, and I find boundaries to be an unending topic that I'm still totally exploring. And when I hear you say energetic sovereignty, that feels like healthy, flexible boundaries as well. I know where I end and you begin, and we can look at it and we can change it. And it's not diffuse boundaries, but it's flexible boundaries, which I think is so important in life, and we really see that with money too.

Rachel Duncan [00:28:12]:
It's like, "Okay. I wasn't gonna buy that avocado toast, and then I wanted it. And am I gonna just allow myself to do that? Because I want it and I am still a good person?" And once you actually get in that place, you develop more mindfulness around how you are with money. And I think that speaks to what you're saying also that I just feel like sovereignty also means there's like a knowing. There's a knowledge of what's going on. You're not avoiding topics or avoiding aspects of that.

Amelia Hruby [00:28:44]:
Are you feeling fed up, burned out or totally sick of social media? Are you wondering if your business might be able to be successful without it or if your creative work would still find its way out in the world without you posting it on Instagram or TikTok every 10 minutes? If you could relate to any of these musings of mine, I wanna invite you to join me in the Interweb. The Interweb is an annual membership for creatives, artists, small business owners, freelancers, influencers, entrepreneurs and creators who want support sharing their work and making money without social media. When you join, you get access to on demand courses taught by biz friends across the Internet and quarterly live events with me, Amelia. If you love this podcast, I hope that you'll head to the show notes to learn more and sign up so that I really can see you off the grid and on the Interweb. Now let's get back into today's episode.

Amelia Hruby [00:29:50]:
So I wanna transition us into this business owner specific part of the conversation, and I wanna talk about setting rates and receiving money because this is a really big challenge for a lot of business owners at every stage of business, and I'm curious for your perspective on the psycho-emotional aspects of this. So I'm not asking you how do you price your services? I'm asking you how do you actually get the gumption to charge for what you do, and then let people pay you for it, and then receive that money. Could you share a little bit about how we can support ourselves in that process?

Rachel Duncan [00:30:29]:
Well, I'll say I'm right there with you. It's tough. A lot of my own work for sure. And I'll share just sort of my own process because that's sometimes all I can do. Coming from both an under earning type of family system as well as being an admin assistant all through my twenties. I was always in this assisting role, I think, similar to your story, being very grateful for the job, being told I was doing great work and I was so valuable, but that not equaling money and people in positions of power in my life telling me that that was how it's supposed to be and it's taken a lot to work through that. I'm still definitely working through that.

Rachel Duncan [00:31:10]:
In the pandemic, when I had to step away from my therapy practice, I have young children and had to be in a caregiving role, and I really missed therapy. And I mean, I miss being a therapist, I should say. I was in therapy myself, but I miss being a therapist. And I started to think about being a therapist is really good for me. So much of the the training and how therapists come to be is like, "Oh, it's in service of the client. You help the client." And that's a huge reason why we're there. But I actually can't do this work if it's not also for me. And being a therapist is good for me I am part of this.

Rachel Duncan [00:31:45]:
And I don't know if this logic tracks for you. This is how it goes on my mind. Okay, if therapy is essential for me as a person and I need to do this work, then I need to charge a rate that allows me to do the work. And I know that seems simple. For some reason, that was a revolution in my head, that I respect my client's sovereignty about what they can and cannot pay for the service, and that is okay, and I am not for everyone. But this is a transaction that needs to happen for me to do the work. If you believe in the work that I do, then this is what must happen for this work to exist. That started to click in for me in the pandemic.

Rachel Duncan [00:32:25]:
And then there's also some of the evidence. As business owners, we sometimes throw spaghetti on the wall. When I raise my rates, I got more clients. Because there is a communication that happens with rate setting, with pricing that is about value. It's literally about value. People value the things that they pay more for. Now granted, I think there's a ceiling. I don't think this means everyone should charge thousands of dollars an hour. I don't think that's that's not that's not quite the point here, but it is actually about consent. And so I really live in this place of consent.

Rachel Duncan [00:33:00]:
As a business owner, I have kind of done the numbers. I gotta charge this for this business to exist. I would love for you to be part of it. It is an offer, but you have to consent to it. And so anytime you buy anything, we are consenting to this dollar amount being the thing that allows this thing to exchange, and it I think it should always be about consent. So I've experimented a lot of different things. I think that pricing psychology, there's a lot to it, and there's probably people who are more experts in it than I am, but there is a kind of energetic exchange when we pay for something. We are now connected in this way, it connects us. I think they call it like, reciprocity bias. We've exchanged that thing, therefore we are connected now.

Rachel Duncan [00:33:47]:
So I take that really seriously, and I'm still playing with it. I gotta say, I've sort of switched my services and my business model in 2024. I'm kinda thinking about switching it back. I don't know. Because I'm trying to find the right match to help the most people as possible and help myself because it has to be good for me. So it's kind of like a roundabout way of describing how I think of pricing. What do you think?

Amelia Hruby [00:34:13]:
I really appreciate where you started because you started in the place of the artist, the place of the creator, which is like, yes, I do this work and it's a job, but like I do this job because I have to. Part of me needs to be creating this, and for you that needs to be holding the conversations of therapy. Maybe it's not a painting, but I still think that is a creative practice. Conversations are created and creative, I believe, as a podcaster. So I think that for people who are creators first, and this is all you Off the Grid listeners out there. Maybe you don't think of yourself as an artist, maybe you do. Maybe you're a writer, maybe you're a creator, maybe you're a podcaster, maybe you're a therapist, any of these things, but you are in the creative act in your business. It has to start from what is the thing that you love doing and you need to do? And that's gonna be the what of your business, the service or the offering.

Amelia Hruby [00:35:12]:
But then also for you to do that, you have to receive and return. And I think a lot of people get caught in that. They have not had that unlocking that you've had, and they're really struggling to even charge for their work. And then what happens is they undervalue it, and they're like, "Okay. I gotta charge for this." They throw out a number that's the least or actually, the highest bid of their threshold, which is maybe, like, a $100. I see this a lot. I've done this. Believe me. I sell hours of my time for a $100.

Rachel Duncan [00:35:41]:
That's such an anchor point, a $100, and it probably felt the same 10, 20 years ago. And it should have shifted with inflation, but there's something about that. Also, six figures. The six figures is really cemented for us. I think it's very interesting. Yeah.

Amelia Hruby [00:35:56]:
And that's personal and cultural, like you're saying. But what I heard in your story is you might be deeply undervaluing your work when you only charge a $100 for it, and then people will undervalue it in return. And something I've said on this show before is if you've been sharing your work, there are people in your audience or community who think you charge way too much and people who think you charge way too little. I would not go to a therapist who only charged me $20 a session. I would be like, what are we doing? The value wouldn't make sense to me. I also wouldn't go to a therapist who costs $20,000 a session because that value wouldn't make sense to me.

Amelia Hruby [00:36:38]:
And I just think that we have to maybe to go back to where I started. There is this piece of, we have to learn to charge for our work. We have to learn to value ourselves. This is where that financial therapy work, I'm sure, around worthiness really comes in. What are the narratives we're holding on to that we don't believe we could charge for our work? How do we unpack that so that when we even get to the moment of setting a rate, we're ready to value ourselves and ready to receive the information from our community and clients because that's the other thing. We can get up all that gumption to set our rates, but we also have to be ready to receive a yes or a no in response to that.

Amelia Hruby [00:37:18]:
And I think that's what keeps us often from putting the rate out there. If I had to do all this work to even charge whatever X dollar amount may be and then nobody buys it, that can be a real wound to our worthiness. And I've witnessed this with clients, and it's really hard to keep going in those moments where we feel rejected and wounded by our business, by our community in that way.

Rachel Duncan [00:37:45]:
Or when I'm reflecting on myself, I think I'm at the point where I have exhausted my organic community, where I had a lot of early wins, which was great. Once I said I was a financial therapist, people came knocking. Oh my gosh. And it's great. But, now a couple years in, I've reached all those people I was gonna reach. They've worked with me. They've gone on. They're doing great because I'm good at my job.

Rachel Duncan [00:38:13]:
And, oh, I'm like, is this rejection, or is this I actually need to continue my reach that, like, that initial audience was already warmed up and the ones who are gonna buy bought? And I'm literally right now really trying to understand this and looking at reach and things like that. The other thing I'll say on just a really practical level, I have a visualization of the billed hour as a pie graph. I think we confuse wage with billed hour. And if I charge someone $100 for my hour, like a slice of that is my wage. There's a slice for taxes, there's a slice for expenses, there's a slice for my time off, there's a slice for all of the training that I do for that hour because no one is billing 40 hours a week. You're maybe billing, you know, for therapists usually around 10 to 20 hours a week. So you can't confuse that with your wage because you you can't earn that for 40 times a week. So you do need to think of it as a unit of service, a unit of experience that supports you.

Rachel Duncan [00:39:20]:
Again, this has to be good for me. This supports me going to that conference. This supports me reading. This supports me with my self care because self care is actually an ethical mandate for therapists. And I would say for artists as well. You don't do good work if you're burned out. So actually that is part of the service is you not being burned out. So you need to be able to charge the amount that allows for you to be really good at your work and not be burned out. And it's gonna be more than $100 an hour. You're right. That's such an important anchor point. And maybe that's even a reach for folks, but that I would say is bare minimum for just modern life right now.

Amelia Hruby [00:40:00]:
And I think this is where we can bring that spirit of play and self care and creativity into playing with these numbers and understanding what they are. And then our role as business owners is once we have that number of, this is what I need to charge per hour or this is what I need to charge per session or this is what I need to make per month, then we get to kind of invent the offerings that we think can do that and go find the people that can afford to pay that. So the other place I really see a mismatch around setting rates and receiving money is that sometimes, especially if we're under earners, I speak from experience here, we may have embedded ourself in a community of other under earners, which means that when we try to actually set a rate that can support us, none of those people are showing up to pay it because they either quite literally can't afford it or they feel they can't afford it, which I think are often different things.

Amelia Hruby [00:40:54]:
And so it may be that a part of our work is going to find the people in cultivating at least a business relationship with communities that can afford this work in their own conception of what affording means, which again, I think is way more than just the numbers and the bank. It has a lot more to do with perceived value and relationship with money and self and all of this. And so that's another piece of this. And so when we figure out what that supportive rate is, we have to cultivate the capacity to receive that much money, and we define the people who have the capacity to pay that much money. And that can all be really challenging.

Amelia Hruby [00:41:35]:
And then on top of that, you get to your situation where I'm really hearing of business has been going great because you seem to me like someone who had already brought a big community into this, and so you had years of just working for that community you already had. And then it's like what's next? To me, that's the transition into being a mid-stage business owner, like, early stage, which can be years and years for some people. You're just working with that community you already knew. I think moving into mid-stage is really proving that this has value to people that I have not met and that I'm able to bridge that gap. And for some people, that happens really fast. And for others who have these more service based relational businesses, I think it can take longer because we've always been embedded in community. We're able to sell our stuff to the people we know, and then all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, what's next?"

Rachel Duncan [00:42:28]:
All those people bought.

Amelia Hruby [00:42:29]:
Now where did they go? It's kind of like my business coach and friend, Jessica Lackey, always reminds me that it's the same thing when you sell a course for the first time, you might sell it out, especially if you've got a mailing list that you've never sold a course to before. But then when you go sell it for the second time, you might not sell a single one because all the people who were gonna buy just bought. And now you actually need way more new people to fill your course a second time, and so that dynamic happens in our businesses.

Rachel Duncan [00:43:00]:
And it's great. And you want to be giving a great service. You want the people to buy from you, who engage in whatever you've got to be really satisfied. And sometimes you do such a good job. I have a friend who's just a really, really gifted trauma therapist, and she's like, "I just keep healing my clients. You know? They work with me for two or three months, and they go on, and they're so good." And so if you know that your service is like that, and I'm kinda like that too, maybe an intensive for a few months and then some maintenance after that.

Rachel Duncan [00:43:31]:
Oh, then that means I have to be meeting X amount of new people every month. And that starts to get a little mind blowing. And you have to get really creative about like, "Okay. It's not the product. It's the reach. It's the reach."

Amelia Hruby [00:43:47]:
And what I'm hearing you say is you have to diagnose that correctly. Because you may think like, "Oh, it's my service that's the problem. Oh, it's my pricing that's the problem." But actually, it is that reach. It's how are you bringing new people into your ecosystem over and over again to keep doing this work for the long term.

Rachel Duncan [00:44:06]:
And I think that as business owners, we're way more obsessed with the price than our customers are.

Amelia Hruby [00:44:10]:
I cosign that.

Rachel Duncan [00:44:12]:
Yeah. I've had people join the club who are like, "All I saw was Money Healing Club, and I bought." They didn't read my website. They didn't look at my stuff. I am on social media, but they're just like, "All I saw was Money Healing Club. Yep. Like, I'll pay anything for that." So, I think we get a little obsessive about that. I don't think the clients care so much. There's a range there. But if you really need that person's help, like, they don't care about that as much as we do.

Amelia Hruby [00:44:42]:
100%. And that's part of why pain point marketing is so effective is because if someone is actually in pain, I'm not here to say "generate false pain points" nor am I here to say "exploit people who are in pain" but when you do find yourself in pain, you're pretty willing to pay for and try whatever you think will really support you and and heal you. And that work is really valuable and that's why it costs money. So you very generously offered to close us out with a visualization. So I was hoping we could take our last five to 10 minutes to kind of experience that together, I guess, for you to guide me in it and by proxy guide the listeners in it, and then wrap up our conversation. Can we go there now?

Rachel Duncan [00:45:25]:
I would love it. Let's get into it. Okay. So, if I were doing this in a session, I would probably have someone make an image, and so listeners are welcome to do that. But just so we don't have loads of silent time, I'm just gonna have you sort of verbally process with me. I'm going to give you a prompt. And it's gonna sort of wake up the the right side of your brain, which is the intuitive image processing part of your brain. And it's the part that's running all the time, but it's often quiet. And the left side of our brain, the more verbal analytical stuff that is much louder usually, but we're gonna quiet that down and listen to the other side of the brain.

Rachel Duncan [00:46:04]:
I'm gonna give you a prompt and I want you to notice the first thing that comes up and without analyzing it and without editing it. So if we were sitting down in session, I would have you make this image, and we'd have kind of a few minutes of silent time for you to work on it, just so you know, the normal setting. Alright, Amelia. Are you ready? Take a breath. Kinda get a little quiet. Well, I want you to imagine your money as a creature. It can be a real or imagined creature.

Amelia Hruby [00:46:36]:
Okay. I'm imagining a koala bear. That's what came up.

Rachel Duncan [00:46:42]:
A koala bear. Yeah. It's never wrong. So as you have this image forming in your mind, it might already be taking some shape. What just do you notice about about this image? What about any sensations you have, surprises? What is it like to have this image come up for you?

Amelia Hruby [00:47:10]:
It feels very joyful, a little silly. I think koala bears are very cute and very silly looking creatures. It's like eating a lot of leaves, and it won't stop eating.

Rachel Duncan [00:47:24]:
Okay. But it was eating.

Amelia Hruby [00:47:26]:
Yes. Hanging out on the tree, eating the leaves, just crunching on those twigs, and I have a smile on my face. I feel just happy to witness it.

Rachel Duncan [00:47:41]:
Happy to witness it. Yeah. Alright. Now as you have this image in your head and if people are listening, if you've drawn an image, that's that's even better. What does this creature need right now to feel complete? This could be in addition to its environment, it could be something for it to work with, it could be a some kind of change And ask it. You can ask it. What do you need to feel complete, koala bear?

Amelia Hruby [00:48:16]:
I think it's really emanating a deep sense of satisfaction. It feels like it has what it needs as long as there are leaves on this tree.

Rachel Duncan [00:48:28]:
And after having asked it what it needed and it responded to you, are there any changes you've noticed about the image, about the creature, about you?

Amelia Hruby [00:48:39]:
I've noticed that the image keeps fluctuating between abundance of leaves, scarcity of leaves. Like, it's like it's flickering in and out. I feel like I don't trust that there are plenty of leaves on the tree. That's a me thing. I feel like koala bears chill.

Rachel Duncan [00:48:57]:
You don't trust, but the koala does. That's interesting. Yeah. Okay. Really good to notice that. Right? That image, it's not just the koala. It's the leaves. It's the environment. It's the thing that it's consuming. And the koala trusts. That's interesting. Yeah. The koalas, we said, joyful, content, filled. There's something about you observing it, that there's a dynamic there. Yeah. What wisdom does this image have for you?

Amelia Hruby [00:49:38]:
The first thing that's coming to mind, I'm giggling because it's silly. But the first thing that came to mind was I was like, oh, I need to be the koala I wish to see in the world. But, not to misappropriate Gandhi's wisdom or something, but to do that. I think that what I'm seeing is, when embedded in its home environment, the koala has plenty and is happy, and I have trouble trusting that the environment will provide, trusting that being in the right place, the place where I'm meant to be, the place where the koala is meant to be, I don't really trust it. So I think that that's the wisdom I'm taking away is. I think this is very much a corollary to my experience of money and particularly making money in Softer Sounds. I'm witnessing the evidence that it's working. I have trouble trusting that it will stay.

Amelia Hruby [00:50:43]:
And that's where I'm at in my current money journey and money work as well. I've gotten in touch with what's enough. I see the evidence that I have it and can experience it. I felt that deep satisfaction, but I slip out of it sometimes. I don't trust it. And it's like I dissociate a little bit. Like, outside of myself looking at myself, and I'm scared and that I don't trust. And that's the same with me looking at the koala I think.

Rachel Duncan [00:51:15]:
Well, and here's the thing. You don't have to be this creature. This creature is a thing you are in relationship with, and it has wisdom for you. Often when we ask money what we should know from it, it's often this very steady, compassionate, boundaried response. Like, "I'm here for you." Almost always when I do this exercise with folks, there's this, "I'm here for you. I'm here to serve you." In some way or another, it's very compassionate. It's also very boundaried.

Rachel Duncan [00:51:50]:
When I've really unpacked this exercise with people, it's like, "Oh, money also has an opinion. It's not like it's unopinionated." But it wants really good things for us, and that's the relationship. And that you might forget. You might not trust it. That's okay. Money's like, "It's okay." But it has a spirit to it that I think is really important to relate to. And as I'll say, this exercise changes every time I do it.

Rachel Duncan [00:52:18]:
I have a new creature that comes to my mind. It's been everything from a dragon to a rat. So it's also where you're at at this moment, and this is the way it's such good information, such good intuitive information. I have yet to encounter someone who has trouble with this exercise. And I would leave it at that. And for you to take the wisdom from this, for you to also let the image kinda do its work. Often it kinda lingers, let yourself dream on it, and it might start changing as you notice it. And that's a really cool process.

Amelia Hruby [00:52:56]:
Yeah. Oh, beautiful. Thank you so much, Rachel. I can't wait to dream of my money koala. Seems like a cool symbolic image to work with, to let my subconscious unravel. Well, thank you again for this entire conversation, for sharing this visualization, for guiding me through it. I hope listeners can rewind and pause and move through it on their own. For the many folks who I am sure want to work with you now, could you just tell them how they can work with you and where they can find you online?

Rachel Duncan [00:53:27]:
So, moneyhealingclub.com is where everything lives. I'm on TikTok and Instagram at MoneyHealingClub, and come to my website for my, free seven day mindful spending challenge, where you get seven lovingly crafted mindfulness prompts every day, and it ends in a workshop, in a webinar. That is some of my best work. And I really can guarantee this is a talk about money that is not usually out there. It's very compassionate. It's very gentle, but very effective.

Amelia Hruby [00:54:02]:
Beautiful. Well, we will link to all of that in the show notes as well. And beautiful listeners, I hope this conversation has served continuing along your money journeys and your money healing journeys specifically, and I hope that you'll check out Rachel's work. And, yeah, just thank you, Rachel. Thank you, listeners. Until next time, I will see you all off the grid and on the Interweb.

Amelia Hruby [00:55:02]:
Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by n'Atelier Studio. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby, and until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the Interweb.