Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
“When I prioritize connecting to Source, making money actually becomes easier. Because those who are turned on by life, those who are allowing life force to flow through them are magnetic.” – Kate Northrup
What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
Kate Northrup: Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host, Kate Northrup, and together, we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level. Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of hunting. Let's go fill our cups.
Kate Northrup: Hello. Welcome to Plenty. We are kicking off today a special 7 episode solo episode series to get you started healing your relationship with money or to take your money healing relationship to the next level if you've already been doing that for a while. So this week is a special week for two reasons. Number 1, it is the spring equinox.
It is a time in the northern hemisphere of rebirth because we are heading into a season of new beginnings. Today marks the day when or right around today well, it's actually today, I think, marks the day when the day is exactly the same length as the night, and we are moving towards the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year. So energetically speaking, this is the perfect time to begin a new project, and the project for this 7 part series is healing and expanding your relationship with money so you can feel more relaxed, so you can experience more abundance both financially and in all the other ways just so that you can live a richer life. So that's what we're here for. Now the second reason this week is a big week is because it is my birthday.
I am a spring equinox baby. I was born on March 20 first, the day that, the sun moved from Pisces to Aries. I don't know why, but my mother did not want a Pisces baby. So, being the good girl that I was and that I'm still working on breaking the conditioning from, I waited and she went into labor at midnight when Pisces moved into Aries. So I am right at the lead of the zodiac.
I am an excellent starter. I really struggle with finishing things. That is why I married Mike, my Virgo king, who is amazing at the follow through. But we are going to follow through with this 7 episode series, and I'm really excited to kick it off today with 4 key money lessons that I have learned about money over the past 4 decades. So here we go.
These things that I'm gonna share with you today have helped me to create a multi seven figure business and to live a life that really is exactly what I dreamed of. I mean, it's different, but, in terms of being able to be present for my kids, in terms of having the free time to be able to spend it with incredible people talking about cool ideas, reading books, writing books, getting to engage in creative projects just for the fuck of it, just because I can, and including all of that in a way of making money that I absolutely love. Like, the fact that what I am doing right now is what I get paid to do is a dream beyond dreams. The fact that I get to cozy up here with a cup of coffee and my do less mug in my own studio recording this podcast to share ideas that have made a difference for me and 100 of thousands of people to get to share these ideas with you is such a dream. And so these 4 money lessons I'm gonna share with you today, there might be a bonus 5th, we'll see, are the things that have unlocked the biggest prosperity in terms of financial resources and in terms of time resources because, actually, our time is our most valuable resource, and so many people spend their lives trading hours for dollars doing something that they don't love doing.
And then they have essentially traded their lives for money, which they cannot take with them when they die. That's not the game. Okay? So instead, I'm gonna share these things with you today that have made a huge difference for me, and that are the bedrock of our programs. Okay.
Number 1, money is not source. What does that mean? Okay. Let me drink a sip of coffee, and then I'm gonna get into it. So money is not source.
So many people we have in our society, we have been conditioned to put money at the center of our lives. Do we need money to buy groceries, to pay rent, or to pay our mortgage, to live, to buy clothes, to, you know, pay for our kids' soccer, like, all oops. I just lost my earring, to do all of those things? Yes. We absolutely do.
However, when we put money at the center of our lives above our connection with god or spirit or that which is greater than us, above our health, above our relationships, above our creativity, above our joy, we end up having a life that is misprioritized and we end up missing our lives. So often because we've been conditioned that we need to work hard for money and we need to sacrifice for money and money is hard to come by, we overemphasize money and we have it in wrong relationship. What do I mean by that? Wrong relationship to money is overemphasizing what money can bring us and getting confused about what money actually can do in our lives. Now money can do a lot of things in our lives that are important.
Like paying for, you know, food, shelter, experiences, but money cannot bring us joy. Money cannot bring us happiness. Money does not bring us closer to the people who matter the most. Money, does not actually source our true sense of fulfillment. Our true sense of fulfillment comes from Source with a capital s And, our connection to Source, with a capital s, is that which is honestly hard to explain.
It is that which is bigger than our small personalities. It is that which is the beautiful sunset, the feeling of connection when you hold your new baby for the first time. The smile you give a stranger walking down the street when you just connect that feeling of being filled up by an energy that connects us to every single living thing on the planet. That is the actual source with a capital s of our sustenance, of our satisfaction, of our fulfillment, of meaning in our lives. It's life force energy.
It is responsible for the fact that our hearts are beating, that we are breathing, and it is responsible for procreation, creativity, and our connection to each other and, and creativity and ideas and the things that we birth in this lifetime. So that is source And, the big money lesson that I learned many years ago was that money is not my source. However, when I prioritize connecting to source through prayer, through meditation, through making love, through, you know, playing with my kids, through being in nature, through dancing, through laughing with friends. When I prioritize through embodiment, when I prioritize connecting to source, making money actually becomes easier. Because those who are turned on by life, those who are allowing life force to flow through them are magnetic.
They're the kind of people we wanna do business with. They're the kind of people we want to invest in they're the kind of people we want to buy stuff from and invite to do things like speaking gigs or or co teaching in a program those the you get more opportunities when you become the honey. When you become the honey by tapping into the sweetness of life that is beyond the things that money can buy, you actually become more magnetic to money. So the irony is, by connecting to source with a capital s, source not being money, we actually allow ourselves to have more access to all the riches, financially and otherwise. So that is lesson number 1, money is not source.
Lesson number 2 is our nervous system mitigates our capacity to receive and enjoy money and wealth. So our nervous system has set points, and I'm gonna dive into this on a much deeper level in next week's episode. So make sure you are subscribed right here to plenty so you don't miss the next installment of the lesson. Because these 7 episodes, while they can be listened to individually, absolutely, they are also designed to build on one another. So it's like a 7 episode mini course.
Well, it's actually kind of like a larger than mini course, but it is a 7 episode free course in healing your relationship with money. So so lesson number 2, your nervous system mitigates your ability to experience abundance, financially and otherwise. Why? Because our nervous systems are running our behavior. Our nervous systems get imprinted by our past experiences and also by the experiences that our ancestors experienced, and I'll get more into that, and all the anatomy of it, and all the physiology of it, and all the biology of it next week in in episode number 2 in this series.
But for today, I just want you to know, you have a thermostat setting. And your thermostat setting gets set mostly by your previous experiences around the feeling of money. What do I mean by that? So we think, oh, my money programming and my money conditioning comes from how much money I had. That is not actually true.
Our nervous systems are not rational in that way. Our nervous systems can't do math. Our nervous systems speak in the language of energy. And according to our nervous system, it's not about how much money there is, it is about the story we are telling about that money. So, if you grew up in a household that actually had relative abundance, maybe you were upper middle class, but the story that your parents or your caregivers were telling, the energy around it was that it was never enough, Your nervous system set point is around creating a reality where there's never quite enough.
How does our nervous system do that? It does it by default. It does it through automatic, unconscious behavior that recreates the feeling that we experienced in our childhood. The feeling in which our nervous system developed, the the the energetic and emotional soup that our nervous system developed in, will be the set point that we will return to unconsciously, because according to our nervous system, that which is unfamiliar is unsafe and our nervous system is designed to keep us alive. It's doing a wonderful job at that.
However, it is not designed by default to help us thrive. So what do we do about that? Well, the good news is you're going to learn more about exactly what to do about that in this 7 episode series. But for today, you just need to know this. Our nervous system thermostat will keep us at the same level of financial abundance and receiving as we are used to from our early childhood experiences and from our ancestors DNA, until we do something to update that nervous system thermostat.
Okay? Next week, I'll tell you how to begin to update that nervous system thermostat. But, for now, you just need to know lesson 2 is, your nervous system is in charge of mitigating how much money you can receive and how much you have the capacity to actually reap the benefits of enjoying the abundance you have. Because, having money is not the same thing as experiencing abundance. Lesson number 3, my worth is not the same as my net worth.
Okay. This lesson, I really learned more the hardware, the hard way. I had conflated money with worth. And, in particular, there are some stories from my upbringing with my dad and money and conflating money with love, and misunderstanding some of his behavior and thinking it had to do with how valuable I was and how lovable I was, especially around the time when my parents got divorced and I had my own relationship with my dad unmitigated by my mother. Now in my history, my dad and my mom have very, very different perspectives on money.
My dad is, far more, frugal. He has more of a set point around there's not enough. Even though he grew up with a lot of money, there were some programming in his family around lack and there not being enough. And this is a perfect example of what I was talking about with the nervous system that it is not about the amount of money we have. It is about the story that we are telling about the amount that there is, which is a very different thing.
And then my mom has much more of the energy with money of, oh, there's more where that came from. I can just tap into divine radiant substance and, so it's very interesting growing up with 2 super different money perspectives. It taught me a lot about the fact that we get to choose the way we relate to money. There are actually choices. There are people walking around who have wildly different money paradigms even who earn around the same amount of income.
And that is fascinating because money isn't just money. It is what we make meaning of. It is how we make meaning of it that matters in terms of the quality of our lives and the richness in our lives. So I had a misunderstanding for years, and this is still a growth edge for me, something I work on because we're never done when it comes to, growth in the area of healing our relationship with money. It is a lifelong incredibly worthwhile pursuit that can actually be really fun.
And so this lesson is my net worth is not the same thing as my inherent worth value as a human being. My lovability has nothing to do with how much money I have in the bank. How much money I have in the bank, my net worth, my income, my expenses, my debt, or as I like to call it, invoices for blessings received, all of that stuff is just kind of like a a snapshot moment. It's just it's just a moment in time of our financial picture. It only means what we make it mean.
Our worth and value as human beings is infinite it is inherent and it is ineffable meaning there is nothing that you could ever do to make yourself less valuable inherently as a human being. Your worth was infinite the moment you were born, and it will continue to be so. We there's like, no. You can't put a value, like, a number value on a human life. It it doesn't make any sense.
And, unfortunately, our society has conflated somebody's value and worth with the amount of money they get paid or the amount of money they have, and that's because we have all these false hierarchies. And coming back to lesson number 1, we have misunderstood money's importance, and we have put it higher than who we are. Like, who we are as a human being is not the same thing as how much money we make or how much money we have. Now similarly, in lesson 1, money is not source, when we understand that the amount of money we have is not the same thing as our worth, our inherent worth, it actually creates a lot more spaciousness and flow for money to come in and out of our lives. We get to participate in the economic flow and the energetic flow of money much more freely, in a much more relaxed manner, when we are not conflating our worth or our lovability with how much money we make, or how much money we have.
When we are conflating our value with our income or our net worth, it's like, clamping down on the flow. It creates constriction. It's like a blood vessel. We want in our blood vessels, we want there to be nice oxygenation, nice easy flow of the blood and the oxygen and all the nutrients running through our body. But when we conflate money with our sore with our source, or we conflate money with our worth, it actually, like, clamps down on that flow.
And if you imagined it in our blood vessels, it would prevent the free flow of all of the nutrients and all the oxygen that we need in our bodies. And so, actually, when we begin to tap into our infinite worth and really know I am worthy as a human being no matter what I do, no matter how much I earn. My worth is inherent, ineffable, and infinite. When we can access that place, ironically, or sort of beautifully, it just becomes a lot easier to have money flow through us, because we don't have that desperation clamping down energy anymore. So that was lesson number 3, is that money is not the same thing.
How much money you have is not the same thing as how valuable you are or how worthy you are, which is why I don't like using the phrase getting paid what you're worth. Because you could never get paid what you're worth. It is on a scale. It is on a spectrum. It is in a realm that you cannot put a dollar amount on a humans a human being's value.
So that's why I don't use that phrase. Okay. Number 4 is holding back financially helps nobody. Holding back financially helps nobody. Why?
Because we are all interconnected. The economy is a flow of resources from one organization, one human being, to another. Our economic well-being depends on the free flow of resources, money coming in, money going out. Interconnectivity is key for economic well-being. What's actually true is that both literally and sort of spiritually and energetically, when I hold back and I block money from coming into my life I am actually also blocking it from coming into the lives of other people around me because my life, my business, is a conduit for resources to flow into the lives of other people I touch literally and energetically.
So here's an example. If I think, oh, okay. Well, I I already have enough. It it's if I have more, I'm keeping it from somebody else and I put a ceiling on what I'm willing to receive. I put a ceiling on my pricing.
I put a ceiling on the number of people that I feel I will serve in my business, if I'm energetically putting a ceiling on my income because of the erroneous idea that that's gonna help somebody else have more, that money doesn't automatically then just go to the people who need it. It goes the money goes to the people who know how to open up and receive and steward those resources. It goes to the people who know how to play the game of money. And so I I will do much better helping other people. If I want to help other people have abundance, I'm much better off taking off the ceiling, allowing myself to receive as much as possible so we and understanding how to play the game of money, which if you are here, you are here learning how to play the game of money.
That is exactly what I am teaching here. Doesn't make you a more worthwhile human being, but it does help you live a richer life in our current reality. So if I can take the ceiling off and allow myself to receive more resources, those resources can, a, inspire other people who I'm around to go for it in a bigger way. I'm sure you've had this experience where you just by spending time with other people who are playing a bigger game, who make more money than you, who have a bigger business than you, who have a larger team, who are working on projects that inspire you, it makes it feel more possible to you, and you go for it in bigger ways. I know that happened for me.
I joined a a network of women entrepreneurs who make over 7 figures, and my business grew. Because while I already was making over 7 figures when I joined that group, I wasn't making multiple 7 figures, and now I am. Because there's something about being in an environment of other people just being around them, something takes place energetically and on a nervous system level, which the nervous system speaks on the level of of energy, so that's what's happening there. When we are around other people who have an expanded reality, it makes it easier and, in some cases, automatic for us also to expand into that reality without having to, like, micromanage and try so hard. It just happens automatically.
So when I expand financially, when I allow myself to receive more, the other people in my life, women especially, because as you know, I'm so passionate about women's financial empowerment. Other women automatically have more access to resources because I've welcomed them in, and then they get to see and feel and their bodies experience what is possible through the way that collective experiences imprint the nervous system and allow our nervous systems collectively to upgrade and expand our thermostats together. So that's the energetic. And then on a literal level, if I take the ceiling off and I allow more money to flow through my business, I can hire more people, so I can create more jobs. I can give more resources to organizations and causes that really align with my values and that I feel are really moving the needle in terms of the education and empowerment of women and girls.
So there are literal things that happen, and there are energetic things that happen when we allow ourselves to receive more. And when I got this, it was so huge. I did not realize the degree to which I was holding back in my business because of this idea that I already had enough and I should leave more for other people. But I didn't realize that by my holding back, I was holding other people back financially as well, and that was helping nobody. So I've switched that around.
I shifted my nervous system set point around that. As a result, my emotions and my beliefs and then my behavior shifted, and therefore, the results have shifted as well. And we've been able to hire more people. We've been able to create more jobs, and we've been able to contribute more to the economy and more to organizations. And that feels really good.
Feels really good, and everybody in the ecosystem wins when we do that. So that was lesson number 4 is you holding back financially or me holding back financially helps nobody. Okay. And I've got a bonus number 5 lesson, and that is this. Why not me?
That's it. Why not you? There is absolutely no reason that you cannot have an abundant life. There is no reason. There are people who grew up in similar circumstances to you right now, who have come through similar circumstances to you right now, who are living abundantly.
So there is no reason we can yes. Absolutely. Is is, you know, are systemic inequities real? For sure. Are do we have massive issues here in the United States, all over the world globally?
For sure. Does everyone start off on the same equal footing? No. They do not. However, continuing to tell the story of why we cannot have what we want does not help us get what we want, it also doesn't help fix the inequities.
You know what helps fix the inequities? Each of us taking responsibility for our own realities and doing what we can to participate in a new paradigm. The way we birth new paradigms is by operating in new paradigms. The way we create a more beautiful world is by operating as though that more beautiful world is already here. And that starts with you just saying, why not me?
And what I'm going to encourage you to do is gather up a list, gather up visuals, start following people on social media who have what you want so that and who are people who you identify with. So if you grew up in a small town without a lot of entrepreneurs around, find some really successful wealthy people who grew up in a similar environment who created an abundant reality even though they didn't have examples of that growing up in their immediate environment. If, you know, whatever obstacles you, have encountered in your life, gather up a whole host of examples. Read their memoirs. Read their autobiographies.
Watch documentaries about these people. Follow them on social media, subscribe to their emails. There is absolutely at least one person who has what you really desire, who had a background similar to yours. I promise you. I promise you.
One of my favorite stories is from, doctor Tara Rai Trent, and she wrote a book. I think it's called The Awakened Woman. We'll put it in the show notes. And when I saw her speak, I was so deeply inspired. So she grew up in a village in Zimbabwe where girls were essentially traded for livestock in exchange for marriage very, very early, like 12, 13, 14 years old.
So her, the future that she had the capacity to dream of was not very wide in this environment. There wasn't social media. There wasn't, like, the Internet. It wasn't she didn't know that there was a different world than being traded, for a cow to be married off at a very young age. She had a bunch of kids, and somebody came to her village and began talking about educating women.
And all of a sudden, she was able to begin to dream of something more for herself, and she dreamed of getting a college education, which was absolutely unheard of for somebody in her village, in her environment. But she wrote that dream down, and she buried it in the ground. And over time, she continued to believe in this dream, and she signed up for a correspondence degree. And she ended up earning not only her undergrad degree, correspondence over years years years. It took her way more than the usual 4 years.
It took her I don't know. It was, like, 7 years, maybe back and forth. And you gotta tell her her tell this story, obviously. And then she went on to come to the United States to get her PhD. She ended up on Oprah writing a best selling book, and now she travels all over the world telling her story of breaking the generational inheritance of abuse, and trauma, and oppression, and poverty, and lack of education.
Now, if somebody like her can create the kind of life that she created, coming from where she came from, with the possibilities that she could see for herself growing up, you can do anything. And she said to herself, why not me? And then she just created it. Now, obviously, it wasn't without unbelievable obstacles and challenges, and yet, she kept believing in the dream that she had planted. And she said, why not me?
So that is what I wanna offer to you today. On this spring equinox, during the week of my birthday, my own solar return and rebirth. I'm gonna review the lessons real quick. Number 1, money is not your source. Number 2, your nervous system is the mitigator of how much abundance financially and otherwise, you are able to receive and actually enjoy.
Number 3, your value is not determined by your net worth. Your value is inherent and infinite. Number 4, you holding back financially helps no one. And number 5, why not you? Thank you so much for listening.
I hope this was enjoyable, helpful, inspiring, expansive. If you liked this episode, please make sure you subscribe because I can't wait for you to come back and understand the anatomy, the physiology of our nervous system, and how it works as our energetic set point for the amount of abundance we can experience. So we're coming back for that next week. Make sure you've subscribed. If you liked this episode, text it to a friend, share it on social media, tag me at Kate Northrup.
If you really liked it and you wanna leave a review, that would be amazing. Please leave us a rating. Please leave us a review. That helps more and more people find this information. What I know is that if we can give people the tools to play the game of money well while also cultivating their connection to joy and source and life force energy, we would get rid of the vast majority of the problems that plague our world.
And so this is my contribution. Please help to spread the word on this life changing information by sharing it on your channels and texting a friend. And I cannot wait to see you back next week for our anatomy of the nervous system and receiving money conversation. Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you next time.
Woo hoo. You made it to the end of an episode of plenty.
Don't you feel expanded already? So if you liked this episode, go ahead and leave us a review. Subscribe to the podcast, text a friend, and let them know they need to listen in. That helps us spread the word so more people can experience plenty together. And if you wanna ease your path to creating wealth, I created a money breakthrough guide for you where I interviewed over 20 of my high earning women friends, and I asked them what their biggest money breakthrough guide was.
And the responses were so mind blowing and helpful, I knew I needed to pass them along to you. This is the kind of thing that is often only shared behind closed doors, but now you can access it totally for free. So head over to katenorthrop.comforward/breakthroughs and get the guide. Again, that's kate northrup.comforward/breakthroughs. And I'll see you next time for plenty.