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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.
If you've ever made more money only to find yourself feeling anxiety or shrinking back or overspending or sabotaging in some other way, I want you to hear me. It is not because there's something wrong with you, it is because there's a part of you that doesn't feel safe with more. 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 plenty.
Kate Northrup:Let's go fill our cups. So I just saw an interesting article. It's about a TMZ documentary about Justin Bieber, believe it or not. And apparently, in 2022, he sold his entire catalog for $200,000,000 because he had run out of money. There was a tour he had that got canceled.
Kate Northrup:However, you think about someone who is a household name like Justin Bieber, who, you know, I don't know how much he had made previously to that point, but he's been famous for like a really freaking long time, and who knows what happened with his deals with Scooter Braun, like the whole thing behind the scenes. But it was such a good example of how making more at one point or another does not mean keeping more, and certainly doesn't mean actually creating a sense, like a deep felt sense of abundance. So have you ever had the experience of growing your income only to then increase your expenses to match it or even exceed it? That's called lifestyle inflation or lifestyle creep. We're so conditioned to think that the next purchase of fitness equipment, or the next fanciest car, or the next handbag, or the next vacation, or the next boat, or the next house, or the next whatever is going to make us finally feel successful and worthy and deserving and happy, and that will never happen from a purchased item.
Kate Northrup:To be honest, it just never will. It's something called hedonic adaptation, where we increase our level of lifestyle or we buy the thing that gives us the initial rush, and then very, very, very shortly, like within hours sometimes, and certainly within days, we return back to the general level of happiness that we had before that purchase or before that moment. That general level of happiness or general sense of well-being or lack of sense of well-being, that set point is what I call your money nervous system thermostat. So your money nervous system thermostat is set according to what it felt like when you were growing up. What did the environment feel like?
Kate Northrup:What was the general vibe? What was the general emotional tone of your childhood environment? Now we can take that further and say what was the general emotional tone of your childhood environment as it relates to money, but the truth is, and I just really actually got this, like got this got this a couple of weeks ago, our money nervous system thermostat is not only set according to what it felt like with money in our childhood environment. Our money nervous system thermostat, level of general well-being that we'll return to no matter what is going on with our financial life, that we will unconsciously sabotage our financial life, in fact, to get back to that thermostat setting, That gets set not only according to what it was like with money when you were growing up, it also gets set according to just what the environment was in general. What did caregiving feel like?
Kate Northrup:How safe did it feel? What was the attachment style? Like what was just the feeling in your childhood home? For me, without going too much into the details, my childhood home had a sense of somewhat inconsistent presence. And that was due to my parents' careers, being in the hospital all the time, not because I was sick.
Kate Northrup:They were they were doctors. And just they were super focused on their careers and whatever. And so as an adult, I have found that without consciously updating my nervous system thermostat, and I'm gonna tell you a couple of ways you can do that today in a moment, so stay with me. But without doing that conscious healing work, I was unconsciously recreating a feeling of an adrenaline rush of going from consistency to inconsistency in terms of my level of safety and support and security in my life. Like I'm going to be, because of the environment I was raised in, I have a greater tendency towards risk taking in my business and in my financial life, because the sense of being unsure about whether or not I'm going to be safe emotionally actually feels like home.
Kate Northrup:Which is wild. Right? Like, it's wild to think about, okay, there are things that I do, and for example, you can listen back to the full story of this if you go back to episode 108, which was about journey to scaling to getting to nearly $3,000,000 and how I healed my nervous system along the way to build the capacity for stability in my business. But one of the things I realized in retrospect is that it wasn't only, because honestly financially things were pretty consistent in the environment in my childhood. And so it didn't totally make sense that I kept re creating unconsciously a situation in which things were not stable financially for me in my business by launching a million different offers, launching a successful offer, and then pulling the plug on it because I didn't have the capacity to experience that level of consistency and that level of stable success over time.
Kate Northrup:When we experience something that is different than what our childhood environment felt like, our nervous system registers it as a threat. Because our nervous system is always wanting to keep us in the narrow band of that which we have experienced before. And so the thing that's tricky is that when we earn more money, most of the time, we're now experiencing something that is outside what we've experienced before. And so our nervous system, which rules our unconscious and our subconscious, and it also mitigates our emotional experience, The thing is, our nervous system is then will freak out when we earn more. So it's like, yeah, I'm earning more.
Kate Northrup:That's a good thing. Right? Well, yeah, according to your conscious mind, that's a good thing. But according to your unconscious and your subconscious, you are now experiencing something new. And your whole survival wiring is now sifting and sorting to see if it's a threat.
Kate Northrup:And especially if we're not consciously metabolizing our emotional stress, if we're not consciously doing things on a daily basis to dump our stress and threat bucket and build capacity for life in general, we are going to be more likely to experience that which is new as a threat if we're already overloaded by stress and threat in our life. And so let's say you get a raise. Let's say you get an unexpected bonus. Let's say you get a windfall of some kind. Let's say you have the biggest launch ever in your business, and it's like, woo hoo.
Kate Northrup:Yes. Consciously, this is such a good thing. But then the sabotage can really sink in, and we can overpay. Right? Overpay our team.
Kate Northrup:Overpay contractors. Give the money away unconsciously to friends or family that we feel like are quote unquote less fortunate than us, and we have this guilt or shame that is imprinted from childhood experiences. Right? So for example, if you grew up in an environment where your caregivers were always talking about how awful rich people are, of course if you don't do the work to heal that patterning and repattern your brain and nervous system, if you start to make more money and become a rich person, of course you're going to sabotage that, and make sure that you either get rid of the money or that you don't enjoy the money so you won't end up like one of those bad rich people that your parents talked about growing up, for example. That's just one example of how this happens.
Kate Northrup:So overspending, over giving, just going unconscious. I I know people who make a lot of money, and then their response isn't actually to get rid of the money, it's actually to go into freeze with the money, so it just sits there. And they keep it like in their checking account, or in a savings account that's not even keeping up with inflation. Right? So they're so paralyzed to do anything with it because that's also how financial dysregulation shows up.
Kate Northrup:So if you're resonating with any of these examples, I want you to know it's not because you're bad with money. It's actually just because you need to wire your nervous system to feel safe having more. So there's a few things you can do. One of them is to practice nervous system healing tools on a daily basis, but then also and especially when you actually get larger cash deposits or when you receive a raise. Like when we are actually experiencing the expansion, that's the time we need to signal to our nervous system, to our body, that we are safe so that it begins to expand its range of resonance around experiences with money, and it begins to see, oh, this is safe and familiar.
Kate Northrup:I don't need to do anything unconsciously or subconsciously to bring us back down to the thermostat setting. Now my thermostat setting is higher, and so this feels safe to me. And we do that by consciously metabolizing our emotions, and we'll link the episode about how to do that below. And then also by learning to signal safety to your body at those times of expansion so you can grow your range of resonance, so that you can grow your capacity in real time. And when you do that, you'll notice that you won't feel so compelled to go spend the money, that you'll feel like, oh wow, there's this money in my checking account, and now I'm going to transfer it into a high yield savings, and now I'm going to learn how to invest it so that I can actually grow this money.
Kate Northrup:Now I'm going to deploy it in really conscious devotional ways to different avenues in my business or in my life that are good investments, that are in alignment with my values. All of those ways of being quote, unquote good with money require nervous system safety first. You cannot layer strategy on a nervous system that doesn't feel safe with money and expect it to work. Justin Bieber is a perfect example. Right?
Kate Northrup:Like, I don't know about Justin Bieber and his nervous system, but it's just an example of, like, how is it possible that Justin Bieber ran out of money and needed to sell his entire song catalog for only $200,000,000, which, of course, that's actually a gargantuan amount of money. But compared to Justin Bieber's career, it's actually not that much. I just got so excited I spit. I mean, like, that's crazy. Right?
Kate Northrup:That is because fundamentally none of us were taught how to expand and increase our money nervous system thermostat. So number one, you need to learn nervous system healing tools so you have your own nervous system healing toolkit. Those students who are inside Relaxed Money already have access to this. I've done it for you. Nervous system healing tools, you know what, like exercise actually is a great one.
Kate Northrup:Breathing into your lower back ribs. There's all sorts of tools, and I use a methodology from a place called Neurosomatic Intelligence. If you want to learn more about that, the link is in the show notes, but you can go to neurosomaticintelligence.com/kate. I use tools from applied neurology because they're such a practical application of when to use what tool for what, and being able to see the change immediately. Okay, so that's just one school of nervous system healing.
Kate Northrup:So that's an example, using nervous system healing tools or drills. Exercise is a really powerful way to metabolize stress and update our nervous system programming to know that we are safe and that the threat has passed, but the kind of exercise matters because sometimes we can actually overdo it if we have old patterning of more is better, and we have old patterning ignoring the signals that it's already been too much, so exercise can be a tricky one, but you know, a walk around the block absolutely for nearly everyone is absolutely powerful, and there's so many other tools. You also, I would recommend after you have really started to incorporate some nervous system healing tools into your life and you are actively at times of contraction, when you're experiencing fear, anxiety, overwhelm, and at times of expansion, when you've just had a windfall, you've just had your biggest ever client, you've just had a win, We actually need to signal safety to our nervous system when we are contracted to build our capacity, and also when things expand beyond our previous experience. That also is a time. I have a story about this that helps to illustrate it, and it's when I got offered my first book deal with Hay House.
Kate Northrup:So I was like 27, and I was in Union Square in New York, and I will never forget it, I was at the W Hotel in Union Square, and Louise Hay herself said to me in the lobby that Hay House wanted to publish my book. And I was so overwhelmed, I was that was so far beyond my previous capacity for success that I went across the street to a cafe, and I started to cry. And I felt this shame spiral. I felt a guilt spiral. I like, when I got sucked down the emotional toilet, I felt awful.
Kate Northrup:It was terrible, and I did not feel like I deserved it. And I was thinking about telling them no. I was thinking about telling them no. But luckily, a girlfriend of mine came to meet me, and I told her what was going on, and she was a safe person who could help me see what was really going on and could hold a thermostat of safety with expansion that I could not hold. So I was able to co regulate with her in community because other people often see us five years ahead of where we see ourselves.
Kate Northrup:So for her, looking at me, was like, yes, it's obvious that you would have a book deal. It's obvious that you would this is a match for you. It didn't feel like a match for me. But over time I was able to, in small doable pieces, show up for the assignment and expand my range of capacity so that through co regulation with her and safe community and a bunch of other ways, so that I could write the book, publish the book, and it became really successful. However, I came real real close to sabotaging it, and along the way there were many ways that I sabotaged it as well, but in the end, it was a net positive, right?
Kate Northrup:It doesn't have to be perfect. And so if we are wanting to build capacity to hold more, definitely leaning into those nervous system healing tools, and definitely leaning into safe community who's also committed to expansion, who's also holding a higher thermostat level. Because being in community is one of the most efficient, effective ways for us to expand our nervous system capacity. Because when we're in community with a bunch of people playing a bigger game, it just kind of instantly begins to feel safer, which is why we have community inside of Relax Money, which is why we do a live event every year, Relax Money Live, so people can find the people who are playing a bigger game, not in a competitive way, but in a collaborative way, in a when I rise, you rise when you rise, I rise kind of way. And that is an incredibly effective strategy.
Kate Northrup:Who you spend time with makes all the difference in terms of your ability to build your capacity to make more money without overspending, sabotaging, etcetera. And then once you are doing those practices, once you know that you're expanding your capacity, you're you're signaling safety when you're in contraction, you're signaling safety when you're expansion. In expansion, you're signaling safety every day, several times a day with your tools, then you can begin to ask yourself a few questions. And they can be helpful to do that digging deeper, that deeper digging to unearth some of the old stories that are not serving you anymore. I don't recommend doing the deeper digging to unearth old stories until you have built some layers of nervous system resourcing so that you have the capacity to face and feel some of the emotions that may come up with this deeper digging.
Kate Northrup:But here are some questions that you might ask yourself. Number one, where do I feel tension when money arrives? Where in my body do I feel tension when money arrives? And then you can close your eyes and actually feel what it feels like in that part of your body, and you can ask that part of your body what story it wants to tell. If it needs to be witnessed in any way.
Kate Northrup:If it had an age, what age would it be? And just find out what might be living in your body in that spot. The second question is, What story am I holding about people who earn what I earn, or about people who want to earn what I want to earn? What story am I holding about people who earn what I earn, or who want to earn what I earn? Next question.
Kate Northrup:Where in my body do I feel unsafe with more? And then that further question would be closing your eyes and going into that part of your body, bringing your conscious awareness to that part of your body and finding out what it wants to tell you or show you, and just being a witness. And then finally, what would support me in feeling safe and supported right now? And you can ask your body, What would make you feel safe and supported right now? What would support you in feeling safe and supported right now?
Kate Northrup:It is unbelievable the kind of wisdom that you will receive when you simply ask the question. So in summary, the way to make more money and be able to actually expand it and hold it and grow it without sabotaging, without overspending, without over giving, is to learn to expand your capacity to feel safe with more on a nervous system level. This is not a strategy game exclusively. This is not a thought experiment. This is something that only can be felt.
Kate Northrup:And when you practice feeling safe with more, more becomes normal. More becomes inevitable. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next time. What if managing money felt effortless? You've worked so hard to earn money, so why does it feel stressful?
Kate Northrup:Well, I wanna introduce you to something brand new that I've created called the money reset because abundance starts in your body, not in your bank account. This free audio experience will help you rewire your nervous system for wealth, stop the money in money out cycle and create a foundation for true wealth, and relax into a new relationship with money. Plus, it comes with the five minute calm cash flow ritual so you can have financial clarity and magnetism anytime you want. All you need to do to get the free money reset is go to katenorthrop.com/reset.