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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.
A question came in on Instagram, and it was basically, I'm really on my abundance healing journey. Like, I'm really working on my prosperity consciousness. I'm really doing my healing around abundance and stepping out of scarcity, but what do I do when my community or my friend group or my family is operating in lack? How can I stay actively on my abundance journey when my the people I'm around are in lack? Welcome to Plenty.
Kate Northrup: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. So I have three things for you on this today, and there's a connected episode to this, which is how do I stay in abundance when my spouse or my partner is in lack? That's a separate episode that we're gonna link in the show notes.
Kate Northrup:Quite frankly, a lot of the same wisdom applies, but there's there's, you know, there's some nuance here, so I thought we'd answer this question too. So number one, you really wanna think about energy management and the hidden cost of scarcity by proximity. So our the data really shows us that who we spend time with dramatically impacts our health, our well-being, our mental health, our levels of happiness, and yes, also our income. It's actually true. You know, I'm sure you've heard people say your income will be the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
Kate Northrup:I don't know if the data is updated on that, but what we do know is that overall, when we spend time in community, we become who we're spending time with. And this can be used for anything, right? Like if you want to be healthier, spend time around people who are healthier. If you want to read more, spend time around people who read. If you want to stop drinking, stop spending time around people who drink.
Kate Northrup:If you want to stop smoking, stop hanging out with smokers. If you want to be abundant, we need to spend time with people who are also in abundance. Now that's tricky when like our primary coworkers or our best friends or our family are any of those categories of things, you know, that we are wanting to move away from. But that doesn't mean we have to cut everyone out of our life. Right?
Kate Northrup:So sometimes people will be like, I'm on my abundance journey. You're in scarcity. We can't be friends anymore, or I can't spend time with you anymore. And I think that that's too extreme in many cases. Now there are times when we may need to take a break from certain relationships.
Kate Northrup:We may need to take space from certain relationships. We may need to minimize the amount of time we're spending with people, but I don't always think that means you need to just, like, cut people out. When I moved to New York City, I ended up spending time around a lot of folks who were in the early stages of becoming wildly successful with their online businesses centered around personal development and empowerment. I know for sure, I didn't like go there for that particular purpose, but we just all found each other and gravitated towards each other. I know for sure that spending time with those people accelerated my growth.
Kate Northrup:The same thing when I moved to Miami from a small town in Maine, I started being around people who were playing a bigger game, entrepreneurially speaking, and our income went up. Not necessarily because we were quote unquote trying, but because when you hang around people who make more money, you tend to just make more money. Now of course, money isn't the only form of abundance. It's just one form of abundance. And I know people who live wildly abundant lives who are on the lower end of earners, and I know people who live lives of scarcity who are high earners or who have access to a lot of financial resources.
Kate Northrup:So I am not saying in any ways that you only can spend time with people who make a lot of money, because abundance and earning are actually two separate things. But really consider who in your life operates in terms of there is more than enough to go around, operates from a place of generosity, from a place like relational exchange, where there's a give and a take. Who in your life is operating from abundance? Those are the people you want to spend more time with, and the people who operate from lack and scarcity, you just want to dial down the amount of time you spend with them, and when you spend time with them, have topics that you know are great to talk about or have activities that you know you can do together that bring out the best in these people. Right?
Kate Northrup:So just because somebody operates in terms of scarcity when it comes to money doesn't mean that they don't have parts of them that can really be in a feeling of abundance. Like maybe you have someone, maybe your mom operates out of scarcity financially, but she actually is deeply connected to the earth and has an incredible garden, or is really connected with the woods and knows tons of things about the plants and animals and whatever, like maybe you go for nature walks with her instead of chatting about finances or the economic news. Right? So we can bolster ourselves and protect ourselves by choosing what topics and what activities we engage in with people who are not on the same path of abundance as we are. And then we can limit the time that we spend with people who are in constriction and contraction around abundance, and expand the amount of time we spend with people who are in a world of expansion.
Kate Northrup:And that may mean that you need to find some new friends. How can you do that? Well, a lot of people find new abundance friends inside my program, Relaxed Money. They show up at Relaxed Money Live, and they meet their soul sisters. This happens all the time.
Kate Northrup:The stories of synchronicity that I hear just blow my mind. And not only our events, right? There's other people's programs, there's other events, there's other incredible things going on in your town. One of the ways I did this when I moved to Portland, Maine from New York City, I was like, okay, I'm moving from a real big pond to a real small pond. How am I going to find my people?
Kate Northrup:So I actually started a book club around a particular book that was about abundance and transformation and healing, and I put it on my blog, I think, and then meetup.com, and I ended up meeting incredible friends who came to the book club, and it was really powerful, and some of those people remained my dearest friends throughout my time in Maine. So there's always ways to meet people who are also on the abundance journey. The second thing is you really want to be conscious about not downplaying your abundance when you get around people in order to belong. So there's something that I call the quote unquote belonging tax that we often pay unconsciously in the following ways. Number one, maybe we're around our family and our family has struggled financially, and so it feels like on some level a betrayal of them to thrive.
Kate Northrup:So maybe we actually find ourselves playing small in our business or playing small in our career, again unconsciously or subconsciously, so that we can continue to belong and get the love from our family, because in our family we connect through a collective financial struggle. That's really, really common. People can have survivor's guilt if they're like the first one to go to college, or the first one to make a million dollars in their business, or the first one to buy a home, or whatever it may be, and there can be a real feeling of like, if I do this, I'm leaving them behind. But there's a paradigm shift here that I want to offer, which is that when we expand, whether it's in our education, whether it's in our healing, whether it's in our earning, whether it's in entrepreneurship or our career, we're actually changing things for our entire lineage. You know, I think about my grandmother, my granny, on my mom's side, she was not born into a family that had tremendous possibilities and privilege by any stretch of the imagination.
Kate Northrup:And I'm living a life that she wouldn't have been able to create. I know for sure that I'm doing that leaving off from where she ended things. Right? She died at 94, and I'm carrying out the legacy not as though we're separate people, but as though I'm carrying on a maternal legacy. Even with my mother, you know, there's some things that are possible for me that were not possible for my mother because of generational limitations and societal limitations.
Kate Northrup:I don't think about that my having the freedoms and some of the possibilities that I have means I'm in any way betraying her. I know that I'm furthering the lineage, and I know that my girls are going to have possibilities and options that I never will have. And I want them to embrace those things wholeheartedly, because I want them to go further than I did. And even if a family member of yours or a friend of yours talks down to you or throws shade about your success or the business you're growing or whatever because they can't handle it and they see it as a threat, know that actually what's happening is a rising tide does in fact lift all ships in the harbor in any community, whether it's a biological family, whether it's a friend group, whether it's an industry. And this is an opportunity for us to really look into the place in us that still believes the lie of separation, which says that if somebody else is having something, that means I can't.
Kate Northrup:That's also tied into the lie of scarcity that says there's only so much to go around, and if somebody has, that means I can't. What's actually true is that one person's success makes another person's success possible, right? Like when Oprah created her empire, she birthed an entire industry that essentially made possible my career, and certainly all the careers of many of my peers. She made this possible for us because she went first, so I'm so glad that she didn't hold back and continue to pay a quote unquote belonging tax by either actually limiting our success subconsciously or talking about it as though it's harder than it is or downplaying it. So another way the belonging tax can show up is like, let's say you're at a family dinner and your sister is asking you how business is going, and actually business is going really great and you had your best year ever, but you find yourself, instead of saying that, complaining about how hard it is to have employees, talking about how much you have to work, talking about all the pressure, because you want to make sure that they know that even though you're doing really well, it's really hard, so you're still one of them.
Kate Northrup:Right? This happens, and I'm sure at least one person is listening right now being like, oh shit, I am doing this. And honestly, why have abundance financially if you're downplaying it? That's not the point. Now I'm not saying that if you massively out earn your friends or family, you need to go hang out with them and like talk all about your, you know, dollars 10,000 week or whatever.
Kate Northrup:Like, that's not what I'm saying, but I don't think we need to downplay it either. And so if somebody asks, how's it going? You can say, we're having a really great year. We just had our biggest launch ever, and my family just asked me about it over the weekend. And in times when I would have previously paid the belonging tax subconsciously and toned it down, I said it went really great.
Kate Northrup:We had our biggest enrollment ever, and I was so proud of the way we did this launch. We left it all on the floor. I'm so proud of it. And was it a perfect conversation? No.
Kate Northrup:Did it feel a little uncomfortable? Yeah, it did. But I was able to just fully stay in the celebration, and then we went and talked about something else. Like, that was it, and it was great. It was great, right?
Kate Northrup:So I understand every family is different. We all come with our own historical baggage, but know that if you are downplaying your success by undercutting it in any way or sabotaging yourself, you are actually betraying your abundance, right? So by trying to not betray your family or your friends, you're betraying your abundance, which I think is actually from the divine. And so you really are betraying the divine when we do that. Like we are essentially receiving a gift, and then turning around and throwing it back.
Kate Northrup:So let's stop doing that, shall we? So that was the belonging tax. And then the third piece is that when you expand your own abundance and your own capacity, you are making space for others to rise, which we talked about already. But I want to highlight that folks in your life stepping into abundance with you is their choice, not your choice. So really frequently, people can start on their spiritual journey, or their health journey, or their mental health healing, or their abundance journey, and then suddenly they're trying to constantly enroll their friends and family, or their husband, or whoever.
Kate Northrup:And your enthusiasm is wonderful, it is life giving, however it is not your job to get anybody to do anything. And one of the most repulsive things we can do is be constantly trying to get someone else on board with something when they are not willingly leaning in to get on board with it. So I really recommend being more like a cat in this regard, having more of an inviting, seductive energy, like, you know, the cat, you come home, maybe the cat looks at you from across the room, maybe you've been home for five minutes and it comes, walks slightly by, rubs on your leg, and then leaves again, right? It's just the slightest invitation for a snuggle versus the golden retriever is like coming to the door, barking, wagging its tail, jumping on you, slobbering everywhere. We do not want to be the golden retriever when it comes to being the invitation to step into money healing or an abundance journey.
Kate Northrup:Be the cat, right? We can share our own experience with zero attachment to whether or not someone joins us. It is not our job to get someone on board, and also we don't actually know what someone else's journey is supposed to be. We don't know their soul's path. We have no idea.
Kate Northrup:All we know is our own soul's path, and that is the only thing we're responsible for. So in summary, number one, we cannot underestimate how scarcity can rub off. So you want to be really careful about who you spend time with, because we can't overestimate how prosperity and abundance also rubs off. So make note. Spend time with people who are also on that abundance journey as much as possible.
Kate Northrup:And when you are spending time with people who aren't, just have good boundaries. I will say one last thing that I didn't say on that. If someone is a constant negative Nelly about money or about your own journey around this, you can say to them, Listen, I am doing this for me. I understand it's not your philosophy, it's not what you want to do. I am going to ask you to be supportive.
Kate Northrup:And if you can't say supportive things, I'm going to let you know that we are not going to talk about this topic at all. So you either support me, or we're not going to talk about it, and that may include letting them know that that means you may need to spend less time with them if they're constantly negative about whatever it is that you're doing around your abundance and money. And that goes with health, sobriety, really literally anything. Number two, be mindful about paying the belonging tax, and either literally sabotaging your success by playing small in order to fit in, or by downplaying it verbally around certain people. And then number three, don't discount how your expansion actually makes more space for others, and know that they're going to step into that as they're ready, and all you need to do is stay on your path, share as it's appropriate, and let them make their own decisions when it is right for them.
Kate Northrup:I hope that this helps you navigate any relationships in your life that feel like maybe they're not on the abundance journey like you are right now, that's completely fine. Everyone gets to run their own race in their own way. You get to let go. It is not your job to get anyone to do anything. All you need to do is focus on yourself.
Kate Northrup:Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time. What if managing money felt effortless? You've worked so hard to earn money, so why does it feel stressful? 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.
Kate Northrup: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.