Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #183| Why Women Struggle With Money — Plus How to Ditch Financial Overwhelm and Increase Your Net Worth

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#183| Why Women Struggle With Money — Plus How to Ditch Financial Overwhelm and Increase Your Net Worth · Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing

• 0:00
  Hilary Hendershott: I call it your money operating system.
• 0:01
  Hilary Hendershott: And so, like, the operating system of the computer dictates how the hardware interacts with the software, and so it's a really great metaphor for your money belief, your money mindset.
• 0:15
  Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
• 0:22
  Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former overwhelmed working woman and current life coach.
• 0:27
  Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life.
• 0:39
  Michelle Gauthier: Hi friend, thanks so much for joining today.
• 0:44
  Michelle Gauthier: Today's episode is such a great reminder that knowing what to do with money isn't always enough.
• 0:50
  Michelle Gauthier: I'm talking with guest Hilary Hendershott, who owns a wealth management firm and is a money mindset expert who went from advising millionaires on what to do with their money to not being able to afford gas in her own BMW.
• 1:02
  Michelle Gauthier: Her story is super honest, a little jaw-dropping and totally inspiring.
• 1:08
  Michelle Gauthier: So when you listen today, you'll start to understand how early beliefs about money shape your behavior as an adult, even if you're good with money and the most common subconscious money operating systems and how to support yours, and then what to do when you feel overwhelmed just thinking about your finances.
• 1:28
  Michelle Gauthier: I know we've talked about money before on the podcast and I think it's such an important thing for us to continue to talk about because it can be a big contributor to overwhelm.
• 1:37
  Michelle Gauthier: So we talk about guilt and people pleasing and how women are often conditioned to play small with money.
• 1:43
  Michelle Gauthier: Let's jump into the episode and welcome Hillary.
• 1:46
  Michelle Gauthier: Hillary, thank you so much for being here with us.
• 1:48
  Michelle Gauthier: Thanks for having me.
• 1:49
  Michelle Gauthier: This is exciting.
• 1:50
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, I'm so glad to have you.
• 1:52
  Michelle Gauthier: So I always want to know first, tell us about you.
• 1:55
  Michelle Gauthier: What is your backstory and how did you get to be this person who's now doing TED Talks and is seen as not only a financial advisor but an expert on finances?
• 2:06
  Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, I had a very regular up and coming path line to being a financial advisor.
• 2:12
  Hilary Hendershott: I fell in love with economics in school.
• 2:15
  Hilary Hendershott: My father was a financial advisor my whole life.
• 2:18
  Hilary Hendershott: I tried a couple things in my early 20s but pretty soon I went to work for my dad.
• 2:23
  Hilary Hendershott: He very much wanted me to be his business continuation plan.
• 2:27
  Hilary Hendershott: As an economics student, I was the ultimate pragmatist.
• 2:30
  Hilary Hendershott: I was like, you know, everything should work out, if you just work hard, you'll do the best kind of mindset.
• 2:37
  Hilary Hendershott: And then and then I found myself in a situation.
• 2:42
  Hilary Hendershott: See, money burned a hole in my pocket and it got to the point where I was coming home from a day full of advising multimillionaires on how to build investment portfolios, to a stack of bills on my kitchen counter that I didn't open because I couldn't pay them.
• 2:55
  Hilary Hendershott: I didn't have the money to pay them, right.
• 2:57
  Hilary Hendershott: And it got so bad that one day I pulled my leased BMW convertible into the gas station and my credit cards were maxed out and my bank account was empty, so I couldn't even buy gas.
• 3:10
  Hilary Hendershott: So I left the BMW at the gas station.
• 3:14
  Hilary Hendershott: I walked home and I had a chat with myself on the way home and I said, obviously, very clearly, I can see at this age that if I continue without a violent interruption of my current pattern, that my future is going to be filled with more, different and worse versions of this outcome.
• 3:33
  Hilary Hendershott: Like I'm going to continue to have financial emergencies, I'm going to continue to have bad credit, no savings, people are going to have to rescue me.
• 3:40
  Hilary Hendershott: Right, and I said obviously, whatever world I'm functioning in about my own personal finances, it doesn't work, my behavior doesn't work.
• 3:49
  Hilary Hendershott: So I look at my friends and colleagues next to me and they might make the same amount of money as I do, but they're saving money, they have good credit, they're paying cash for cars.
• 3:59
  Hilary Hendershott: And I said, what's giving me my behavior is my psychology.
• 4:02
  Hilary Hendershott: So it's obviously not my love for economics that's going to save the day.
• 4:05
  Hilary Hendershott: I'm going to have to become a student of money psychology.
• 4:08
  Hilary Hendershott: And I started attending conferences.
• 4:10
  Hilary Hendershott: I mean, I got really humble.
• 4:12
  Hilary Hendershott: I told people in my life what was actually happening in my world.
• 4:16
  Hilary Hendershott: I remember I attended this lecture and I heard the term overspender for the first time, and I did not.
• 4:22
  Hilary Hendershott: I'd never heard that term before, but I knew when I heard it that I was one.
• 4:25
  Hilary Hendershott: Right.
• 4:27
  Michelle Gauthier: You identified immediately as an overspender.
• 4:30
  Hilary Hendershott: Ding ding ding, like you know, and I've heard and said the word so many times.
• 4:34
  Hilary Hendershott: It's funny to say that I hadn't.
• 4:35
  Hilary Hendershott: I knew that day, I'd never heard it before.
• 4:37
  Hilary Hendershott: And you know, I got like I said.
• 4:39
  Hilary Hendershott: I got transparent with my I mean, my father was my boss, so I told him the dire situation of my finances and I got into right relationship with wealth.
• 4:48
  Hilary Hendershott: I right-sized my spending by force.
• 4:50
  Hilary Hendershott: It was a belt cinching in the beginning, right, and it took some time and the beginning parts were painful.
• 4:58
  Hilary Hendershott: No ifs, ands or buts about it.
• 5:00
  Hilary Hendershott: I had to have that BMW towed back to the credit union - they owned it.
• 5:05
  Hilary Hendershott: It was a lease, like I said it was.
• 5:06
  Hilary Hendershott: It was lease.
• 5:07
  Hilary Hendershott: And I walked in and I handed her the keys and I said here, this isn't mine anymore.
• 5:10
  Hilary Hendershott: You know, the look on this woman's face was like she said I've never had anyone do this before.
• 5:15
  Hilary Hendershott: Well, I wasn't going to get, wait for it to be repossessed.
• 5:17
  Hilary Hendershott: So here you go.
• 5:25
  Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, I did a deal in lieu of foreclosure on a condo.
• 5:26
  Hilary Hendershott: I had one of those mortgages where I made the minimum payment every month and the balance went up on a monthly basis.
• 5:29
  Hilary Hendershott: So by the time I let go of the condo.
• 5:31
  Hilary Hendershott: The mortgage amount was, you know, close to the actual fair market value of the condo, but it had gone from 420 - It was worth 420,000.
• 5:40
  Hilary Hendershott: And then, in the real estate crisis, it got down to $190,000.
• 5:45
  Hilary Hendershott: So I had $420,000 in debt on a condo that was worth less than $200,000.
• 5:51
  Hilary Hendershott: So I cleared the debts, I negotiated with all those debtors and fast forward a few years.
• 5:57
  Hilary Hendershott: I started to get really focused on how can I impact my earnings?
• 6:01
  Hilary Hendershott: Because, look, I'm making $65,000 a year.
• 6:04
  Hilary Hendershott: Now that's all fine and good and I'm doing everything the right way.
• 6:07
  Hilary Hendershott: I haven't spent money in a restaurant or spent money in a coffee shop for years, and I did that for a long time.
• 6:13
  Hilary Hendershott: But how can I impact my earnings?
• 6:15
  Hilary Hendershott: Because that's the big lever point.
• 6:17
  Hilary Hendershott: And when things started to really change for me around my earnings and you know, I went from 65K to 150K to 250K, to well beyond that at this point, and the numbers started to look very different I said to myself I have acquired a skill set and a mindset that people on this planet need.
• 6:37
  Hilary Hendershott: Like we all know, people suffer about money, right?
• 6:40
  Hilary Hendershott: So at that point I decided to integrate my economics and my certified financial planner designation with my deep compassion and understanding about money mindset and money beliefs, and launched my podcast, and it's been off to the races.
• 6:53
  Hilary Hendershott: I now own the company.
• 6:55
  Hilary Hendershott: We're a team of 10 people, nine women.
• 6:59
  Hilary Hendershott: The firm is designed by women, for women and and this earlier this year I actually hired my husband.
• 7:05
  Hilary Hendershott: He's a PhD in finance, so we now have a chief investment officer.
• 7:08
  Hilary Hendershott: So it's been fun.
• 7:10
  Hilary Hendershott: It's been fun and well-received.
• 7:12
  Michelle Gauthier: He's the one exception.
• 7:13
  Michelle Gauthier: He's the one guy who's allowed in the company.
• 7:15
  Michelle Gauthier: Huh yeah.
• 7:16
  Hilary Hendershott: That's great.
• 7:17
  Hilary Hendershott: I love dudes, but we're by women for women.
• 7:21
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, exactly Nothing against them.
• 7:23
  Michelle Gauthier: But well, we're by women for women.
• 7:26
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, exactly Nothing against them.
• 7:27
  Michelle Gauthier: But well, I think a couple of things before I go on and ask you some more questions.
• 7:29
  Michelle Gauthier: That was great.
• 7:29
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you so much for sharing your story.
• 7:30
  Michelle Gauthier: I think it is so common.
• 7:32
  Michelle Gauthier: So if anyone is listening who is overwhelmed by their finances or just the amount of things they even have to think about to try to get their financial picture together, that it's totally normal.
• 7:44
  Michelle Gauthier: And your example of a stack of bills that you didn't even want to open is some that like things of that nature are what I hear all the time from my clients, where they just don't want to open the door to that basement that's full of stuff, or they just don't want to open those bills because they know what's in there.
• 8:00
  Michelle Gauthier: So I think that's going to resonate with a lot of listeners.
• 8:04
  Michelle Gauthier: I also think that you sharing that you had to, even though you intellectually knew.
• 8:10
  Michelle Gauthier: Like if someone else would have said, hey, here's my salary, what should I do with it?
• 8:14
  Michelle Gauthier: You probably could have said do this, invest here, do all these things.
• 8:16
  Michelle Gauthier: So you intellectually knew how to manage money, but there was something that was stopping you from actually doing it in your own life and that's so powerful, I think, to share that story.
• 8:27
  Michelle Gauthier: So what did you as you worked through that?
• 8:30
  Michelle Gauthier: What did you find as those money beliefs or your thoughts about money?
• 8:34
  Michelle Gauthier: What was it that was driving you to act in a different way than what you intellectually knew how to do?
• 8:41
  Hilary Hendershott: Oh, that is a really good question and the answer is we don't often look at things this way as human beings, but once you see it, you can't not see it.
• 8:50
  Hilary Hendershott: So money is really, in reality, is a blank canvas.
• 8:56
  Hilary Hendershott: It is a white wall.
• 8:57
  Hilary Hendershott: Money has no true nature and it's conceptual.
• 9:00
  Hilary Hendershott: Really, all money is as an agreement that you can exchange later for something of value, right like, and only only reason money continues to work is because we all abide by it and we simplify it like I have a credit card right here, like like this is money or like a dollar bill is money, but those are not money.
• 9:16
  Hilary Hendershott: Money is the agreement we all live in as humans, and kids can't understand it.
• 9:21
  Hilary Hendershott: So we adults got bad money relationships from our parents because they got bad money relationships from their parents and we unknowingly pass them down to our kids.
• 9:32
  Hilary Hendershott: My mother actually has a pretty functional relationship with money, but she was earning an average income and just saving a lot of it.
• 9:39
  Hilary Hendershott: She was really being responsible, and so for me, there was nothing left to do the things I wanted to do.
• 9:44
  Hilary Hendershott: For example, I was on the high school basketball team and I wanted everyone on the team had Nike high tops.
• 9:49
  Hilary Hendershott: I wanted Nike high tops and my mom took me to Payless Shoe Source and I got Pro Wings.
• 9:54
  Hilary Hendershott: Do you remember?
• 10:02
  Hilary Hendershott: Okay, I too was a Payless shopper.
• 10:03
  Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, that was embarrassing for me.
• 10:04
  Hilary Hendershott: I called the cause, I wanted them to be Nikes, I called them like, but I made up that there's never enough money.
• 10:07
  Hilary Hendershott: And that was true.
• 10:08
  Hilary Hendershott: For me there's never enough money.
• 10:09
  Hilary Hendershott: So then, counterintuitively, when you believe there's never enough money, if someone pays you $100, what do you have to do with that $100?
• 10:17
  Hilary Hendershott: You have to spend it.
• 10:18
  Hilary Hendershott: You have to spend it, and in my case, I would spend $110.
• 10:22
  Hilary Hendershott: Now there's other people who get $100 and spend $200, right, but either way it's bad because otherwise there becomes enough money.
• 10:31
  Hilary Hendershott: If you get paid $100 and $100 and $100, pretty soon there's $1,000 in your bank account and your mindset that there's never enough money starts to go.
• 10:39
  Hilary Hendershott: It gets painful, right, and so I think that's where that saying money burns a hole in her pocket comes from.
• 10:46
  Hilary Hendershott: That's what it felt like Every time money came in.
• 10:49
  Hilary Hendershott: I already had it spent, somehow, managed magically, I would get paid one hundred dollars.
• 10:53
  Hilary Hendershott: I owed someone one hundred and five over here.
• 10:55
  Hilary Hendershott: I mean.
• 10:56
  Hilary Hendershott: Every time.
• 10:56
  Hilary Hendershott: It was infuriating.
• 10:59
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, but I think that's such a good and perfect example of what we believe, or what we're thinking, becomes the truth.
• 11:06
  Michelle Gauthier: So if, deep down, you were thinking, probably unconsciously, there's never enough money, the universe makes it so that there's never enough money.
• 11:15
  Michelle Gauthier: You don't have the capacity to have and to believe that there's always enough money and all those things.
• 11:21
  Hilary Hendershott: And you just naturally accept limitations right, because you think they're for you.
• 11:25
  Hilary Hendershott: That's right.
• 11:31
  Hilary Hendershott: I fit in that really small box Ready, yes, you know.
• 11:32
  Hilary Hendershott: And you don't negotiate for more or try to get bigger or better, and I see that all over my past.
• 11:35
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, and I'm sure you see it a lot in your clients as well.
• 11:38
  Michelle Gauthier: For me personally, it was interesting when I started my own business, because I had a corporate job before this where I made great money and I thought to myself, okay, it's possible for me to make that much money on my own.
• 11:50
  Michelle Gauthier: But it was funny because I had a belief that I couldn't make a lot of money without it being really hard and kind of suffering, like I would have to work a ton of hours and I would have to, you know, do work that I didn't really enjoy, and so I had to work on the belief that I could do a job that I really enjoy and that I really wanted to do and also make money.
• 12:10
  Michelle Gauthier: So I feel like, no matter how far you come, there's always like a new ceiling that we have to believe past before we can get past it.
• 12:21
  Hilary Hendershott: Isn't it pervasive?
• 12:22
  Hilary Hendershott: There's that saying new level, new devil.
• 12:25
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, exactly and right when you think I nailed it, I got this.
• 12:29
  Michelle Gauthier: I could totally do this.
• 12:30
  Michelle Gauthier: There's some kind of new feeling it's never homeostasis I know, no for sure.
• 12:34
  Michelle Gauthier: Do you know Jen Sincero, who wrote that book?
• 12:37
  Michelle Gauthier: You're a badass at making money, so she said it on your desk.
• 12:40
  Michelle Gauthier: Oh yes, yes, that's one of her books.
• 12:43
  Michelle Gauthier: I love her.
• 12:43
  Michelle Gauthier: But one of the things she says in her money book is that by age seven we have been basically programmed for our money beliefs by our parents.
• 12:53
  Michelle Gauthier: So maybe what you got from your mom was like you have to save more than you spend and it's never okay to spend on something that's expensive or you know whatever that was.
• 13:03
  Michelle Gauthier: And so I just thought that was such an eye opener for me that we all grew up with these money beliefs and we haven't even investigated them because they're just subconscious.
• 13:11
  Michelle Gauthier: We just get programmed when we're kids from our parents and then we get kind of go along that way.
• 13:16
  Michelle Gauthier: So just wanted to say that because I think that's an interesting fact.
• 13:20
  Hilary Hendershott: You know for with my mom and God bless her.
• 13:22
  Hilary Hendershott: You know I've mentioned her on probably a thousand podcast interviews now.
• 13:25
  Hilary Hendershott: She never wanted her financial life to be made public, but she really did well, right.
• 13:30
  Hilary Hendershott: And the thing for me is that the savings wasn't real.
• 13:34
  Hilary Hendershott: I didn't see it, it wasn't anything to me and I didn't have.
• 13:40
  Hilary Hendershott: As a high school basketball player, I didn't have a sense of what life's going to be like when my mom turned 65, how much money she needs to retire, right.
• 13:48
  Hilary Hendershott: So one of the things I do to combat that like, for example, I show my daughter the restaurant bill and then we talk about how many hours she would have to work at ten five dollars an hour to pay for that that dinner bill.
• 14:00
  Michelle Gauthier: Right.
• 14:00
  Hilary Hendershott: I just want her to see it.
• 14:01
  Hilary Hendershott: When our stock accounts are up, I pull her in front of the computer.
• 14:05
  Hilary Hendershott: I'm not sure that's the right thing.
• 14:07
  Hilary Hendershott: I'll let you know when she turns out Right.
• 14:09
  Hilary Hendershott: Right, it's kind of how I've tried to answer that question.
• 14:18
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, I'm doing the same thing with my kids as well, and it is funny, my son he's 17 now, but he got his first job last year and he worked and he was making $13 an hour, so I helped him figure out you know what that was going to be.
• 14:25
  Michelle Gauthier: Of course, he didn't know about taxes and he was like what, what?
• 14:28
  Michelle Gauthier: No, what does that go to?
• 14:30
  Michelle Gauthier: It's such a bummer when you first realize like, oh so, this isn't all mine.
• 14:34
  Michelle Gauthier: So tell us what you would recommend for people finding out what are their money blocks and then how they can try to change them.
• 14:45
  Hilary Hendershott: Your money.
• 14:46
  Hilary Hendershott: I call it your money operating system, and so, like, the operating system of the computer dictates how the hardware interacts with the software, and so it's a really great metaphor for your money belief, your money mindset.
• 14:57
  Hilary Hendershott: Money mindset is sort of a vague term.
• 14:59
  Hilary Hendershott: Specifically, I'm talking about this very and I'm going to use the word childish.
• 15:04
  Hilary Hendershott: It's elementary, it's simple, it's something a child would believe because you did decide it when you were a kid, and it is the way money is for you.
• 15:12
  Hilary Hendershott: It's the water you swim in, it's the air you breathe.
• 15:15
  Hilary Hendershott: Listen to the things you say about money.
• 15:17
  Hilary Hendershott: You know it's obvious to me in hindsight that what was true for me, both in my mind and in my bank accounts at that time, is there is never enough money.
• 15:26
  Hilary Hendershott: It's very simple, very clear, and then just the sort of devious behaviors that I was doing to continue to perpetuate that were the aha moment.
• 15:36
  Hilary Hendershott: It was like, oh my God, look at the things I've been doing.
• 15:39
  Hilary Hendershott: Some of the most common money operating systems are there's never enough money.
• 15:43
  Hilary Hendershott: Money operating systems are there's never enough money.
• 15:44
  Hilary Hendershott: Conversely, there's always enough money.
• 15:47
  Hilary Hendershott: Now these people have to worry also because there's always enough money, as a childish belief doesn't always verify that there is enough money, right.
• 15:58
  Hilary Hendershott: I had a woman one time call me.
• 16:00
  Hilary Hendershott: She said I just retired, I have $250,000.
• 16:03
  Hilary Hendershott: I said call your boss back and beg for your job because you know not enough.
• 16:10
  Hilary Hendershott: That's kind of how I picture there's always enough money.
• 16:14
  Hilary Hendershott: Also, the sort of common tropes that we hear about money money is the root of all evil.
• 16:20
  Hilary Hendershott: This is a very destructive, painful money operating system because these folks can't even come to the table and have like a shoulder to shoulder egalitarian conversation or constructive conversation about money.
• 16:34
  Hilary Hendershott: Right, because even wanting money is bad.
• 16:36
  Hilary Hendershott: And you know you're the only one in the world who's committed to filling your bank accounts.
• 16:39
  Hilary Hendershott: I promise you so, if you can't even be transparent, that you do want to have a prosperous financial life.
• 16:46
  Hilary Hendershott: You know you're very limited.
• 16:47
  Hilary Hendershott: Until you unravel that particular belief, there is absolution of responsibility, but of course said like a child if I'm good, daddy will handle it for me.
• 16:57
  Hilary Hendershott: Oh gosh, yeah.
• 16:59
  Hilary Hendershott: And sometimes it's the universe or sometimes it's God.
• 17:04
  Hilary Hendershott: Right, but these folks really struggle because they have virtuous behavior paired with financial success and the money just doesn't work that way.
• 17:14
  Hilary Hendershott: I mean, yes, you have to have integrity to have your money and keep it around, but money requires earning, spending, saving, you know, yeah.
• 17:22
  Hilary Hendershott: So and then there's the one that's very common out in the world is money gives me power, and these are the people who pay for the dinner bill.
• 17:30
  Hilary Hendershott: They're the ones who drive the red sports car.
• 17:32
  Hilary Hendershott: They wear the flashy clothes maybe when they don't have the bank account balance, to kind of justify it.
• 17:36
  Hilary Hendershott: I was definitely.
• 17:38
  Hilary Hendershott: I had this, so that I had two of them.
• 17:40
  Hilary Hendershott: When I was little, my parents got divorced.
• 17:43
  Hilary Hendershott: My father said to me I don't want to pay the child support because I don't want your mother to have that kind of power over me.
• 17:48
  Hilary Hendershott: And I said oh, money is power.
• 17:50
  Hilary Hendershott: So how that translated was in my world, I would take you out and I was trying to buy your affection.
• 17:56
  Hilary Hendershott: I wanted you to like me, so I would pay for drinks, pay for dinner, whatever, pay for the vacation with money that I didn't have, trying to convince you that I was a worthwhile person who was already successful.
• 18:07
  Hilary Hendershott: There's that saying spending money on people you don't like to prove.
• 18:11
  Hilary Hendershott: Anyway, spending money, you don't have to buy friends.
• 18:13
  Hilary Hendershott: You don't even like something like that.
• 18:16
  Michelle Gauthier: Great, I haven't heard that before.
• 18:17
  Michelle Gauthier: That's so good, though, if anybody's out there doing that right now.
• 18:22
  Hilary Hendershott: Oh, there are people doing it, I promise you.
• 18:24
  Hilary Hendershott: So those are really the five most common ones I hear about.
• 18:29
  Hilary Hendershott: You know, really, take an inventory, like spend a week, and write down all the things you say about money, all the things you think to yourself about money.
• 18:37
  Hilary Hendershott: Mostly we don't, especially if you're a female.
• 18:39
  Hilary Hendershott: We don't talk much about money, we talk about sales right money.
• 18:46
  Hilary Hendershott: We talk about sales, right, or we talk about maybe we talk about like I'm saving in my 401k, but we don't talk about how much we're earning.
• 18:49
  Hilary Hendershott: We don't talk about how we feel about money.
• 18:50
  Hilary Hendershott: And so if right now, the only person you talk to about money is yourself, you have to write down your thoughts, and I find that those kinds of thought diaries and, you know, conversation logs can be absolutely illuminating when it comes to isolating your money operating system.
• 19:06
  Michelle Gauthier: I think that's great, that's such a good idea.
• 19:08
  Michelle Gauthier: So if somebody is listening and they're like, oh, that one cut me deep, that's me, I'm definitely doing that and they're thinking I already have a million things to do and I'm overwhelmed.
• 19:18
  Michelle Gauthier: What am I supposed to do with this?
• 19:20
  Michelle Gauthier: What would you suggest that people do?
• 19:22
  Michelle Gauthier: I heard your first step was is to write down and just get curious about how you're thinking about money, what your operating system might be saying at a very kid, basic type level.
• 19:33
  Michelle Gauthier: What else can they do?
• 19:35
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah?
• 19:36
  Hilary Hendershott: So you know, in life we can either live with an intimate relationship with what's so like reality or we can live in story.
• 19:46
  Hilary Hendershott: Right, and as long as you're in an empowered story, more power to you.
• 19:49
  Hilary Hendershott: Go live in your story that you're the greatest person, you're the best mom.
• 19:53
  Hilary Hendershott: I love that for you, Wonderful.
• 19:54
  Hilary Hendershott: If your money story isn't working for you, it is time to get closer to reality, right?
• 19:59
  Hilary Hendershott: Because sometimes the money story just creates drama and disempowerment and no money.
• 20:04
  Hilary Hendershott: So add to your money conversation.
• 20:07
  Hilary Hendershott: Log your money log.
• 20:09
  Hilary Hendershott: Take stock of your income, your current savings level.
• 20:13
  Hilary Hendershott: Where are those savings?
• 20:15
  Hilary Hendershott: What counts are they in?
• 20:16
  Hilary Hendershott: Maybe some of you haven't even opened the portals in years, right, that's not uncommon.
• 20:22
  Hilary Hendershott: How much debt do you have?
• 20:23
  Hilary Hendershott: What are the credit cards that you have?
• 20:24
  Hilary Hendershott: What's the interest rate you're paying on those credit cards?
• 20:26
  Hilary Hendershott: Just this activity alone will be transformational, right, and as long as you keep moving the needle.
• 20:35
  Hilary Hendershott: I mean, look, when I was $570,000 in debt, including the mortgage, I had a 440 credit score or something and a $65,000 a year income.
• 20:45
  Hilary Hendershott: It seemed impossible, but I pointed my rudder in the right direction and started to have exponential leaps forward.
• 20:55
  Hilary Hendershott: Right, Because I kept my mindset pressed on how can I move the lever for myself?
• 21:01
  Hilary Hendershott: So just know it can happen, but definitely take stock of exactly what you have.
• 21:07
  Hilary Hendershott: Your focus needs to be on increasing your net worth every day or every week, or at least every year, right, Rather than whatever your focus has been on in the past.
• 21:17
  Hilary Hendershott: And if it helps you to articulate what you've actually been focused on, which I was focused on buying friends so that I could, people would love me pretending that I was already successful rather than getting successful.
• 21:28
  Hilary Hendershott: If it helps you to admit that, great, it helped me, and then you can get yourself pointed in the right direction.
• 21:35
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes.
• 21:36
  Michelle Gauthier: I just feel like in general you're saying just open the closet and let the monsters come out, like, see what you're doing, see where all your balances are, see where you have debt, and then just facing.
• 21:49
  Michelle Gauthier: That is probably the biggest step to just admit OK, there's a problem here.
• 21:54
  Hilary Hendershott: Here's what it is.
• 21:54
  Hilary Hendershott: I don't know if it's the biggest step, like, maybe maybe tripling your income would be a bigger step but it's always it's always a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial success.
• 22:06
  Hilary Hendershott: So, yeah, if, if clarity ever goes out, just go get clarity again.
• 22:11
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, exactly, exactly Okay.
• 22:14
  Michelle Gauthier: One more question for you.
• 22:15
  Michelle Gauthier: Something we talk about a lot on this podcast is people pleasing and how women are really conditioned most of the time to put others ahead of themselves or to do things in order to make others happy, and your experience with yourself and maybe your clients who are women which I'm assuming most of your clients are women Do you see people pleasing showing up in people's financial lives?
• 22:37
  Hilary Hendershott: At this firm, You know, it started about 90% women.
• 22:39
  Hilary Hendershott: At this point my practice is more like 60% women, because we get a lot of cool dudes who just really want to hang out with us, definitely.
• 22:48
  Hilary Hendershott: I've led conversation circles with women about money, and this is almost always what comes up is the pain of the internalized gender roles, and that also includes often, almost always, the idea of pleasing or being easy, being not wanting more than you have.
• 23:10
  Hilary Hendershott: Be quiet, don't speak up, don't ask for more, be easily pleased, just put a smile on your face, sister, girl Right, and oh God, it's a mindset and a practice that I just, I find myself wanting, just wanting us to shed ourselves up, shed S-H-E-D.
• 23:33
  Hilary Hendershott: Shed ourselves up.
• 23:34
  Hilary Hendershott: It.
• 23:34
  Hilary Hendershott: I mean, and I say that I can't even say that with enough intensity, you know, but the thing is, we perpetrate it on ourselves.
• 23:40
  Hilary Hendershott: If you think about it, you've either been the woman and I have to criticize another woman, or you sat in a circle of women who've been criticizing a woman outside that circle for wanting more, dressing better, asking for the promotion, asking for a divorce, whatever it is.
• 23:57
  Hilary Hendershott: And so, you know, I see us as women also sometimes perpetrating patriarchy on ourselves.
• 24:04
  Hilary Hendershott: It's an insidious problem and it really is on us to say enough is enough, right, yeah?
• 24:13
  Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, the time for this mindset has come and gone.
• 24:16
  Michelle Gauthier: That's absolutely right.
• 24:17
  Michelle Gauthier: I just think the whole concept of you don't have to be easy and laid back and willing to take whatever your pay is anymore.
• 24:29
  Michelle Gauthier: I don't think we ever did, but maybe we just didn't have the words for it.
• 24:33
  Michelle Gauthier: But the reason why it seems like women do that at least I know for sure I did was in order to be seen as easy to get along with and nice and everybody likes me and so I don't need to ask for that extra thing or I don't need to want more money and I think just giving ourselves permission to do what we want, just because you want to, it's OK to take up space.
• 24:57
  Michelle Gauthier: It's OK to take up space.
• 24:59
  Hilary Hendershott: It's OK to want more.
• 25:00
  Hilary Hendershott: It's OK to want to be big.
• 25:02
  Hilary Hendershott: It's OK to want to make a difference or have an influence, or work full time and pay a nanny to take care of your kids.
• 25:08
  Hilary Hendershott: Some of the times it's OK, yeah exactly, exactly.
• 25:12
  Michelle Gauthier: We don't even have to feel guilty about it.
• 25:14
  Michelle Gauthier: We can feel like we're in alignment when we're doing all that.
• 25:17
  Michelle Gauthier: It's magic.
• 25:18
  Michelle Gauthier: It's magic, oh my gosh.
• 25:20
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, I have two more questions for you that I ask everybody who's a guest on the podcast.
• 25:24
  Michelle Gauthier: The first one is what is something that you do when you feel overwhelmed to make yourself feel better?
• 25:31
  Hilary Hendershott: Oh well, first of all, I give myself permission to lay down.
• 25:34
  Hilary Hendershott: Okay, I mean, most of us work from home at this point, but I'm in a place in life where I have chosen, in my late forties for the first time, to choose peace in my soul over being a workaholic.
• 25:49
  Hilary Hendershott: And it's not, it's not quite natural.
• 25:53
  Hilary Hendershott: Yet I have to remind myself, I'm like, oh, the breathing is shallow.
• 25:56
  Hilary Hendershott: I think it's time to lay down, you know, and sometimes it takes 10 minutes or 20 minutes to really like get back into that soft belly breathing.
• 26:04
  Hilary Hendershott: And you know, I mean I have a heart rate monitor so I know what heart rate I'm targeting, like mid 70s I'm cool with, so that's something.
• 26:12
  Hilary Hendershott: And then I use that brain dump, what I call the conversation log.
• 26:17
  Hilary Hendershott: I just pull out a piece of paper and I start writing, or I pull up a Google document and I start typing, and if it's a persistent complaint, I type it over and over and over until it magically sounds like gibberish to me.
• 26:27
  Hilary Hendershott: And if it's overwhelming all the things I have to do I just type them all up and I make sure they're all documented somewhere until I can, you know, wrap my arms around the task list.
• 26:35
  Hilary Hendershott: Now you're the expert.
• 26:36
  Hilary Hendershott: How did I do?
• 26:37
  Michelle Gauthier: Amazing, perfect, absolutely perfect.
• 26:39
  Michelle Gauthier: I think the key is know yourself what makes you feel overwhelmed and then what makes you feel better.
• 26:45
  Michelle Gauthier: And it sounds like you've got that down.
• 26:46
  Michelle Gauthier: I love that suggestion that you just gave though that I haven't heard that one before to just keep writing down your complaints until it sounds like gibberish, like just keep reading it until you're like OK, this is, this is silly, I'm just going to move on and do something else.
• 27:00
  Michelle Gauthier: I also think, 100 percent of the time, things in our head feel worse than things on a piece of paper.
• 27:05
  Michelle Gauthier: So anytime you can just get it from your brain to a piece of paper, I feel like you're guaranteed to feel better.
• 27:10
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, okay.
• 27:11
  Michelle Gauthier: And then next, what is something that you do to save time or to do less?
• 27:18
  Hilary Hendershott: I have decided in my life to have a high income so that I can pay people to do things like errands and cleaning and repair work and things like that.
• 27:29
  Hilary Hendershott: So I know that sounds simplistic, like I but but it's.
• 27:33
  Michelle Gauthier: It actually it sounds kind of profound because a lot of people, just the way that you said it to, like I have chosen to have a high income so that I can have the money to hire people to do this.
• 27:43
  Michelle Gauthier: I think being able to say that and feel nothing about it except for that's a fact and that's my life is really a big deal, because I know lots of people who would feel guilty for even wanting that and then, well, I could hire someone, but I really could do it myself.
• 27:57
  Michelle Gauthier: So I really think that's profound.
• 27:58
  Michelle Gauthier: Just to say these are the choices that I have made and this is how I spend my money.
• 28:02
  Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, yeah, and it's a choice that informs so many behaviors and conversations and specifics, right, because there's a lot that goes into that having a boundary about how low I'll allow my paycheck to go, and of course, as a business owner, I do have some more input on that than you know.
• 28:19
  Hilary Hendershott: I don't have to ask a superior for a raise, right, I have to go earn it, and the other thing.
• 28:24
  Hilary Hendershott: There's just a lot I don't do.
• 28:26
  Michelle Gauthier: I mean there's a lot I just don't do.
• 28:28
  Michelle Gauthier: That's another great answer you just cross things off your list and just don't do them.
• 28:33
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah.
• 28:33
  Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, yeah, the ladies here in the resort my neighborhood I live in a gated neighborhood they play pickleball and my chiropractor said, oh, pickleball keeps me in business, right, the injuries are so expensive and they keep inviting me out to play pickleball.
• 28:48
  Hilary Hendershott: And I was considering am I going to take the time to be really good at pickleball, because I'm competitive?
• 28:53
  Hilary Hendershott: And I finally just decided you know what?
• 28:55
  Hilary Hendershott: I'm just not going to play pickleball, I'm just not going to go.
• 28:59
  Hilary Hendershott: I'm not going to do it.
• 29:00
  Hilary Hendershott: If you're going to meet me out, it's going to be for a drink or a meal, yes, but it won't play for pickleball, because I don't want to end up in the chiropractor's office injured and I don't have time.
• 29:08
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, yes exactly, I love that.
• 29:11
  Michelle Gauthier: One of the things I talk about is having a to don't list, so on your to don't list is pickleball.
• 29:16
  Michelle Gauthier: Then you know, if anybody ever asks you you're like, let me check my nope, it's on my to don't list.
• 29:20
  Michelle Gauthier: I don't do that.
• 29:21
  Michelle Gauthier: One for sure I'm not doing it.
• 29:22
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, exactly.
• 29:23
  Michelle Gauthier: Well, if people want to know more about you, I know first tell us about your podcast and then any any other places they can go if they want to learn more about money, their thoughts on money, what some of their backstories might be.
• 29:37
  Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, my podcast if you have room in your podcast lineup is called Love your Money and it's a kind of a play on words because we talk about what it would take for your money to write you a love note signed love comma, your money.
• 29:49
  Hilary Hendershott: But also it's about being in a reciprocal relationship with your money.
• 29:52
  Hilary Hendershott: But also it's about being in a reciprocal relationship with your money right, like really building trust and rapport with your money, and so that's fun.
• 29:57
  Hilary Hendershott: We'd love to have you subscribe there.
• 29:59
  Hilary Hendershott: And then everything I'm doing on the web you can find at hendershotwealthcom, and Hendershot has no C and two Ts.
• 30:07
  Hilary Hendershott: We'll put that in the show notes.
• 30:11
  Hilary Hendershott: You know, as a result of all this financial growth that I've done, I really developed a soft spot for working with women.
• 30:17
  Hilary Hendershott: Many of my clients are widows.
• 30:19
  Hilary Hendershott: Many of my clients are executives who never got married.
• 30:22
  Hilary Hendershott: My firm is, like I said, by women for women, and yet we don't sacrifice anything in terms of investment, performance or the quality of the service and it's been so well receivedreceived.
• 30:33
  Hilary Hendershott: It's a very fulfilling.
• 30:34
  Hilary Hendershott: It's very fulfilling work for my team and I, and we work for women and couples.
• 30:38
  Hilary Hendershott: And if you're looking for potentially looking for a financial planner to partner with.
• 30:42
  Hilary Hendershott: We'd love to have you visit us and fill out a contact to get on our schedule.
• 30:46
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, awesome, and is that at the same website?
• 30:50
  Hilary Hendershott: It is at hendershotwealth.
• 30:51
  Hilary Hendershott: com/ contact.
• 30:53
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, perfect, great.
• 30:55
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you so much.
• 31:04
  Michelle Gauthier: It was so nice to meet you.
• 31:05
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
• 31:07
  Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegothiercom.
• 31:11
  Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.