Latest / Cash Confident with Brie Sodano / Breaking Free From Financial Survival Mode

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Breaking Free From Financial Survival Mode · Cash Confident with Brie Sodano

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Cash Confident podcast.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: I'm Brie Sedano, your fearless host, personal finance expert and the visionary behind the revolutionary Cash Confident community.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Get ready to embark on an electrifying journey where we redefine the rules of money and empower women to harness the immense power to craft a life they truly, truly desire.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: This podcast is the ultimate resource, meticulously crafted, for women who are ready to unleash their financial prowess and embrace a life of abundant success.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: We leave no stone unturned as we delve into the depths of money management, mindset mastery and the undeniable influence of emotions on your financial decisions.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Prepare to rise above the societal limitations and break free from the chains that have held you back, as we equip you with the tools and knowledge to make bold, confident choices with your cash.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: We believe that true financial power begins with knowledge, and that is exactly what we deliver.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: So buckle up, my fierce and ambitious friends, as we embark on this transformative journey to becoming Cash Confident together.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Oh hello, hello, everyone.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Today, what we are going to be talking about and working on is struggle and survival mode, and I'm really pumped to talk about this topic because this is a thing that I work on with so many of my clients.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: At really all different levels.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: I've had clients who are making a ton of money like, let's say, half a million dollars a year, take home and really living in an emotional state and I'll call it property something that really feels like survival mode, even though they actually have plenty of resources.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: And I do want to say that your emotional state can be impacted by your money, but for most people it's really not so.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: If you grew up in a state of survival mode and really stressed about money a lot of times people will make so much more money, but that stress, that survival mode, doesn't actually go away.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: You can carry survival mode all the way up with an income ladder.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: So, anyways, today what we're going to talk about is some of the ways that struggle and survival mode are intertwined and the ways that these things we can get stuck in them for very long periods of time, like decades maybe, or, yeah, I would say decades and then we will do some work around learning how to release yourself from some of those struggle patterns.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: So very excited to talk to you all today about these things.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: All right, so when I think about survival mode, when I'm working with a client who's telling me that they're in survival mode, a lot of times they're going to say things to me like I feel like I'm drowning, I feel like I can't catch my breath.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: I feel like when I finally get to a place where I could stand still with my money, something surprises me.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: These are generally some indications that I know that I'm dealing with somebody who's in survival mode.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Also, with survival mode, it's like all of the goals are around just enough and they're not really around more than that.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: So it's like get enough money to pay all my bills, get enough money to pay off this debt, get enough money to do this.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: And it's like the result of those goals is not to be ahead, it's not to be building wealth, it's just to be getting our bear needs covered.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: And so if you run your numbers and you count up all the things that you need, and then your money goal is the same thing of all the things that you need, that's a good indication that you're in survival mode.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: And what ends up happening when you're doing that?
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: It's because that's the first thing.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Obviously, we have to take care of our needs first, and so it's like your brain can't even go further ahead.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: What's beyond that is almost irrelevant to you until everything else is taken care of, which again makes sense, but this is an indication of when we're stuck there for very long periods of time.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: So if this has been a pattern for you where you have just enough or just enough plus like a tiny, tiny bit for long periods of time, you can probably just own it that you're in survival mode.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: And survival mode is really very different than thriving.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: It's a different mindset, it's a different way of looking at the world, it's a different emotional state, it's a different physiology, it's a different level of stress in the body, it's a different nervous system response.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: All of these things are different when we're surviving or thriving.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: So there's layers to it, and so I want to talk about some of the things that actually keep us in survival mode and some of the ways we struggle against those things.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: So the first thing that we will discuss is really around identity, and we've talked about identity in previous episodes.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: But identity is a set of belief structures that you have that pertain to you and how you navigate the world.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: So it may be your I am statements, it may be the judgments that you have about what you are or are not, and it may even include judgments about other people who are separate than you Like.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: Oh, I'm not rich like the people who live on the other side of the tracks and so that good stuff is not available to me kind of stuff.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: And you'd be surprised at how insidious and small these belief structures can be and just like under the radar of your conscious mind, but still they're there, just kind of doing their own thing.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: So when I'm working with clients on what belief structures cause some struggle, I'll look for things like do they say things like life is hard, or this is hard to do, or you have to work hard to make enough money, or nothing is ever easy, or if it is easy it's not worth having.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Right, those were what else.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: There's another one around being easy, like easy come, easy go.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: That's another idiom that says to me that you love some struggle.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: And I will tell you some of my own stories.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: So when I grew up, my single dad raised us and I remember at one point one of my cousins got an award for something and I was a little jealous because I was a kid and a little, maybe, envious of the attention, and I remember thinking to myself like, yeah, well, of course she has all the time and energy to win a war because she's got a mom and a dad and people who like fix her lunch and take care of her and like all she has to do is worry about this one thing.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: And what I did there in my mind, you know, was I discounted her you know awesome sauce because it didn't really have as much perceived struggle and I'm not even saying that, I even know that she didn't struggle, but it was like this perception of struggle, like all of my success is so much more valid than her success because I had to work harder and I had to struggle for it and it was hard and hers came easy, so essentially as her right and yeah, and so that's like a little embarrassing, a little vulnerable, to admit, but this was where I was at, you know, in my probably middle school age brain, but that bit of identity where I separated myself from things that were easy.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: I separated myself from success that came without struggle.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: I separated myself from being supported or being cared for and I made all of my success in my mind, more valid because of these reasons and this, this, these pieces on my identity, really manifested like I, up until the last couple of years really struggled so much more than I had to Like.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: I took low paying jobs.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: You know I worked in the nonprofit for a while for, you know, not a ton of money.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: I said even to my kids.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: I said to my kids when they were little, like life is hard, a bazillion times a day I called myself a hot mess.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: I struggled to get out of the house on time.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: I struggled, you know, like with everything, with every area of life and money and and everything.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: And it was because on my identity I kind of put struggle as like a badge of weird honor.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Right, and so we're over.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: I'm telling you my story.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: I'm not telling you anybody else's story, but this story is remarkably common in a thousand different flavors, where when other people seem like they have it easier or have more privilege or have more support or things like that, we can separate ourselves from that and then discount their successes in our minds Like well, yeah, of course she got it, her dad is a bazillionaire and that actually contributes to some of the struggle, because what we're doing is we're mentally being like we got some judgments around it, and judgments stop the flow of energy, they stop the flow of thought energy, they stop the flow of physical action.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: They bump up against our emotions in a lot of ways.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: So we want to start to really look at that identity and see am I just a person who struggles?
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: And if that's like I'm your I am statements you probably want to change those.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Unless you still want to struggle some more, which is also fine.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: We can have seasons of life where we do struggle, when you're learning something new or when you're doing something big or like.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: Struggling is not inherently good or bad or right or wrong.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: E is the same thing, not inherently good or bad or right or wrong.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: But when we only struggle, it just makes our life hard.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: It just makes our life less juicy.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: It just puts us in a place of constantly just getting like our ass kicked by life.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: When that's on our identity and when we're always in ease or unwilling to struggle, we probably don't get as much juice out of life either.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: We probably stay in our comfort zone a little bit more.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: So there's a balance.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: There's a balance.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: So I'm talking about like, for the context of this episode is people who are really stuck in struggle, really stuck in survival mode and unable to really move through that.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: So looking at your I am statements and looking at the judgments that you have against other people, especially the people that you think maybe have it easier, the people who didn't struggle or don't have to struggle, you probably want to look at those judgments because those same judgments apply to you.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: Like judgments are just, they're just a mental structure, and so when we're looking outwards, we can see that so and so, maybe on the wrong side of our judgment, and we may be on the right side of our judgment and maybe we're feeling a little righteous indignation or something equally delicious, but those same judgments apply to us.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: So if we're like Kim Kardashian didn't earn it, didn't get it, she didn't, like her success isn't as valid because she was an heiress and a bazillionaire and grew up like blah blah, blah blah, you're separating yourself from all of those things with those judgments.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: And so, when it comes to judgments, my favorite way to really look at judgments is to project them out onto other people, and this is for our journal.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: We're not, like you know, outwardly judging people on the internet, but those.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: It's always easier to see our judgments in the outside world than they are to be on the inside world, but the same judgments that apply to other people, apply to us, even if we're currently on the right side of our judgment and they're currently on the wrong side of our judgment.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: If we were to be on the wrong side of our judgment, we would feel super, super bad, right, and I will tell you that when things started to get easier for me, I would get in my own way and I would make them harder because I started to be incongruent with my identity, right Like.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: So I had the struggle on my identity and I struggled for years beyond what I needed to, because I didn't shift my identity around it.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: And even though I still see my, sometimes, I will still struggle a little bit.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Sometimes I'll still get in my own way or over, complicate things or burn something down, not like literally, like burn something in my business down.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: That's working, you know like sometimes I still do it, but I'm much, much more aware of it at this point.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: So looking at your identity, looking at your judgments, is really the second thing to do, to start to be like hmm, where am I perpetuating this?
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Where am I doing this to myself here?
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Self Like, where are we doing this?
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: So that judgment?
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: You know, to take out your, your, your journal and then, with the judgments, one of the things that I like to do is like so people like that are really far away from us, like Kim Kardashian or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: People love to judge all of those people.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: But then you can start to bring it in.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: You know, like judge, you know people that you went to school with, or coworkers or family members you know, or siblings like the closer that you get, the more those judgments are going to be closer to you.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: So like when we're judging a billionaire, it's like, well, all right, those judgments are also really really far away from where we are.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: When we're judging our you know, our brother or sister, or like you know our cousin, those judgments are much closer.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: So you can kind of start on the outside, you know, on the way outside of your social circle, and work your way in and just like looking at the things that you judge about people in regards to struggle or success or survival mode, or ease or joy, you know just the things that kind of come up.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: And then the last thing I want to say about struggle and survival mode is that we can really get physiologically, like in our body, addicted to the stress.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: A lot of those stress hormones cortisol and whatever's going on that keeps us in that stress have come with a lot of energy.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: And when we're, when we're believing that productivity is worth, when we're believing that we need to, you know, be busy all the time and we need to be productive all the time, what can end up happening is we can actually get addicted, our body can get addicted, to that high intensity sensation of stress, and when we drop out of stress, we can feel such a letdown of energy that it feels like, oh, if I sit down, I'm never going to get back up again.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: And so we can.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: Really, when we stay in survival mode a very long time, it can even kind of scare our body a little bit, like if we rest, we're never going to, we're never going to be able to get back up again, you know.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: And so that's just something to be aware of, because sometimes we just need to check in with ourselves and be like, actually, I did enough today, actually, my project is complete, actually self, it's time to rest, like it's time for a break, and that helps us to just kind of kind of regulate.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: And if you're really really stuck in that super stressful place.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: You should probably look at working you know quite a bit on your nervous system, right?
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: So there are, you know you can look on the internet for like somatic kind of work and start looking at really getting some of those fight or flight responses closed in your nervous system, right?
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: So some of the things that we can do.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: I'll talk about three different things that we can do to break out of survival mode.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: And struggle is so, first, I guess we were really doing in the previous three things around like identity judgments and just like being addicted to stretches.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Stress is that we can, that those things are all like helpful.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: And then we can start to look at what are the belief structures that actually hold us in those, those stress patterns.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: And once you're asking your brain hey, what beliefs do I have that hold me in these stress patterns or that hold me in survival mode?
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: What do I believe that keeps me here in survival mode?
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: What would have to change for me to get out of survival mode, your brain will start looking for answers.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: So sometimes it takes a minute and you may have to ask yourself that every day for a period of time.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: But we want to start to identify those belief structures and then question them and break them down.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Now, when we grew up in survival mode, when we grew up maybe in poverty or lower middle class so there was just a lot of struggle and strife around money or other things those belief structures are very likely going to be true and what we're not doing is trying to make our story different, like you can have the truth of that struggle and also change your perspective going forward, because what we believe becomes the things that we create, and so when we don't examine our beliefs, we just keep creating old stories, old patterns, right, so patterns of struggle, like they pass through families.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: So if you start looking at like well, what made my mom struggle or what made my dad struggle or what made my grandparents struggle for decades, you can start to see these things and then you can start to evaluate do I still want this belief?
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Do I still want this to be the truth that I operate from?
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: And then you can start to break down those belief structures.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Once you have them identify, then sometimes, with struggle patterns, there's a lot of old, congealed feelings that we're going to have to move through.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: We're going to have to let ourselves have that experience.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: So sometimes we put up walls and judgments so that way we don't have to feel the shame of being in survival mode.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: A lot of us, you know like I've talked to a lot of people and there can be a lot of shame or embarrassment around not having the right school clothes or not having school supplies, or growing up in a house that was, you know, a little dirty or decrepit or whatever it was.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: So some of these patterns, we will set up these mental judgments to separate us from the people that had a different situation, just so we don't have to feel like the shame or embarrassment around our situation.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: So a lot of times when we're getting out of survival mode we're going to have to actually sit with those feelings around the places that we were maybe ashamed or embarrassed or, you know, maybe we felt guilty about how much more we had than somebody who was struggling even harder than us, or feelings around like fear of loss of family and relatability, like all of these things kind of come up when we're getting out of survival mode.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you a quick story just to kind of ground this, and then I'll move on to the last point, which is so.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: At one point I had a client, young woman so smart, so beautiful, full of life and energy, and she already had a master's degree when she was working with me.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: And she was working at a nonprofit, making less than $20 an hour, with a master's degree and brilliance, right.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: And so we get into it.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: And her family grew up North Florida, super rural, super poor, and her family had some judgments about those people, those people who work in air conditioned offices, those people who get rich off of the sweat of people like us, right, and there was so much just tension around that that it was like if she was to make a lot of money and get out of the survival mode, it was almost like a betrayal and there was a lot of fear there that if she was one of those people I have an air quotes those people she wouldn't be able to go home Like, her family wouldn't love her anymore, she'd be on the wrong side of all of their judgments, against all of life, right, all of the world.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: And so she had to really work through those fears and those feelings to be able to even increase her income and really break out of that survival mode.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: So this is kind of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about move through some of these old feelings.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: And then we have to move into our bodies and move through some of these fight or flight responses.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: So money in our brain is tied up with resources and so the way that our brain and our body communicate about money is around food, like our survival.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: So when you are stressing about money, your body picks that signal up as we're gonna starve to death.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: So when your brain is really stressing about money or you're really reworking your numbers or really having that kind of struggle going on in your mind, your body picks that signal up as we're gonna starve to death.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: We're not gonna have the resources that we need and for many of us that will cause a fight or flight response or a freeze response.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: And when we don't close those loops, when they stay open, those stress loops stay open.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: We can end up feeling really triggered or really dysregulated.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: When any sort of financial situation happens or changes that can really be jarring to the body, because it's like today's regular amount of money stress brings up all of these other active money stresses with still open loops happening in our body.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: So sometimes we have to drop into the body and just be with ourselves there and that may include like going for a run or having a scream, or tightening up all of our muscles and releasing them to move some of this energy through the places in our nervous system where it's been stuck.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: So those are different levels where these survival mode because survival mode is an extra trickier, you know it's extra tricky.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: It's not something that you can just work on in like mindset, even though mindset is a huge part of it, because your mental structures is what keeps you there, what keeps you creating those things, but those emotional you know that emotional stuff also can be really limiting.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: And then it's like the body, because survival mode feels just like being in a perpetual state of threatened, you know.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: So there's a lot of body issues.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: So where a lot of times, people who do the kind of work that I do talk about many mindset and that's really, really important there are some places where we have to go a couple layers deeper and getting out of survival mode.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: That's one of the places where we have to look at our mind, at our emotions, at our energy body and at our nervous system.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: Like it's a few different layers because if you just take care of survival mode in your mind but you never close those stress loops, you never get it out of your nervous system.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: It won't ever really go away.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: You can still stay addicted to stress right, and just like dependent on cortisol to get anything done.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: So those are things I just wanted to kind of lay out for you and just help you to understand, like, what are the dynamics around struggle and survival mode and then how to start to shift, breaking out of those.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: So I hope that you learned a ton.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: I hope that this was useful for you.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: Please feel free to share this work with a friend.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Nobody wants to be in survival mode.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: So if you see a friend really struggling like and it's like this could be like I mean the same concepts apply to struggle like around love, around work or money or, you know, body issues or whatever, whatever else is coming up for people.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: So, anyways, please feel free to share this with everybody that you think would benefit.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: All right, I love you.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: I appreciate you.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: Thank you for hanging out with me today.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: Bye, it was my pleasure and joy to talk with you today.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening.
• 24:51
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• 24:58
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