​​​​​​​8 years ago today, at 10:10am, I pushed my baby girl Ruby and her 100th percentile head out of me in a triumphant, unmedicated VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean).

It was not easy, but it permanently changed my relationship to choice, pressure, and what I do in the moments that matter. 

I’d planned a homebirth with her sister, but after dilating to 10cm in a horse trough filled with water in our downstairs bathroom, I ended up needing to be transported to the hospital in an ambulance for an urgent C-section because she was coming out one foot up and one foot down. (And as my mom said to me after, as I was trying to make sense of what happened: “A foot is not a good dilator.”)

My first daughter’s birth left me with more than a C-section scar. I struggled with postpartum insomnia, postpartum anxiety, and other manifestations of the birth trauma for a long time. (Tracking my cycle and organizing my work around it saved me. My second book, Do Less, has it all.)

Ruby’s birth, though? A completely different story. But I don’t think it’s because I did it naturally. I think it’s because I had such a strong sense of agency.

When someone feels like their actions can produce a desirable outcome (aka agency), they have a 92% higher chance of fully resolving the stressor compared to those who don’t feel like they have any control over what happens to them. This is independent of income, education, or circumstances. The feeling of agency is a primary driver of how people resolve stress in individual moments and across the lifespan of adults.

In other words: when you feel like you have a move, everything changes.

And when researchers isolated the variable specifically for financial behavior  –  controlling for income, education, and financial literacy  –  a person’s felt sense of agency was still the strongest independent predictor of whether they saved, invested, built a cushion, or paid down debt. The knowledge to act without the felt sense of agency doesn’t move.

​​​​​​​I see this pattern constantly – highly capable people with access, information, and opportunity who still don’t experience traction because they don’t feel like they have a move when it counts.

Here’s what’s even more fascinating:

We are biologically wired to go passive in stressful situations. Giving our power away under pressure is not a flaw – it’s the default.

In order to have a sense of agency, we need to repattern our default response from one of “this is happening to me” to “I have a move here.”

This is the foundation of the work I’ve been developing and refining for years.

(This is exactly where we start inside Good with Money – because this is the skill that determines how your financial life actually moves.)

We are in a time of rapid change – economically, technologically, and globally. You don’t need a news breakdown to feel it. It’s showing up in markets, industries, the cost of living, and how people make and manage money.

This moment in history is unstable and shifting, and it’s going to impact us all differently, especially when it comes to our money.

The key determinant isn’t your income level, your education, or even how much you know.

How this moment impacts you, your money, and your family is whether you let it happen to you or whether you engage and activate your agency.

Just like the difference between my first and second births, our ability to not only weather the storm, but also prosper and thrive as the ground beneath us shifts, depends the most on one single thing:

Whether or not we feel like we have a choice.

Here’s what makes this especially striking: researchers studying high-income, financially educated adults found that more financial knowledge actually correlated with less satisfaction with their financial outcomes  –  not more.

Income and information alone don’t close the gap. Agency does.

(This is what we train inside Good with Money.)

Here’s what matters:

Feeling like you have a choice and that your choices have a positive, meaningful impact on the outcome, also known as self-efficacy, is something anyone can learn.

A comprehensive review of 245 studies published between 1992 and 2024 confirmed it: financial self-efficacy  –  the belief that your actions can change your financial future  –  is a learnable, trainable skill, and it is independently more predictive of real financial outcomes than literacy, income, or education alone.

None of us was born with it, so every single person who’s thriving because they feel like they have some sense of control over their circumstances picked that up as a skillset somewhere along the way.

This isn’t personality. It’s patterning.

When I had Penelope, I felt like the traumatic experience had happened to me, and I didn’t have a choice. (I later did the work to repattern this and reinsert agency, which changed everything.)

When I had Ruby 8 years ago today, I’d advocated for myself to have dual care between my OB/GYN practice and a local midwife, I’d advocated for myself to have a VBAC even when the doctors doubted me, I advocated for myself in the delivery room when the OB threatened me with forceps, a vacuum, and then another c-section. And I advocated for myself when I refused Pitocin, fiercely reminding the OB that if my body had been able to push out an 8lb, 10oz baby girl without the help of a medication, certainly it could deliver the placenta through the same mechanics.

And while I was left with a 4th degree tear, a hemorrhage, and broken blood vessels in my eyes and on my forehead, I was also left with a deep feeling of victory.

I’d met the moment full on. The moment wasn’t what I’d wanted or planned. That birth didn’t go anything like what I truly wanted. But I walked through the storm knowing that my choices would have a profound impact on the outcome.

And they did.

We’re in a storm right now.

You’ll meet it in one of two ways, depending on how you’re wired to respond.

For most people, it creates contraction, passivity, and a sense that things are happening to them.

But this is also the exact kind of environment where people who have trained themselves into agency start to separate.

Not because they know more.

Because they move differently when it matters.

Those who thrive during these times will be the ones who cultivate ONE single skillset:
CHOICE

The data is clear. We’ve seen it before. This time is no different.

Join me inside Good with Money, and we’ll build the ability to access choice when it matters – so your financial life starts moving with clarity, direction, and real momentum.

→ Claim your free seat now

I’m so grateful for my two daughters, the greatest gifts of my life, and how they came into the world in two very different ways, so I could learn how to meet the hard things in life in a way that guarantees thriving, not just surviving.

And I’m so honored to pass along the message to you today to help you with a very different, but equally important moment.

Xo,
Kate

👉 Save your spot in Good With Money here.