Kate Northrup: In the first twenty minutes after we opened the cart, we made sales, which was great. And after that, Mike and I did not look at sales numbers again until we closed the cart. And we did that because we wanted to focus on. Welcome to Plenty, a weekly recalibration of power, money, and safety for high capacity humans. I’m Kate Northrup, best selling author and creator of Relaxed Money.

And this is where neuroscience meets ancient wisdom meets real wealth strategy. This is the sacred conversation at the intersection of money, the body, and the life you’re truly here to live. If you’re ready to reimagine what’s possible for yourself and for the world, you’re in the right place. Let’s go. This episode is part of a series called build a business that sets you free.

It is an eight episode series, and we already are a few episodes in. Today is part two of a two parter going behind the scenes of our most recent Relaxed Money launch. On the last episode of this, I talked about the numbers, and I talked about the metrics. And the numbers of the metrics matter. We gotta be measuring the right things.

And if you want the CEO dashboard to tell you exactly what the right things are to measure so you can obsess about the right metrics and not get lost in the weeds of what doesn’t matter, you can head over to katenorthrup.com/james where you can find the digital CEO dashboard totally for free. Today’s episode is about the inner story. So last one was the outer story. This one was the inner story. And it’s about why I spent the last day of our launch on the couch and why that reading a novel and why that was the most important part.

So Mike and I closed our 2026 relaxed money enrollment period on April 23, I believe. Yes. April 23. It’s been a little less than a month since then. I’ve had some time to reflect, and it was such a busy season.

So during our prelaunch, we had purchased a home. We also listed our first short term rental up on Airbnb and VRBO. We were getting all that set behind the scenes. It’s a busy season with our kids’ schools, and it’s a busy season with my family behind the scenes for a few reasons that I am not going to talk about here. But all that to say, we’re at the end of the launch, and I started the night before we closed cart.

I actually started throwing up, and I was so tired. I couldn’t even get up off the couch to make my kids dinner. So luckily, there was food that was sort of premade for them, and so they brought their little plates over to the coffee table. They ate their dinner next to me, and I couldn’t even look at my phone. I was so exhausted.

I just laid on the couch with my eyes closed. And soon after that, I started throwing up, and I was out. I think I went to bed that night at 07:30 at night. Now this is twenty four hours before we closed cart on our biggest launch of the year. So the stakes are high because so far, our business model is such that this is our big moneymaker for the year.

And I I wish I could say that I spent the last day of the launch lying on the couch reading a novel because I wanted to, but what was actually true is I spent the last day of our launch on the couch reading a novel because I was sick, and I didn’t have anything left to give. It reminded me very much of years ago, it was 2000 I wanna say it was 2012, 2011, actually. It was 2011. I got invited to speak at my friend Megan Waterson’s REVEAL conference. She was hosting it at Donna Karan’s Urban Zen Center in New York City, and it was such a beautiful invitation for me.

It was a big deal to get invited to speak. I was doing a talk on women and wealth, and I go to get on to go to the airport. Mike drops me off at the Phoenix Airport. We were staying with my aunt and uncle at the time. He drops me off at the airport.

I immediately run to a trash can and throw up. And I just said to Mike, I’m sure I’ll be fine. I’m sure it’s just some freak thing I’m still gonna go get on the airplane. I spent the entire flight on the bathroom floor of the airplane, which is not great, throwing up. And when we landed, I was so sick that I had to wait until all the other passengers got off so that I could be wheeled off the airplane in a wheelchair because I was so dehydrated and so sick I couldn’t walk.

And I was put in a cab, and I got to where I was staying, and I slept for fourteen hours straight. And I was supposed to have spent that flight from Phoenix to New York City planning my talk for Urban Zen, but instead I was throwing up. And I woke up the next morning having not prepared my talk, and I felt well enough to do the talk. So I just show up, and I gave one of the to that date, one of the best talks of my career. Marie Forleo was there.

My friend Megan was there. And little did I know that my future editor at Hay House, Patty Gift, who’s now the head of acquisitions at Hay House, was also there. And that talk got me my first book deal. So this experience of puking my guts out in the last twenty four hours of our launch felt like the same thing. It felt like I was clearing anything in my system that was no longer a match for the level of expansion that me and my family were about to move into.

And I can tell you just this past weekend, we moved into our new home. Mike and I have lived in 11 homes in the last fifteen years, none of them for longer than three and a half years. So we have been up rooted. We’ve been renters for the last five years, which has been great from a perspective of building our net worth because the money that would have gone into a down payment of a home and home maintenance has gone into other investments. So we’ve been able to grow a 7 figure net worth during that time, but it was time to switch strategies.

And so even though maybe it makes more financial sense for some people in some seasons of life to be renters, For us, it didn’t make emotional sense anymore. And so we were on the precipice of moving into a house that has more possibility than anything I ever could have imagined for myself. It really blows my circuits in terms of what is possible for someone like me. And we’ve only slept there for two nights so far, but I will say I wake up in the morning, and the
light is so incredible streaming into our breakfast room because we have this beautiful eastern exposure in our kitchen windows and the breakfast room. And I go out in the backyard through the door from my bathroom, and I stand in the grass, and I just welcome the sunrise.

And I feel so unbelievably blessed to be surrounded by trees and green and birds and flowers and this gorgeous view. We’re up at the top of a mountain, and the sounds and the smells and the sights, it’s so good. Feel like I live at a beautiful eco luxury resort. And, again, I cannot go into details, but there are some things shifting in my family where there’s a change in what home means for me. And there’s such a change in terms of you know how they talk about on the planet a pole shifting and that over time, I think the the North and the South Pole have have shifted a little bit?

It feels like that in my life. It feels like the poles have shifted, and my true north is exactly where I am as opposed to before where my true north was a little bit in my past and a little bit in my future. And now it feels like my true north is me and what I’ve created with Mike and our family and in our business. So all that to say, I spent the last twenty four hours of our launch lying on a lying on the couch reading a novel, which was unexpected. And I’m so grateful because we have a system that works.

We have an incredible team who shows up. And by that point, by the final day of an enrollment, there’s not a whole lot you can do. It’s similar to I just had my friend Andrew Forrester on talking about his debut novel, How the Story Goes, and that episode will be out a little bit later this summer. But he was talking about how, you know, by the day of book publishing day, there’s not much else you can do. You just sort of have to sit and wait and sit and receive, and that’s very much the same thing on a cart close day.

So the point wasn’t that, oh, I chose to sit on the couch and read a novel all day on the final day of my launch, though that would have been a beautiful story, but that was not this story. This happened because a, I was sick, but b, I we had the systems and structures in place to allow that to be possible. James Wedmore says, the more structure you have in your business, the more freedom you have in your life, which feels very meta because one of the reasons I’m doing this multi part series is I want you to know about his programs and his teaching. He’s doing a free workshop coming up called the business breakthrough experience, and you can go to katenorthrup.com/bbe to get signed up for that. It’s free.

But the very reason that our launch did so well, and I talked about those metrics in the in the episode about that a couple episodes back, the very reason the launch did so well is partially because of the strategies that we used that James has taught us. And even though I was sick, even though I was running out of energy, even though my body was recalibrating to a new more expanded reality, and it was releasing everything that was no longer a match for that reality. That final day of the launch, lying on the couch, reading a novel was evidence of the very thing that James teaches, which is the more structure you have in your business, the more freedom you have in your life. And we’ve expanded more and more into that every single year, and I am so incredibly grateful for that. There was a moment earlier on in the enrollment where I was starting to wake up at three in the morning panicking, and I talked a little bit about this from a metrics perspective in the last episode, but I wanna talk about it here from an emotional perspective.

My body was on high alert, and I was feeling a lot of pressure at the beginning of the launch. And it was such a great opportunity to walk myself through the very thing that we teach in Relax Money, which is that we cannot receive money if our body does not feel safe. Or we do receive the money, but it doesn’t make us feel any better. Because I know that, because I have thousands of students who’ve gone through the program with success stories learning how to first feel safe in their body or simultaneously feel safe in their body with money so that the money comes, stays, grows, and sticks around, and actually makes an emotional difference for them, I was able to realize that I was in a nervous system scarcity loop. Right?

I was caught up in the lie of scarcity, and I was feeling all this pressure like this do or die. Oh my gosh. If this launch doesn’t work, you know, we’re gonna every we’re gonna be screwed. Everything is gonna fall apart, which of course is not true, but that felt very real, especially at three in the morning. So I was able to use my own tools, and I I wanna share what I did because I think it might help you in similar moments whether you’re spinning out about launch results, maybe the conversion rates aren’t what you want them to be, maybe you haven’t made as many sales, or whatever it is that you might be feeling contracted and pressure around.

Because I will tell you, a feeling of pressure and and desperation is repulsive to sales and is repulsive to money because any sale we make, any money we make comes from another human being, and desperation and pressure is repulsive to other human beings. We all know when someone is trying to sell us something and we feel desperation from them, it’s awful. Right? So it’s it’s repulsive as opposed to attractive. One of the key things I did is, number one, I told the truth about it to someone safe.

Especially for women, we are relational, and we regulate ourselves more easily relationally. So rather than trying to get ourselves all squared away alone, it’s really smart to have relationships, business friends, close friends, partners, who you know, mentorship, people who you’re who you’re in programs with, who you can reach out to when you’re having a hard time. So that’s what I did. I I sent voice memos to one of my best friends just telling her the truth of how I was feeling, and she was able to reflect back and give me a pep talk and just help me see some things that I wasn’t able to see. And because I often leave voice memos for her while walking and then listen to voice memos from her while walking, it was the combined co regular so first of all, saying something out loud for me, especially when it’s a hard thing, diminishes its power.

So instead of that obsessive thought of, I feel so much pressure around this, and it’s not gonna work, and I’m gonna be screwed, instead of that having all this power, when I say it out loud to someone else, the power gets diminished. And it it doesn’t mean that it feels completely untrue, but it feels a lot less true. And I have a lot more breathing room around it. And then number two, hearing her truth back to me was very helpful, relational. It helped me to signal safety in my body.

And then number three, being able to walk while I did that also signaled safety to my body. And it was very shortly after that that especially saying the hard thing out loud, saying the thing that I was afraid to say out loud was very shortly after that that I was then able to take a look at the landing page for good with money, see the leaks in conversion, and make those shifts. And Mike and I did it so quickly within an hour or two, and then our conversion rate went way higher. So that was an emotional nervous system shift that then allowed us to create a real tangible result in the five d I mean, sorry, in the three d. Another thing that happened during this launch, and this is why I love even though it feels like pressure and some people will say, don’t live launch.

You know, you wanna always have things be light and soft, and evergreen is the only way. What I love about live launching, and and I love a combination of strategies, by the way. So I’m not saying one is better than the other. We incorporate all strategies, and this year, we’re really we’re building out more of an evergreen strategy, meaning having offerings available all the time. That being said, one of the things I love about live launching with you know, we had 200 affiliates.

We had Facebook ads going. We had social media. We had all the organic emails, all the things. Right? All these different prelaunch assets in the buildup.
We had a we had the recalibration series here on the podcast. We had the big money decision matrix. We had the recalibration field guide. We had all these different things. One of the things that live launching does is it creates this launch halo effect, and it also pressure tests the system.

It shows us where there are weak links in our systems. It shows us where our team may need strengthening in their skills or in their systems or who’s on the team. It shows us also in Technicolor what’s working and what’s not. What I saw during this launch that I could not have seen unless we had all these eyeballs all at the same time is that talking about money and the body is revolutionary. No one else is doing this the way we are with the nervous system evidence based grounding in neuroscience, with the personal finance aspects, with the wealth consciousness aspects, with the emotional healing aspects, there’s no place where the body and the nervous system are considered when it comes to your relationship with money in the way we do it here.

And something happened during the launch that was very synchronistic and such a gift, which is that my friend Natalie McNeil had created this tool for her launch of her program AI Dream Team, and it was a ninety day road map fully customized AI tool that people filled out live during her workshop, and it gave them a road map for their own journey of installing AI in their company. And I I thought, oh, that’s a really cool idea. I wanna do that for good with money. So I talked about this in the last episode. We created this ninety day relaxed money road map.

As I said, it was too valuable to have given away for free. We learned that the hard way. But it was created by this incredible developer who’s worked behind the scenes with VC backed companies. He’s really, really, really gifted. He’s also a founder.

And he helped me to see that this body of work is so much bigger than me being a personal brand. And the feedback we got about this tool blew my mind. So the lesson here is that what we’re doing is so much bigger than me. This body of work can live beyond me. No one going through the ninety day relax money road map needed to know who I was, my own personal success story, any of that.

It didn’t matter because the tool is built on the frameworks on my intellectual property that has been chiseled and refined over the last twenty years working with over 20,000 students. And it was such a revelation for me to have mirrored back by a highly skilled developer who’s worked in the personal finance industry for a while that this is a revolutionary body of work that could live beyond me in some way. Each one of you listening, each person listening has some sort of revolutionary perspective, expertise, body of work that is going to change the game for someone. And if you’re not getting it out there in the world in a way that people can receive, you’re actually doing the public a disservice. And we all many of us make the mistake of discounting our own expertise, discounting our own intellectual property because it comes easy to us.

The work that I do in Relax Money, honestly, it feels obvious to me. But every time I bring it up with someone outside my ecosystem, their mind is blown, especially financial professionals. And so I highly recommend that you do whatever you need to do to codify your methodology, your frameworks, and get it out into the world through a digital program or a membership because it allows things to live beyond you in a way that cannot happen if you’re only doing one on one coaching or even small group programs, which is why I love James Vedmore’s work and why I recommend his business breakthrough experience. The other thing that we did that was really different, we did it last year as well to some degree, but we went all in this year, is we didn’t check our stats during cart open. So in the first twenty minutes after we opened the cart, we made 30 sales, which was great.

And after that, Mike and I did not look at sales numbers again until we closed the cart. And we did that because we wanted to focus on humans. We wanted to focus on being of service. We wanted to focus on helping human beings make a good decision for them. We didn’t wanna be looking at people as numbers, and we didn’t want to be on the roller coaster of watching stats all week.

And it was so freeing, and I cannot recommend that highly enough. Now it doesn’t mean you’re not gonna track metrics. Right? We track all of our metrics, and somebody on the team was absolutely watching sales so that just in case somebody something broke or whatever, we could be alerted. But having us be free to follow through on the launch without checking the sales for the four days that the cart was open was so freeing, and it made me feel so powerful.

So rather than being attached to the result and letting our sales numbers have all the power, we held our power within ourselves, and it was very freeing, and it made those four days far less stressful. And then when we finally knew the sales numbers, we could just know the sales numbers and celebrate them instead of having been on a roller coaster all week. It’s so funny that I spent the final day of the launch laying on a couch reading a novel. I did do a q and a with our potential students who wanted to ask questions, so I did show up for that, which was a joy. But other than that, I was relaxing, and I was texting with a girlfriend, and I was like, well, I guess this is what relaxed money is.

You know? Feet up, reading friction, not looking at my sales numbers, just in total trust. Because the more structure you build in your business, the more freedom you have in your life and the more relaxation, and that applies to your finances as well. If we have strong engineering, if we have strong systems and we’re using the right strategies, we don’t have to be constantly refreshing our sales dashboard. We don’t have to be looking at Stripe every two seconds.

We don’t have to be constantly looking at our bank account. We know that the systems are working, and we can check-in periodically on the right metrics at the right time. And that is what is taught during the business breakthrough experience. Not only the outer stuff, the numbers, the metrics, the strategies, but also the inner work. Who do you need to be to be the kind of person who could close a multi 7 figure launch lying on a couch reading a novel while her body purges that which is no longer a match for the next chapter of life that she is stepping into.

So that’s what was going on behind the scenes of the Relax Money launch. It was a wild ride, and I’m so grateful for each and every student who’s now with us on this live cohort. We are having the most incredible time, and I can’t wait to see how it evolves over time. So if you are a digital course creator, if you are a coach, if you are a healer, if you have a big heart for service, you need to be part of the business breakthrough experience. Head over to katenorthrup.com/bbe.

Get yourself signed up totally for free. I will see you there. Thanks for listening in. If you are a digital course creator and or a coach and you wanna grow your business online, listen. A couple of years ago, I had someone sweep into my life and help us to grow our launch revenue to a million dollars for the first time and now to multiple 7 figures over and over again.

His name is James Wedmore. He is an 8 figure digital CEO who coaches and supports people just like you who wanna turn their expertise into revenue using online business. Once a year, he does an incredible free training called the business breakthrough experience, and it is coming up. I will be there right alongside you learning these strategies. Head to katenorthrup.com/bbe and I will see you for the business breakthrough experience.