Kate Northrup: No amount of money will ever make you feel the way you want to feel unless you have developed the capacity to feel that way already. 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. Hello, and welcome to Plenty. If you’re new here, I am so excited to have you. And if you’ve been around for a while, welcome back. Today, we are talking about how to navigate when your body has not caught up to your assets increasing or when your body has not yet caught up to the level of success you are experiencing.

So I hear versions of the following over and over again, and today I’m gonna tell you what to do about it. So here are a couple of of examples. Looking at my asset totals, and honestly, I’m not feeling them. So I’m looking at my asset totals. I’m I’m here at my financial dashboard, and I’m not feeling them.

I’m certainly not feeling relief, comfort, or expansion. Right? We have this idea that a change in our assets, a change in our bank account balance, a change in our salary, our profit numbers is going to change us, is going to change our emotional reality, is going to change the way we feel in our lives. Yet I often hear from people that that’s not the case. Another example here is we’ve already hit our enough number and then some, yet I still find that I’m stressed out about money quite consistently.

So if you’ve ever had this experience, this episode is for you. Welcome. Here are a couple of signs that your body has not yet caught up to your financial reality. One, you check your bank account balance more often now that it’s higher. So there’s a hypervigilance that has set in as the numbers have gone up.

Two, you’re close to your financial independence number, and you’re still scared to look at your day to day spending. So yesterday, I sat down with a woman who works with 7 figure female entrepreneurs, and she said something came up in a recent meeting with them that was surprising slash not surprising to her. And that was that these women all had their business finances completely in order. Their business financial house was totally in order. However, they didn’t want anyone to see their personal finances.

So their personal finances were a completely separate story. And the reason they didn’t want anyone to see their personal finances was because they didn’t want someone else to judge the way they were spending their money, specifically for this person. It was the amount that they spend on Amazon every month. And there’s so much there, and I could do a whole other episode on it. But basically, what that says is that if you’re afraid of someone else seeing your financial patterns, that simply means that there’s a misalignment in the way you are behaving and the way you would like to be behaving.

So who you are imagining yourself to be, your self-concept is not a match for who you’re actually being, and that is a real money leak. That’s a that’s a, a lack of financial alignment, and that impacts us at every single income level. So if you’re someone who is close to their enough number or close to their financial independence number and yet is still afraid to look at your own personal spending or doesn’t want somebody else to see the way you spend your money, listen up. This episode is for you. Next sign.

You know where every dollar goes, but you still feel like you don’t know your numbers. So even though technically, you have everything in a financial tracking software, there’s still a feeling of nebulousness, of vagueness, of not quite knowing where your feet are, of fogginess. And then another one, you have a big deposit land. Maybe you get a dividend from an investment or a large paycheck from a bonus or a large deposit after a launch, and you feel nothing, or it actually increases your sense of constriction instead of decreasing it, which is what we think money is going to do. From my own life, here’s an example.

Mike was really, really sick. It was early twenty twenty one, and I was caught in a cycle of resentment. And I felt so much financial stress and so much financial pressure because we were one man down literally in business, in earning, in parenting, in life. And he was really, really sick chronically, so it’s not like he had a really bad cold. This was going on for months and months and months.

And we sat down with our incredible therapist, David, on Zoom. And David asked me to close my eyes and imagine Mike had come home and said, hey, babe. I just made $10,000,000. So for the foreseeable future, you do not need to work anymore, or you can just kind of do whatever you want. And David had me check-in inside and see how my body responded to that news.

And the way I responded shocked me. I felt dead inside. I remember it so clearly. We were sitting next to these floor to ceiling windows overlooking Biscayne Bay in Miami. We were living on the 42nd Floor of a high rise at the time, way too far off the ground.

And I remember feeling as though I had flatlined. Like, there was this sense of almost terminal boredom. And what I realized as I unpacked that with David and in some other interior work that I did was that I didn’t feel alive without a certain amount of financial stress and without a certain amount of performance pressure. Now, of course, that traces back to my own nervous system patterns that I was in the environment I was raised in, which really I grew up in an environment that focused on academic achievement and where both of my parents were incredibly successful doctors, and there was always a sense of financial and time pressure. So financial and time pressure was the water that we were swimming in.

And so my nervous system developed to understand that what it means to be alive is to feel some sense of stress and pressure. So cut to 2021, I’m now a complete adult with two children, a husband, a business. And even though I didn’t like the feeling of financial stress and pressure that I was under, when I allowed my body to feel into the reality in which it went away, I actually felt dead inside. Because we will always gravitate towards a money nervous system thermostat that matches the way it felt in our childhood, not because it feels good, but because it feels like home. So if your numbers have changed, if your body has not yet caught up with the level of financial success that you are experiencing, it is likely because it’s not a match for your money nervous system thermostat, and what needs to be updated is your capacity to be present with the abundance that’s already here.

Because we can add as much money as we want to your environment. Let’s pretend it’s a garden. So if you have a garden and you have seeds and you wanna grow vegetables and flowers, you have the seeds. Right? And you can have two different garden plots.

Let’s pretend that one garden plot or one raised bed has sandy, dry soil that has been used five summers in a row and has never been replenished properly with organic matter, with fertilizer, with with the ingredients, the nutrients that make soil healthy. And then you have garden bed number two, and garden bed number two has been freshly revitalized with incredibly rich organic compost that has run through the bodies of worms and is so fertile and so verdant, and it’s like, it has that smell of aliveness. And you take the same seeds, and you plant them in garden bed a and garden bed b, which garden bed are you going to get a beautiful nutrient dense abundant crop from? Garden bed b. Because garden bed b has the soil, the capacity to grow and make something of what’s planted there.

Garden bed a does not have that capacity. Your nervous system is the soil. Money or opportunities or any kind of abundance are the seeds. You can plant the same money, the same opportunities, the same abundance in both garden beds, and only the one that has the capacity to receive it and expand it is going to grow the crops you desire. Adding money alone is never going to be enough.

So what do we do about it? Maybe you have increased your numbers. Maybe you just did your biggest launch of your life. Maybe you just got, your dream job with your dream salary or a bonus or an inheritance or something, maybe you’re past your enough number, and yet you’re still experiencing anxiety. What that means is that your body does not have the receptor sites yet to be able to receive what is already here.

And so in many ways, you have abundance blindness. Right? You have abundance blindness. It’s almost like being color blind where, you know, you only are seeing certain colors even though other colors are actually there. So what we need to do is increase your capacity to be present with the abundance that is already here.

And when you do that, your body gets the message, oh, all is well. Oh, I can change my money nervous system thermostat setting now so that I am not set constantly to stress and pressure or scarcity like I had in my childhood, and I actually feel safe to experience plenty. I feel safe to experience freedom, security, whatever that essence is for you around your desired feeling with money. No amount of money will ever make you feel the way you want to feel unless you have developed the capacity to feel that way already or simultaneously. So how do we do that?

Here’s what I recommend. You can do this today. Open up one account. It could be an investment account. It could be a checking account.

It could be a high yield savings. Whatever account feels like, quote, unquote, this should be enough. I should feel like this is enough. I should feel like this is abundant. Maybe it’s your whole financial tracking or something, your your financial dashboard.

If you’re a Relaxed Money student, you know, you have your your Relaxed Money financial dashboard, and spend sixty seconds, just sixty seconds, one minute, looking at the balance, looking at the total, and noticing how your body feels. Not noticing your thoughts, noticing the sensation in your body. No need to change it. No need to fix it. Just notice it.

Give yourself sixty seconds to be with that balance. That’s it. And when you do it, I wanna hear how it goes. I wanna hear what happened. So send me a DM or email us at [email protected] and report in what happened when you sat with that balance and noticed what happened in your body.

Now that’s step one. In two weeks, I have another episode coming out about why I don’t believe that we should try to get better at holding money, at holding wealth. You’ll hear a lot of people talking about you need to increase your capacity to hold money. Women need to get better at holding money. I do not believe that’s true.

I think that’s actually the opposite of what we need to be doing. And in that episode, in two weeks, I’m gonna be telling you why. So stay tuned. That will be part two of the conversation we started today. Now if this resonated with you, I wanna know about it.

Share the episode on social. Tag me. Email us. Send this to a friend who also needs to hear this information. I really want us all to understand more money cannot change our relationship with money.

But when we change our relationship with money, our money reality changes. Now if this episode resonated with you, perhaps your money reality already has changed, and now we need to change your relationship with money so that you can actually enjoy the fruits of that abundance. So we are going to tend to your soil. We are going to increase the health and richness and fertility of your soil so that you actually can create a harvest and a sense of satisfaction and security and freedom that you thought money would bring you, but that can only be felt from the inside first. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Plenty.

Send it to someone who needs to hear this. And I will see you for that part two in two weeks. What you earn and what you keep are two different things. Most people know what they make, but many don’t have any idea what happens after that and why a big month doesn’t actually change the feeling of the ground we stand on. The wealth mirror fixes that.

This is a free resource where you can learn exactly what’s happening in three clear diagnostics running underneath your money. Because the top line number does not tell the whole story, but the wealth mirror does. So if you wanna know the intel, the precious information and wisdom and intelligence happening underneath your money that will help you to feel the level of security and freedom that you actually desire, head to katenorthrup.com/mirror. The link is in the show notes. Again, go to katenorthrup.com/mirror to run your free wealth mirror now.