It’s time to unlearn some of the ways you seek enough as an entrepreneur.
Have you ever felt like you’re not good enough because you’re not making enough money? Perhaps you often feel low because your bank account has been dwindling, or you want to make more but keep plateauing. Maybe you’re barely making enough to get by, and each time you check your finances, a wave of inadequacy washes over you.
If you feel low while thinking about your money or sales, it’s possible your self-worth is tangled up in your bank account—or tied up in the tactics you use to earn money.
Let me ask you this: Where do you seek and find your self-worth right now?
Give yourself a minute to think about that. Do you seek it through other people? Through people-pleasing? Do you find it by seeking approval from others? Are you constantly learning everything you can so you’ll finally know “enough”? Do you find your self-worth in your social media likes, comments, engagement, or reach? Is it found in your bank account or net worth? In your productivity and how much you get done each day?
The Dangerous Dance Between Money and Worth
I’ve been studying, teaching, and coaching women on enoughness and self-worth for 10 years. When I ran my first business, The Abundant Mama Project, we talked endlessly about establishing and feeling a state of enoughness. When are we enough? When do we have enough? When do we feel like we’ve finally done enough?
Today, I’m addressing a very specialized department of self-worth—the dangerous connection between your worth as a human being and the money you earn.
For years, I worked with women who weren’t making any money because they were staying home as full-time caretakers. Their self-worth plummeted. They didn’t feel enough, mainly because they couldn’t contribute financially to their families and relied heavily on their partners for financial support. They didn’t feel worthy.
But here’s what’s fascinating—and maybe not surprising: I’ve discovered that making money can be just as damaging to your self-worth as not making money.
My Own Money-Worth Addiction
I’ve been creating online for 15 years and making a full-time income from it for 10 years. My work helps pay the mortgage and supports our life as a family of four. We don’t have a lavish lifestyle—my business is designed for creative freedom and flexibility around caretaking our twin daughters, now 16. But I take my work very seriously. It’s a full-time business, not a hobby.
When I first started creating online, I operated on a high-volume, low-cost model—$10, $15, $30 offers for most of eight years. In this model, money could come in all day, every day. It wasn’t uncommon for me to open my email and see 10, 15, or 20 sales. Sometimes my entire inbox was flooded with sales.
This multi-daily dopamine hit became addictive. I opened my email repeatedly, searching for evidence of my value and worthiness. I am worthy because look—there’s a sale.
Because it was mostly passive income, it was intoxicating to see money flowing in constantly. Unless it wasn’t.
Over time, this pleasure-seeking started to unravel my self-worth. I literally began to equate money-making with being worthy. I would check my email constantly to see if sales came in. It didn’t matter if they were $10 or $100—if something came in, I felt worthy. I felt enough.
If no money came in, I felt terrible. I would slip into despair and feel irrelevant.
The Worthiness Spiral
Here’s how this spiral works for me—and many, many clients:
We get caught up in perfectionism and worthiness. Who am I to write this, do this, offer this?
We let that perfectionism or lack of worthiness stop us in our tracks and we fall into indecision. I can make this better, I can say something more… I can try harder.
That indecision leads to inaction. Inaction can take shape in many ways: over-perfecting and not moving forward, lack of progress, just quitting, starting something new, trying a different system or way—but not following through or making progress.
That inaction leads to inconsistency. Hiding. Shutting down. Cutting off. Feast or famine. Ebb, not flow.
The truth was that I was looking day-to-day instead of seeing the big picture. I wasn’t tending to my holistic financial wellbeing—I was just reacting to the ins and outs, the ebbs and flows. All I could see was myself being “not good enough” when money wasn’t coming in. I was missing the actual problem beneath the surface. Instead of focusing on my strengths, I focused on my weaknesses when money wasn’t flowing.
Once I woke up to this pattern, I realized this dopamine-driven attachment of self-worth to net worth was destructive.
The Research Backs This Up
Researchers call this “financial contingency of self-worth,” and as it turns out, it’s terrible for your mental health. A study from the University of Buffalo in 2020 found that those who tangle their self-worth up in their net worth tend to be more socially isolated and lonely. While they’re busy trying to earn more money, they’re actually cutting themselves off from other important channels that could improve their mental health.
As entrepreneurs, it’s incredibly difficult not to see your value in relation to your income. It’s even harder when there’s so much attention on six, seven, and eight-figure businesses (which doesn’t necessarily mean you earn a six-figure salary, by the way—many high-income business owners have significant overhead).
Money often feels like the only evidence that your work is valued. I know when I receive evidence my work is valued in other ways, I feel just as great as when I earn income. For instance, when I launched my weekly newsletter, I felt wonderful that people were subscribing. Recently, when people at an event told me they truly love my emails, I felt amazing.
My hard work was being seen and valued.
But here’s the key distinction: Your WORK is valued.
The work stands alone. When money is paid, the work is what’s being valued. When people sign up or give feedback, the marketing and messaging are being valued. The work is not about YOU or your self-worth as a human being.
Brave YES Power Moves: Untangling Worth from Wealth
While money is essential—we must make it, we need it—how much we earn (or if we earn at all) has nothing to do with our self-worth as human beings.
Your self-worth is innate. You’re born with it. Your life is worthy and valuable just for being born, and it has nothing to do with your net worth.
How amazing is that? You’re sitting there right now, questioning everything, and you are so worthy just for being alive.
The question is: Do you value yourself?
This is my favorite work to do with my private coaching clients. We work together to discover your authentic, beautiful inner strength and self-leadership skills. We build inner worth, trust, self-awareness, and confidence together. You get to find it, discover it, and shape it into something that differentiates you and helps you truly shine.
Worth vs. Confidence: Understanding the Difference
Your self-worth is not the same as your self-confidence.
Self-worth is when you can truly say: “I am a valuable human being worthy of love, being seen, being heard, and taking up space.”
When you feel that, when you believe that in every part of your body, you can walk into any room, make any sale, deliver any speech, or say what you truly believe. Because you know you’re worthy to be there—worthy to be standing on that stage, worthy to be the speaker in that workshop, worthy to be putting your message out there.
Self-confidence is what happens when we bring everything we think, feel, and believe into alignment and show up boldly. That’s getting on stage and saying exactly what you want to say, for real, with no holding back. That’s confidence—it’s what you deliver, how you deliver it, your presence.
But just the fact that you’re up there, believing you deserve to be up there? That’s self-worth.
Brave YES Power Moves: Where Are You Seeking Worth?
When you tangle your worth up in your bank account—and all the other places where you might be seeking self-worth—you forget that what you’re really trying to do is believe you’re worthy to be doing the work you’re doing.
I want to invite you to consider where you’re currently seeking your self-worth and dig deeper to see if it’s something you can start to untangle, one string at a time.
You cannot find your self-worth in:
Your bank account
Your career choices
Your number of social invitations
Your list of accomplishments, awards, or certificates
Your relationships
Your weight
Your education
Your age or gender
Your possessions
Who you know
What your house looks like
Your self-worth is innate and based on your authentic gifts and strengths, which you can use in every possible moment.
Start tuning into the authentic beauty you could bring to this world if you believed more in your self-worth. If you could show up without striving, without toxic productivity or destructive perfectionism, you are still worthy when you make mistakes, when you get rejected, when you don’t make a cent in a week.
You are worthy to be who you want to be, say what you want to say, and do what you want to do.
Brave YES Power Moves: Building Financial Wellbeing
When I started to really tend to my well-being financially and made that a top priority (not an afterthought), I began to see how I could separate my money-making story from my worth.
One way I untangled my worth from my bank account was by starting to tend to my financial wellbeing — one of the eight spokes on my wellbeing wheel that we need as human beings to thrive.
I maintain a weekly ritual I call “Friday Financials” that nourishes me in mind, body, and spirit. This weekly check-in is about maintaining a grounded, balanced, and intentional practice of tending to my current money story.
Rather than putting my head in the sand (and I have clients who come to me saying exactly this), rather than suffering through feast-or-famine cycles, this financial wellbeing ritual is as much about goal-tending as it is about paying bills and invoicing clients. It’s as much about seeking peace around my bank account as it is about keeping my money mindset in check.
Confidence begins with believing in your own worth and knowing that you are a worthy human being, no matter what’s in your bank account.
Ready to make your own Brave YES Power Moves and untangle your worth from your wealth? I work with mission-driven entrepreneurs and business leaders who want to build authentic confidence and step fully into their worth. Let’s explore how we can work together to help you shine in your industry while staying grounded in your true value. Book a FREE coaching exploratory call here.
If your bank account is in a scary place, you’re not going to feel good no matter how much self-care you do.
Your wellbeing requires a healthy bank account.
This is how I define true prosperity — if you are able to feel good in all areas of your life because you feel safe, you feel secure and you can use your resources to help lift others up.
Too many of my good, good entrepreneur friends are sacrificing safety and security for doing the right thing.
Their own ability to thrive and prosper are hindered by being caught in the web of paradoxes of earning an income and making money as conscious entrepreneurs.
This month I’m focusing my work around what it means to practice liberated money practices, a concept I have been learning about and really focusing on for a very long time as an online creator and coach and that has been reiterated I’m really redefined by the work that I’ve been doing this year with Kelly Diehls and her We Are The Culture Makers Program.
Your financial wellbeing matters just as much as your physical wellbeing. Feeling safe and secure is vital to your own flourishing. You must make earning a thriving income a priority.
I can speak from personal experience that for a long time I had my worth tied up in my bank account — and this is a topic I’ll be exploring in the next episode.
Once I learned to cut my worth off of my income, I found another issue.
I was so busy trying to be nice, to be good to people that I had sacrificed my own thriving and flourishing.
And I can tell you that I was doing a lot of self-care but as long as I was pinching pennies and working hard to make ends meet — and experiencing countless nights of insomnia on how the mortgage would be paid …
I suffered.
I really want to talk about paradoxes that we as highly conscious wholehearted entrepreneurs bring to the table and the conditioning that we have been informed by around money making.
Listen to this episode now — or keep reading below.
I talked about money in the last episode on my framework of Money, Meaning and the Greater Good and how we can build businesses that don’t really truly bring all of that to the table so that we are not depriving ourselves of money, we’re not depriving ourselves of joy and we’re not depriving the world of our activism or our beliefs or our strengths or our values.
When we build a business based on those three things, we thrive.
But all too often now we are surrounded by a great sense of greed and unethical sales strategies.
I want to tell a story. I’m in a Facebook group where the leader is all about helping you make a lot of money by offering high ticket offers. I was brought into this group by a third-party. It’s not my kind of group but I enjoy seeing what the leader of the group is saying from time to time.
But recently, this group leader started to call out the “ethical sales” movement which I am a fan of and follow wholeheartedly ….
This entrepreneur is making millions of dollars by selling offers strictly to help people try and make millions. She was calling out ethical marketing advocacy as being harmful to women and preventing us from being able to make money.
I was watching this thread and in the responses to it because I am I am a proponent of an ethic of care and love and concern in our sales in our marketing but I’m also a student because I still have work to do on how to incorporate all of this in and still make money.
To call out ethical sales and money making without encouraging conscientiousness is harmful. I was glad when another more active member of the group said as much.
The truth is that making money ethically is harder. Much harder. But it’s not impossible.
I’m earning a thriving income right now and I’m doing it in a way that feels good, feels aligned and feels ethical and I’m being conscientious — very conscientious — about my practices.
But it’s not easy by any stretch.
There is a lot of mixed up information out there that has people confused and doing things like tactics and strategies that may not always work, that won’t feel good to you.
I am talking to conscious entrepreneurs right now. This is for those who struggle with asking for money, asking for the sales, who struggle with pricing.
So I want to talk about some of the paradoxes of money making as conscious entrepreneurs or conscientious entrepreneurs.
Here are 3 Paradoxes in Money Making as Conscious Entrepreneurs
PRICING AND WORTH
so the very first one that I want to address right upfront is the most obvious and that is our pricing oh there is so much juicy loaded complicated stuff stuff it is stuff around pricing and everybody seems to have the answers and I don’t know that anybody is correct I don’t know that anybody is wrong I just know that it is loaded and it’s filled with paradoxes.
There are essentially three school of thoughts around pricing. If you charge too much, you’re pricing out marginalized people and being inaccessible. If you charge too little, you are under earning and undercharging, which can make your work seem less valuable. The third way, which is the way I support, is finding the just right number that allows you to thrive while also keeping pricing accessible for most of your aligned clients.
THE MONEY MOMENT: Do what you need to thrive financially and what feels right for you and if it’s working, it’s working and if it’s not it’s OK to switch things around. Don’t charge X rate because someone else says you’re too cheap. Do you have enough money coming in at the rate you have and are you able to maintain a high level of capacity for those clients and the rest of your life and business? Then it’s enough.
TIME IS MONEY
We learn at a young age that time is money. And so one of the paradoxes we are seeing now is a real movement to make more and earn less. And, at the same time, a whole lot of hustle and grind is unfolding for people hoping to get lucky and strike it rich. As it turns out, time is money. Making money takes time. We either want ease or we want money. It’s rare that we get both.
THE MONEY MOMENT: Do what you need to do to handle the important stuff and when things are fine, let them be fine. See a therapist or work with a coach on how to cope through or how to make moves that are for future self and future business impact. Don’t waste time wasting time for that time is money conditioning.
GREED VS. THRIVING
Another paradox is in money making to thrive. Conscious entrepreneurs don’t want to look greedy so they tend to undersell and undervalue their work and worth. And yet being human is very costly and money is needed not only to survive but to thrive. This paradox of greed vs. thriving is important to break down.
THE MONEY MOMENT: Do you have enough money to pay your bills and feel like you are living a prosperous life? Do you have just enough, barely enough or plenty? Let this guide you on how much more pushy you could stand to be. Honestly? I could use more money. We have a lot of medical bills and inflation. I need to be more pushy so that I am experiencing prosperity.
Prosperity should be available to everyone. And, that may mean you have to learn new ways of putting your work into the world. As I have mentioned, my framework of being Business Brave is all about ensuring you thrive because you are running a business that is making money, making meaning for you the founder and making a difference in the world either directly or indirectly.
Scarcity mindset first showed up for me a few years into being a creator and business owner.
I am an accidental, self-taught entrepreneur — which means I didn’t go into business considering the many obstacles I might experience. Nor did I struggle to start up. My business began fast — and at scale, serving hundreds of women within a couple months.
But over the years, as the market shifted, the certainty bottomed out and there were times of ease and flow — and times of struggle and famine.
When in flow, life and business was so easy. Effortless.
When in famine, life was so hard, and my mental health was affected — more so by scarcity mentality than scarcity itself.
Since my Brave Yes Coaching framework is about saying YES to yourself — and feeling safe to do so — I work with my clients on healing their scarcity mindset and working on correcting any “scarcity holes” in their business and life.
Scarcity is a belief that we are all here to compete for limited or scarce resources and that there is not enough to go around for everyone.
Scarcity mindset or mentality is when you become overly obsessed on something feel you do not have enough of in your life. When in this state you struggle to enjoy life because you are so obsessed with what is lacking.
This creates a survival mode and desperate approach to being in this world. Just look at the more is more culture that the corporate world operates under to see the grips of scarcity and how it works.
All you have to do is see the lines outside a business offering limited availability of a product to see how scarcity creates hysteria.
TrueScarcity is when there isn’t enough to go around and we have to fight for what we need or want. It’s a feeling or state that means we do not have all that we need — or want. This is rooted in the present. If you aren’t sure how you will pay your rent, money truly is scarce.
Scarcity mindset is a perception that you won’t have enough and it’s often rooted in fear of losing it all or comparisons with others who appear to have more. It’s more based in the future.
Are we ever really doing enough?
Do we ever get to the end of our workload?
And since our livelihoods — especially if you have a business or do work in a company — depend on the outcomes of our output it’s really easy to get bogged down in what we haven’t yet acquired and our lack.
There are a few types of scarcity that I have noticed with my clients over the years:
Scarcity of money
Scarcity of resources
Scarcity of time
Scarcity of power
Scarcity of belonging/support
Scarcity of motivation
It’s normal to feel these areas of lack or not enough sometimes.
“Most people — the average human being — doesn’t realize the power of these types of scarcity driving their daily lives and their every action, thought and feeling.”
SHAWN FINK
There are a lot of people awakening to these daily drivers — but who are teaching methods to gloss over them rather than to heal them and work through them so they don’t take over.
The Spiritual bypassing of True Scarcity
With more and more people feeling determined to become millionaires and to work freely anywhere in the world, there has been a ton of spiritual bypassing happening around true scarcity and feelings of scarcity mentality.
Some spiritual and business mindset gurus tell you that if you want to get YOUR piece of all those scarce resources all you need to do is adopt an abundance mindset and manifest.
In fact, they will tell you that if you want more, more, more you just need to give yourself some mantras or affirmations and will your desires into fruition. along with not enoughness is so prevalent in our society.
Make a vision board!
Manifest!
I call BS.
I do believe in the Law of Attraction but I also believe that marginalized populations of our society can’t manifest their way through racism, sexism, oppression and being trapped in the broken systems of navigating poverty.
Scarcity is a very real thing for many perfectly wonderful people and it must be dealt with effectively — not glossed over.
“For many people the thrill of having more is intensified by the presence of those who have less. Waste is not the issue here. To many greedy individuals, power lies in withholding resources.”
bell hooks
There are many people in our communities who truly are unable to get their needs met because they are a person of color, LGBTQIA+, indigenous or a woman or because they are not educated enough, because they have mental health obstacles, and many other factors etc..
So if you are a privileged person does that mean you can’t experience scarcity?
Sometimes scarcity is real. Sometimes, though, it’s an illusion.
Regardless, the solutions are always, in my work, taking intentional, aligned actions.
My former longtime business was called Abundant Mama and my work was very much rooted in abundance work because I believe abundance work could change this world for the better. The work is not mindset work — it’s intentional and algined actions toward healing scarcity and feelings of scarcity.
Imagine if everyone felt safe, taken care of and as if we all have our needs met — always.
Since realizing from doing my own work on racial justice that “abundance mindset” is based in white privilege I do not promote it — but rather coach and mentor women through building their own abundance toolbox — actions YOU take that lead you toward feeling more safe, more trusting, more secure and more confident.
The Way Through is Through
Sometimes scarcity is real — even for the dominant culture.
To heal scarcity in my work with ALL women, we first get super present with the facts of your personal situation. My coaching offers safe space for you to share personal and confidential information that you might otherwise feel scared to share.
Sometimes scarcity is healed through real conversations where you get to be heard and seen — and valued. It’s amazing how much we bottle up inside.
You can suffer from scarcity if you are seriously are worried you are not able to pay yourself or your bills — or if you are legitimately worried about where the money will come from.
However, the work is always — whether rooted in fact or fiction — about taking aligned and intentional actions for mindful progress. I would never suggest a client “mindset” her way out of money problems and money fears.
There’s action and inaction. AND, since I work in soul alignment as well, there is some level of trust work that needs to always happen when we’re thinking about money and resources that we need.
So for me abundance begets abundance and so I practice taking actions that lead to more abundance.
When scarcity does show up for me — I dig deeper for the truth. In my case, there’s always been a legitimate fear at the root not just my mind playing tricks.
And then I take action to address the root issue.
In my GRIT coaching exercise that I offer to my clients in the zone of Scarcity, the aligned actions we work with around scarcity is based on the following themes:
Grow with a Growth Action List
Re-align with the Present
Implement Radical Self-Trust
Thrive and Flourish with Positivity Pauses
Gratitude falls under T — thrive with positivity pauses since it’s a cornerstone positive emotion — but there are many more ways to actively cultivate positive energy.
Gratitude is my favorite place to begin because it’s such an accessible practice that most people know how to use it quickly and easily.
Gratitude is a cornerstone positive emotion and antidote to scarcity mindset
It’s hard to feel lack when you are focused on all that you have and all that is going well.
It’s hard to feel angry when you are feeling grateful.
Cultivating true feelings of gratitude requires intentional actions — not just rote reciting of random things like we hear around the Thanksgiving dinner table.
When I tossed all faith to the universe and quit my 9 to 5, we had managed to have about 6 months of income saved up. We gave it that long to make the dream happen. If it didn’t work, I would go back to get a real job. Thankfully that never was needed as Abundant Mama did well instantly. But it wasn’t always easy.
That’s where my daily gratitude practice — going strong for 11 years and soon to be 12 — truly became a foundation for myself, my mental health and my work.
Why is Gratitude so powerful — what does the science say?
Putting a deep focus on what you value, what is good and what is working improves your wellbeing — giving you the capacity and clarity to focus on getting what else you need or want.
This is one of the many powers of gratitude.
When I started my gratitude journaling 11 years ago, I never dreamed I would stick with it this long.
But the truth is that I have found nothing but positive energy from. the practice. A big part of my success is in being consistently motivated and moving forward in my life and work. Gratitude is a key part of my self-care.
When we have positive feelings inside of us, have the energy and the capacity to do challenging things or to navigate through tough situations.
The practice for me is to write in my journal — sometimes 3 things. Sometimes two pages.
And while many have told me they find gratitude journaling rote — and they get tired of writing the same things over and over, I have a natural ability to find the gold in my day to write about so that it’s hardly the same.
I’ve been coaching women through this practice for a decade and offered a lot prompts over the years. However, today I am focused on the standpoint of scarcity.
Scarcity Mindset? 3 Gratitude Prompts to Heal Feelings of Not Enough and Cultivate Abundance
Gratitude journaling can get boring if you don’t know how to elicit the root of the gratitude itself — which is why I try and give my clients new prompts all the time.
These are designed just to help you work through feelings of scarcity.
What can I be grateful for right now that always keeps me safe and protected?
Who can I show gratitude to for always being there for me?
What strengths of mine am I grateful for right now that have gotten me this far?
What part of this post lands for you? Take time to notice and journal.
