The 3 Money Stories Keeping You in Survival Mode

Why do some business owners make good money but still feel anxious, overworked, or one quiet month away from trouble?

The answer may have less to do with how much you earn and more to do with the money stories shaping your decisions.

In this episode of Lowkey Rich, Ilonka Ras breaks down the three money stories that influence how you price, sell, work, spend, save, and manage money inside your business.

You’ll learn:

• Why making more money does not always solve financial stress
• How your beliefs about wealth may limit how much you allow yourself to earn
• Why you may connect higher income with harder work
• How emotional spending keeps business owners stuck in a feast-and-famine cycle
• What your current money habits reveal about your hidden beliefs
• How your internal money thermostat affects your income, profit, and financial security

You may already know that you should increase your prices, save for tax, pay yourself well, and keep more profit.

But why are you not doing the things you know would help?

This episode will help you spot the beliefs driving your money habits, understand why the same financial patterns keep repeating, and begin changing your relationship with money.

Listen now and discover which money story may be keeping you in survival mode.

Download:

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the very first episode of the Low Key Rich Podcast. I am so excited that you are here. I wanted to start this podcast with a conversation about money stories because the results we have with money are never random. There is always a pattern behind them. Now you might be making good money but struggle to keep it. You might know that you need to increase your prices, but every time you think about doing that, you feel really uncomfortable. So you avoid it. You might work constantly and still feel like you are one quiet month away from everything falling apart. Now I coach on the topic of money a lot, and business owners often assume that the problem is the amount of money coming in. That the answer is to simply make more money, to increase revenue. Now, sometimes you do actually need to make more money. But what I have seen over and over again with my private clients is that simply earning more isn't always the answer. The problem with earning more is that it amplifies the problem if you don't have a good system for managing the money that is already there. If you just make more and continue behaving in the same way, you will end up with a bigger business, yes, but also the same or even worse financial anxiety. In other words, earning more will not solve bad money habits. Now I want you to really just understand why you have the results you have currently as it pertains to money. And this is less about me giving you more financial information because you probably already know that you should charge more. You should save, plan for taxes, and avoid spending everything you make. But knowing what to do and actually doing it are two very different things. The real question is why are you not doing the things you already know would help you? And the answer can be found in your money story. A money story is the belief you have about money. It's what you believe to be true when it comes to money. It feels like the truth of the universe. Now, you may never have said these beliefs out loud. You may not even realize that you have them, but they still influence the way you price your services, speak about your work, choose clients, spend money, save money, and also how you respond when you face money challenges, whether that's in your life or your business. And there is research behind this. Your brain does not only respond to what happens, it also responds to what it believes the situation means. Researchers call this cognitive appraisal, meaning that emotions and stress are not caused by the event itself, but rather by how you perceive and interpret that event. Two people can face the exact same situation and feel completely different about it. One person can hear that price is too high and think this client is not the right fit for me. Another person can hear the same thing and think, I'm asking too much. Maybe my work isn't worth it. The situation is the same. The meaning they give it is different. That meaning changes how they feel and what they do next. And this is the pattern I want you to notice. The meaning you give things, your thoughts about the situation, drive your emotions, drive your feelings. And those feelings influence your behavior. And this behavior or the actions you take or don't take creates the results you see. And the most interesting part of this is that our results will then reinforce that original belief or the meaning that we have attached to the situation, creating more proof that what we believe and what we think about this specific thing is true. So, in essence, it keeps the belief alive and strong. So let me give you an example. Let's say you believe that making good money requires a lot of hard work. Now, because of that belief, you feel like you should do more than what is asked. So you have to overgive. And because you are constantly adding more and saying yes to work that wasn't initially part of the deliverables, you aren't getting paid for everything you do. So you are insanely busy, but you're not actually making the kind of money you should for the effort that you are putting in. So in order to make more, you need to take on even more clients. And pretty soon you are working yourself to the bone. You feel tired and maybe even a little bit resentful. At the end of the month, you look at how hard you have worked and think, see, making money is hard. Your belief influenced your choices, and those choices created the result that seemed to prove the belief was true. Now, once you can see your money patterns, you can now consciously choose to stop participating in the story. I want you to think about your money beliefs as a psychological thermostat. A thermostat has a setting. If the temperature moves away from that setting, the system is going to work to bring it back to what it has been programmed to as normal. There is an amount of money, success, stability that feels familiar to you. And just because something is familiar doesn't mean that it is good or always comfortable. Living from paycheck to paycheck can feel familiar. Always stressing your way through month end can feel familiar. Now, when you move beyond that familiar feeling, your internal money thermostat will do the work to bring you back to what you know. Your income increases, but instead of feeling secure, you feel exposed. So you unconsciously do things to bring your revenue back to what feels familiar. You increase your prices but start adding more work because the new price feels too high. You have a strong month, but stop marketing because you feel like you've done enough. Your external results have changed, but your internal idea of what is safe, normal, acceptable has stayed the same. And this is how we unconsciously block ourselves from more success, more money, more stability. This is why someone can double their income and still feel exactly the same about money. The number changed, but their relationship with that number did not. Now, it's also important to say that I'm not suggesting that we create every single negative thing that happens to us financially. Sometimes things out of our control happen, but our internal money stories or pattern will impact how we deal with those circumstances. So let's look at the three money stories that I see play out most often for my clients. The first is your story about the meaning of money. What does having money say about a person? What does wanting more money say about you? Maybe you grew up hearing that rich people are greedy. Maybe people with money were described as dishonest, selfish, or out of touch. Maybe you learned that good people should be satisfied with what they have. Maybe wanting more was seen as ungrateful. Maybe you heard people criticize about who appeared to be doing well. You can consciously want a successful business while also holding a deeper belief that financial success will make you a bad person. And this, of course, creates an internal conflict. One part of you wants more money, another part of you does not feel safe having it. And here's what this might look like in your business specifically. You might avoid speaking about your goals because you do not want people to judge you. You might undercharge because earning too much from one client feels unfair. You might give away too much of your work for free. You might avoid selling because you do not want to come across as pushy. You might make money and then spend it very quickly because keeping a large amount feels uncomfortable. You might also downplay your success. Someone asks how the business is going, and even after a strong couple of months, you immediately talk about everything that is difficult. You do not allow yourself to say it's actually going really well because you don't want to sound boastful or arrogant. Now I want you to think about what happens when you see someone doing very well financially, not just surviving or being okay, but someone who is doing really well financially. What are your thoughts about this person? Do you feel curious about how they did it? Do you immediately look for something wrong with them? Do you assume they must have taken advantage of someone? Do you decide they probably had help, connections, or a really easy start? If you believe that wealthy people are greedy, dishonest, or selfish, there is no way you are going to allow yourself to become wealthy if that is the meaning you are attaching to it. Your mind will protect you from becoming the type of person you have learned to dislike. This story sets the upper limit on your thermostat. It determines how much you believe you are allowed to have before it starts to feel morally uncomfortable. The second story is about what you think it takes to make money. Now you may believe that making money is hard, that you need to work long hours to deserve a good income, or that making more money means taking on more clients or to offer a wider range of services. This specific money story can show up in interesting ways. Something I see often with my clients who are really good at what they do. They know how to make sales, they're really good at generating money, but how they generate the money is often done in ways that keep them stuck and overworking. Working long nights, weekends, always being available, taking their laptops with them on vacation. So in this case, it's not that they lack the belief in their ability to make money. It's that they believe they can't do it in a way that also allows them lots of space in their schedule. The story they have about making money is that they need to work themselves to the bone in order to deserve it. Again, there are different ways this particular story might show up for you as a business owner. Here are a few sneaky ways you may be stopping yourself from earning more with ease. When someone asks you what you charge, you immediately start explaining everything they receive because you feel the need to justify it. You offer extra work because you are worried that it's not enough. You haven't increased your prices in years, or you've done so very incrementally just to keep up with inflation. You minimize the importance of your work because it's easy for you to do. You don't value it as highly as you should. You think that it takes you five minutes, so maybe you should just do it for free. You add more work, you create more deliverables, you make the process more complicated because you think more is valuable. Now, this is an important pattern to notice. Do you only feel deserving of money when earning it has cost you lots of energy and effort? If growth, or more money, always means more work, you will at some point start resisting that because you only have so much energy and time to give. It's here that the internal money thermostat will kick in again. You want the higher income, but you do not want the life you believe comes with it. The third money story is about what happens after you make the money. Now, you may believe that you are bad at managing money or that money just never stays. When you make money, you spend money. And if that is the story you have been telling yourself for years, it's driving the actions you take every time money comes into your business. Now, for one of my clients, her default was to spend the money as soon as it hit her account. A payment would come in and she would immediately feel very relieved. She would start paying bills, even though they weren't due yet. There would always be something that she had to buy. And if it wasn't for the business, she would buy something for herself because she felt like she worked so hard to make the money that she deserves to treat herself a bit. And before long, the account was back in the red and she would feel intense anxiety. Now, because she was very good at generating revenue, she would kick into sales mode again, bring another client in, and then repeat the cycle all over again. Make money, spend money, panic, make more money. She believed that the answer to the feast and famine was basically just to generate more revenue. But every increase in income was followed by an increase in spending. A bigger month just gave her more cash to move through the same pattern. You can grow your revenue every year, but still have nothing to show for it. And it's because making more does not necessarily mean keeping more. This money story can also show up in other subtle ways. You avoid looking at your bank account until you need to pay for something. You make spending decisions based on the balance in your account without considering what is happening next month or the month after that. You have a strong month and start spending as if every month will now look the same. You make emotional decisions because the money gives you a temporary feeling of safety. And sometimes you spend the money because you believe that spending it will help you make more. But you haven't actually asked yourself exactly how you are going to get a return on what you've spent or invested. So you can see how much of our behavior with money is impacted by our thoughts and our emotions. And when we act emotionally, we often do so because we are chasing a specific emotion or trying to avoid a certain emotion. We want to feel a certain way, like we are moving forward, that we are successful. And this is where we need to understand the difference between making a planned investment and using money to manage or avoid an emotion. The purchase may look like a business decision on the outside, but the real reason for the purchase may actually be anxiety, insecurity, boredom, or the need to prove that the business is doing well. And I want to add that there is nothing wrong with enjoying the money you make. But if every good month creates permanent new expenses, you will need to keep earning more just to maintain that new level of spending. And that is going to keep you in survival or hustle mode. Because no matter how much the business makes, there is never enough space between what comes in and what goes out. Now, when we look at all three stories together, it starts to make sense why we have the current results we have with money. Your story about the meaning of money affects how much money you believe you are allowed to have. Your story about making money affects what you believe you need to do to earn it and how you need to earn it in order to deserve it. And your story about managing money affects how much you feel comfortable keeping it and being a good steward of the money that flows through your business. And ultimately, how you build personal wealth. Together, these stories create your internal money thermostat. They set the level of money, success, and stability that feels normal to you. So if you are constantly undercharging, overworking, overspending, or simply avoiding your numbers, that behavior is telling you something. It is showing you the belief you are currently operating from. And this is why I do not want you to only look at the number in your bank account. The number is the result, right? We need to look at what happened before the result. What decisions did you make? What were you feeling when you made those decisions? And what is the money story driving it all? Seeing the pattern is the first step in recalibrating your internal money thermostat. Now, before you go, I have created a money story audit to help you identify which of these stories is showing up in your business. It will help you look at the current results you have, the behaviors creating those results, and the money story sitting underneath all of it. You can go ahead and download the money story audit using the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me for this first episode. I will talk to you again next week.