Ep.45 😬Rethink the fuel behind your money choices right now!

Here is the rewrite:

What if the reason you keep stopping and restarting with money has nothing to do with discipline — and everything to do with the fuel you've been using?

You already know what you need to do. Track your spending. Save more. Stop the impulse purchases. Stick to the budget.

You know. And yet — by Wednesday, the plan falls apart.

I lived this. The Monday reset. The Wednesday collapse. The guilt. The "I'll try again next week." For years, I believed the problem was me — that I just didn't have enough discipline, enough commitment, enough willpower to make it work.

It wasn't until I started learning differently that everything changed. Not by trying harder. But by understanding what was really driving my choices all along.

What changed everything was one realization: motivation is not a feeling you wait for. It is a choice you make.

In this solo episode, I'm sharing one of the most misunderstood patterns in personal finance — the willpower trap. It's the start-stop cycle that keeps so many hardworking women stuck despite their best intentions. And it is not a character flaw. It is a system problem.

Drawing on the research of Brené Brown, the teachings of my coach Brad Bizjak, and the framework of Brendon Burchard's The Motivation Manifesto, I walk you through the 3-pillar system that replaced white-knuckling with something that actually works — and actually lasts.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why willpower is the weakest fuel source for long-term financial change
• What Brené Brown's research reveals about how real change happens
• The phone battery analogy — taught by Brad Bizjak — that explains why you're running on empty by 8 PM
• The difference between managing money from fear vs. from freedom
• The 3-pillar system: Environmental Architecture, Compounding Repetition, and Directional Recalibration
• How the Weekly Money Moment can transform your relationship with money from dread to calm leadership

If you've ever felt like you know exactly what to do — but can't seem to make it stick — this episode was made for you.

The gap between knowing and doing is not a character flaw. It is a system problem. And systems can be fixed.

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Transcript

😬Rethink the fuel behind your money choices right now!

[00:00:01]

Welcome to the Money Is Not Your Problem podcast, the show for
hardworking women of faith who are doing everything they can to care
for their families but still feel defeated when it comes to money. I'm
Madeleine Strasburg, financial coach, educator, and mom. I've felt the
anxiety of swiping my card and hoping it would not be declined. I know
what it's like to feel like you cannot say no to your kids, your family,
or your husband, and to end up resentful for always putting yourself
last. But I've broken the cycle, and now I'm here to help you make
peace with your money using 3 pillars: our faith, applied financial
knowledge, and a mindset of progress. Each week, I'll share real
stories, honest lessons from my own financial blunders, and 3 simple
steps you can use in your everyday life, even in the middle of a busy,
overwhelming schedule. Your prosperous financial life starts right here,
exactly where you are. Because money is not your problem.

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[00:01:05]

Welcome to the Money Is Not Your Problem podcast. I'm Madeleine
Strasburg. I'm your host. Today we're going to be talking about
something that you might have fallen for: the willpower trap.

You may already have heard of the author and professor Brené Brown.
She is a researcher and she has changed how millions of people
understand human behavior. It has been over two decades that she
studies emotions, and one of the major talks she gave on TED Talk was
about vulnerability. It became one of the most viewed talks in the
world, and her books have helped millions of people rethink how they
approach growth and change. Some of the topics she talks about would
be shame, courage, and of course, vulnerability.

But there's something surprising that happened to her in the beginning
of her research career when she began studying what she calls
wholehearted lives. People who are courageous, resilient, and able to
make meaningful changes in their lives. She expected to find something
simple. She thought those people probably had more discipline, more
willpower, more grit — but the data showed something very different.

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[00:02:21]

The people who actually changed their lives weren't constantly forcing
themselves to act through discipline. Instead, they were managing
something deeper. They were managing their emotional state. Their
environment, their beliefs, their relationships, and the way they
interpreted their experiences created an emotional foundation that made
action easier.

When Brené Brown realized this, she has said it actually caused what
she jokingly calls a researcher breakdown. The evidence contradicted
what she expected to find. It meant that behavior change wasn't mainly
about pushing harder. It was about understanding the emotional forces
that drive our actions in the first place.

And that insight is exactly what I want to talk about today when it
comes to money. Because when it comes to finances, we already know
what we should be doing — but we're not doing it. We already know
that we should be sticking to our budget, saving more, starting to
invest, stopping impulse spending. But knowing what to do and actually
doing it consistently are two very different things.

That's a very common saying in our home. My husband would say
something to the girls, they'd complain, and then say they already know
what he's saying.

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[00:03:34]

And then he says every time: knowing and doing are two different things.

And you know how that goes. You hear someone talking about money, or
you receive a bill, you look at your bank account and you finally decide:
no, I'm going to change my ways. Starting next week, I'm going to do
everything right with my money.

So then you start Monday. You created your budget, you're following
your plan, and you do that for one, two, three days. By Wednesday or
Thursday, you got home tired, stressed — and then what happens? You
go back to your old habits. You end up spending some time browsing and
shopping on Amazon, putting a bunch of things in the cart and buying
anyway. You end up going out to eat. And you choose a very expensive
restaurant because you deserve to take care of yourself — spending
money that you were not planning to spend.

And as you know, the shame, the guilt, and the frustration set in —
only to repeat the whole cycle again next Monday.

If that sounds like you, I want you to know that you're not alone. The
problem isn't your work ethic, your commitment, or your intelligence.

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[00:04:43]

The problem is that you've been taught to rely on the wrong fuel source
for change. You've been caught in something that I call the willpower
trap.

I first learned about the willpower trap from my coach, Brad Bizjak.
Most financial advice assumes that change happens through willpower —
that if you push harder, stay stricter, and force yourself to be more
disciplined, everything will eventually fall into place. It's like white
knuckling. But willpower is the weakest fuel source for long-term
change. It runs out.

So in today's episode, we're going to dismantle this trap. We're going
to talk about 3 important things.

First: why willpower is actually a failing strategy for financial change,
and why relying on it often makes consistency much harder, not easier.

Second: what really drives consistent action — which is your emotional
state — and how to start managing it intentionally to get the things
that you want.

And third: a simple 3-part system that creates financial momentum so
you can finally do what you already know you need to do with your
money — without constantly forcing yourself.

Let's get started.

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[00:06:03]

So what exactly is this willpower trap? During our training with Coach
Brad Bizjak, he used the analogy of willpower being like a battery on
your phone.

Every time you have to force yourself to do something you don't feel
like doing — like dragging yourself out of bed for a workout, resisting
a cookie, or in our case, forcing ourselves to open that dreaded credit
card statement — you drain that battery a little bit. By the end of the
day or the week, the battery is completely depleted. This is burnout.

And when you're burned out, you have zero energy left to make good
financial decisions — or any other good decisions.

That's why you can see people following a diet, doing so well during
the week — and then when they get to Friday, they feel they need to
celebrate their hard work. So they go and eat everything in sight. They
cannot control themselves because they're so depleted that no matter
how much they talk about it, they're not going to listen to themselves.

And those decisions don't necessarily have to be only about money. We
are making decisions every day, multiple times a day, depleting that
battery little by little.

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[00:07:08]

This is why you might be a rock star in your career all day, making
high-stakes decisions — but by 8:00 PM, you find yourself mindlessly
adding things to an online shopping cart. Your decision-making energy
is gone.

But wait — there's more. It gets worse.

Every time you use willpower to force a financial action, you are
literally training your brain to believe that managing your money is a
hard, painful, and draining activity. Your brain's primary job is to
avoid pain, so it creates even more resistance the next time — making
it even harder to take that same action.

That's why over time, consistency gets harder, not easier, when you're
relying on willpower alone.

So this is your willpower trap — or if you prefer, we can call it the
start-stop cycle. You get a burst of motivation, use your willpower to
force action, drain your battery, burn out, stop, feel guilty, and wait
for the next burst of motivation to do it all over again.

It's a recipe for failure. The difference between money and food is that
the failure with a diet just ends up on your hips — but when it's money,
it ends up affecting your entire bank account.

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[00:08:21]

So then you ask me: if motivation and willpower are the wrong fuel
sources, what's the right one?

The answer is your emotional state.

You might have heard about the cognitive behavior model: thoughts
create our feelings, and feelings lead us to action or inaction,
determining our results.

Think about your own experience. On the days you feel financially
anxious, overwhelmed, or ashamed — like the case where you got an
unexpected bill, or you look at your account and it's at a very low
balance — what do you do? Most of us avoid. We close the app, we
don't open the mail, we tell ourselves we'll deal with it later. And that
avoidance only deepens the anxiety, which deepens the avoidance —
and then you have a downward spiral.

But on the days you feel clear, capable, and in control — you sit down,
you make a plan, you move money around, you feel good about it. And
that good feeling makes you want to do it again tomorrow. An upward
spiral.

Your emotional state is the cause of your financial action. And this
awareness is great — because if the cause of your financial distress is
your emotional state when you make those decisions, then at the same
time as the problem, it's also the solution.

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[00:09:37]

By addressing your emotional state, you'll be able to change your
financial results. That's the secret.

And this is where the wisdom of my other coach, Brendon Burchard, and
his book The Motivation Manifesto becomes so powerful. If you're
looking for a great book to read — it's almost like a poetry book, but
with really great insights — I highly recommend The Motivation
Manifesto.

He talks about motivation and explains where it comes from. He argues
that it comes from two places: freedom or fear.

Think about your own money habits right now. Are you managing your
money from a place of fear? Fear of running out, fear of making a
mistake, fear of being judged for how much or how little you have? Or
are you managing from a place of freedom? The freedom to quit a job
you hate, the freedom to travel, to build the life you want on your own
terms.

This is one of the most radical and liberating ideas. In the book, he
explains that motivation is a choice.

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[00:10:41]

Wait — what?

We wait around to feel motivated to deal with our money, but that
feeling rarely comes. Brendon Burchard explains that motivation is not
a feeling that happens to us. It's a choice we make. We can choose to
focus on freedom instead of fear. We choose to direct our minds toward
our ambitions. The feeling of motivation follows the choice. It does not
precede it.

So how do we make that choice on a Tuesday morning? How do we build
a system for it?

It comes down to 3 pillars. I've adapted these specifically for our
financial lives.

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[00:11:05]  PILLAR 1: ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

That sounds fancy — but it's not. It's about purposefully designing your
environment for financial success.

Here's an example: you would never put a plant in a dark closet with no
water and then blame the plant when it dies. You'd blame the
environment. It was in the wrong place. Yet when it comes to our
financial goals, we blame ourselves for not having enough willpower
when our environment is actively working against us.

I remember learning from Brooke Castillo that we don't necessarily
need to remove temptations from the house. Using mindset work and the
cognitive model, you should theoretically be able to stay in any
situation with temptations available and not give in. But if you want to
really succeed and something's really hard for you, I say: set up your
environment to make the right choice the easiest choice.

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[00:12:54]

So how does this apply to finances?

For you, the working woman who wants to master her money: what does
your financial environment look like?

What information are you consuming daily? Is your social media filled
with scarcity-based headlines and influencers promoting
hyperconsumerism? Or are you deliberately following podcasts, authors,
and accounts that provide empowering, practical financial advice?

How about your digital space? Are your credit cards saved in the
browser for one-click purchases, or have you created a little healthy
friction? Have you automated your savings and investments so that the
best decision is always the easiest decision?

Also — who are you talking to about money? Are you surrounded by
friends and family who complain about being broke all the time and see
wealth as something for other people? Or do you even have a person in
your life with whom you can talk about your financial goals from a place
of possibility and ambition?

Architecting your environment means you stop passively absorbing
financial stress from your surroundings and start actively absorbing
financial empowerment. It is the foundation of everything.

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[00:15:30]  PILLAR 2: COMPOUNDING REPETITION

The second pillar is about continuity over intensity. Momentum is not
built in one massive, intense overhaul. It is built through small daily
compounding actions. I know — super boring. But from small things,
great things come to pass.

Here's a visual: think about a train. To get a train moving from a
standstill takes a lot of energy. But once it's at speed, it's almost
impossible to stop. Most of us treat our finances like that stopped
train. We do a huge financial reset once a year — maybe at New Year's
or after a financial scare — lose all momentum, and then have to find
that massive start-up energy all over again.

Instead, what if we focus on tiny daily repetition?

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[00:16:46]

What if you spend just 3 minutes every morning looking at your bank
accounts? Not with judgment — with simple calm awareness. Clarity is
so important.

What if every paycheck you automated a small transfer to your savings
account or investment? What if you took 1 minute before bed to write
down one thing you're grateful for that your money provides?

These actions are too small to fail. They don't require willpower, but
they keep the train moving. They build a daily habit of engaging with
your money from a place of calm and control.

Brendon Burchard says it beautifully: "The deeper and longer I give
attention to my ambitions and passions, the more motivation I feel."

This is how you build unstoppable financial momentum — not through a
single heroic effort, but through daily loving attention.

And when you do something that's not wise financially, be compassionate
to yourself. You are not your financial mistakes. Compassion alone won't
solve the problem — but you get much more momentum if you don't beat
yourself down for making a mistake. Get the learning, get the lesson,
and go back to your daily habits that will put you back on track.

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[00:17:57]  PILLAR 3: DIRECTIONAL RECALIBRATION

The final pillar is perhaps the most overlooked — especially for women.

Here's the truth that might sting a little: positivity without direction
is delusion. You can't just think positive about your money and hope it
works out. You have to take the right actions.

Many of us are so busy grinding, working hard, running the household,
being everything to everyone — that we never pause to ask: is this
financial ladder I'm climbing leaning against the right wall? Are you
working hard on the financial goals that truly matter to you? Is the way
you're earning and spending aligned with your deepest values?

Directional recalibration is the practice of intentionally pausing to
reflect on your actions. It doesn't have to take hours. It can be a
10-minute journaling session every Friday — or Sunday, like I do.

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[00:19:05]

During that time, ask yourself:
  · What did I do financially this week?
  · Did it work? What did not work?
  · What needs to change?
  · Am I moving toward the life I actually want?
  · What can I anticipate financially next week?

I created a planner that has this embedded into every week. It's your
Weekly Money Moment — a place to sit down, bring your favorite
beverage, maybe some dessert, look at your money, and do a review of
the past week and plan for the following. We're trying to associate
dealing with money with something good instead of stress and anxiety.

This pause is where you gain the insights to ensure you're not just
working hard, but working smart.

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[00:20:18]  ★ KEY MOMENT — FEATURED AUDIOBITE

The reason you've been stuck in the financial start-stop cycle is not
because you're bad with money. It's because you've been caught in the
willpower trap — trying to force change using a fuel source that's
guaranteed to run out.

The shift: the real secret to lasting financial change is to stop relying
on willpower and start cultivating emotional momentum.

And you do that by making a conscious decision. As Brendon Burchard
writes, motivation is not a personality trait. It is an intention and will
of a free and conscious mind. It's a choice. That means it's available
to you right now, today.

As you listen to me, you can make a new choice.

You can choose to manage your money from a place of freedom, not fear.
You can choose to release the story of "I'm just not good with money"
and step into the identity of a woman who is the director of her own
financial life. A woman who doesn't wait to feel ready. A woman who
chooses to act and lets the feeling of empowerment follow.

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[00:21:22]  YOUR HOMEWORK FROM THIS EPISODE

Your homework is simple. Focus on the 3 pillars.

FIRST — look at your environment. Make one small change today.
Unfollow a social media account that makes you feel bad about yourself.
Subscribe to a financial podcast. (Ahem.) Put a sticky note on your
laptop with your number one financial goal. Make your environment work
for you.

SECOND — start a compounding repetition. Pick one tiny daily financial
action you can commit to. Just one. Maybe it's checking your budget for
2 minutes every morning. Maybe it's moving spare change into a savings
account. Make it so easy you cannot say no. Then do it again tomorrow.

THIRD — schedule a directional recalibration. Your Weekly Money
Moment. Put 15 minutes on your calendar for this Friday — or Sunday.
Label it "My Financial Power-Up" or "Weekly Money Moment." During
that time, ask yourself: is what I did this week moving me closer to the
life I truly want?

This is how you escape the willpower trap. Not with a burst of intensity,
but with a quiet, consistent, and powerful system. You build your
momentum, keep the train on the tracks, and become the woman who
doesn't just know what to do — but actually does it.

And that, my friend, is what financial freedom actually looks like.

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[00:22:23]

Thank you so much for joining me today on the Money Is Not Your
Problem podcast. If this episode resonated with you, please share it
with a friend who needs to hear it. Leave a review, subscribe wherever
you listen, and I will see you in the next episode.

Until then, remember: money is not your problem.

Até breve e obrigada! 💛

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[00:22:35]

Thank you for listening to the Money Is Not Your Problem podcast.
Remember: you are not your debt, and you're not your past financial
mistakes.

You are exactly where you need to be to begin creating the peaceful,
prosperous financial life you want to have — at your own pace and with
purpose.

If this episode helped you, share it with someone who could use some
encouragement or support on their own financial journey.

Come back next time for more financial goodness.

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[00:22:53]

Até breve e obrigada! 💛

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END OF TRANSCRIPT
Money Is Not Your Problem Podcast
Madeleine Strasburg · @MadStrasCoach
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2011548
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