Your Money, Your Rules | Money Mindset, Money Management, Abundance Mindset, Budgeting, Spirituality

157 | Why Female Entrepreneurs Doubt Their Money Decisions and How to Build Financial Self-Trust

• Erin Gray | Wealth Coach, Former CFP and CFO

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In this episode, we explore why so many women unconsciously outsource their financial power and how to rebuild deep, embodied self-trust with money.

You’ll learn how social conditioning, approval-seeking, and a nervous system wired for safety all play into hesitation and how to unwind those patterns so you can make calm, confident, intuitive choices in business and life.

In this episode we discuss:

  • How social conditioning teaches women to seek approval and give away their financial power
  • Using intuition and body signals instead of looping in overthinking
  • Separating money outcomes from identity and worth
  • Recognizing low trust habits like chronic advice seeking and analysis paralysis
  • Choosing certainty over hesitation
  • Keeping promises to yourself to rebuild confidence through evidence
  • Weekly nervous system practices to install a feeling of financial calmness and clarity


Resources mentioned in this episode:

Ep. 60 Understanding Your Emotional Wave(s) within Human Design

Create Financial Ease Using Human Design Workshop


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Step 1: Join my Facebook Community.

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➡️ Schedule your free clarity call here


From my soul to yours,

Erin

Erin Gray:

Are you doubting if you have set your prices correctly? Maybe you have hesitated or are hesitating to invest in your business, or you feel like you need to talk to someone after you've had a conversation with your CPA, bookkeeper, or attorney as to what direction you think you need to take. You would not be the first person to do this. And today I'm diving into why I see women entrepreneurs struggle to trust themselves, not just financially, but as a whole. And I'm going to share simple, actionable tools to make not only money decisions with confidence, but also every decision in your life. Because the skill sets that I'm teaching you here on this podcast, you can take them and you can translate them and use them in every other area of your life, not just with money. Welcome back to your money, your rules with me, your host, Aaron Gray. Okay, so let's talk about why I think women, men do this too, but I see this a lot with women, why we struggle to trust ourselves with money. First of all, I think that it is a societal thing, right? Society teaches us to defer or to outsource our power to seek approval. I see this all the time with my daughter's friends. Like we were at a field trip at Hobby Lobby, and so many of them were asking, Well, what do you think I should choose to for my fabric? And they were going to, you know, each other or their friends and asking them, Well, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? And I watched this happen. And for several of the girls, I just went up to them and we were talking. She was asking me, Well, what do you think I should choose? I was like, Well, what do you actually want to choose? What feels good on your body? What are you going to enjoy having and, you know, lounging around in? And so I think so many of us have been taught from very early on to outsource our power to ask other people their opinions first before we actually check in with ourselves. Um, we also aren't actually taught how to make decisions, you know, to follow our intuition, to be guided from our body. Um, you can go back to episode, I believe it's episode 60. I'll put it in the show notes for you. If that's incorrect, I'll put the correct number in the show notes for you. But about, you know, human design, I use human design very loosely, but I weave this in with my clients to help them understand the way that they are meant to make decisions. And I use human design to empower you and to show you to tap back into your body. First and foremost, we're all meant to make decisions intuitively, not with our head. And then I use human design to kind of show you how to be more in alignment with your decision making. You know, so for many of us, we perceive money, a lot of us perceive money as a threat. So our nervous system can get a little hijacked. Um, and we can go into this fight, flight, freeze response, and what I call a survival mode. And it's not a creative place. It's not a place that, you know, we want to be making decisions from a very creative, expansive, abundant place, not from a fight, flight, freeze, survival mode, protect, shrink place. And so often we have also tied money and money decisions to our identity and our self-worth. You know, I know that this has been my story. I know that I have seen it in clients and friends. So if I in the past, if Aaron used to, you know, if I used to make decisions that would lose money, air quotes, lose money. Money can never be lost. You know, it's circulated, it comes back. But let's just say that I didn't see the return immediately, or I judged how I had invested, then I would make it mean something about me as a person. And more often than not, I would make it mean that I was a bad person or I did something wrong. More so I did something wrong. Not that I didn't look at it from the lens of growth of like I made a decision, I got more data and I learned from it. And how am I going to take this information and move forward? And I think every decision that we make, whether the money, I always like to think and believe that like the money comes back twofold instantly, because that is a very empowering belief for me, versus I'm going to invest this money and I don't know when I'm going to see it. Like that doesn't feel very good in the body. So I think a lot of us have, you know, tied up our who we think we are, who we believe ourselves to be if we make a decision with money. We're so afraid we act from such a fear-based place of if I make this or if I invest in this, and what if I lose this? Versus like, how is this going to expand me? How am I going to grow? How is this going to expand my business, my mindset? You know, always be looking at investing your money as in a growth way, not as in a protective shrinking way. So signs, or I would say, like the way that I have seen it present in myself and in clients and friends of mine and people that I, you know, have been around that you might be, I don't like the word lacking financial trust, but maybe not as strong or empowered with, you know, trusting yourself with financial decisions. You know, anytime that you are making a decision, I call it in your head. You go out of your body into your head. So you're overthinking and just recognize when you're in this space, right? You are not in your body. You are not in the energy of calm and expansion. So if this is you, if you are making this a decision and you are in this state, then I always recommend no decision needs to be made in that moment. You either need to shift your energy and get back into your body, get back into an empowered state, or you just need to allow the energy to move. And I always like, I think it's a perfect time to look at uh what are the beliefs that I'm thinking and feeling right now that is having me, you know, be in my head versus my body. You could be overanalyzing your pricing investment decisions, you know, what your attorney or your CPA said. You could be, I have some friends that just ask all the people, right? So multiple people that you're asking for approval or what are their thoughts before acting. You could be feeling guilt or shame or you know, anxiety, which is just a resistance to feeling fear when spending or investing. So think about all of these lower vibration emotions, which I mean, shame is on the lowest end, and then it's guilt, and then I don't know where apathy is, but like apathy and doubt or worry, just those lower vibration emotions. Anytime that we are feeling that, we are not in the energy of love and self-trust and expansion and abundance and joy, just those higher creativity or creative vibrations. So just recognizing if you're in that state, do not make any decisions from that place because nothing that you are going to make from that place is going to then give you abundance on the other side. If you are freezing when opportunities arise, you know, we want to feel what I always say is certain over hesitancy. And one of my Kabbala teachers, he talks about certainty over logic, which I think that is kind of equates, right? Like it's just you are certain and you are moving from a certain place versus hesitating or doubting or worrying. I'll give you a quick example. So, as some of you may know, I've had ordered a Tahoe. It was in line to be made. I guess GM decided they were stopping making the 25s and switching to the 26s. So they denied my order after they said it had accepted. There's all this behind-the-scenes stuff. But basically, what it we were able to drive a GMC. And when we went on um to a trip just a couple hours from here, and what I realized and recognized is I actually like the GM better than I liked the Chevy. So it was an amazing, obviously, like everything always works out. It was an amazing opportunity for, or I'm glad that my um order got canceled because then it allowed me to decide I wanted a GM. And so in this process, as we're getting closer to 2026, there are, or at least where I live, there were air quotes, limited amounts. I don't believe anything is limited, but you know, I was being told there was limited. I'm like, I'm not believing this. And so I was really getting to the point where like I wanted this car. I did not want to wait six months or eight months to be built because they were gonna put, you know, all of these other ones in front of me, in the sense of like they're gonna mass produce and then they're gonna take special orders. And I didn't want to wait for that. And so I just held the vision that I was going to receive, like it, God was gonna bring me the exact, you know, AT4 that I wanted. So when the sales guy that I have been working with, he texted and said, Hey, you want to go for a drive? And there was a one that had come in that I had not been looking at that was kind of an upper the top of the line model or whatever. And so I decided that that day. So he texted me like at 1:30. I was like, absolutely, I will be there this afternoon. So, you know, from Thursday to Saturday, I bought a car. Now, from the outside, looking in, it could look like, oh my gosh, that happened so quickly, you know, because my husband said a couple of weekends ago, he's like, Did you actually believe that you were gonna buy a car this weekend? And I was like, I knew something was happening, happening this weekend because I was certain that I was going to, you know, I wasn't going to just like, oh, well, maybe I'll come drive it. No, I want to drive this car and I'm going to make another decision based on, you know, sitting in this car. And so moving from certainty, I truly believe is what created, you know, when I held the belief and I moved from, you know, like, because my husband was like, well, what if we get you, you know, maybe a used car or a used, you know, GM until the new ones come out. And just me holding that vision of like, no, this is what I'm doing, this is what I want. I am not backing down. I am not compromising. And moving from that certainty and not hesitating, like that is the energy that we need to be moving from. And when we move from certainty, then that is when, like, it's almost like what they call like the 11th hour. That's when the stuff shows up, right? It's when we, hmm, him and ha, and like, oh, I wonder if, you know, I'll be able to, versus like, no, I know that there is a car because I imagine it in my mind. So if I imagine it in my mind, it has to exist in the 5D. We just got to bring it into the 3D. So holding that vision, moving from certainty rather than hesitancy and like wondering and in like I already said, himming and hawing. So really starting to practice more of moving from that place. So, how do we actually build self-trust when it comes to money? Like everything else, it is a practice. And I always suggest like start small, start testing those waters, practice self-trust in lower stakes money decisions first. I also want to say here that self-trust in doing what you say you are going to do. So when you schedule something and you put it on your calendar and you don't do it, you are eroding your self-trust. So I think that the work here is also doing what you say you're gonna do. It's not just trusting yourself when you make a business decision. It's trusting yourself that when you say you're gonna sit down and you're gonna look at your money, or you say you're gonna sit down and you're gonna work on, you know, like Mondays are typically podcast days for me. I sit down and I work on my podcast. Like I am building up the evidence that when I say I'm gonna do something, I do it. When I put it on my calendar, I'm going to do it. Now, I will be completely honest, as I always am with you. This is not how I have always been, right? Like there have been times in the past, many times, where I said I was gonna do something and I didn't. But how we are with one thing is how we are with everything. So you really have to start to think about well, where am I not trusting myself when I say I'm gonna do something I'm gonna do that doesn't even involve money, you know? So really start to look there and see it's not just with money, you know, that we're developing self-trust. It's in every area of our life. The next thing that I would focus on is, as I always say, somatic regulation, right? What are your go-to tools? And I think that sometimes people want to like think this is optional. In my mind, it's not optional. Like, what are you doing on a weekly basis to regulate your nervous system so that when things do come up, it isn't this big ordeal to the body. It's you already have skill sets and um practices in place to honor and to help your body in your nervous system. So whether that be breath work or EFT tapping or grounding to calm your nervous system. I've already talked about how I'm such a huge fan of emotion code release therapy. You know, what are the things that you are going to do on a consistent basis? And this is self-trust too, right? What are you gonna do on a consistent basis that is gonna help you with your nervous system regulation? The third thing would be, you know, ultimately is like internal guidance, right? Your intuition, listening and developing your intuition. You know, in the beginning, I didn't know what mine felt like. So I had to play with it with the small stakes. I had to play with it asking myself, going out to eat, taking one road over another. And then I started, you know, expanding it and playing bigger with money decisions, with vacations, with business decisions. And then it just continues to increase. And what I also did that was helpful for me so I could kind of calm the ego mind is I kept a list of when I trusted my decisions from my intuition, how well it turned out, and when I didn't listen. And I'm sure that you can probably, you know, relate that when I made decisions against my intuition. Now I will say it always works out. Like even when it doesn't feel like it's working out, it's still working out for us. But, you know, one of the things that I really had to start keeping track of is look at all the ways it worked out way better than I even imagined when I listened to my intuition. And then look when I tried to like, I call it, you know, mind, I call it mindfuck it, you know, like when you're trying to, you know, make decisions from your mind, even though your body and your intuition is telling you something different, it didn't work out. Like I said, it does work out, but you know what I mean. It's it was not as easy and it's like you're having to go through mud or you're trying to, you know, like it's like walking versus just jumping. So really start to listen and hone in your intuition. I think also something else that I'm noticing is a lot of us don't celebrate. We don't celebrate all of these micro moments, all of these micro shifts that we're having, which we are basically withholding the dopamine from ourselves. We're withholding the fun and the joy. So acknowledge and celebrate each time you make a decision without overthinking. Like, I can't tell you how often I will talk to clients and I'll say, Well, have you celebrated? And they're like, No, and then they want to go on and I'll have to interrupt them and I'll say, Stop. Like, you have to really become aware and celebrate how far you've come. Celebrate what you have done and like live in that moment and in that feeling. So every time that you make a decision from your intuition and you do it without overthinking and without asking other people's permission, just think about and celebrate how well it's turned out and give yourself an add a girl. And I think that what I, you know, always come back to is are we willing? You know, like I can tell you all of this stuff every single week. I can give you all of my tips and tricks, but you've got to come back to are you willing to play with this and see how it goes and and love yourself, anyways. Like, can you make a decision? And you know, here's the thing about intuition we never know why, right? Like there are things that I have followed my intuition and I thought my mind thought it was for this reason, but it actually showed up for another reason. And so you have to lean in and you have to be willing to play with this. And that's why I say start small. But like if you want this big, grand life, whatever that looks like for you, you have to be willing to take some of the stuff and run with it and actually implement it. You know, you have to embody it. Like just talking about it, just thinking about it isn't going to get you where you want to go. You've got to actually do the embodiment piece. And so if this is something that you want guidance on, to feel more confident and grounded with your money and overall just decision making. Like I think that is one of the most powerful things that we can do for ourselves is to trust ourselves with our decision making and making decisions from our intuition. I invite you to schedule a one-on-one call with me. Like together we can look through and see like, how are you currently making decisions? Like ease some of this financial anxiety. And I, you know, am a strong proponent of empowering you to make decisions so that you trust yourself. So all you have to do, if that resonates with you, is just click the link in the show notes and we can and just schedule a call and we can see if we are a good fit and then how I can support you. Okay, so let's talk about like the practical 3D ways for to develop more financial clarity. One thing I always ask, because I think a lot of times if we aren't aware, or depending on where we are in the process with some of our, what would you call it, evolution of our consciousness? We're focusing on what we don't want, which I've talked about in the past before, is great when it gives you the contrast and it shows you, hey, I don't want this. So then you start to question what do you want? But I always ask myself, what would I love? And this cuts right through the bullshit and it shows you what your heart's desire is. It's not a head response, right? This is, and and the courageous part is acting on it. You know, when I say what would I love, and I really get down to what it would be, then the next step for me is okay, it's actually taking the action. So I also always like to ask this question like, if I was making a hundred million dollars, would I make this decision? Like that gets you out of for me, and at least for clients, gets me out of my head into my body immediately because it takes money off the table. And I think a lot of us are conditioned to make decisions based on money versus what do we actually desire? So it also has you acting like from the end, not where you currently are. I think a lot of us have been taught, and I'm gonna do an episode on this on law of supply, but a lot of us have been taught to make decisions on if we have the money in the account. But there have been so many numerous times that I have made money, uh money decisions, not even when the money was in the account. It's when you leap, it's when you create the demand. That's when the supply shows up. So when you are making decisions from the person that you are right now, you're gonna create more of the same. You have to make decisions on who you are, you know, becoming or, and I know that's we already are that person right now because there is no, you know, past, present, future. But you really have to make decisions from the end. Um, another question that you can ask yourself are like, what is the next just the next step? You know, sometimes I think that we think we have to make all of these decisions up front. Like I was talking to a client the other day and I was like, listen, let's just make this decision and then let's make another decision. But you can't make decision, you know, B, C, and D until you actually make decision A. So you got to get more and not more information as in more gathered, uh, more data gathering and sit on it, but like you don't even know which way you want to go because you don't know all of the facts yet. So let's just get the data and the facts. Let's make this decision, let's hire this person, let's do this thing, and then we can make another decision. So I believe like that's how business, you know, works. It's that's how business in life works, right? Like you've got to be able to trust your intuition, make a decision, and then get more data and make another decision. I want to say that, you know, truth, desire, intuition, they feel calm and peaceful in the body. Now, it might feel a little when I say calm and peaceful, what I mean is like it's just like it's just a yes or a no. It's just a go here, do this. It's call this person, try this thing. Like it's just so simple. Now, when you start to take action, the body might feel a little bit because it's unfamiliar, but that doesn't mean that it's a wrong, and I'm ear quoting a wrong decision. It just means your body's not familiar with this. So recognizing that your mind might want to chatter, but the real work here is moving from our bodies, not from our minds, allowing this unfamiliar and being in that messy middle, like I call it in the middle of the river, right? And to keep going. And we have a choice. When we are in that middle of the river, you can go back to where you were. You already know what that looks like. Or you can keep going and get to the other side, and you're gonna have, you know, different things and you're gonna be more expanded and the, you know, really creating the life that you want, but you're gonna go through the river either way. You get to choose do you get what you want on the other side, or do you continue to stay in the discomfort that you currently are in? Okay, that's all I have for you today. As always, you are on your way, you're doing it. And if you would love some support and have someone with you along the way, cheering you on, empowering you, you know, sharing tips and tricks and speeding things up for you and really helping you change your not just your money mindset, but your overall consciousness, I'm here for you. Okay, I'll see you in the next episode.