Money Mom Podcast
Welcome to The Money Mom Podcast—the ultimate guide for moms who want to take control of their finances, crush debt, and create a life of financial freedom and abundance. Hosted by Rachel Coons, a budgeting expert and mom of three, this podcast is your go-to resource for practical tips, mindset shifts, and empowering strategies to help you manage your money with confidence.
Whether you’re navigating grocery budgets, tackling debt, or dreaming of building wealth for your family, each episode offers bite-sized, actionable advice to make money management simple, stress-free, and even enjoyable. With relatable stories, expert insights, and a dose of mom-to-mom encouragement, you'll learn how to transform your finances—one small step at a time.
Tune in every week to discover how to save more, spend smarter, and feel empowered to create the financial life you deserve. Because when moms thrive financially, families flourish.
Money Mom Podcast
54: It's My Birthday! 3 Lessons I Learned This Year
Birthdays have a way of inviting reflection, and as I turn 35, I'm sharing the three profound lessons that completely transformed my life this past year. What began as challenging experiences ultimately led to unprecedented growth, strength, and self-assurance I never thought possible.
These lessons weren't easy—they required facing difficult truths and making uncomfortable changes. But the growth on the other side has been worth every challenging moment. If you're navigating similar crossroads, I hope these insights offer guidance or at least the comfort of knowing you're not alone. And if you've found value in this episode, consider leaving a review as my birthday gift!
xoxo,
Rachel
Where to find me:
Instagram: @heyrachelcoons
TikTok: @heyrachelcoons
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Hey there and welcome back to the Money Mom podcast. I'm your host, rachel, and today is a really special episode because the day this podcast comes out it is my 35th birthday. That's right. April 21st 1990 was when I was born and today I am turning 35 years old, which actually just feels totally crazy because I still feel like I'm 16. And so to be in my mid 30s and now closer to 40 than I am to 30 kind of freaks me out and I don't know how I feel about it yet.
Speaker 1:But I am loving this phase of my life that I'm in right now, where I'm stable in my career, my children are getting a little bit older, my marriage is more stable now than ever and I just feel like the last 10 years have been a massive growth for me, massive expansion of who I am and who I want to be, and I can really see now how I've created this foundation so that the next 10 years of my life are probably going to be a lot more stable than they have been, and just continuing to grow and learn and gets me really excited about the future. But what I want to do on this episode today is to reflect on the past year and think about some of the biggest lessons that I've learned along the way, lessons that have stretched me, have pushed me, have humbled me and have helped me grow, because I really do believe that, just like a muscle, if we want to build a muscle in the body, we have to break down that muscle before we can let it grow back to be something stronger. And the lessons that I've learned this year have really pushed me and really broke me down at some points, but ultimately I'm seeing now the fruition of that breakdown, where I feel stronger now than ever. I feel more self-assured, more confident in who I am, and the lessons felt really messy when I was learning them and now just so grateful for the things that I've learned. Before we do dive into the lessons, I want to tell you something that's really important to me that I've come to love self-reflection and honestly, it wasn't always like that. I used to avoid setting goals or looking back because I thought it meant bringing up past pain, I guess, and past mistakes that I've made and beating myself up. But now I've seen this beautiful opportunity in reflection where I can pause, process and then realign and make sure I'm heading in the trajectory that I want and it's how I've gotten perspective on my life and it's how I find meaning in that messy middle. It's how I know that I am becoming the person that I want to be. So whether that happens at the new year is a big time of reflection. I also like to do that at my birthday as well, because it's another year around the sun and a new beginning as well into what I can look forward to.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to share three of the biggest lessons that I learned. Stick around for it, because it is the biggest one and I'm not going to be able to get into all the nitty-gritty of that lesson, but I want to expand on that later in a different episode. But I'm going to share with you that last one is the big clinger and it completely changed the way I live my life. It completely changed my marriage, how I interact with Brad, and it flipped a switch for me. So let's get into it.
Speaker 1:The first lesson that I learned is that doing less isn't lazy. It's not going to decrease your self-worth. It's not going to mean that you are less successful in life. It's actually strategic. Doing less is better, and from someone who is a high achiever I don't know if you are familiar with the Enneagram. If you are, I am an Enneagram 3. And for a long time I refused to agree that I was an Enneagram 3, but I 100% am through and through high achiever. I am super driven and I've always had really big goals for myself.
Speaker 1:And that kind of came to a tipping point last April, about the same time last year, when I kind of had a crash and burn moment of this self-realization that I was putting so much pressure on myself to achieve the big goals that I had and to work myself into the ground that I was giving up the thing that was the most important to me and that was my family and raising my children. And it wasn't that I was literally not being present with my kids, but I was choosing in small little opportunities to be on my computer or on my phone when I should have been helping my children or tucking my kids into bed at night or reading them a story. And it came down on me like a ton of bricks when this happened and when I tell you the turmoil that this sent me into for days on end where I felt so guilty about the past you know, six months of how I had worked so hard and had given up what was most important to me. I had to reevaluate everything, and what I came to the conclusion was that it doesn't matter if my business never takes off, it doesn't matter if I don't complete as many tasks in a day. All that matters is my family and how I show up for my kids. And so this realization was really painful, but also the most beautiful experience, because I was able to let go of that high achieving need. That desire is never going to go away for me. That drive, the goals that I have are never going to go away, but I have more patience in that and I see the beauty in the journey versus getting to the end goal. So that deconstruction, that burnout, that feeling of not measuring up to what I really wanted, was hard and it humbled me. But it created much more intention and I was driven to be more intentional with my time, and so I started doing less Over the summer with my children, I was more present.
Speaker 1:I put my laptop away, I set strict time when I wanted to be working versus when I wanted to be with the children, and aligning what was important to me being also super strategic in my business didn't actually make my business fail. It actually took off and we increased the business by like 300% in a couple months and I truly believe that I had to learn that lesson. I had to put my family first and I had to be okay with doing less and delegating the tasks that I didn't have to do, so that way my business could be more successful. Okay, that was lesson number one. Now let's get into lesson number two. And lesson number two is like kind of hard for me to explain, but I think once I give some examples of what I'm talking about, it might wrap up the lesson.
Speaker 1:I don't really have like a statement of like this is the lesson that I learned, but really the things that I've experienced this past year is all about alignment. Really, the things that I've experienced this past year is all about alignment, and that alignment is going to the deepest parts of yourself and making sure that your actions, your thoughts, your world is aligning with the deeper sense of who you are. And I think I've always kind of understood that on paper, but I don't think I've ever seen it in my life where it's like I am truly aligning with who I am and who I am meant to become and what I'm supposed to do on this earth and I think a lot of us, when it comes to how we map out our life is. We have one path where we're born into a family and then we go to school and then we choose where we want to go to college, and then we choose what we want to study, and then we start a career and then we find our person and we end up getting married and then we have children and we're just living this like check marks of what life is supposed to look like.
Speaker 1:But what we're forgetting is that we are all internally and who we are as souls is so different from one another and we kind of get in this river of flowing towards who knows what. What are we even flowing for? I think everyone's trying to achieve ultimate happiness and joy, but what we forget is that deep down we're all so different and we all have different gifts and abilities and things that make us ourselves. And when we get into the river and we start floating down this river with society and our world, we lose that essence of who we are and when we can really dive deep into ourselves and kind of get into the nitty gritty of what makes you you, what is the beauty of your soul and who you are, and what kind of attributes do you bring to the world and how can you align your life with that deeper purpose and deeper meaning. And this last year I think I've always tried to do that and really dig deep and I think we all kind of go on this journey of self-discovery and learning about ourselves more. The older we get, the more experiences we have.
Speaker 1:But this last year I really came at a crossroads of my business how I show up in my relationships, how I show up in my family, how I show up in my family and who I want to be, and is that in alignment with who I am and I had to make some really pivotal decisions to make sure that alignment is in check. And it's a constant thing where you're constantly checking in and making sure you're making the right decisions. But this last year a lot of those things came to a head and what I will say is kind of going through that process and coming out the other side, after you have figured out that alignment, there's so much more peace and so much more confidence in how you show up and who you are as a person. And maybe this is just me getting older. I think people just naturally do this. They kind of don't give two Fs about what anybody else thinks, and maybe that's just really them getting into alignment with who they are. And for the first time, I feel like I've shed this idea of expectations of people around me, of worrying about what other people are saying about me or worrying about where I fall short in life and just feeling so super confident in who I am and what I was meant to do, and that has brought so much peace into my life.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you've heard of the new book by Mel Robbins. It's called the Let them Theory. I mean, I feel like every self-help book everyone's screaming about this book because it is so life-changing. But that book self-help book Everyone's screaming about this book because it is so life-changing. But that book it pretty much sums up like kind of what I've discovered this year is like I am going to let other people be who they are and I'm going to let me be who I am and that's okay. That's actually what we were meant to do. I feel like it's divine in that God made us how we're supposed to be and God made other people how they're supposed to be, and if we just radically accept that, there's so much that we can learn from other people. If you feel like I'm just talking about theories and it's not real tangible, here's an example of this.
Speaker 1:So about two years ago, when I really jumped into business and I really wanted to start helping people, I was trying to figure out what I could do to help and how I could serve other people, and it kind of came to be that I really helped people save time and money feeding their family. When it came to grocery, shopping, planning, cooking, all of those things. I had a system that really really worked for all the families that I had worked with, and so I created a membership, a community of moms, to help them save money on groceries and energy and time feeding their family, and that birthed a community and it was beautiful and we created this community. We had over a thousand people in this community of moms who were seeing fantastic results. But it came to a point and this happened September of last year, 2024, where I started digging a little deeper and I kind of started feeling like is this really what I am meant to do. Is this really what my inner gifts are? Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life is help people save time and money feeding their family, and while it's something I'm really passionate about, there's so much more to me and there's so much more that I want to serve and help and I was feeling a little bit out of alignment where it was like I want to get into more of this deeper sense of womanhood and the money issues that people have and the stress that people have around money, because it felt a little superficial If I talk about alignment, it was a little bit more superficial than I wanted it to be, and it wasn't until I sat down with my business coach in November that I brought this up.
Speaker 1:I hadn't really told many people this. It was kind of just something that was roaming around in my head of like, I believe in what I'm doing and I'm good at what I do and I love what I do, but is there a little pivot that I could make that could deepen my sense of peace with what I believe is my true calling? That meeting that I had with my business coach changed everything, where he for the first time, gave me permission, and I think I just needed somebody that was more in tune with what business looks like and how to make pivots and how to expand and grow. I needed that permission from someone else. I think I could have figured it out on my own, but I think it would have taken me a lot longer. What I was experiencing, and he knew deep down that I was meant for something bigger, and I had the capability and the knowledge and the experience that I could go bigger than that. And so he gave me the permission to do it. And he basically said Rachel, you have something here that is so beautiful, why don't we just expand it and make it something even bigger?
Speaker 1:And so that's where the rebirth of my online community went from the Shop Society, which was solely focused on helping families save money on groceries, and we've expanded it to the Money Mom Club, which really encompasses everything that women and moms deal with when it comes to money how to save, how to build wealth, how to grow their income if they want to, how to save for retirement and build emergency funds and get out of debt the real nitty gritties of money. And then also, how do we heal our relationship with money, how do we show up differently with money so that money shows up differently for us? All of these things are the deeper aspect of what I was trying to do, but I wasn't able to get there, and so that little pivot, that little change felt so much more in alignment with who I am and what it did was. It just helped me show up better in my life and show up better in my business, and it was just one step right. It was just one little change of like.
Speaker 1:I feel like this isn't right, this isn't what I really am called to do, and then it was like okay, now you can become a little different, you can change, and that's a huge lesson in and of itself. Is that change is good, change will happen, and I guess what I'm saying is with alignment, is we have to be okay with change. We have to be okay for a further purpose of what are we working towards? What's our end goal in how we're showing up in our life right now and really thinking towards the future and making sure that our choices that we make day in and day out, how we choose to live our life, how we choose to treat other people, is that actually what we want for our future and is it going to get us closer to that end goal? That's what true alignment is. I haven't figured it out. I'm only 35 years old. There's still so much more I have to learn, but I feel like, with that one little missing piece that I had, I now have permission to do that in every area of my life. Okay, lesson number three is actually kind of the umbrella. That was the tipping point for everything that I learned this year. It really got to the root cause of a lot of my problems with myself, my own relationship, and then with my relationship specifically with Brad, but with everyone and it was learning how to regulate my nervous system.
Speaker 1:When people talk about the nervous system, it's kind of this buzzword right now and everybody wants to talk about regulating your nervous system. As someone who has just recently learned about this and learned how to do it myself, I think really what we can talk about when we're talking about the nervous system is how are you experiencing your world? Are you experiencing your world from a state of calm, connection and love? Or are you experiencing your world in a state of activation and fight or flight and chaos, not saying there's one or the other. In your life, you're constantly flowing between these two states of activation or calm. But figuring out your own nervous system and how your nervous system is affecting your reality is life-changing, and I'm hoping to bring on my good friend and nervous system expert in a couple episodes because I want to dive a little bit deeper into this expert in a couple episodes, because I want to dive a little bit deeper into this. But here is an example of how the nervous system changed my life.
Speaker 1:It's no surprise that marriage is hard. Right, everybody knows that. Everybody talks about marriage is hard, and you'll go through seasons of really good and then seasons of you know where you're struggling. A little bit more, and without going into too much detail, brad and I hit a rough patch about a year, year and a half ago. Prior to this, we had decided that we wanted to start doing couples therapy and so we hired a therapist. We were going every couple of weeks and working through some of the issues that we had. It was like we'd been married for 11 years and everything had been really good. I mean, brad and I are best friends, like we've been best friends since we were teenagers, and so that relationship has always had a really strong foundation, but we were working through some of the issues of things that have kind of built up over the years of being married for 11 years and we had never been able to like work through some of these deeper, underlying problems because we were having babies and he was going through school and we were building a business and all of these different things.
Speaker 1:We finally had time to work through these issues that we had, but we didn't know how to. We didn't have the tools, we didn't have the communication, and so we went into therapy with this idea of like let's just strengthen and deepen our relationship. It wasn't again. Our relationship wasn't bad. It wasn't at the point of like let's just strengthen and deepen our relationship. It wasn't again. Our relationship wasn't bad. It wasn't at the point of like, we either do therapy or we're separating. But it was just like let's try and get through some of these things that we constantly argue about, that if we could work through them then we maybe wouldn't argue as much.
Speaker 1:And therapy worked for a while and it worked until it didn't. And then we hit a kind of a breaking point where we kind of felt just at a crossroads of like we're not able, we're not getting to the deeper issues. And we both weren't able to work through those deeper issues and it brought us both to a point of being really afraid of the future for our marriage and trying to decide like, could we work through these issues or are they non-negotiables? And, you know, trying to figure out how to get to this deeper issue that we were having. And therapy, wasn't it Like we couldn't figure it out in therapy?
Speaker 1:And so I was explaining this to my friend, eliza, who is a nervous system expert, and I was just kind of explaining to her some of the struggles that we were having and some experiences that we had had. And she looked at me and I'll never forget what she said and she was like, have you ever learned about the nervous system? And I was like, well, yeah, like I know what the nervous system is. You know, I learned about it in physiology and whatever. And she's like no, no, no, have you ever really learned about your own nervous system and learned about Brad's nervous system? Because what she said was all of these things that I hear that you're talking about, the issues that you guys have, it sounds like you guys are struggling with your nervous systems, not the actual content of the things that you're struggling with. It's deeper than that. And I looked at her and I was like Eliza, this sounds exactly like what we're dealing with.
Speaker 1:And she went on to explain to me how, when we are in the state of activation, it doesn't matter what the other person says, it doesn't matter what the other person does, we're instantly going to take it as negative. We're going to create experiences that are not positive just because of our own nervous system state. And so I was clued in. We talked for like an hour at dinner one night and I was like Brad and I need to do this work, we need to figure this out. I think this is the missing key. I think this is where therapy hasn't figured this out for us. And so Eliza, so graciously, I bought her course and then she was willing to take us on as clients as well. So we did a couple zoom calls with her to map out our own nervous systems and how we know where the other person is, and checking in with the other person and figuring out ourselves.
Speaker 1:And how do I, if I'm in a state of activation which can happen very easily as a mom and business owner and just in everyday life. How do I go from that state of feeling agitated and frustrated and how do I go back to being calm? What actions do I need to take to get there? And giving a little bit more grace for each other? When Brad experiences something, I can give him grace because I know he is in a state of activation and I can give him time, space, whatever he needs in order to come back and feel less activated, less agitated. And then doing that together, figuring that out together, has literally changed everything. And Brad and I always say we spent thousands of dollars in therapy, but the like $300 in her course and working through what she taught us was the best money we've ever spent.
Speaker 1:And it's stuff we use today. I use it with my children, I use it with myself, where I'm always checking in with my nervous system and how I'm feeling and how I need to regulate that constantly, every day and doing things that regulate my nervous system. So it's kind of hard to explain it until you really really get into the nitty gritty of it. And that's why I'm hoping to have Eliza on the podcast, because when I say this was the biggest lesson I learned this year, it really was, and I feel like I'm so glad I learned it at age 35 so that I can have it for the rest of my life, because I feel a lot more in control of my emotion. I feel a lot more in control of how other people treat me. I just feel so much more embodied in myself and it was purely because I learned about my own nervous system and what is actually going on. If you ever feel like chaotic, out of control, where you're like I'm Superman and I don't know why and everyone's pissing me off, you know it's that time of the month and I just can't even handle anyone. Chances are, yeah, there's hormones at play and yeah, there's things going on, but chances are are it probably is a nervous system issue and if we can learn how to regulate our own nervous systems, we show up differently and the world shows up differently for us, and I'm just so glad I learned that lesson and so glad I was able to work with Eliza and go through that. I'll make sure Eliza comes on and we can get into more of the nitty gritty of the nervous system. But yeah, those are my three lessons. First one is cutting back. Doing less is important and it's strategic. The second one is finding that alignment with who you are and making sure that your actions are in alignment with that future self of who you want to become. And number three is learning how to regulate my nervous system. Those are the three biggest lessons that I learned this year and we're going to take those lessons and move them into this next year around the sun. I'm super excited.
Speaker 1:This last year was kind of a doozy, to be honest. It was a hard year. It was a hard year for a lot of reasons, and so I'm kind of like, okay, I learned my lessons. Can we just have a really easy, fun year this next year? But in the same breath, I also so much stronger and they have made me so much happier. Going through that mucky, icky mess has made me feel happier in my life.
Speaker 1:So I wouldn't wish for an easy year. Like I don't wish for an easy year. I want challenges. I want things that are going to help me grow and be better, and I think, when you can kind of get to that place of acceptance and knowing that the future is for your good, everything is for your good. All the experiences that we have are meant to make us better, more whole beings and more godly beings, and I am grateful for that knowledge that I learned that this year. Hey, it's my birthday, so for my birthday, you know what you can do as a present. For me, it would be leaving a review, either on Apple, spotify, amazon, wherever you listen to your podcasts, we are always looking to grow the podcast and get it in the ears of more moms. So if you enjoyed this episode, if you've listened to any of our episodes, leave us a review and I'll be so grateful. So, okay, thanks, guys, have a wonderful week and we'll see you next week.
