20. Broke Bitter Bitch to Successful Businesswoman: Exposing my Personal Money Mindset Journey

In this solo episode of Success through Scars, I’m telling the vulnerable truth about my money journey: how I went from broke, bitter, and resentful to running a six-figure business and finally feeling safe with money.

I open up about:

• Living in low-income housing (and not even realizing it at first)
• Resenting my friends whose parents paid for everything
• Struggling to accept help from others
• Working four jobs just to get by while building my business
• The moment things finally started to shift (hint: it involved delusional confidence and a mentor)

If you’ve ever felt stuck in a scarcity mindset, ashamed of your financial situation, or unsure if success is really possible for you, I hope my story shows you that transformation is possible- and that it starts with belief.

💸 I also talk about my Make More Money Masterclass, where I teach you how to rewire your beliefs about money, get out of scarcity mode, and start seeing real possibilities for income and abundance.

Use code BROKETOBOSS for a special discount, valid through August 10th.
🎟 Grab your spot here

Come say hi on Instagram @anniecalvaneso, and if this episode speaks to you, send it to a friend who might need it too!

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to Success Through Scars, the podcast where we turn our most painful struggles into our greatest success stories. I'm Annie Esso, a multi-passionate entrepreneur, business mentor, and professional singer who's overcome anorexia C-P-T-S-D, depression and anxiety. Each week, you'll hear powerful stories of resilience from people who have transformed their deepest pains into testimonies of strength. If you are feeling lost or broken, but have big goals, you are in the right place. Whether your scar comes from a traumatic past, a breakup, a near death experience, or a mental health struggle, remember this, your scars are proof that you survived and scar tissue rebuilds and repairs itself, and you come out stronger on the other side. I hope this podcast can bring you the hope you need to keep going. Let's walk this journey of finding success through scars together.

Annie: 0:58

Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of Success through Scars. Today is another solo episode and as you can see from the title of this episode, I want to just have a very candid conversation about my journey with. Money and money mindset and everything that it's taken me to get up to this point. Healing my relationship with money and how I grew to make more when I was stuck in a starving artist mentality. Where I went from. Resenting my friends who had money or had their parents pay for all of their stuff to being in a place now where I'm a lot better at accepting help from other people. I am better at receiving, I make way more. It's been a whole journey, this will probably have to be two episodes. I don't know if I can really dive into every single little detail in this episode, but I wanted to just share'cause I felt inspired today. If you're on Instagram and Facebook today, you'll see that I made a reel sharing more of my story and more about. How I used to live in low income housing, which is not a part of my story that I talk about that often. I'm kind of just starting to be transparent about it because number one, I didn't realize that I was in low income housing when I was there, and at the time when I applied for low income housing, I was going to live with my best friend and she decided not to live with me there, and she was so kind, she didn't tell me why. And then later I found out why. And it's because it was low income housing. You had to have an income. Minimum in order to live there. Or rather, I think it was actually an income maximum. Like you couldn't make more than a certain amount. So, when I was in college, I really struggled financially. I paid for my own school, I paid for my own apartment. While I was in school, I worked like four jobs. It was just really hard and it wasn't just the work that was hard. It was also my mindset around money and the way that I viewed people who had it. I was such an asshole to my friends who had money, like I really resented them. I would say things like, it's not so easy for me. Mommy and daddy don't pay for all my things. And I would infantalize them and it was not kind. And it was honestly just because I had this huge block of wanting what they had, but not being able to get it. And I wanted both the actual money and the financial abundance and the freedom that they had, but I also wanted. The mindset that they had around money. I wanted to feel safe with money. I wanted to feel like I deserved money. I wanted to be open to receiving more from other people. This was also a stage in my life where I literally could not accept help from other people. I couldn't describe my own emotions. I'm, I've grown so far since then. It's insane. So anyway, when I graduated from school, I was still in that mindset and I had this dream of. Starting my own business and working for myself full time. And as you know, I still worked for myself all throughout college. I taught voice lessons. I just didn't think of it as entrepreneurship or working for myself. And my money mindset was still shit. Like I was making enough to get by, but I was still paycheck to paycheck, it wasn't until after I graduated from college and started looking at these things by hiring a mentor that it actually started to improve. But before that, for about two years, I lived in low income housing. So I lived in an area that was not unsafe by any means, but. It was not comfortable. My rent was around$400 a month, so this was in 2017 to like 2019. It was around$400 a month, and I lived with a roommate, so we had a two bedroom apartment for like$800 a month you had to have a income maximum to live there, so you couldn't make more than a certain amount. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I do remember that when I applied for it, I could prove around.$1,100 or$1,200 a month worth of income, which was just about enough to be able to live there.'cause you had to make three times the rent. And the rent was$400 a month. So anyway, I lived there and I. Could not consciously process it. At the time it wasn't until I moved out that I processed this part of it, but I felt so unsafe living there. There was one time that I was leaving to go visit my family and there was someone laying on the ground in front of my car as I was leaving, and another man who was. Really high on drugs the one guy had actually OD'ed on heroin and died and was laying in the street and the other guy was trying to help him, but he was also high and they were trying to get me to help them. And I did. I stopped and I called the cops and I helped them. And you know, I was 22. I did the best that I could at the time, I had no idea what I was doing. So that was just one example of things being pretty unsafe. And then also there was a man who lived next door to me who would, I would hear him constantly screaming at his wife, and I would hear him throwing things, hitting things. I would hear her crying all throughout the night. I would call the cops all the time. It was just, I didn't feel safe living there at all. And it wasn't until I actually left that I realized how unsafe I felt in that place. I know this sounds pretty extreme at the time. It didn't seem like a big deal, but looking back on it now and comparing it to the life that I have now, or even the life that I had in childhood,'cause I grew up very comfortable, right? I grew up in a middle class family. My dad worked like three jobs growing up to provide for us, but compared to the low income housing that I lived in right after school. My childhood life and my life now are very, very cushy compared to that. So anyway, once I moved out of that place, I started putting together the pieces and realizing how unsafe it actually was. But while I was there was when I started realizing that I could. Live somewhere else. I could live in a nicer place. I could grow, I could build my income. And really the way that that happened was honestly by just having delusional belief in myself by having goals and wanting to get out of the place that I was in. And by starting to see myself as a really successful business owner, even when I wasn't, when I first started, I was making around.$1,800 a month in my business, but that was better than 1100 a month that I was making, working tons of hours for someone else. So the turning point for me was actually hiring a business mentor and having someone who would challenge my beliefs. I think I always had it within me to want to grow and. Do better. And if you're listening to this right now and you resonate with this, if you're in a position where you don't really feel financially comfortable, but you wanna get out of it, I'm telling you right now, you have that same stuff within you that I have. You just maybe don't realize it yet, and I didn't realize it at the time, but just having that desire in your heart to want to grow means that you have everything that you need to get to the next level. So I started just surrounding myself with people who had. What I wanted. My business mentor helped a lot. I started going to entrepreneurship events and meeting other people who had money, but were transparent about their journey and the struggles that they went through, which is honestly why I'm making this podcast. Why I wanna be so transparent about what I've been through, just to show other people that. I have not always had this freedom and flexibility and abundance. I actually struggled a lot before I got to this place, and I think that hearing from other people who have been in a similar place and have gotten out of it can give you the hope that you need to be able to get there too, because that's what happened for me. I started going to entrepreneurship events where I would hear. People's entire stories. I wouldn't just see the polished version of them. I would actually hear the story of how they got to where they are. Now. Everyone's story is different. You know, some people lost their entire income during their recession in 2008. Some people went through a divorce and lost other income. Some people started out really poor. But the thing is, we all have this root belief that. We are not worthy of making more money or that making more money somehow makes us evil or manipulative. And by surrounding myself with people who had overcome those beliefs, I started to see that it was possible for me as well, and I started challenging my own beliefs around money. So if you knew me in 2017 to 2019, you'll know that I was building this version of myself. I was not the best version of myself. I was constantly anxious. I was constantly overwhelmed. I was building and I was not always happy. I was pretty stressed out a lot of the time, and I was facing head on these really terrifying beliefs that I had around money. And I didn't want people to know my rent was so cheap. Again, I had no idea. My best friend told me later that she knew that it was low income housing, but she just didn't wanna tell me because she didn't want me to feel bad. At the time, I was happy with it. I felt extremely unsafe, but I was happy to have a place to live that I could afford. I honestly could have moved back in with my parents at that time instead of being a quote unquote starving artist. But I honestly was too proud to do that because to me, that seemed like. Giving up or failing, or maybe would mean that I wasn't independent. So I started going to entrepreneurship conferences. I started surrounding myself with people who had similar goals as I did or who have maybe overcome. The things that I was going through who had been in even worse situations than I had. I talked to a woman who grew up in poverty and now has a seven figure business. I talked to these amazing people that have been through such hard things, and that's honestly, that's why I started this podcast to show you. Both my own story, but also examples of other people's stories that you can relate to. If you can't relate to mine, hopefully there's someone else I've interviewed that you can relate to. Just to show you that the people you look up to who are successful started in a very similar position to you. Sometimes if you hear about someone who maybe has been in a worse position, it makes you feel a little better because you're like, okay, if they can start from that really horrible position. Then I can do this too. You know, maybe you are right now working a job that you hate. That makes. Minimum wage, but you're living in a nice place and you don't feel unsafe in your living conditions. And hearing about me feeling unsafe in my living conditions makes you think, okay, if she can grow to the point where she's, running a six figure business and going to Italy multiple times a year, then I can do that too, because she started off worse than I did. That sounds so ridiculous to say, but. It really does help. It's kind of like a healthy comparison, you know, to be able to look at someone who maybe had it a little worse than you did and still was successful, that like, if they can do it, you can too. Or maybe this is not relatable and you need to find someone else on this podcast or someone else that you can relate to. But the main message that I do want to share with you in this is that it is possible and it just takes that delusional confidence and big vision and surrounding yourself with the right people and knowing that if someone else. Can do this, you can too. And that belief in yourself is really the first step. Like maybe you don't even fully believe it, but maybe you can say, I am willing to believe that I can do this. And that's the first step. And then from there, your brain will start to look for solutions for how to get there. You're not living in your limitations anymore. You're living in possibility. You're living in a solution oriented mind Now. And this has been tested for me actually many times. It was not just when I first started in the online space. It was also when COVID hit. I lost my entire business as you know. My first business was teaching voice. My second business that I still run in a smaller capacity is strength for singers. So I was training singers and performers all around the world in health and fitness. And then when COVID hit, so many singers and performers lost their main source of income performing, they lost thousands of dollars of gigs overnight and. Basically could not afford to pay me anymore because I was more of a luxury service, right? I lost my entire business overnight. Didn't know if I could get the government support didn't know if I could get unemployment, and I had no idea what I was gonna do. And it was really hard and I had to believe that I could get myself out of it again and start from scratch, just like I had at the very beginning. So I pivoted and thought of another idea that I could. Monetize something else that I could do to make money. That led me to start my third business, which is business mentorship and consulting, which is what I do now. And I absolutely love it because I feel like even more so than fitness, I can inspire people to think differently and inspire people to live in alignment with their values. And I think when more people do that, we raise the collective consciousness of the world and we also bring more music into the world and we help kids to have music education. So that's a lot of what I'm doing now, and it's been so fulfilling. And that setback at the time only led me to have an even more fulfilling life. So if you're resilient and you take these obstacles that you're given and you use them to build yourself up rather than to. Tear yourself down. If you use the bricks that are thrown at you as ladders to stand on, you will be unstoppable. So I hope that this inspires you. If you struggle with money, if you struggle with money mindset just know that other people have gone through the exact same things that you're struggling with and have come out a lot stronger on the other side, and that it is possible for you too. It's not easy. I'm not gonna lie to you and say that it's easy to break these money patterns that live within your body.'cause it's literally trauma sometimes, right? But it is possible and you just have to keep holding the vision and showing up and reinstiling the belief in yourself that you can have whatever you want because you absolutely can. And I hope that my story is a testament of that for you. So I hope that this was helpful. If you would like to connect with me more, feel free to follow me on Instagram at Andy Calvin. So, and I will have a link up for my Make More Money Masterclass, which digs into these exact topics, your belief around money, your money mindset, how you can start to. Train your brain to see possibilities and potential instead of limitations. There's a whole segment on the masterclass about different ways that you can make money and it trains your brain to see different solutions for how you can start to make more money. So if you're interested in that, there will be a coupon code the code will be up until August 10th if you're interested in grabbing that code. To get a little bit of money off of the Make More Money Masterclass. And as always, if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend who you think this would be helpful for, and I will talk to you guys on the next one. Bye.