You Don’t Have a Strategy Problem: Why Your Income Feels Stuck w/ Cara Barone

You’re doing everything “right” so why does making money still feel so hard?

You’re showing up. You’re following the strategy. But behind the scenes, it still feels like a cycle of stress, overthinking, burnout, and starting over again.

In this episode, nervous system and subconscious pattern expert Cara Barone breaks down what’s actually keeping you stuck at the same income level even when you’re doing everything right. And it’s not your strategy.

It’s how your nervous system has been wired to keep you safe.

Cara unpacks the deeper layer most people overlook: the patterns you’ve been practicing your entire life and how they directly impact your ability to make, receive, and hold more money. She also breaks down the neuroscience behind why your state drives your thoughts, decisions, and actions which explains why traditional mindset and strategy alone are not enough to create lasting change.

If you’ve ever found yourself stuck in hustle, avoidance, inconsistency, self-doubt, or disappearing when things start to grow, this episode is going to connect a lot of dots.

In this episode, you’ll learn why you keep cycling between hustle and burnout, how your nervous system is shaping your decisions and results, and what it actually takes to build the capacity to make, receive, and hold more money.

Chapters:

00:30 Why you don’t have a strategy problem

02:15 Cara’s background and burnout turning point

05:15 What your nervous system actually controls

07:30 The 3 nervous system states explained

10:30 Why your state drives your thoughts and actions

12:15 Why high performers stay stuck at the same income level

13:45 Visibility blocks (overposting vs disappearing)

16:00 Consistency blocks (sprint and crash cycle)

17:30 Receiving blocks (undercharging, overdelivering, avoiding sales)

19:30 Identifying your default money pattern

22:30 How to regulate your nervous system (practical tools)

24:45 Building capacity through small, consistent action

26:00 How to increase your ability to hold more income

Connect with Cara Barone:

Instagram: @carabarone

Tik Tok: @carabarone

Work with Cara: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YGdGQyQaFzLsbYzowHVEqoeNczbYQQpoijjRxx8MH-s/edit?tab=t.0

Cara’s Linktree: https://linktr.ee/cara.barone?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio

Release fear of rejection & step into confident visibility that attracts premium opportunities - https://go.carabaroneaiconsulting.net/fear-of-rejection-release-discounted?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio

Let’s Stay Connected:
→ Follow Lauren on Instagram: www.instagram.com/laurennajar
→ Learn more or work with me: www.laurennajar.com
→ Follow Business Over Cocktails on IG: www.instagram.com/businessovercocktails
→ Attend Growth & Connect retreats & events: www.instagram.com/growthandconnect

🎧 Subscribe & Review:
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Business Chaser, your quick pour of strategy, clarity, and momentum. We skip the small talk and get straight to the strategy here in these bite-sized episodes. We're here to help you grow smarter, market better, and chase what matters all in 15 minutes or less. I'm your host, Lauren Najar. Tune in and let's chat.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Hello everyone. Today we're talking about Unblock Money, the nervous system reset to end the spiral and expand your capacity. I'm so excited to be here. If you have ever made money from straight hustle or avoidance, this is going to be for you. So if you've ever made money in your business or you're thinking about your next phase and it's ever felt like hustle, like rush or frozen, you're hiding, you're overthinking, you're full of self-doubt, back and forth, back and forth, you're undercharging, or maybe you're disappearing for days on end. I want to tell you you don't have a strategy problem. You have a nervous system pattern. And once you know exactly what pattern you are practicing, and I want you to hear me when I say practicing, that means you can practice something different because it's usually something you've practiced your entire life. You can make so much more money and stop blocking it, right? As in stop the sabotage patterns around it. But most important, as in most important for me and the woman that I work with is stressing less, right? Actually enjoying your business, enjoying your life, being present, whether you're a present mom, whether you're present with friends, family, husband, loved ones, that's just so important to me. It's not just like what we're making anymore, it is how we are making it. So hello, I'm Kara. My name is Kara Broni. I work with high performers to remove subconscious blocks, patterns, preventing women from earning more. And as I mentioned, stressing less. So really helping women be regulated leaders, CEOs, heartlit entrepreneurs. And the funny thing is, as I just told you, it's usually not a strategy problem, but at heart, I'm a strategy girl. I've worked 11 years, three different countries at LinkedIn, 15 years in corporate. I started my business strategy, strategy, strategy. It was mindset and strategy. I knew how to push and I knew how to push hard. I always hit all my goals. I was an athlete, right? Push past your capacity at all, whatever it takes, right? But it was always with force. It was always with hustle. It was always with a lot of internal angst and anxiety. And it wasn't until I had really years of burnout, chronic health issues, mold, Lyme, like that left me just in such a shutdown state that I couldn't take action anymore. My body was just so exhausted that I learned about what I'm going to share with you today, about your nervous system, about these patterns that block really what God has put you on this earth to do, right? Whatever that purpose is, whatever that passion that you feel, you're meant to do it. You know it, right? You have those deep down desires. And maybe right now you're listening to this, you're like, I kind of want to give up, or like, oh my gosh, I'm just so burnt out. I'm so exhausted. I'm going to share with you how I turned off these patterns for myself, whether they're stress patterns, sabotage patterns, so you can really have the impact that you want without the burnout, without the sickness, without the self-sacrifice. So, really, today I'm going to go over three different areas. What is your nervous system? Showing that it's not woo at all. There it's a physiological aspect of how your body works, your body and your brain. Second, I'm going to go over the neuroscience of removing these sabotage-shrinking patterns, specifically with money, and how to move forward to hit any of your goals. Okay. So what is your nervous system? I feel like it's been this trendy, buzzy word all over the internet lately, but I'm going to get into a little bit of the neuroscience and specifically using or simplifying the polyvagal theory. So when I'm talking about your nervous system, I want you to think about your autonomic nervous system. When I say autonomic, it's automatic, right? It is your control panel. It controls everything from your thoughts to your emotions to the speed of your thoughts to how fast you were speaking, to your tone, to your heart racing, your pupils, your digestion, everything. Everything. Automatically. It's like if you're walking in the woods and you hear a stick just break suddenly, you feel tight. And oh my gosh, okay, something happened, right? Your heart will start racing, your pupils will start dilating. That happens automatically all day long. It is perceived threats. And the word perceived is really, really important, which I'll get to in a bit. So your nervous system, that job, the built-in system that God gave you, its job and its only job is to keep you safe. And safe is the exact place that you're in today. Financially, that's safety. What you knew growing up, that's safety. Even if you don't want it. So this becomes really the difference between what you consciously want, which might be the half million, million dollar business, right? Versus what your nervous system deems as safe today, which might be 100K, which might be 200K, whatever it is where you are right now, there's something that your nervous system deems as safe. So I want to show you how to move forward because entrepreneurship will never ever ever be about staying safe, staying the same, right? Entrepreneurship is doing new things all the time. So the faster that you can create a felt sense of safety, the more your nervous system is going to turn that guard off and let you take action and move forward. So, as I mentioned, your nervous system controls everything. It is the control panel. It is your body's safety scanner. So we have something called neurosception, which is your threat detector. And it is constantly asking whatever thing you're about to do, whatever thing you want, whether it's a money thing, a marketing thing, getting on a new stage thing, it's going to ask, is this safe, dangerous life threatening? All day, every day. Same as walking in the woods, right? Everywhere you are, safe, dangerous life threatening, safe, dangerous life threatening. And based on your database of information, so your past, it's going to bring you into one of the three states is a safe, dangerous, life threatening. Safe will throw you into a ventral vagal state. Okay. This is when you can be relaxed, calm, in connection. When it's danger, that's going to turn on your fight or flight response. When it's life-threatening, that's going to put you into an absolute shutdown. What I need you to know here, that this makes decisions, your autonomic nervous system will make decisions way faster than your conscious mind. Your thoughts will often explain what your body has already decided and felt. So when I say your database of information, these are going to be on past experiences, past memories, past programming, how you grew up, the society that you live in, all of that. Okay. So as I mentioned, I'm going to start by explaining polyvagal theory. Some of my work is based in this theory, this by the psychologist of Stephen Porges, but this really helped me so, so much to understand so much more than just what's rest and digest, right? You probably have heard that, the parasympathetic state versus fight or flight, the sympathetic state. I want to break it down more than that. So as you are hearing me talk about these three states, I want you to be thinking, where do I spend the majority of my day, the majority of my time? Shifting your baseline state will shift everything, not only in your business, but also in your life, how present you are around your family, your children, your coworkers, your colleagues, and how quickly and confidently you take action. Okay, so the three states that break down into rest and digest or sympathetic is state number one, your ventral vagal. So as you are listening to my voice, you can probably tell I'm pretty calm and connected and regulated. Like I've talked about this work a million times over. So hopefully, even you listening to this, I might talk a little fast paced, I'm American, right? But hopefully you can even feel your system start to relax as you're listening to me. That's called co-regulation. And so the ventral vagal state is when you can really be feel safe. You can feel regulated, you can feel connected, grounded, present, creative, social, steady. This is the state we want to spend the majority of our time. Now we don't demonize any of the other states. It's only when you get stuck in the other states chronically. We were supposed to be there maybe 10, 15 minutes, right? Think, fight, or fight, run away from the lion. But if you're constantly running away from the lion, which the majority of society is, that leads to a lot of gut issues. That leads to burnout. That leads to, you know, dis-ease and a lot of hypervigilance, anxiety, the world's on fire. Okay. So I want you just to first high-level understand the ventral vagal. Second, sympathetic, which will be your fight or flight response. This is when there's a lot of urgency. Everyone's talking really fast. There's a lot of anxiety, hyperfocus. Oh my gosh, my business is burning down. I have to go, I have to go, I have to go. There's never enough time. So you can even hear, as I'm starting to say it, really understanding that the state is fast. And the thing is, when things are fast, you are making mistakes. You are not company, but you can still be going a million miles an hour, but you are in self-doubt and you are pushing, you are pushing, you're pushing, you're pushing. Mistakes are going to happen. Okay. You feel dysregulated when you're around people like this. You feel more anxious around them because they're always anxious. That's your second state. Your third state, if you've lived in fight or flight a really long time, or if you grew up around, you know, parents that had more depression or apathy or weren't there, you might go to this state more, which is your dorsal vagal, your shutdown, or your free state. Here, there's more avoidance. You're collapsed, you're numb, you're hiding. Things are like, what's the point? You're gonna be talking a lot slower here because your body's starting to shut down. It's brain fog, it's dizzy. Like I said, it could be scrolling, numbing. So you might even fall here after a long day. A lot of my high-performing women, they'll be in fight or flight sympathetic all day long. By the time five, six o'clock comes, nothing left, no gas in the tank. It's now a shutdown experience. Okay. So as I said, these three states, I really want you to identify where do I spend the baseline, the majority of my time and my day. And it's really important before we go into the next session to really understand this. Now, most people try to use mindset to override a state. So in the past 10 years, the personal development and mindset sphere online has boomed. But it doesn't help create long-term sustainable change. I'm not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater. I've done that before. Mindset's really important. But what I need you to know is your state drives your thoughts, your behavior. So if you heard me talk about sympathetic, right? Remember the fight or flight say where you're really going a million miles an hour and you just want to try to get everything done? You're going to be thinking there's never enough time. You're going to be thinking in fear and scarcity. Oh my gosh, my money, my money's my running out. What I need you to know is your state creates your thoughts and your feelings and your actions, not the other way around. So when you can create safety and calm your state, guess what? Your thoughts become better, become full of more abundance and possibility. You can do way less mindset work when you change your state first, right? So it's always state, create self-talk. Then the strategy comes. If you do it backwards, like I did the first few years of my business, it will feel really, really tough. And you might want to give up all the time and cry all the time. Okay. So why do high performers get stuck at the same income level? They often live in that chronic, sympathetic, fight or flight baseline state. So I'm saying where you spend the majority of your day. So it's super productive, it's capable. Outwardly, everything looks fine, but internally, it's full of self-doubt. It's full of fastness, wired, thinking about problems all the time, because your stress brain is turned on. When stressed brain is chronically on, strategy brain is off. Okay, so that means your logical brain is actually a little bit more off. It cannot be fully online. So you'll be more into your emotions, more into overthinking, ruminating, self-doubt, like I mentioned before, living in fear, a little bit more poverty mindset. It will decrease your decisiveness and your confidence, which overall this state decreases sales because stress is increased. Or the absolute opposite, right? The avoidance to shut down the hiding state. That is the like, okay, I'll just start again all over on Monday. So I want you to write down as you're listening to this, where are you? Which one are you? As I mentioned, awareness is key. You can't shift what you don't understand, what you aren't aware of. And I love giving like the science behind it. Because then when you understand, oh, my brain is stuck in just a stress brain, I can't access full strategy brain. It makes so much sense. Okay, so I'm just gonna go over three of the top examples out now. Since you understand your baseline money making state, how you make money, where you make it, I want to talk about how your nervous system actually blocks money. So I'm gonna go into three examples of the biggest money blocks I typically work with my clients on in terms of visibility, consistency, and the then actual money. Um, have a piece of paper out if you are listening to this and that that's possible, or you can just write it in your notepad. So let's talk about visibility blocks. So marketing or however that is that you're marketing, whether that's speaking on podcasts or social media, whatever it looks like for you. When the nervous system reads visibility as a threat, so it'll go into one of the two main states. So fight or flight, you'll over-post, overexplain, obsess over engagement numbers, comment numbers. You'll scramble to fix your branding strategy. There's a lot of frantic energy here. Or opposite, so that more hiding state, right? The freeze and the shutdown, you'll procrastinate content. You will compare it with everyone else, you'll disappear after being seen, or you'll disappear before being seen, as in like avoiding the lives, the videos, the sales conversations. And it's there's a lot of perfectionism that comes on here. Like I'll I'll do it when it's perfect, but it'll never be perfect. A lot of like, okay, I'll start over on Monday. So what I need you to know is visibility isn't just about marketing. Like for your body, it's really going to feel like exposure. It's really going to feel like vulnerability. It's really important you understand what it feels like for you. Like, what's the actual threat for you? So why you don't feel safe, it will be linked to past memory or memories. Oftentimes I'm working with people who, you know, are complete experts and authorities in this space, but they still are overthinking stories, for example, or using template stories, and it's not feeling authentic. It's not feeling bold, like they know that they are, because they were bullied in seventh grade or they were laughed at as children. And so visibility reminds your body and nervous system of these things. And so typically it actually doesn't have to do with the thing that we're trying to do as adults, but there's an imprint in your nervous system that is triggering either of those two responses that I just talked about. So I want you to really get curious about your visibility, is number one, where do you go the majority of the time? Is it that a fight or flight, or is it that freeze and shutdown? And then number two, what does it remind you of? Getting to the root cause will help you move through it so much faster. Okay, the second part is consistency block. So when the system can't sustain output safely, so let's go into this example, fight or flight, it's going to feel potentially like really, really fast. Like you have to get all the content out and you get all the content out all the time. But typically it becomes then inconsistent because you sprint and then crash. So this is where inconsistency comes, is you are so fast doing so, so much, and then eventually it becomes unsustainable, or you start to really just kind of like dread and avoid if you've done too much too fast and and such a fast pace all the time. Or potentially you go the opposite, the freeze and the shutdown, you're inconsistent because it starts to feel like finishing is absolutely impossible. What's the point? So you just you don't do it. You're very, very inconsistent. So I want you to, again, around consistency, if that is a challenge in your business right now, whether that's from a visibility standpoint, whether that's from a money-making standpoint, really starting to identify which one you fall into the most. And as I mentioned, most of the time, inconsistency is often a nervous system cycle, not a lack of knowing what to do. Most people go strategy after strategy after strategy, but it's an internal system challenge. Okay, and then the last one I don't want to talk about is receiving blocks, specifically around like the money itself, whether it's the sales part or the price itself. So when you're stuck in a baseline fight or flight here, it usually looks something like discounts to relieve pressure because you're still like in a pressured state, but you're you're doubting that a little bit. It might be chasing yeses, like extreme follow-up, a little bit of desperate energy here. Selling feels like an emergency. I have to now, or everything's gonna end. Like it's a true go, go, go. You send a million emails, you send a ton of outreach, but it feels like so much in your system all the time. Kind of feels like you're in fire, but at the same time, you might be like really second-guessing yourself and pricing, but you just have to get things out there. But you have a lot of money anxiety, sales anxiety. There's a high performance mode here. Yeah. And then sometimes what I see a lot of people is there's like an over-delivery. So this is a people-pleasing pattern as well. Like you throw so many things into your program and you want to over-deliver and you're always checking up on them and worry that the clients aren't getting the results and you're not holding boundaries, but then you're having this resentful success. That's usually a body stuck in hypervigilance, trying to be responsible, so responsible for everything and everyone. Or again, the opposite, you might avoid the selling, avoid talking about your pricing, avoiding the follow-up, avoiding the asking, or undercharging because it's linked to your worth or linked to some of the other money things. Again, you probably consciously know all this, but have you considered it's actually a nervous system state with beliefs and stories around it? So if receiving spikes your system, you will unconsciously push money away or make it hard to make or keep. So it feels like you might have to over-deliver. Sorry, if it feels like you have to over-deliver as well, like really proving yourself, proving your worth, proving your offer, and that you're already exhausted or you already have so much on your plate, you will push it away as well. So I always like to see where's the resistance in the money coming in. So if you think of a full funnel, you can say, okay, is it around myself? As in, do I believe that I'm good enough for this that I can do it? Then go down the ladder, right? So start with the self-reflection. And then you're going into, okay, everything I just talked about, is it my marketing? And break it down really far, right? Is it my marketing? Is it the consistency portion? Is it my marketing, the visibility portion? And then go down to the, you know, the middle of the funnel, the audience that you are thinking about, the pricing, the offer, and then the very bottom, the sales, right? So I go through all of that all the time. I'm like, where's the actual resistance? And really pinpointing what that feels like when you can pinpoint, oh, okay, I'm in a total fight or flight around that one, but maybe I'm completely shut down about that one. You being able to name and have that type of awareness will shift a lot as well. So I want you to just diagnose that based on everything I just said. And I want you to pinpoint your default money state, not on your best day. This is it, right? On your default, your default, where you go the majority of the time. So asking yourself things like, okay, when it's time to be visible or something, do I speed up or shut down? You will very easily be able to diagnose where you are. Second, do you tend to crash and sprint or stall in a void? And then lastly, when money comes in, do you feel relief and then pressure? Or do you feel guilt, overwhelmed, want to hide, or It's gonna tell you a lot about where your nervous system is just going. Okay. So if you're speeding up, as I mentioned a million times over now, you're probably living in a more fight or flight mode around money or the selling and services or more shutdown, you're probably living in a freeze hiding around that. Okay. So as I keep like talking about is like awareness is absolutely so key. And once you can name your state, but also pinpoint the exact pattern behavior that you practice, you won't make it mean so much about yourself. You won't make it so personal, but you'll actually be able to start changing it. And so I want you to say out loud, like now that you've noticed, right? The top two or three patterns that you've noticed, I practice money anxiety, right? Or I practice self-doubt. I practice comparison. What are the top two to three patterns? These are so important because they're not going to be just about your business. They're probably going to be things you've noticed for a really, really, really long time. Okay, getting into the last part, the solution. Okay. I want you to talk about creating safety and rising and expanding your capacity. So there's really two things that are going to completely change all of these patterns and behaviors. First and foremost, changing your baseline state. Right. So recognizing everything I just said, where is your baseline state? Not the very specifics, but overall where you're spending the majority of your day and time. So you can take more action, whether that's faster action or more regulated, competent action. Both impact your income, period. Okay. So when you create more safety, it will change everything for you. Okay. The second part would be changing your subconscious beliefs. I'm not going into that today, but I'm talking about how to create more safety. So I'm going to part one. So remember, anything new will not be safe. Anything new. So your job as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as a mother, whatever it might be, is to make it safe because now you have such awareness of your patterns. So step one is regulation. You've probably heard all about nervous system regulation, but are you doing it? Are you making it small? Are you making it personable for what works for you, right? Are you making it doable? Don't commit to 20 minutes when you have to. Okay. So when you notice these patterns, especially if you were in a fight or flight, I love to do humming. I love to do shaking, something to move the energy. If you notice you're in an avoidance or any of these things are coming back up, I love to do the four, seven, eight breath. This relaxes the vagus nerve, which I won't get into today, but that helps you to relax your overall system. These are practices to make your body feel safer. Not to be safe and retreat, but to be safe and take action. Orienting. That's a really great one for so many people, especially if you are amongst coworkers and leadership meetings. Okay. What I need you to know, and I'm not going through all of these, you can Google them. They're all over the place. Regulation is personal. They work different for everyone, but you can't afford not to do it because your body does not feel safe doing the things that are new to you. Okay. So what works for you to become back into your body and to be able to take action is going to be completely different than the next person. I mentioned this already, but like a step two is you regulate, create safety to rise and take action because you still have to do hard things. That just doesn't go away. It's your edge. You hit up a new edge, you're going to open the edge and go to the expand the edge, okay? So we don't regulate to avoid hard things. This is what most people teach. This is why they're ending up in freaking circles, looping. You regulate so you can do the things without your system going into complete survival stress mode, shutting you down. You regulate, rise through action, small action, 1%. What's the very next step? Guys, I want you to message me on Instagram, Kara Baroni, C-A-R-A-B-A-R-O-N A. Tell me what you're doing through this. This is so important. Most people do not do this right. Step three, this is when and where you expand your capacity so you can hold more, do more without snapping backwards, without snapping at people. The more times you do this, take the small action. So say visibility is your block. Okay. You do this for 10 days in a row. It is exposure therapy. Suddenly it becomes so easy. That is building capacity. It stresses you at first. What do you do? You regulate, you move, and then 10 days later, no big deal. Okay. It's so important to understand that actual concept from a neuroscience standpoint. So if you do things in fight or flight mode, right, you're going to start to do things without the anxiety, right? So it's going to be calmer, easier, bolder, actually more competent, not that desperate fight or flight energy that some people are in, not that everyone is, but you know what I mean. Or if you're in more of a shutdown hiding, you're going to start taking faster action without avoiding it. That's what it's going to look like. Okay. So you're going to be increasing your confidence, increasing your capacity, increasing your ability to take action without comfort. Capacity is your ability to stay present through the discomfort. You're not hiding anymore. You're facing it head on. When capacity expands, consistency will become normal, will become natural. When capacity expands, visibility stops feeling like danger. When capacity expands, you can start holding and increasing your income without sabotaging. But it takes time. It takes you committing to this. It is a choice. I want everyone to hear it is a choice and a decision. I know you know that, but I hope you hear now the neuroscience of what actually happens physiologically when you're avoiding things. And maybe you've worked with certain coaches. You're like, why can't I just freaking do it? This is why. And this is the answer. So to wrap things up, this is longer than I thought, but I hope you loved it. I hope you enjoyed it. This has been my greatest gift to teach. And I've been teaching for eight years, but your nervous system is your moneymaker. Okay. It determines your consistency, your confidence, how you show up, your visibility, your ability to receive, your ability to help clients, to stay present through it all, but really to get out of your own way to do what God put you on this earth to do and keep going and not burn out doing it. So I want you to really start simple, become so acutely aware of these patterns, these money blocking patterns or keeping you stuck patterns. Notice what you practice and then create safety through regulation, but then take the action. All right. I hope you all love this. Message me on Instagram with any feedback. I can't wait to hear from you. Lauren, thank you for having me. I appreciate you. I love this space. I love when women just freaking go out with their bold, beautiful gifts. So thank you. Appreciate you. Bye, guys.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

That's your quick hit of clarity and momentum for the week. If it sparked something, share it with a friend or tag us in your stories at Business Over Cocktails and or at Lauren Major. We love seeing what resonates. Don't forget, Mondays are for full-length episodes with rich conversations. And Fridays are the Business Chaser episodes. These are bite sized insights pulled from our guests to keep you inspired and aligned throughout the week. If you have a question or takeaway, DM us at Business Over Cocktails. We just might feature it in a feature episode. Cheers!