Building Worthiness Before Wealth - 37

Money doesn’t fix feelings of unworthiness — but worthiness changes the way money shows up in your life. In this episode, I guide you through practical ways to start embodying worthiness today: how to receive, claim value, and step into financial power with confidence and ease. 

Transcript

Autumn G Noble (00:00)

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is gonna feel a little bit different. I'm gonna be doing a lot of oversharing and kind of bringing this month of money work to a close and sharing what this work has meant for me, not only here on the free podcast, but going through the 30 day money shadow work journey on the premium side of things. So today's episode is the conclusion of an exploration of money worth.

and shadow work. And I really want this to be a space for integration, not just learning, not just awareness, not some interesting trivia about yourself, but to actually start embodying something different in your relationship with your own worthiness and how that drives your relationship with money and wealth.

So today I want to talk about what I see as a common core issue underlying everything we've explored this month relating to money. And that is this idea around how to build sustainable wealth. And I think in a lot of professional communities, we think about sustainable wealth as correlating to pushing or striving or burning the midnight oils. And I think that really is off the mark and the real

indicator of sustainable long-term wealth is your relationship with your own innate worthiness. Not the kind of worthiness that you have to prove through accolades and working harder and getting promotions and making more money, but it's the kind of worthiness that you begin to embody and allow naturally. There are no external markers for it. It's all an internal exercise that we learn to engage in.

day in and day out. An easy way to kind of explore this quickly for yourself while we're sitting here is to consider.

Do you ever feel like you need to earn your right to money? So I mean, earn your right to charge more, earn your right to spend however you want to and freely, to earn your right to enjoy everything that you've created or all the revenue that you've generated. For a lot of people, that answer is yes. Maybe it's not explicit, but it's built into this idea of, I really don't.

want to charge more because I don't think I'm worth that just yet. I've got to learn more. I don't know enough yet. I can't ask for that promotion because I just don't think I'm as perfect at this role as I should be before I deserve a promotion. It's all sort of built into those subtle rationalities that we give ourselves for not asking for more or pursuing something bigger.

Even if it doesn't show up all of the time, there's always this underlying feeling of I'll feel worthy or good enough when X, Y, or Z. I make partner, I get married, I have kids, I get the promotion, I make six figures easily and regularly. We all have these sort of ways of ending that statement of when we will finally allow ourselves to feel like a success, like we're worthy and like we're good enough.

But what I have seen in my own life and working with all of my coaching clients is that this pattern never resolves itself with more success. Our belief in our worthiness and good enoughness, it's not a light switch. You're not just gonna get the promotion, make the money, flip the switch and suddenly believe that you're good enough.

especially when you've spent all of those years leading up to that accolade, believing again and again and again, I'm not good enough. That's a neural pathway that we just don't erase once we get there. That neural pathway is gonna continue to run no matter what we accomplish. And that's a really scary proposition for a lot of women that I work with. When they achieve that next big thing, there's a hot minute of feeling pretty good, and then we're right back into it.

with those crappy thoughts and those thoughts about our lack of worthiness, they come back and they make us feel terrible all over again. Now we just have more accolades. So there's an even greater disconnect between how crappy we feel and objective markers of success. And I think the divide just gets bigger and bigger. And so if you stop listening right now, that's the takeaway for you. Achieving more.

is never going to resolve the issue of worthiness. It just doesn't work like that. Our brains don't work that way. Instead, we have to evolve our brains to believe in our worthiness along the journey so that we can actually feel good about our accomplishments and feel worthier and worthier the more we achieve. But if we don't do that work along the way, we're kind of waiting for our brains to be like a light switch and suddenly

believe that we're good enough and it just never comes. It becomes an endless chase of the next accolade, the next accolade and hoping that we'll feel different and we never do because our brains aren't changing. We have to invest in that evolution now because here is the truth. Your beliefs about your worth, they don't just impact how you earn money, they shape

how you spend money, how you receive money, how you hold money, how you receive accomplishments, how you experience accolades, and even how comfortable you are when you do have those accolades or that money. And this is where things start to get really interesting

because sometimes the pattern is not that we're under earning or under achieving, right? We're getting the good money, we're getting the accolades. Sometimes this pattern actually shows up in what we do with those accolades and with that additional income. So we're able to do all the things, we still don't really believe in our worthiness, and we know there's a subconscious problem when we start looking at how do we spend that money?

How do we experience that new level of visibility that comes with that promotion or that new accolade? An easy way to get a sense of how this is impacting you is to think about how quickly money comes in and then goes right back out the door. If that's a really quick turnaround, there's probably some shadow work around worthiness and visibility built into your relationship with money that's always going to keep you at a certain threshold and keep you from

being able to hold more and more abundance and really embody that worthiness. And that is what I want to unpack with you today because I found this again and again in my own shadow work this month and it is blowing my mind.

something that I've been noticing about myself this month really goes back to my early kind of experiences with being seen and feeling vulnerable and invisible. So I think as women, we all have these horror experiences from junior high, and I don't think my own is any more unique than anyone else's, but I do distinctly remember in junior high having a moment.

where I felt like I was kind of on the outs with the cool girls and I was navigating kind of the social intricacies of junior high and trying to find my people. And I remember that period in my life, I started telling if I just show up perfectly, then no one can say anything about me. And if they're gonna be looking, I might as well not give them anything to look at. And so I would start like tracking the clothes that I was wearing, for God forbid.

they see me wearing the same thing more than once over the course of a month and they're gonna make fun of me for it. And so I became really kind of hyper vigilant in what I was presenting to the world. Fast forward as a grownup, that has left some real discomfort around visibility and being seen. And I think subconsciously that has kind of haunted me throughout a lot of my career. Every time I do something,

big or exciting or I contemplate a new kind of a jump, there is a ton of discomfort around being seen. And I can look back on experiences in my life where I play small or I tell myself that doesn't really fit or it doesn't really align. I don't want to do that thing because I don't want to be seen because there is that real fear of being judged and being gossiped about and having people talk about me. And I'll certainly say, you know, having a podcast is one way to work your way through that.

But even so, it's been an interesting exercise in discomfort because every time I do this, I have all of these thoughts about what it means to be visible and put your life out there and open yourself up to exposure and judgment and criticism from people around you. And a lot of that goes back to how I was feeling as a young girl in junior high.

fast forward to my professional career. And I think instances where this really showed up the most

was when I had opportunities to ask for more or to seek promotional roles.

I think about some of the experiences I had in private practice when there were leadership positions or openings available and deep inside I wanted them. But I never wanted to come out and say, hey, I want that. Please consider me for that. I would like to be in the running for that because I was so afraid that people will look at me and say, well, you don't know enough or you haven't been here long enough or you're not the right fit. And that really caused a tremendous amount.

of discomfort, again, going all the way back to junior high. And if I look at my life, I can point to a number of instances and scenarios where there were things that I wanted that either came with prestige or more income, and I was hesitant to throw my hat in the ring. Instead, I would kind of sit back and hope that someone would just pick me by seeing how hard I was working and seeing how much I was contributing.

and that that would be enough for them to say, you know what, think Autumn's right for that role. And it never happens. My failure to advocate for myself and own the things that I wanted absolutely worked to my detriment. I think looking back when I was in junior high and high school, I was student body president and class president for years all through high school, but it wasn't because I put my hat in the ring.

I came from a really small school where we were kind of selected into a slate that was presented to the student body, I think is how it worked. Either way, I never had to own it and say that I wanted it. And so I was able to get something that I secretly really did want, but I was able to do it without kind of pushing myself into the limelight. And I think...

It's just that discomfort with saying I want something and the potentially not getting it and being open to that criticism and embarrassment that almost kind of paralyzed me at a young age from going out on the limb and raising my hand fortunately for me the way that those types of elections worked in junior high and high school I was able to get what I wanted.

without having to do that. But when I use that same approach later on in life, I found myself getting looked over or passed over for things that I really did want because no one knew that I wanted them. I just thought if I sat back and I worked hard enough, that would be enough to draw the attention to me and see that I deserved it instead of stepping in that truth and stepping into that power and asking for it. And at the root of all of that is a fear of visibility, which is really

a fear in your own worthiness that you're not good enough. That if you put yourself out there and are seen as wanting something and then you don't get it, it kind of begs the question, why I'm not good enough and I didn't deserve it. And who wants to open themselves up to that? Especially if your own worthiness foundation is a little unsteady, which I was finding, looking back, mine had been,

And I've had to continue to do that work now and build that foundation up and know that if I really want something, it's on me to put myself out there and allow myself to be judged and the way I think about it now is I don't give energy or consideration to the opinions of people that I don't respect.

And so if I have a mentor or someone that I respect saying you really shouldn't have done that, that was a bad idea, like you're really not qualified, I'll listen to that. Anybody else, it's just noise. But that's something that I had to get to in recognizing that I was sabotaging myself because I didn't believe enough in my own worthiness to stand up to those types of criticism. And for whatever reason, it seems like everything always goes back to Junior.

And I have really been doing a lot of thinking about that these days.

and let me say this connection between worthiness and visibility is something that I see often in a lot of women that I work with and it keeps coming up for me. And I think the reason this is coming up this month while we're studying money is because money doesn't exist in isolation. Money often increases visibility. So subconsciously,

the more we earn, the more visible we become. And that means we're being seen, we're being evaluated, we're being known. And for a lot of us, if you were conditioned early in life, like I think I probably was, to stay small, stay humble, to not draw attention, to not outshine others, being seen can feel very unsafe. And your nervous system doesn't forget that.

So we start to unconsciously regulate all of those fears by shrinking, holding back, talking ourselves out of things. And we create patterns that keep us from fully stepping into that next level. It's crazy stuff and how it's all interconnected, but how it's all stored in the body somewhere. And our body and our nervous system is just trying to keep us safe.

And so when we're reaching for that next thing, our nervous system's like, this is bad, this is danger. I know what this is like. We gotta pull back. We gotta play small. We gotta shrink.

The results can be a lot of really subtle patterns that can look like over giving in order to receive, right? We want a raise and we start working our butts off. So we over give so that we're good enough to receive or we overwork before allowing ourselves to rest. Cause we don't.

deserve breaks unless we've worked ourselves to death. First, I say it in jest, but that's what we do. If we have a vacation coming up, we're going to make ourselves miserable beforehand and decide that everything has to be done before we go. And it's sort of this subconscious dance that we have to overwork in order to deserve a break.

Other ways we do it is delaying decisions that would expand our life or questioning whether you deserve what you already have or even feeling discomfort when things are going well and waiting for that other shoe to drop. These are all subconscious patterns that really tie back to this idea of worthiness and visibility. And can I withstand this extra visibility and everything that comes with it?

Or is my nervous system going to drive me to sort of offload wealth, opportunity and visibility to keep me safe?

As I started to explore this work and examine my own patterns and habits as well, I started to take a look at some of my financial decisions that I've made over the course of my life and my career. And what I started to recognize is that I wasn't always just making decisions based upon the finances or necessarily what I want. It was really rooted in

what felt safe in my identity. So let me paint the picture here. A lot of individuals that I work with that are first generation professionals really struggle with this. And my husband and I both came from backgrounds that were much more blue collar than a lot of our counterparts. And I think sometimes when we receive big chunks of money or big bonuses or have a really great month,

there's this discomfort of like, my God, what am gonna do with this? Like, let's plan something big, let's plan an extravagant vacation. There's almost like this panic energy to spend it. And I think sometimes coming from households didn't always spend money that kind of a way. Being able to do that was such a treat that the idea of holding onto it and not celebrating it's very uncomfortable. But I also think that it's rooted more subconsciously in

It's not gonna last, we've got to get rid of it. Like we don't know what it means to hold that kind of money for us. That kind of money is fun money, so let's treat it like fun money. And as you start to kind of notice how quickly you spend excess money, it can be an indication of discomfort holding money and holding abundance and owning wealth and trusting that you not only deserve that, but that you deserve.

more. This isn't a one-off thing. This is your life and really living in that space. Instead, we kind of have this unconscious unworthiness lens coming in and saying, this feels uncomfortable. Like, I don't know what to do with this and it feels like I'm really kind of

Changing who I am. I'm becoming a person that has all this money and like that's not who I know and I don't know what to do with that and so our nervous system kind of kicks in and brings this panicked spending and it's wild to me to have spent so many years working with these wealthy attorneys from all over the world with these incredible annual salaries as well as their bonuses and So many times they're telling me why can't afford this I really want to work with you, but I can't afford it and

Inside I'm thinking you really need this if that's how you're feeling and thinking there's so much that we need to unpack and it almost always comes back to worthiness and visibility and how that impacts how we're spending all of that money that we're bringing in and our inability or subconscious discomfort in holding down that wealth and embodying your right to that wealth and value and it's such

So interesting to watch. And so I invite all of you just to take a little examination of your spending habits. Does money go out really quickly? Why is that? Is there a discomfort just receiving a big bonus and putting in the check and moving on? Business as usual. What is that about? What happens in your brain, in your body when you have those big bumps in your income? There's so much there to tell us. Because what I'm really driving at here is that there is a

Difference a significant difference between earning worthiness and embodying Worthiness and whichever bucket you're in is dramatically going to affect your ability to accumulate or spend wealth earning worthiness says I'll feel Worthy enough when I achieve more and I get more and they keep climbing when you're earning

worthiness in that kind of a way, money is going to feel conditional, inconsistent, emotionally charged versus when we embody worthiness innately, money instead becomes neutral, it's stable, it's supportive. Not because everything is perfect, but because your relation to it has changed. It's not this charged thing that kind of freaks us out.

and is unpredictable. It's just a given because our worthiness is a given and money doesn't change that meter whatsoever.

So I want to invite you into one final reflection here today. Where in your life are you still trying to earn your worth instead of embodying it? Is it in your career? Is it in your income? Is it how you spend? Is it your visibility? And just notice, because that awareness is truly the doorway to that deeper work.

Are we doing all of these things to try and create our worthiness? And I want you to hear me when I say it never succeeds. We always feel empty and we just keep getting more things. We have a hard time keeping those things too. So that kind of adds to the spiral versus a life of embodying our worthiness. The things we accumulate, they're kind of the cherry on top of this worthiness that we are. And we can make more intentional and calm choices.

about what to do with what we accomplish and what we accumulate and make calmer choices that allow us to retain a lot more of that because it's neutral and our energy is more stable relating to all of those things.

Everything that we have explored this month along the lines of money stories, fear, visibility, shrinking and receiving, ultimately it all comes back to this idea that awareness of these patterns in our bodies and in our minds, it's real power. But that awareness, doesn't alone create change. We have to learn how to integrate everything we're finding and discovering in ourselves.

And that means getting better at catching ourselves in patterns, pausing and choosing something different. Even if it feels unfamiliar, which it will at first, and even if it feels uncomfortable, which it will at first, we have to practice a new pattern, instead of...

I received a huge bonus, I've got to spend it. What am I going to do with it? It's not going to come again, so I might as well enjoy it while I have it. That kind of panicked energy. Instead of that, we can pause and notice our tendency to want to do that. We can see how our mind kind of lights up and all the things that we can buy. Built into this idea that it's fleeting and it's not coming again, so we might as well spend it and have some fun with it. If we can pause in that moment and notice that pattern wanting to run its course, we can instead take a breath.

and say, well, this is great. This is a beautiful reflection of the value I bring to the table. I don't need to do anything with it necessarily because that doesn't change anything for me. Instead, I can decide intentionally and thoughtfully, do I really want to spend it? And if I do really want to spend it, where does that urge come from? Those types of pauses and questions will allow you to create new patterns that better align with who you want to be and how you want to engage with your own

worthiness as well as wealth. This, all of this is why I created the 30 day money shadow work series. Because those underlying patterns, that's one thing, but learning how to shift them in real time is something entirely different.

In that premium podcast, this month's 30-day shadow work series, it's designed to help you embody that worthiness and not just understand it.

If any of this is ringing true for you, I encourage you to go out and check out the premium podcast. It's $5 a month. Spend your five bucks, check it out for 30 days, take what works, leave the rest, and be done with it and see what you can do for yourself with that really small investment. You literally have nothing to lose. Every day, you're gonna have journaling prompts and exercises that will support you to receive more.

to claim your value, to navigate visibility and step into your financial power with a lot more ease and confidence. So if you're ready to integrate these insights and start living your wealth story more fully, the premium podcast is waiting for you and there's a link in the show notes to get started today. As we close out this month, I just wanna leave you with this.

You do not have to prove your worth to build wealth. You don't have to exhaust yourself to deserve more or to deserve ease. You don't have to hide who you are to feel safe having it. This work is about learning to feel safe, being seen, being supported and having more.

And it's a whole process as I'm learning, but it's one that really changes everything because it's never just about the money. It's about everything underneath it. So thank you so much for being part of the journey with me this month.

I can't wait to see you in the next episode. Next month, we are pivoting over into a new topic on the Premium Podcast as well as on here, and it's going to be an emotional one, just to leave you with a bit of a teaser. I can't wait to see you there in April where we kick off a new topic both on here and in the Premium Podcast content. And for any of you wanting a little bit more fast-track work, I am accepting two new clients in my one-on-one coaching program.

for three months or six months. So feel free to email me, autumn at theuncomfortabledream.com if you're ready to take this work deeper and invest in yourself deeply for these next few months. I hope to see some of you soon. We'll catch you all next month.