Healing the Hustle with Shulamit Ber Levtov

In this insightful interview, Shulamit Ber Levtov, known as the Entrepreneur's Therapist, shares her journey into supporting entrepreneurs' mental health, the trauma of money, and the unique challenges faced by neurodivergent entrepreneurs. Discover practical strategies for emotional resilience, understanding money trauma, and building sustainable success.

Learn more about Shula and her work at  https://shula.ca/financial-therapy-for-women-entrepreneurs/, and be sure to sign up for her newsletter for ongoing insights and resources.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Hey Money, Get a Life, the podcast where we tell money to take the back seat and stop trying to drive our lives off a cliff. Here we talk about money, stress, and anxiety, but not in a boring spreadsheet kind of way. So grab your coffee, your wine, or your weighted blanket, and let's laugh, learn, and maybe cry a little, but like the good kind. Because life's too short to let money call the shots.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Welcome everyone to our podcast today. Hey Money, get a life. I'm your host, Jody Stauffer, and we have an exciting guest here with us today. She is known as the entrepreneur's therapist. I'm really excited to chat with her because we have some crossover in the work we do. But let's just start with throwing it out to her and having her introduce herself and all the great work she does. So welcome, Shumla.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Thank you, Jody. I'm so happy to be here. So my full name is Shula Meet Bear Lev Tove. But you and anyone else is welcome to call me Shula for short. And as you said, I'm the entrepreneur's therapist, uh, which means I'm a therapist for entrepreneurs on the emotional side of business and the emotional side of money. Okay, great.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

And so uh I know you have tons of history, but give us a little bit of like how you got into this work and you know why you started doing this particular type of work.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Yeah, thanks for asking. There's a long story, but I'll give the short version, as always, right? Those of us who come into things with lots of experience, life experience. Um, although I do have to say, uh, I started my master's degree when I was in my early 40s, and my goal was to finish before I was 50, and I did it. So for all y'all who are starting late, it's never too late. You can do it. My master's was in uh counseling and spirituality, so I started my private practice as a therapist uh and it grew into a thriving group practice that was going very well. But on the inside, I was not doing so well because of the stress of running a business. And it came to the point where it was either the business or my mental health, and I chose to exit the business. I I chose myself. So I'm sitting at home, I've exited the business, they're all going merrily along their own way, and I'm like, what am I going to do now? And I remembered, because I was building a business, what it was like to hang out with other entrepreneurs who would, because I was a therapist, they would whisper to me about the challenges they were experiencing around their mental and emotional well-being. Right. And then I had my own experience, and then I was, you know, checking the academic literature, and sure enough, it was a thing. Mental health challenges are inherent in entrepreneurship. But at the time, there was a gap in the market. There were no mental health professionals who understood the unique conditions of entrepreneurship and the impact on their mental health. And because I didn't, I wanted no one to ever have to go through what I went through. That's why I'm doing this work, supporting entrepreneurs with their mental and emotional well-being.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

Excellent. And this is a this is the reason why I think this is going to be a great fit for us to have this conversation. And so interesting is, as you know, a lot of the work I do is with behavioral finance, particularly around mental health and ADHD. And believe it or not, there's a huge statistic on the amount of people who actually have the risk tolerance to be an entrepreneur. Not everybody has that ability. That's correct. So there's a bit of a crossover between having the gumption to do it and then keeping yourself sane while you're doing it, which is the work you do, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:31

And I'll add to that that it has been for many years anecdotal about the predominance of folks with ADHD who are business owners. But now we have the data, the academic research data to demonstrate that it's actually true. And that some of the personality characteristics that are unique to folks with ADHD make them predisposed, or rather, uh, these are characteristics that can lead to entrepreneurship. And in fact, one of the things that's so interesting is that as young people, this is predominantly men, but as young people, ADHD folks get into a lot of trouble early in their in their, like late in their teens, earlier in their adulthood. They can even have um engagement with uh the criminal system. And yet they are brilliant, brilliant people with lots of great ideas who can run great businesses. And in fact, that's kind of where their home is.

SPEAKER_02 4:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Right? It's and and my take on it as a neurodivergent person myself, my daughter also has ADHD. Um the the world is not made for us, and that's why we end up quote unquote in trouble. And so we're creating our own worlds, and so should we.

SPEAKER_02 4:47

Yeah. And like to everybody that's listening, we're not suggesting that, you know, you're only an entrepreneur if you have that. We just know that there is a layer for risk tolerance and other things. And so the mental health piece, regardless of what, you know, what your previous mental health or any diagnosis or anything of that, it's a huge piece of the risk and the the adventure. And the other thing about, you know, I believe this about everybody, and I talk to all my clients about this, is do what you love. Like figure out what you're good at. And when you have a creative mind or, you know, you, you know, kind of bounce around, entrepreneurs, you know, that's a great way for someone to take their passion about something and turn it into something else. The challenge is it's like you can't just stay, you can't just only do what you love and what you're good at. There's other parts of being an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

When you're running a business, you're wearing all the hats. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

All the hats. And I think that's the challenge for any business owner out there is, you know, you're the hats that you started wanting to wear when you started your business is not, especially in the beginning, like the other hats are the ones you you're usually bad at. And so, you know, that's a challenge. So before we really jump in deeply to this, I want to start, because this is kind of the, you know, let's get to know each other a bit. But I always ask my guests to tell me something about you that we wouldn't read on the internet or we wouldn't know about you. So a little, just a little ditty about, you know, something that's interesting about yourself.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Well, I love to sing. And most people know that I belong to a community choir, but one of the most fun things I ever did singing-wise was I belonged to a woman's barbershop choir. So it wasn't a quartet, it was a whole choir of women singing barbershop music in the four-part harmony of barbershop choir. That was like the funnest thing. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 6:35

That's awesome. Well, good. I love that. And uh I guess I'll I'll ask you, but you you're gonna say no, and I get it. That you're gonna sing for us at the end. It might happen in the course of our conversation.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

It's just, you know, sometimes us like, for example, I was in a breakout group in a networking thing just before this, and we were the first breakout group, and they were talking about being number one, and I was like, We are the champions, no time for losers, right? I I just tunes come to mind. So there you go. There you go. We we got you to sing just like that. This is probably the only podcast on which I have ever sung.

SPEAKER_02 7:12

And opened by singing almost. So that's great. I I feel honored that you we went there. So let's jump in because I know, you know, this is this is gonna be very interesting for both of us and probably for our listeners. Um, we kind of opened saying, you know, we both are very familiar with the challenges that, you know, the neurodiversion, but let's just talk about everybody in general and the challenges you have. A lot of my clients are entrepreneurs. They come to me, they're really great at what they do. Um, and they're like, ugh, that it's I'm like having a nervous breakdown. I want to go work for someone else. And as an entrepreneur myself, I get that where you get to a point and you're like, it's just too much, I'm burnt out or I can't do it. And you you jump out, like you said. Um and you know, in past careers, I I have done that, but I I still I still have moments, but the urge to stick it out because I know that this is just being an entrepreneur, right? So talk to me a little bit about your experience and like what insight you have to offer with that.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

So, first of all, I just want to normalize like and empathize and say it's hard. It's hard to be a business owner, it's hard to run a business, even if you're a self-employed business owner, it's still really hard. And the majority of people who come to work with me come because they think there's something wrong with them. And the truth is, entrepreneurship is hard work. And it's hard. We're having an experience of it being hard, not because there's something wrong with us, but because the work we're doing is hard. So the number one thing I would say is there's nothing wrong with you for having the emotions and the frustration and the fear and the anxiety, all that stuff is completely quote unquote normal, as in expected in the course of entrepreneurship. And so if you're experiencing that, it's not abnormal, it's actually very normal, and there's nothing wrong with you.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

Right. That's a really good point. And also, you know, before you jump out and give up, you know, maybe seek seek you out, seek me out, whoever, um, somebody to say, like, help me out here. Because often I find it's they don't like it's just the other stuff that they're not good at. And that, you know, entrepreneurs always start out trying a good entrepreneur starts out lean, tries to do ever as much as they can themselves. But that actually, you know, I always say to clients who come to me and they're starting out, they say, What should we do? I said, get a bookkeeper and accountant, like right out of the gates if you don't do those two things. But we're smart people and we think we should be able to do it. So I think that's part of the message is, you know, you hear these people who say, Oh, I built a huge company by, you know, pulling myself up by my bootstraps. Oh my gosh, I just aged myself, but um, you know, that type of conversation. And so they feel like everybody's telling them, well, we all did it all by ourselves, but that's not what makes success for entrepreneurs, is, you know, being able to say, I did it all by myself, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:08

Well, I would say that it can make success, but I don't know about whether it makes sustainable success and sustainable well-being for you as a human. And to me, in this climate, that's, I mean, sustainability, we talk about it in terms of the environment, but what about the inner environment, our personal environment, and the environment of the of the business that we're building? So I think sustainability is a concept that can really hit home for people. And um, I agree with you. A lot of people think about mental health in the business and like not asking for mental for for help with your mental health. Mainly there are many barriers, right? And they think about it as exclusively a therapist. But as you have identified, hiring systems help in your business, like, for example, a bookkeeper and an accountant, it are actually mental health strategies. So, like it's not only therapeutic, it's how you organize your business, it's how you envision success, it's how you structure your days, it's how you set your goals. Uh, because we absorb a lot of ideas about what success means, what it looks like to work in a business and to be your own boss. And really, we need to design these things to work for us first. And when we do that, then we're sustainable and successful both.

SPEAKER_02 11:23

Right, right. Talk to me. One of the areas that you've done, I believe, a ton of training in and education and then part of the work you do, which I'm very intrigued by. I know a lot about as well, is the trauma of money. And so this is partially where we cross over quite a bit because I've had a lot of training in um, you know, finance and emotional. Behavioral finance. Yeah. And so, and it's something that probably 95% of my clients are looking for, you know, some more than others, but everybody wants to see to talk. And I often bring up like, but how are you feeling? Like, this is a feeling that's driving this. So you're kind of the expert in this area. So, how'd you get into the trauma of money work? And then let's talk a little bit about that because I think that's really intriguing.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Yeah. So I I want to start with something before I get into dive into the story part. You and I both know, and maybe the folks listening don't, that it's not your inability to carry through on your money decisions has nothing to do with what you know or don't know, or how smart or stupid you are.

SPEAKER_02 12:24

How smart you are, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Or your capacity with money, none of that. You can know all the things, and all the research shows people know all the things and aren't able to carry through. And this is why, just to toss like some laurels to you, uh, fee or advice only, financial planners help people make the decisions, considering what's unique to their context and what they know already and your expertise plus the behavioral aspects, the emotional aspects, because that's the missing piece, right? And so I our work is complementary just to distinguish for folks where you um are giving uh financial direction and guidance. I don't do that. And you consider the emotional side of things, I consider exclusive the emotional side of things and do not give direction or advice. In fact, if somebody does their inner work and comes with me and then says, well, how do I make a budget? That's not I have to refer out, right? So folks like us really have a very um powerful reciprocal relationship on behalf of our clients. Um, but coming to the question of emotions, like I knew, I knew what I needed to do. Do you think I could do it? No. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

And so when I started this business, because I've had a number of other businesses and none of them uh succeeded in the way that you would want them to succeed, you know. I knew that this was my retirement plan. Like I was coming into the workforce, I was 48 uh when I graduated, as I said, and nobody's gonna hire a 40 year old 48-year-old woman at the bottom, like in the starting position of a career, right? Like it's just not gonna happen. So I knew that this private practice had to be run like a business, it had to generate revenue that was gonna pay my salary till the day I died.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

Why I don't have savings is a whole nother part of my money story that and an RSP and punchings, which we might get to. So I I knew that I had to get my money stuff straight. And this is when I started thinking about well, what can I do? And I knew my idea was I was bad with money and bad with numbers. And I was also afraid of the CRA, the Canadian, the Canada Revenue Agency, our tax. Everybody is, right? The tax man. Plus, P.S. I used to be a translator, and the company I worked for had the CRA contract exclusively for 10 years. So I translated a lot of tax court decisions. I know what the CRA does to people. So I was like, oh. So really I scraped together my pennies and hired somebody to do that work for me. And to this day, I have somebody else doing that work for me and thank God for them. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 15:01

I just can I stop you for one second because I just want to say too, like, I have a lot of like you you saying that like our work cross is over and you do the like talk to them about the trauma, but it's like go get a budget. And I think that's great because I have a lot of therapists who refer clients to me because they get to the point you're saying is they're like, we've got, we've kind of figured this out, but now you need to, and I have also implement go the other way with clients where I'm talking to them and we're working on things, and all of a sudden it gets like I'm like, whoa, this is outside, and I'll say to them, this is outside of my area of expertise, my scope. You too need to go talk to a therapist because I can't help you unwind these pieces. And I think every financial planner, uh therapist out there who works in anywhere in this crossover needs to know that they're they can't have handle everything, right? So when my clients start to really hit turmoil, I have to say, and often when clients come to me and it is really messy and I can feel their like emotions, I say, Are you working? Like I'll ask them right out of the gates, do you have a therapist you work with? Because there is going to be things that re that are gonna fly up for you that I'm not equipped to deal with. So I love that you said like it goes both ways. And I think every entrepreneur needs a therapist, myself included, which I have, and vice versa, and needs somebody to help drive them or help them make good decisions. Because I think entrepreneurs, uh, the other thing that I really think people struggle with is they really question themselves. They know what they know and they know what they're really good at. But a lot of times they're a really, there's a lot of fear in this, in the sense that, like, am I am I screwing this up for lack of a better word, right? Like, is this the way? Like, you know, what what mistake am I gonna make that's gonna blow up my whole life? And that ties into shame and all those things, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Yes, exactly. Well, um, this really this is I'll come back to a bit more of my money story, but the I mentioned why I don't have a pension and savings. And this ties into what you're saying right now, which is why I want to bring it up now. When I was 20, my parents had a life insurance that they like I was born in 1964. So what your parents did at the time was buy a life insurance that matured when you were like 18, 20, something. So I and I researched at the time mutual funds were new, and I put that money into a mutual fund. So I was already thinking about money because of what my parents had done for me. However, every financial advisor that I went to at the time, between then and when I was about 55, I had fear and shame. Um, shame that I should be better with money, shame that I should understand more, shame that I should be able to do math better. And if those people had done two things, which you do, which is pause and notice that there's shame present, not that they have to process the shame with me. This is, but the power of the work that you do is you can be responsive in the moment. And had somebody responded to me in the moment, my outcomes would have been far better. And the other thing was they just did the math and prescribed for me, well, if you need X dollars, then you have to put away X a month. And I was like never, I was a single mom. I was on welfare for a period of time. Uh, women, you know, we earn 75 cents on the dollar, uh, a couple of failed marriages, which means, you know, you start from zero financially. So it's nice to say that I should put $750 away a month, but where's that money going to come from? And I was so ashamed that I that I just dropped the ball. I never did anything. And if one person had said to me in my 20s, I get choked up every time I tell this story. Because I'm 61 now, and this, like I can now understand the harm that was done at that time. If one person had said to me, if you only put away five bucks, 10 bucks, 50 bucks on a regular basis, maybe once a month, and I and when I look back now, 50 bucks was doable most of my life. I would be in a completely different position. But because I was having shame and because they didn't take into consideration my context, I never got the advice I needed until it was very late in the day.

SPEAKER_02 19:01

Yeah. And to your point, this, and this is very frustrating for me as well. When people come to me and they're exactly in the situation you say, if I say to them, they're like, I I can't even, I have no money to even start, I can't think of retirement, you know, and that's where a lot of entrepreneurs live. They don't know if they're gonna make it to payroll. Never mind, past that. I always say to them, first of all, it's okay. Like it's okay, you're gonna be okay. And second of all, like we can start with a hundred to your point. Like sometimes I say to clients, let's start with a hundred dollars for 12 months and then we'll go to 150 because that $50 drop, right? But you're right, if you go to and you get, you know, go to an advisor or get, you know, advice that's based strictly on how big of a pool can we grow for you. That doesn't work for most people because a lot of people, you know, are like, I don't care what I'm gonna do 20 years from now. I want to get this going today. And so they're dumping everything in, which is great. And I'm, you know, not necessarily against that, but part of that is because of the advice they're giving. So I always, to your point, I always say to my clients, you can do a little bit of both. Like you can live, you can drive your business. Let's just do this little thing on the side. And eventually the fact that that little thing is growing, that actually motivates people to go. And that's what I did.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

I started the first thing I did in my business, because I was afraid, God forbid, because I'm a woman, what if I got breast cancer? That was my big fear. And so the person that I was working with at the time uh suggested um critical illness. I can't remember now what it's called.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

Critical illness. Critical illness.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

That's exactly it. That was a little hundred dollars. For a few years, that's all I did. But then I started contributing to um to something that would grow, an investment that would grow in bare interest. And every year I would just up it by like five bucks, 10 bucks. I'm still not putting away thousands of dollars, but I'm doing more, a little bit more every year. And you're so right that the incremental, like the percentage increase isn't really noticeable.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

No. It's the other thing that I think is really important to that what you're talking about in this story is I think the big piece that a lot of advisors are missing if they don't understand this behavioral side of things is if you're working with an entrepreneur, no matter how successful or not successful they are, they they likely are not on the normal trajectory of I'm gonna work till I'm 60, I'm gonna have a pension, I'm gonna retire, I'm gonna do nothing, or I'm gonna travel. Most of us, like me and my husband talk about this all the time. I don't know, if I like what I'm doing, I'll probably never retire. Like, so it's it's harder to have that, like, oh, you have to have this big pool by 60 conversation with somebody who feels like, like, what are we? And this is the other thing I say to clients, what are you gonna do with the rest of your life? What are you gonna do with the next 40 years? And for most people who are driven to be an entrepreneur, that is a that's actually more scary than being broke, is to the fact that somebody might retire you at age 60 and you're bored for the next 40 years. So I think that's a missing piece of this for clients too. I have clients who come to me in their 40s and 50s. And they say it's hopeless. And I go, Yeah, we only need 10 years to fix this. And then, and they're like, Well, I'm gonna work for 20 more. And I'm like, then you're good. You're laughing, dude.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

You're laughing, friend. Yeah. So what we're talking about, let me bring this to the trauma of money because we have talked about one of the aspects of one of the traumatic sides or um stressful, uh, damaging sides of people's experience related to money. And that's traditional personal finance advice. What can what is considered good with money was set up by wealthy North American, educated, English-speaking white guys. Yes. And what's good in those conditions is the accumulation of wealth to the exclusion of all other options. When this is this when this is the predominant opinion in the field, you measure yourself against that and you come up short. Then you tell yourself, I'm no good, then you feel ashamed. And then you carry this shame with you. And that has an impact on your entire relationship with money. So traditional in the trauma of money thinking, there are a number of um, let's say, ways in which we can have traumatic, we can experience traumatic impacts on our nervous system in relationship to money. And traditional financial, personal financial advice is one of the ways that we can experience harm in relationship to money. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:32

And so again, I'll just give you a little short story on that. Yeah. So this is part of the reason I do the work I do is because I went through a divorce and had two kids. Uh, before I was even 30, I had my two daughters and we went through a divorce. And I already worked in finance. I was already in the world. I already knew how to do financial planning, you know, had been trained and all those things. And that divorce destroyed us financially. We were too young to have like had enough and, you know, and I was a single mom and all that. And the shame as someone who knew better was it haunted me for many, many years until I actually went and talked to somebody and said, you know, I have all the shame. And then it also, um, until I started doing the work, it also created so much fear. And the fear and the shame were so tied together that, you know, the things that I, you know, do now, I should have been doing when I was 30, but I was so afraid to fail again. So divorce in my mind was a failure and financially it hurt us. Um, but then I was just so afraid that this was a me thing. Again, had somebody said, you know what, you're gonna be okay. Like just pick yourself up and get going. It took me a long time as a single mom and all those things to actually get let myself off the hook. Like I didn't entirely break that, even though I knew enough, I didn't know enough of the trauma of money. And so that money trauma still lives with me. I still feel like tomorrow my whole life could blow up. And I say this to my husband sometimes. And as I'm happy and I'm voicing this to him, because it's something that, you know, I've done the work, so I know, I'll say, he'll say, Well, why? And I'll say, because in my mind, you know, I'm gonna forget to pay a bill and you're going to divorce me and we're gonna lose everything we have. And he just looks at me like I'm crazy because he doesn't have that same, you know, trauma. But honestly, at that moment, I know logically that's not true. I know that's so, but I truly feel that, and it causes me to go, and this is after 20 years of working through this. So I can't imagine people who don't know and like who don't know this or figure this out or haven't had some help with this. Every decision you're making is coming from a shame, a fear, or a lack of knowledge place. And so the trauma is so huge.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

It can be, yeah. So I used to do work as a trauma therapist with survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and childhood sexual abuse before I came to do the work with entrepreneurs. So I know what's to be expected in terms of trauma recovery, whether it's, you know, money trauma or other traumas. And you're pointing out something that's really important in a person's trauma recovery journey, particularly since we're talking about money. Our triggers, the things that activate the parts of us that remember the bad stuff is never going to go away. However, what's going to change is our skill and our capacity in responding to those parts of us so that when they come up, we can say, Oh, honey, I see you there. Of course you're feeling scared or anxious right now or whatever. You know, of course, because and you have a good reason. Look what you've been through. Of course, of course. It's okay for you to feel this way. You can be here with me. I can be with you. You can feel that way for as much as you want to. I, I am with you, I've got you. And when we relate to ourselves in that way, that supports the nervous system in coming back to its window of resilience, meaning that the brain, instead of attributing the body's energy budget to fight, flight, freeze, fawn, like to the nervous system responses, it reattributes the body's energy budget to our executive functioning, our creative problem solving, our um, our troubleshooting, all our capacity to think and reason and reach out. When we respond to ourselves in that kind way, it actually increases our capacity to solve the problems we're facing that brought up those feelings in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

Yeah, that's great. And also knowing, like, like you said, once you start, you can be kind to yourself, but I know that my reaction is uh fight or flight. So I'm either angry and I'm saying to my husband, or I'm like, good wanna, I'm just like, I'm done. I'm not doing this anymore. Like we can't, you know, I have like those are my two, and I know that, but because I can, because I've done the work, I can catch myself. But before I did the work, I I'd quit a job or I would, you know, because that was my fear, like it was all coming up. And then I would, where now I know, okay, I'm feeling this and I know what I'm gonna, I know my reactions are gonna be one of two things. Um, and I need to just tamper that down. And, you know, luckily when you have good support in place, you can see that. But it and it's very cyclical too, if you don't work, like even for myself, I have a six to seven year window, which is coincidentally how long I was married for the first time. Um, and I start to feel this like trigger. Like I'm like, oh my God, okay, something's gonna blow up.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

And yeah, coincidence.

SPEAKER_02 28:37

And I the Biden my reaction is if yeah, and if I blow this up, this is how my brain goes. If I blow this up, then I controlled it. So that's less shame around it. Absolutely, yeah. Which is like, I know that's completely irrational, but that is, and that when we're talking to clients, your um patients, my clients, that's exactly the stuff I'm seeing in them. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you don't have to blow this up. Like, let's step back a little bit, right? 100%.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Yeah. Yeah. And and as you said, what grows is your skill and your capacity to respond so that you tweak to what's happening faster, you intervene sooner, the interventions are more effective, your nervous system resets itself, and then you can um, you know, do what needs to be done. Um, but the but the these are survival responses, like they're logical, not from the mind, but from the point of view of the body having them. And one of the things that I really want to validate for people is the value of the body's desire to survive. We don't want to trash the parts of us that want to do these things because these are things that helped us survive in the past. We don't want to do them again. And part of the way of not doing them again is saying, of course, you feel the way you do now. It makes sense that you would want to do what you want to do. That's okay. Because you, they're not running the show anymore. You are, right? Right.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:01

So, and your point about the, sorry, can I just interrupt you're point about the like the way the traditional, like this is the way. None of that advice is good advice today. I'll tell you that. Not for that. Probably like if my parents, yeah. What what my parents got as advice to work for them, it it's not relevant to anybody, 20 years old or 70 year olds today. But the other part of that is is everyone feels, so I always compare this to food. Everyone feels like, well, I'm not good at money or I'm not good at food, but you can't get away from that. If I'm not good at roller skating, I can never roller skate in the rest of my life. Yet people, because of all these norms, and I say this often, finance and money is the one area where we've, as a society, have agreed that it's okay not to tell the truth.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

So everybody around everybody else, because of the shame piece and because everyone's like, oh, I'm great. Like, look at me, look what I'm doing. We have our stuff together. And everybody truly believes every single thing that comes. So if I said, oh, I own a white elephant, everybody'd be like, yeah, okay, Jody, and they'd walk away, right? But if I say, well, I've got two million bucks in the bank and I'm got crypto, everyone's like, ooh, that's actually factual. That makes it even harder for this shame and this emotion. Yes. Because this comparison, and then we think we believe what people are telling us. But sometimes people are telling you things because they're dealing with their shame and emotions, right? 100%. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think this uh speaks to the whole aspect of life now that's it's very curated. Um, and to the aspect of shame that it's very, or money rather, that it's very taboo, right? It's a it's a very, it's courageous to have these kinds of conversations. The folks who come to you, the folks who come to me to talk about their money stuff have really um got a lot of ovaries, a lot of courage, right? You know? Um, and this and this all ties into like how did I get into the financial side of things? Why did I decide to look? How did I come even to understanding the trauma of money? Because of all these things, all these experiences that we've talked about, I thought I wasn't any good with money. And but I knew I had to get right with that for my own self. But all that was available was this woo stuff. And like I'm a very woo, I'm a deeply spiritual person. I have my Oracle card right here beside me. So woo is important. But as a therapist, because of the regulations that govern the practice of my work, I can only use evidence-based information. So while I did my own work with the stuff that was available at the time, when I wanted to become empowered to work with clients, because I understood, well, crap, if I, as an entrepreneur, have to have my own money straight, my clients, this is a gap in my knowledge and supporting clients. So I started looking. And the first thing I discovered, you know, this is the Klaunce. You're familiar with the work of doctors Ted and Brad Klants.

SPEAKER_02 32:52

Brad Clantz.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

So I started, um, I read all their books. I worked with uh an advisor that is trained in their way. Um, I worked through the material, it was really, really helpful. It helped me understand really the behavioral aspect of finance. It helped me understand why I was doing what I was doing, and it gave me a language to talk to clients about. But you know how the algorithms work. As I was doing this, the the Internet Gods and Goddesses showed me the trauma of money program developed by Chantel Chapman, who's a Canadian. Yeah. Uh, and as a Canadian, I wanted Canadian resources as well. And as a trauma therapist, it attracted me the concept that there was trauma related to money. And from the first minute in the program when she explained the concept, I was like, of course. Because money in our culture is a proxy for safety or survival and self-worth. And under the conditions we live in now, our self-worth and our survival is under attack every day. Like when you're a mother, where you you can you can nurse and be demonized by some people and you can bottle feed and be demonized by others. There is just no way to do the right thing as a parent, as a mom. With money, there is no way to do the right thing. Because no matter what you choose, somebody's gonna be shitting on you about that, right?

SPEAKER_02 34:12

Yeah. Somebody's gonna think your way is not the way.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

And because it's so taboo, what's gonna happen? You're gonna feel ashamed. And that's why that's what drew me to the trauma of money certification. And that's why I use the methodology to work with my clients to how it's a psychoeducational method that gives people a framework of understanding um we cut, we talk understanding the factors at play. And we talk about decreased shame and increased discernment because the main aspect of understanding and locating the shame around money is to understand that it's not yours, that it was put on you. You are ashamed because you have been judged by standards, external standards that don't bear any relationship to who you are as a human being. And once we can put the shame where it belongs, then you can start to have discernment around what are my values in general and my money values specifically. What numbers matter to me and what numbers don't? What matters to me in 10 in the sense of wealth beyond money? And what am I going to do to support myself with this, right? But until you decrease your shame, it's really hard to have discernment around these things. And that's the point of the trauma of money work.

SPEAKER_02 35:32

Yeah. And to your point, I, you know, you mentioned this earlier about your experience. You know, if there was more people out there, um, whether it was advice only or fine or, you know, people who worked in this field, I think it would do amazing things for people in our society because the level of shame, like if you go to your bookkeeper or your accountant or your investment person or your banker, the level of shame that's coming at people, whether it's coming from the person or you're just internalizing, right?

SPEAKER_01 36:05

Society's messages, yeah. Yeah. And so somebody can say something neutral. Your bookkeeper can say something neutral to you, and you can have a shame attack because of all the messages that are circling in your head. They never said what you think they said, but because of the way the traumatized mind goes, it will hear even neutral stuff as a threat.

SPEAKER_02 36:25

Right.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

And here's your poor bookkeeper on the other end saying, I just said that um this is the amount for X. Why are you like, you know, what's going on here?

SPEAKER_02 36:36

Yeah. Yeah. And I think too, uh, so you can tell me this, because I this is I don't know this, but I, you know, I'm just kind of wondering about it. Is when people have this shame, and we're talking about like, you know, people are talking to your bat bookkeeper or these other people, um, you know, everything that that person is saying somehow is being spit spun, like, and the fear, like, you know, when you're a smart person and you research and you do all these things, what which most entrepreneurs are, then the people around you are starting to put the traditional, well, this is what you should be doing, or this or this or this on you. That's just building the shame. Correct. It's not helping in any way. And even if the that's nobody else's intent, if somebody's living with that, um, it just is making it worse again that there's this old, you know, the old guard or whatever. There's still so many people in the industry in finance that are of the old guard thinking. It's true.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

Yeah. So what's different for me now, having done this work personally, is for example, yesterday I had to make a refund for a client. Uh, I use QuickBooks for my accounting software. I don't do my own accounting, but I do process payments. So I needed to make the refund. I couldn't figure out how to do it. Number one, I knew that it was not my problem. I had something to tell myself, this is not my problem. That system was not built for me. I can ask for help. I asked my bookkeeper for help. She sent me the link because she doesn't have access to the money side. She only does the numbers, right? She sent me the link how to do it. I did it, but I have dyscalculia, which is a math learning disorder. And very familiar. I did the math. I did the math wrong. And I only refunded the client a hundred of the hundred and twenty-five dollars that I was supposed to have refunded them. In other times, that would have been the end of me. But I just went, oh crap. And then I sent them an e-transfer for the remainder. No shame, no blame. I didn't wreck my day. It didn't derail me from any of the other things because I had discernment now to know, first of all, to offer myself some forgiveness around the dyscalculia. Because as part of the discernment process, as you're doing your own recovery, you come to understand what are all the factors at play. And dyscalculia was one of them for me. Um, I have forgiveness around that for myself. And I have um ways to talk to myself about when things don't go well that don't involve blaming me.

SPEAKER_02 39:11

Right.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

I also don't on a bookkeeping day, like I used to run the group practice, and I still had nobody else pays my bills. Somebody does all the reconciliation, but I do the bills, right? And I would shake and sweat and not sleep the night before. I would shake and sweat all day. And you know how it is when you're in a nervous system, like in an anxiety, how hard it is to do anything. So I have a brain that doesn't do math and I'm anxious. It was really hard. It took me all day. Now I can do that in a couple of hours because I don't have the nervous system response. Those are the kinds of things that are possible for folks when they support themselves in healing their relationship to money.

SPEAKER_02 39:49

Yeah. And that what you're exactly what you're saying is huge. And that's what I see with a lot of the work I do with my clients is they're frozen because it's so overwhelming and their body's reacting to the fact that, you know, this is, you know, you said you mentioned the CRA, but there's other parts of this where they're just, and it just the only way to soothe themselves is to look, not look at it and walk away. And but then that's just adding to their shame. And so it's this cycle that I, and I'm always like, let's stop the cycle. Like, I can't fix your shame because that's not something that I, you know, can do. Right. But I can tell you that it's a norm. Yeah. And I often I have clients that often, especially my female ones, who will get emotional and cry in the first few meetings. And I'm all sometimes I'm I'm like, did I say something? And often it's like, no, you just see me and you're telling me that it's not me. And this is not like I'm not, you know, a disaster or whatever. And for me, I'm like, well, thank God. Because even just knowing that, you know, you have a community, or you know, I everyone always says to me, This is, I can guarantee you, this is the worst you've ever seen. And I always laugh because it's never even close to the worst I've ever seen. Most cases it's actually way better. Um, but that's truly how people come to me. Like I have people who come to me who are very successful and they say to me, This is gonna be the worst you ever see. And you have no idea. Um, but yeah, so that that's rewarding for me, but it also shows, you know, if people are breaking down in front of their financial planner, this has been something that's been at them in a million different ways for so long.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

Yeah. And I just hearing you say what you say to what happens and what you say to clients chokes me up. It just really gets me choked up. I feel sad for the me who didn't get that. And I feel very tender and compassionate toward the folks who are in your office. And I feel choked up with gratitude that there's somebody doing that for people, being present with the people in the moment when they're having their emotions in the way that you do.

SPEAKER_02 41:49

That is really having a safe space, like even if somebody, like you know, the other professionals out there that we work with, and this is like I circle myself around professionals who are very clear on how I um, how my clients and me interact, the knowledge I have with them. So if I'm saying you need insurance and I know that's just gonna be overwhelming, because I expect those people to come at it at the same, like, don't be shameful that you don't have this. It's okay. And, you know, that's really important for me because, first of all, I'm somebody, but second of all, we've done this work to try to start to unwind it. And I'm getting them to call the CRA or to do this. The last thing I need is somebody else slamming them back, like closing them back up when we're trying to open them, right? Um, and I think all, you know, everybody like everyone needs to have therapists that they can refer to. Everybody needs to have people that understand their type of client, right? And I think that's probably the missing piece in the industry because not everybody needs me, not everybody needs you, but those that do need us and other people that understand what the work we're trying to do with them.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

I think the moral of the story is everybody needs their own little ecosystem, right? Not only around money, but around all the things, because none of us does it all by ourselves. There's always somebody there holding us up. Like even when we think we're doing it alone. An example, you know, we buy chicken in the grocery store and we and we think that we're independent, but we're not. We depend on the person who produced that chicken. We just don't see them, they're invisible. And the truth is we're all supported by networks. Even when we think we're doing it alone, it's just that the supports are invisible. And when we can um name our supportive ecosystems and build our supportive ecosystems, whether it's around entrepreneurship, whether it's around parenting, whether it's around money, whether it's around business, we're stronger with support.

unknown 43:41

Right.

SPEAKER_02 43:42

Let's can we just pivot a little bit into the type of work you do specifically with entrepreneurs and how, you know, all your training and education really supports them, you know, partially from the trauma of money, but also, you know, that like don't give up or, you know. Whatever, whatever they need, you know, what's the, I guess, what sets the entrepreneur coming to you apart from, you know, somebody who's, you know, an employee when they're well without coming to the Yeah, the precarity really.

SPEAKER_01 44:15

Um, I have a a post that I wrote, an article I wrote, I'll share the link. Um, in the course of my work, I've identified seven factors that have an impact on entrepreneurs' mental health. Um, and the precarity, the financial precarity is one of those elements. If you look at the research around entrepreneur number mental health, the number one factor is cash flow. Now, I can't do anything about cash flow, but I can support people with their nervous system responses to cash flow. If you don't look at cash flow, the number one stressor is uh isolation. So there's there's the unique conditions of entrepreneurship. Isolation is one of them because we have just fewer peers. But also because of the taboos around success and money, you may be surrounded by your peers, but you can't disclose, you've got nobody to whom you can, you don't feel met or seen or heard because there's a thing called uh impression management, where the we believe that the success of our business rides on the impression that we make that we create with others. And if we let anybody know that something's not going right, that we fear that that's going to undermine our credibility and therefore our sales and our business, right? So isolation is another big factor that plays a role that distinguishes entrepreneurs from employees. The wearing the all the hats, that's another factor that distinguishes entrepreneurs from employees. Um, the barriers we experience to support. So we don't have paid sick days, we don't have paid time off for any reason, we don't have vacation, we don't have access to health insurance or extended rather extended health care benefits. Those are all conditions that elevate the stress, the load, the mental load as well as the stress that distinguishes us from folks who are employed. And uh, as I said, I'll share the list. The thing is that it's not that employed folks don't experience these things. It's that they don't experience them to the extent that we do and to the degree that we do. So they don't experience as many of these factors and they don't experience these factors co-occurring like an entrepreneur does. And that's the difference.

SPEAKER_02 46:22

Right. And to your point, you know, entrepreneurs often have other people that are relying on them. So that level, you know, it's one thing to go to work and have your, you know, boss rely on you or the other people. But if you make a mistake or if you're not, you know, doing your job, everybody there's not going to necessarily lose their job. But entrepreneurs also have that fear is like, I will go bankrupt, but I don't want to hurt any of these other people because most entrepreneurs are very compassionate about the people that work with them. So that level, like that level is very high for a lot of people. And I find that, and again, I don't know if you find this in your work, but in my work, for that reason is why a lot of my people or a lot of my clients who are entrepreneurs don't have as much support around them in terms of like teams to do some of the stuff that they shouldn't be doing, the ability to grow their business because the fear of and the shame that they have, they don't really want anybody to see that. And they don't want that extra, like that added pressure. So they stay small, right? Where that's one of the big things is unwinding that. Um, can you tell us a little bit? What are the what are the things that would drive someone to be an entrepreneur? The personality traits or that are also why it's a challenge. Like it's almost like you have these strengths, and so you're more likely to be an entrepreneur, but that's also going to set you up for some mental health challenges as well, because those strengths could also lead to some other issues. Do you see something? Do you see that different in entrepreneurs than in, you know, regular um patients or clients out there?

SPEAKER_01 47:54

Yeah. So there's a concept in the psychological research called the big five uh personality traits, the big five personalities traits. And these are 50% hardwired and 50% determined by your environment. So they're openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which basically means volatile emotions. It's a dumb word for it, but that's the word in the research. So entrepreneurs are more likely to be open to experience, to be conscientious, and to be extroverted. And they're less likely to be agreeable, less likely to get along with other folks, and less and they're likely to have more volatile emotions. So the openness to experience is curiosity, creativity, novelty, variety, right? Which is great when you see a gap. This is what leads us to see a gap in the marketplace and identify what uh what's the solution to that gap. But the thing is, then you can be caught iterating and iterating and iterating, or you can drop that and go on to something else. So openness is a character trait, a personality trait of an entrepreneur, is a double-edged sword. Conscientiousness is another one. It means that you're industrious, you have self-discipline, you work hard, you're achievement-oriented and goal-directed. But, you know, that gets us places, but also it burns us out. That's the flip side. And extroversion, we have a lot of uh sociability and high energy. We're assertive and we seek stimulation. But similarly, we don't then, if we go too far to that end, we don't take the time, the reflection, the solitude. We don't slow down in the way that we need to to be able to be present to what's actually happening and to, you know, if we have the business already going and we're out extroverted looking at something else, the business declines. So this is just an overview. I'm not an expert in this material. There are others who do the research into this. Dr. Freeman is one person, and uh Damian Salas, I'll I'll put the references so we can put them in the show notes so people can explore more deeply the personality traits and how they relate to entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER_02 50:01

Awesome. How does perfectionism play into this? Because you said about like, so I'm working on doing a whole bunch of research and working on unmasking or masking right now. Um and and on I, as an entrepreneur, I'm wearing my mask 90 at work, it's always on, and I'm trying to, you know, learn to take it down. I noticed at the beginning you said, how do I take me off the screen? That's one of the things about masking is watching yourself perform, right? Do do you find that entrepreneurs, this is part of what leads into the mental health issue, is the fact that in their like they are their business. I am my business, particularly when it comes to my ADHD niche. It's very personal to me. So if I make a mistake or if things aren't perfect, in my mind, that means that I'm less credible, right? And this is a very common thing. I've heard this with other people. Um, and so the work part of the work is like it doesn't have to be perfect, right? And I have to remind myself that, but I also am always reminding clients. Is this something with entrepreneurs or is this just generally well we the human so this is one of the seven factors that that I will share the blog article?

SPEAKER_01 51:13

It's the propensity to tie our sense of self-worth to the success or not of the business, or to doing the right thing in our business, which is another way of looking at success, right? Humans uh need in the majority, the way we've been trained, we need stories to tell ourselves about how we're doing well, doing the right thing, succeeding in order to feel good about ourselves. It's just a human tendency. The problem, though, in entrepreneurship is, as you said, our sense of self-worth, our sense of identity is tied so closely to the ups and downs of our businesses, to the small and large successes and failures in our businesses that we get our, we get our self-work gets yanked. You know, in the morning you could feel great because you won a big contract. And then the afternoon it can, you can be like circling the drain because somebody quit. And you're like, oh, I'm a shitty boss. In the morning, you're like, I'm the best person on the planet. In the afternoon, you're like, I'm a shitty boss. So that's the very difficult work of um one of the really difficult or not difficult, but like not easy either. It's not like you can say, oh, I can see that my self-worth is tied to my success, and I'm just gonna stop that. You can't do that. Um, but it is important to point it out because once you know why you're so volatile, you can go, oh, wait, first of all, there's nothing wrong with me. I understand why this is happening and I can get support for it. And then as you over time, I like the way you use the word unwind over time when you work with someone uh on kind of um caring for this, you can unwind the ties that connect the two and have a sense of yourself. And this is one of the things that at Dr. Freeman and other researchers recommend is doing things in life that are that where people know you as a whole human outside, like it's good to hang out with people who are not business owners and who don't give a shit about your business or your status as a business owner. Because if your business was to fail, they will still see you as a valuable human being, right? So that's my little blurb about that, but it's it's work to tease it apart. And you're right to point it out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:16

Yeah. And also what you were saying, because this, you know, a lot I see this is where some somebody's worked really hard and they've landed that big contract in the morning and they're happy. By afternoon, they're spiraling because now they have to actually do the work and they feel like an imposter. So imposter syndrome's coming in, right? Like, why did I get this? So now the like we went from yay, and I'm gonna I have all this opportunity to often, oh no, like uh maybe I should call. I've actually had clients say, Maybe I should call them and tell them they probably made a mistake. And I'm like, what? But that is so it's this like ebb and flow. Most people would go, yeah, you landed a big contract, and everybody goes out like on TV and celebrates and has drinks and we're all good. No, no, most entrepreneurs go, yay, oh no, what have I signed myself up for?

SPEAKER_01 54:02

And if you're a trauma survivor, success can activate. People think big money, big success is just a big celebration, but it can actually activate success, it can be deeply frightening. It can activate your trauma responses, your survival responses. And that needs care so that then you can allow what's coming to come.

SPEAKER_02 54:24

Yeah, and you're right. That that's the piece, and I'm glad you mentioned that is in the work you've done with the trauma of money and what I'm aware of too, is you know, there's going to be stuff that may creep up into that to say, like, wow, now, you know, my family did really good one time and then we went bankrupt or whatever. So some of that past stuff is going to start popping up and and you don't even know where you're that's coming from. And I think that's part of this is, you know, people don't even know. So they they think it's them. They don't know that this is past and there's historic history in this and all kinds of things happening that, you know, success for an entrepreneur doesn't just look like it's not just a straight uphill, like you're good. It's like all over the map. And even when things are great, sometimes when things are great, that's when the most amount of fear and shame come out of people. This is information that everybody out there, entrepreneur or not, needs to hear that this isn't you and money isn't you, right? Is there any last thing you want to leave us with?

SPEAKER_01 55:21

Well, it's I'll leave where I opened, which is there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. The behaviors you're engaging in, the feelings you're having are here for a good reason. It makes sense and there's nothing wrong with you.

SPEAKER_02 55:38

That's a perfect closing, and I appreciate that. Um, we will let you go, but thanks everyone for joining Heymoney Get a Life. Um, we will definitely have Shula back uh very soon. But thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. Uh if somebody wants to get a hold of you, right, tell them how to get a hold of you.

SPEAKER_01 55:57

Sure. Shula.ca s h ula.ca, because I'm in Canada, is my website. Shula.ca slash newsletter is my newsletter. And you get all kinds of juicy content like this. I don't mark it in my newsletter, it's exclusively, almost exclusively content. So if you want to like nerd out more on this, subscribe to my newsletter.

SPEAKER_02 56:16

And we will put some of the links to that um in the show notes so people can find you there as well. Thank you so much. This was a great conversation. I had such a good time, Jody. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 56:26

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Hey Money, get a life. Be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And for more information, head to moneycoachescanada.ca.