Feeling trapped in a cycle of financial anxiety and scarcity? Discover how you can break free after divorce. In this episode I share my personal journey from a limiting belief system about money during my marriage to embracing a mindset of abundance and financial empowerment.
I open up about the struggles of constantly feeling like I couldn't afford anything and how I was inspired to challenge and transform those outdated beliefs post-divorce. This episode is packed with insights designed to help you identify and reshape your own relationship with money.
This episode covers:
• Understanding the emotional challenges of money after divorce
• The impact of a scarcity mindset on financial well-being
• Personal stories of overcoming limiting beliefs about money
• Practical questions to evaluate your relationship with money
• Strategies for transitioning to an abundance mindset
• The vital role of belief in achieving financial success
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Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Are you going through a divorce, or you've been through a divorce and you find yourself stuck, confused, overly angry and continually sad. You know you need to move on, but you're just not sure how to do that. Well, this podcast, becoming you Again, is exactly what you need to be listening to, if that describes you. This podcast is where you learn how to heal from the past and move toward the future that you want. You're listening to episode number 203, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life, so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. My lovely ladies, I am so happy that you're here listening, learning, improving your lives, getting unstuck, feeling powerful in the decisions that you get to make in your life, so that you can literally create an amazing life outside of divorce.
Today, we're going to be talking about money, money scarcity and how that kind of relates to you and your divorce. So I'm just going to give a little disclaimer right here at the beginning this is not going to be a podcast about financial advice where you should be putting your money, how you should be investing it, what you should do with the money that you end up with at the end of the divorce, how you're going to divide your money in the divorce. It's not going to be about any of that stuff. Okay, this is more going to be like meta, like how you think about money and how thinking about money actually creates what shows up in your life. This podcast, it's going to focus specifically on your relationship with money, so like basically, your beliefs about money and how those beliefs directly impact the amount of money you produce.
So I'm going to start with a story from my own experience. I used to have a terrible. I used to have a terrible relationship with money and I mean terrible with a capital T when I was married. We just never seemed to have enough money, like I remember hating to look at our bank statement at the end of every month, or like logging on and checking the amount right, because I would just. Every time I would look at it, I would just think why is there never enough? Why do we never have enough money to pay our bills? And I just I couldn't figure out why we could never get a handle on it. We were both working full time, we were both making like pretty good money comparatively in like we were middle class Americans right, we were like pretty good money comparatively in like we were middle class Americans right, we were making pretty good money. But it would just seemingly disappear before our eyes. Even if we tried to budget, even if we tried to like pay off debt, it just did not matter. We never seemed to had enough.
And a statement that I used a lot with myself and with my husband and with my kids all the time was well, we can't afford that. I mean, I would say this sentence all the time Anytime the kids asked for anything extra, if we were in the store and they were like oh my gosh, look at this cute sweatshirt, it's so cute, can I get it? We can't afford that. We're like thinking about going on a vacation. Oh my gosh, it would be so fun to take the kids to this or that. We can't afford that Like it was just like this habitual statement that I just literally believed I didn't even take a look at our finances.
I didn't even see if we could figure out how to make it work. I didn't. There was none of that going on. It was just a blanket statement that I would put to everything we can't afford that. And in reality, it wasn't like I was really lying, right, we didn't have a lot of extra money, like I just explained. Like we didn't have a lot of extra money, like I just explained, like we didn't have a lot of extra money for things like trips. I mean, every so often we were able to fit a vacation in, but it was difficult, right. We usually put it on a credit card and not pay it off for years, right. And so we didn't have a lot of extra for things that the kids wanted we didn't have a lot of extra for, like the newer car or putting money away, even in a savings account, like we. Just there was no extra for that.
So I just believed that my life was always going to look like this, that I just was always going to feel like I was trying to catch up with my finances. I believed that for me and my life, there just wasn't enough to go around and there never would be. And then, a few years later, get divorced, find coaching, and I want you to picture me with like a little grin on my face, because that's literally what I'm doing right now, because coaching changed so much for me and the way I thought about things, the way I think about things right now. I remember I was going through my divorce. We were like we might've even already like figured everything out. Maybe we were waiting for the judge to sign it or whatever, but we were like figuring stuff out right.
But one of the very first books I read when I was in the thick of it was this book by an author named Jen Sincero, and it was called you Are a Badass at Making Money. Because I desperately wanted to believe that I just. I was looking for hope, I was looking for answers, I was looking for some kind of direction and I didn't like subconsciously, I think, I didn't want to believe that for the rest of my life I was only going to have what I had. I was always going to be struggling with money. I didn't want that to be my reality, even though my habit brain, my primal brain, was like this is just what it is. There was a part of me that was like but I don't want that to be the final answer for me, and now that I'm getting divorced, I definitely don't want that to be my reality any longer. So I found this book. You are a badass at making money. You are a badass at making money, and to say that this book opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking that is an understatement.
Now, jen Sincero is by trade, or at least she was. I don't know if she still is, but she was a coach and she had written this book. And I didn't know anything about life coaches and I definitely didn't know anything about her. I hadn't read any of her other books, but this book changed my life.
This book helped me see that I had been thinking about money with a scarcity mindset. It helped me understand in a small way I've since grown to understand much more what that relationship was, but it helped me understand in a small way that I had a terrible relationship with money and I needed to change that if I wanted to change what I was producing in my life in terms of money and finances. I believed that there wasn't enough to go around. I believed that I wasn't capable, no matter what I tried to do, of making more or producing more money. I believed that having money and making money was for other people, but it wasn't in the cards for me. Like, I just believed those things, I just thought that they were true. That is what felt true to me, because that had been my life up to that point, especially for the parts of the years where I was married and so I just took those thoughts and those beliefs at face value. I didn't question them at all until I read this book.
When I read this book, it helped me begin to question those beliefs and it taught me that if I wanted to and if I worked on it, I could believe something else. And here's what's really interesting when you start to believe something new Now, I'm not saying you just start believing that you're going to be a multimillionaire and then all of a sudden you are, because that isn't what happens, right. But here's the really interesting thing about changing how you think about something. When you change how you think and how you believe about something, you start feeling differently about it and you start taking different actions that create different results in your life. They create different returns than you had before, and that's the key of learning to believe something different. So when I read this book, I didn't want to just believe something else, but I wanted to learn to believe something else and then act from those beliefs, which would then create, like I just said, this return in my life that looked different than what I had been previously producing. So I read that book I probably read it like four times within like maybe a year and a half time period and it was soon after that that I found my first actual coach that I was working with. That I was like paying money to to help me change my beliefs, to help me like learn to feel, reconnect my mind, body and intuition all of those things Right. I found my first coach and it was with working with her that I was able to work on building new beliefs and applying the things that I was learning and the skills I was learning into my everyday life. That's when I started to see a major change in the amount of money I produced.
Now remember, this is after my divorce was final. I had a full-time job. I was making like okay, money pretty good, not, not, not amazing. I wasn't I'm not like a multimillionaire, right, but I was making like okay money, enough to pay the bills. But I had goals. I wanted to bring in more. It had been a goal of mine for ever, for so long, to make over $100,000 a year with the job that I had, and I just I didn't see how that could ever be possible. I just couldn't see it. I didn't understand how that would even happen.
I hadn't started coaching at that point and I also had a terrible credit score from when I was married, like we just had no savings. We had like bad credit because we were bad at paying bills, paying credit card bills, and like bad right, just like the worst you could possibly imagine. So I just want you to think about where you're at. Maybe you're way better off than I am Amazing, build from there. Maybe you're way worse off than I was Amazing. You can still build from where you were at. It was bad right. I didn't get alimony because my ex and I we made about the same amount of money and it was a decision that we both made to not have him pay me alimony, and so it's not like I got divorced and then all of a sudden I was like I'm going to read this book and then the money is just going to come rolling in. I didn't suddenly go from a scarcity mindset to sufficiency and then abundance all overnight, like no, that is not how it works.
What happened and what I learned from my coach, was that in order to change what I was producing, the first step had to be taking a deep look at my thought patterns around money and then choosing intentionally to believe something different. I had to intentionally choose to believe that it was possible for me to create as much money as I want and then from there I get to go to work on dismantling my old beliefs while I incorporate my new beliefs, like literally changing my brain matter. My brain matter right, the stuff that's actually in my cranium, my brain matter by forming new neural pathways with new beliefs about money and what I was capable of creating. Like that's kind of mind blowing that we have that much control over our brain that we can actually create new synapses, new neural pathways that were not there before. We are creating new ones to replace the old ones that we don't want to use any longer. That's amazing, that is powerful, that's in your hands.
So that's a long introductory story about what we're doing in today's podcast, but I wanted to offer you my story so that you can see that, like wherever you're starting from, it is possible for you to build to what you want and then beyond. So in today's episode I'm going to offer you some questions that you can ask yourself to take a look at your money beliefs so that you can have a better idea about what you believe about money. You can have a better idea about what your relationship looks like with money. We have to start there. We have to start with the current beliefs so that you have awareness around it. Start with the current beliefs so that you have awareness around it. Once you have awareness, that's when you can start to work to dismantle those old beliefs and decide intentionally, consciously, what you want to start believing instead. So I'm going to get to those questions in just a minute, but what I want to point out is just a couple of things.
I didn't go from a scarcity mindset to an abundant mindset overnight, like I just said a couple minutes ago, like it didn't just happen. I just I didn't just like snap my fingers and then all of the sudden, I don't think those things, I don't, I don't think anymore, like I can't afford it. Like that didn't just happen overnight, I didn't just say I'm never going to think I never have enough and instead I'm just going to go around thinking I have enough, it's going to be easy, I'm going to make more money and it's going to happen real fast. Like that's not reality. When it comes to thinking new thoughts, those are actually toxic positivity or toxic affirmations or whatever you want to call it. That type of thinking doesn't work. It's not helpful, because your brain doesn't believe any of that in the slightest, and so it will just immediately discount it. So the key to making actual change and believing new thoughts and then being able to take action from those new thoughts and feelings is to take little baby steps, little kitten steps, little tiny baby kitten steps. Right, like, just picture a little tiny, cute, teeny tiny kitten and their cute little steps that they take with their cute short little legs. Right, that's what we're doing here. Right, that's what we're doing here. We're just going to imagine that we're kittens, we're learning something new and we're just going to take some cute little kitten steps to what we want to actually be believing.
Like I'm eight years out from my divorce and I've built my credit score up to amazing. Yeah, it's happened slowly over those eight years, but where it's at now is the best it's ever been. I've built up my savings to where I actually have one. I never had a savings in like the 20 years that we were married. Never, not one time. Yeah, maybe you're like going. Maybe you're judging me. It's totally fine, you can judge me. I judged me for a really long time for not doing that and guess what? I'm in a different place now because I started believing new things and my savings continues to grow. I am making more money now than I ever have in my life and, yes, I finally hit that goal of making six figures. I've been able to do things that I never would have been able to do, like build a new deck on our house last year, update almost all of my appliances in my house. I was able to travel to Alaska and live there for two months. I've been able to take vacations with my loved ones. I have more planned in the future and I'm not stopping there. Like I have so many goals that I want to reach in terms of my finances and the good that I want to be able to do with those finances for myself and so many others.
I made these changes with these little kitten steps about my beliefs and about my relationship with money, and you can too. It is absolutely possible for you. No matter where you are, no matter where you're beginning at, you can believe new things, and it doesn't have to be just with money. You can believe new things about anything that you want. I'm just happen to be specifically talking about money in this podcast, right, but you can learn to step out of a scarcity mindset and kitten step your way to sufficiency and then kitten step your way to abundance, if that's what you want. I am living proof of this, all right.
So here are some questions to help you figure out what you believe about money and what your relationship looks like with money. This is not an exhaustive list, all right. This is just a few questions to start with. If something comes up that you want to question, that you're curious about, or you come across some other money questions list, ask yourself those questions and be honest. Answer without judgment. The more curious you can be here, the better off you'll be, because curiosity is not the same as judgment. Curiosity is like open. I really want to learn, I really want to understand. Judgment is like the same as judgment. Curiosity is like open, I really want to learn, I really want to understand. Judgment is like oh my gosh, I can't believe you think that. Right, you see the difference. When you can ask with curiosity, that's when you create the awareness and then you can decide from there where you want to go, how you want to change. Okay, so you ready for these questions? If you're in a place where you can write them down, you might want to write them down because this is important work and if you really want to change your relationship with money and start changing what you produce in your life in terms of finances, you're going to really want to understand and get curious about how you think about these things.
Okay, so, number one is money good or bad? Pretty straightforward question. There's not a right or wrong answer, it's just what you you think. Is money good or bad? Number two what do you think about people who have or want to make a lot of money? Number three do you want to make more money? Why or why not? Number four do you like those reasons? Why or why not? Number five is it easy to make money or hard to make money? Number six is it easy or hard to manage money? Number seven do you think you're capable of producing more money? Do you think you're smart enough? Do you think to believe about money? Number nine if that belief feels completely unbelievable, completely out of reach, what's a kit and step thought that feels doable about money?
Here's the truth about beliefs about money and about your relationship with money. Your belief is what produces the money you'll earn. Now again, this does not mean that you just sit around and really believe that you're a millionaire. That's not actual belief, because actual belief takes action. Actual belief shows up in how you feel and from there you take those actions which then leads to a return in your life. We have so much more power over how much money we create and we are able to bring into our life than we think. If you learn to believe that it's easy to create more money in your life, you will always see opportunities to make that happen, no matter what you're going through, like a divorce or any other challenging thing that you come across. If you believe, truly believe that it's easy to create more money in your life, you will always see the opportunities to do so. Okay, I just want to close with this for this podcast episode.
One of the beliefs that I consciously decided to stop believing was I can't afford that. Remember how I said at the beginning I thought it was just like this thing that I would just say. I would just say it, and I said it all the time and I was coached on this belief and my coach had me question if that statement was actually true, can you actually not afford it? Like, whatever it is, just insert anything, anything in that sentence I can't afford eggs because they're $75 right now. Like they're not really $75, but they're like 12 or $13 for a dozen. Right, I can't afford eggs. I would. I probably would have told myself that for sure during that time period in my life. And my coach was like let's question that blanket statement because you're using it for everything. So I had to question is that actually true? And what I came to realize is that I was using this as a blanket statement, believing that I didn't have the money for things.
However, when I really questioned it and when I really slowed everything down and took a look, the reality was that I did have money. I was just choosing to spend my money on my bills, my groceries that were important, the most important groceries that I felt our family needed. My mortgage paying for kids' clothes and school stuff and their activities that they loved to do that enhanced their life. Those were the things that I was choosing to put my money toward. I had never looked at it that way. I had never thought about it in that way, but seeing things from that new perspective changed the way I thought about spending my money.
Moving forward, if I wanted something, I could afford it. I could figure out how to make that happen. In fact, a couple of years ago, there was a trauma-informed coaching course that I really wanted to take and it was quite expensive for me at that period in my life and I didn't have just like multiple thousands of dollars just sitting around. And I definitely didn't want to put that on a credit card so that I would have to pay all of that extra interest. But I was in a place where I didn't tell myself I couldn't afford this. Instead, I believed if this is something that I truly want, I will figure out a way to make this happen. I will figure out a way that I can afford this, that I can fit this into my budget and make this happen. And I did because I believed I would figure out how to make it happen. And I figured out how to make it happen. I didn't tell myself I couldn't afford that.
I have worked on dismantling that belief. I can't afford it over these last eight years, ever since my brain was first opened up to the idea that the way I think about money creates what is actually happening in my life. And I remind myself that if I really want it, I can afford it, and if I don't, that's fine, I can choose not to purchase it. It's totally within my power my power right. I can make it happen. I can figure out a way. And if it's not that important or in alignment with my values, then I didn't want to spend my money on it anyway. You have power here. You can choose what you want to start believing when it comes to money, and if you want to step out of scarcity and into sufficiency or even abundance, you are 100% capable of doing that. But it has to start with where you're at right now, which is the beliefs and the relationship that you currently have about money. So start there and figure out where you want to go.
All right, my friends, that is it for today. I will be back next week. Hi, friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real-life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to karinnelsoncoaching dot com. That's W-W w dot karin nelson coaching dot com when you were married. Make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.
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