14. How Financial Shame is Costing Your Money and Keeping You Stuck

I'm going all Brené Brown on you in this week's episode and talking about shame. Specifically financial shame. 

Financial shame is costing you money every day in your business. It's keeping you stuck in your business because shame leads to inaction, buffering and continuing on the same path. 

I hear from clients all the time about how ashamed or embarrassed they are by the state of their finances. 

And I tell them there is nothing I haven't seen. And once we face it and have a plan, they all experience a feeling of relief. And wish they hadn't waited.

You can stay in shame and judgement and  or you can decide to take action. Taking action is really about just leaning into the discomfort. 

In this week's episode, you'll learn:

• Why financial shame is all in your head
• How financial shame is costing you money everyday in your business
• How to move past financial shame and start moving forward

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ready to quit avoiding your finances and finally take charge of them? Book your free financial assessment to get started
• Get your profit guide with 10 ways to improve your profit

For the full show notes, including the transcript, go to www.carlamoats.com/podcast/episode14





This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher.

DISCLAIMER: The information in this podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an accountant-client relationship. While we use reasonable efforts to furnish accurate and up-to-date information, we assume no liability or responsibility for any errors, omissions or regulatory updates.

Transcript

Hi there and welcome back to the Purposeful Profit podcast. I'm your host, Carla Moats. And this week, I'm going all Brené Brown on you. And we are talking about shame, specifically financial shame. Brené Brown did a famous Ted Talk. It really is what launched her career and it was on shame and is the fifth most listened to Ted Talk out there. Over 60 million people have listened her talk about shame, and that's because as humans, we have a lot of shame. 

My clients are no different. Typically, my clients are often coming to me because in some way, shape or form, they feel like their business finances their profit, that it's a bit of a hot mess. And there are two things I almost always hear from clients, sometimes before they're actually even clients, in that first call that we have, “I can't believe I'm airing my dirty laundry, I should have figured this out already.” “I'm not good enough.” Some version of shame or embarrassment and they've been putting it off for a while. 

Then the other thing that I will hear from them almost always, often in just a few weeks, is, “oh my God, I wish I hadn't waited. I can't believe that I sat and I just kept avoiding it and I kept pushing it off because now I feel so much relief because just knowing where I'm at, I just feel relief.”

And here's the thing. Financial shame costs you money every day in your business. You'll know, if this is you, you're avoiding your finances, you don't know where your numbers are, you feel like things are a hot mess and you just keep putting off looking at it. Just know that every day you defer addressing it. You're costing yourself money every day in your business. One key to building a profitable business is you just have to quit sitting in the shame and you really have to start taking action. 

So, today I'm going to talk about why financial shame is all in your head, how financial shame is costing you money every day in your business. And then I'm going to talk to you about how you can move past the financial shame so you can start moving forward. One thing I want to talk about, first of all is that shame is just an emotion. Shame is really just your thoughts about your finances. Because if we looked at your financial situation, it really is neutral. It's not good or bad. Two people can have different thoughts about it. And how do I know this? Because when my clients come to me, they usually have thoughts. Like I said earlier, “I can't believe I'm sharing this. She's not going to be able to help me or she's never seen anything this bad.” I mean, I've had clients say that. 

When I look at it, I have a completely different thought. My thought is, there's nothing you can show me that I haven't seen before. This is all fixable. I can actually get a little excited because this is my zone, and I know that I can take clients who think their finances are a hot mess or they've been avoiding them, and I know that I can help them turn it around. 

Shame is coming from self criticism, okay? It's your perceived failure against some bar that you've set or you think others have set for your business. It's what we call a manual. You have a manual for yourself as a CEO, and think about what that is. What are the operating rules you have, or the expectations? Almost think of yourself as like an employee of your business. If you were the person supervising or managing yourself, what are your expectations? A lot of times it's, I should have figured this out already. I'm the CEO. I should know this already. I ought to be able to do this alone. Asking for help is admitting a weakness. And if I keep growing revenue, profit will catch up. That's one of the ones I see a lot. “I'll just keep chasing that revenue, and eventually the profit will catch up.” 

But whatever the state of your finances, they really are neutral, okay? It's really just your thoughts about your finances that are creating shame, and shame is keeping you stuck. When you feel shame, what do you do? You can think about it in your business, or you can think about it elsewhere in your life. But when you feel shame, what do you do? You don't take action. Typically, when you feel shame, you hide. You play small. You avoid, you buffer. So maybe you're buffering on social media, or maybe you're buffering with other activities in your business.

Think about when something doesn't feel right in your body compared to when you're not feeling well. You feel something in your body that isn't right, and you have this pit in your stomach. Maybe you're avoiding the doctor. Have the pit in your stomach, you turn to Dr. Google, buffer along with Dr. Google. You start going to worst-case scenarios, maybe overcompensate. So maybe you're not feeling well, you're like, well, I'm going to go start hitting the gym seven days a week. So you overcompensate. You're not sleeping. Where if you went to the doctor and got a diagnosis, now you have a plan. Very often the doctor is going to tell you, most of the time, that doctor is telling you that it was really a minor bug. It wasn't all these worst-case scenarios that you're imagining. 

I think people do the same thing with their finances. If I had a dime for every time people came in and they think, this has got to be the worst you've ever seen. And I've been doing this for 30 years, and a lot of my career in corporate as well was in transformation, change management. And so a lot of what I've been doing is turning around unproductive teams, automating processes, going into underperforming areas and helping make them better. Pretty much guarantee you there's nothing you have that I haven't seen before. 

So you can keep avoiding, be in the same place, or probably a worse place in three months or six months. So again, go back to the analogy. If something's not feeling right in your body, if you wait three months, six months to go to the doctor, whatever you had is probably worse at that point. So you could either keep avoiding and be the same or worse shape in three or six months, or you can quit judging yourself, set the judgment aside, and you can take action. Judging yourself doesn't really do you any good.

Shame is costing you every day because shame is a feeling and our feelings are what drive our actions or inactions. So again, when I feel shame, what do I do? I don't take action. I don't have a plan. I continue the actions that led to the current state. So you have a snowball effect. So if I feel shame and maybe one of the things that led to the current state, let's just say your issue is that you're actually losing money. And one of the things that's contributing to that is fact that you don't really have any control over your spending. You don't really know where your money is going. You continue to do that, again, it continues to get worse. Your profit doesn't improve. You continue to have losses, you continue to bleed money. Or maybe it's just that you just never know where you actually stand. So you really never know what you have available to you to invest in the business.

This manifests in a few ways in your business. You continue overspending, you're pricing improperly. Maybe you don't really know what it costs you to produce your service, so you don't really know how to price or you're not accounting for your overhead. You never know where you stand. You really don't know each month how your financial picture for the year looks. Maybe you're not paying yourself in your business. A lot of people come to me and they're like because they don't really know where they stand. They're afraid to pay themselves. You don't know if your clients or your business are profitable. A lot of times when I'll first talk to clients and I'll ask them, and a lot of times this is businesses have been around for a while. They can tell me the revenue number, but I'll say, well, what's your profit? And they'll say, well, it's not enough, but I don't know what it is.

It was mounting money anxiety. Just like when you go to the doctor, you got that pit in the bottom of your stomach when you don't know where you stand or you know deep down that you've got some financial issues that you're not addressing. You have this mounting money anxiety that runs in the background all the time. 

And one of the things, too, it really does, is it keeps you from stepping into your zone of genius. Your zone of genius is this thing that sets you apart. And when you have all these other things going on, you're not stepping into your zone of genius because you're putting out fires all the time. That's one of the ways you know that you've got some issues that haven't been addressed. You're constantly putting out fires. You're constantly in triage mode. 

So then the question is, how do I move forward? What do I do to move forward? So the first thing I want you to do is really give yourself grace. Show yourself some compassion. One of the things I always tell clients when they come to me and we start talking about this is like, what you're feeling is very normal. Shame is a human emotion, but quit judging it. Quit judging yourself. Find a safe space. Somebody who’s not going to judge you. Lean into the discomfort. Okay, I'm feeling shame, but I'm going to lean into the discomfort of actually facing my fears about my finances head on, and put together a plan.

There's a tool that we actually use in the mindset space. It's called the 4N process. I learned this from one of my coaches. Corinne Crabtree and the 4 Ns. stand for notice, normalize, neutralize and next best step. 

I've talked about this, and I think in another podcast, we have 60,000 thoughts that run through our brain a day. More than 80% of those are unconscious when you know we're thinking them. So the first thing you want to do is notice the things that you're thinking. So the next time you try and avoid, maybe your bookkeeper sends you your financial statements and you just stick it in a folder and you avoid them. Notice what you're thinking. Are you thinking, I don't want to look at these numbers? Are you thinking, I don't understand them? Notice your thoughts and then normalize them. 

Normalize means a lot of our shame comes from thinking that we're the only person whose finances are a mess or we're the only person who doesn't know where our numbers are. And I can tell you now that's not the case. In fact, I would say it's almost more normal, I think, especially for smaller business owners than having everything all their ducks in a row. So normalize it. 

Then you're going to neutralize it. Neutralize it is taking the emotional charge out of it, getting to facts. So maybe you do look at your financial statements and you had a loss this month, and your normalize is: businesses have losses. And neutralize is: I had a loss of $10,000. It's just a fact. There's no emotional charging in the sentence. And then I want you to ask yourself, what is your next best step that you can take? 

And one of the things I want to do is if this resonated for you, I do a free financial assessment. It's a no pressure call: www.carlamoats.com/workwithme. This is a call where I have a process I take you through where we look at your profits, your cash flow, your owner's comp. I help you evaluate where you're at. And when we do this, there's a couple of other things we look at as well. We look at your processes, a couple of other things, and it allows you to really easily see where your issues are at. Most people will come into me and not all issues will be the same. So we will do this free financial assessment, and then you will walk out with knowing what your issues are and a plan.

Having a plan is really the big thing because, like going to the doctor, the doctor now tells you what's wrong and he says, okay, here's a diagnosis and here's what we're going to do to address it. And you suddenly you walk out and you have a plan. And your mind doesn't have to go to all the worst-case scenarios. You have a plan. And when you have the plan, that just brings relief. When I said clients will often say, after a few weeks, I wish I had waited this long. That's why. Because suddenly they have relief. They have a path, and it brings a tremendous amount of mental relief to them.

So thanks for listening this week. Again, if today resonated with you and you're sitting in shame, know you're not alone. I am a safe, judgment-free space. I've seen it all. I invite you to go to www.carlamoats.com/workwithme and we can continue this conversation. All right? And I will see you next time.