I knew I needed to talk to Jonathan about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to contribute as much to rent this month. I’d known it for weeks, as my launch didn’t fill as quickly as I’d hoped, and person after person told me they were interested in the next round.

Then, a 1:1 client’s payment failed, and I felt my body go rigid. I was terrified.

I knew I needed to reach out to the client, but couldn’t do it from such a freaked out place.

I knew I needed to make a plan for how we were going to cover rent, but the thought of admitting that to my husband felt almost as bad as the suspicion I had that we’d have to reach out to my mother-in-law to ask for help.

I knew that I needed to keep selling, to share about my offer from a neutral, creative place, but I couldn’t shift myself out of the desperation I felt.

The money stress had me frozen, stuck in a loop of desperately taking some action, but avoiding the things that would actually help me get out of this situation.

And hey, maybe you’ve only experienced the other side of money stress, where the fear isn’t about not having enough to pay the bills, but about people getting mad at you when you charge more, or feeling scared of having more than enough money, because it feels unsafe to your nervous system, like it could all just go away at any moment…

I’ve felt both, and as wild as it is, the experience in my body is almost identical.

Just a few months after that month I couldn’t cover my part of rent, I had my first big month. The kind of month I’d been dreaming about since I started my business. I didn’t just hit the $10k month, I surpassed it, bringing in $15,451.99 cash.

And instead of celebrating, I felt… terrified.

Suddenly I was making more than my parents ever made. More than felt normal or safe in my world. These were the numbers I saw all over the internet, sure, but I didn’t have people in my daily life making this. And with that came this gnawing anxiety: What if I can’t do this again? What if I screw up my taxes now? What do I even do with all this money?

I started second-guessing everything. Are my prices right? Will people get mad at me? Should I stick with the same offers? Was I about to get cancelled?

Same tight chest. Same intrusive thoughts. Same inability to move forward with any degree of logic, strategy or creativity.

Completely different numbers in the bank.

Because money stress doesn’t just come from not having enough. It comes from having more than you’re used to, from raising prices to a level that actually works for your business, from the gap between where you’ve been and where you’re trying to go.

And whether it’s too little or too much, money stress does the same thing to your brain: it shuts down your ability to think clearly, make good decisions or show up in a way that actually helps you make more money or deliver results for your clients and audience.

When you’re in money stress, whether that’s “I need $5k by the 1st” or “I just made $20k and I’m terrified I can’t sustain this or I’m gonna mess this up,” your brain and body see a threat.

And whether you default to fight, flight, freeze or fawn (or a combo), you shift into a survival response. You lose access to your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that helps you think strategically, make nuanced decisions, access creativity, see possibilities.

You’re just trying to make the bad feeling stop.

Which is why, when I was sitting at my desk that day freaking out about how to pay rent, I didn’t do the strategic thing. I did the reactive thing.

I posted desperately instead of reaching out thoughtfully. I felt so unsafe that I had to act, and slowing down to make a plan felt like even more of a threat to my already fried system.

That kind of situation is expensive AF.

Not just in the money you don’t make because you’re posting from fear instead of selling strategically, though yes, that’s part of it.

But in the energy you burn through. The clients you take on who drain you. The momentum you lose when you stop posting altogether because nothing feels good enough or it all feels too scary.

Money stress impacts the way you sell, your creativity, the way you feel about your audience, and thus the way you talk to them.

Whichever version of money stress you’re experiencing, the cycle costs you, starting with…

• The Story You Tell Yourself → this money situation isn’t safe. I can’t live like this. What if ______ happens? I have to do something about this…
• Which Leads to The Action You Take → panicked selling… or spending. Desperation, or avoidance of your business because this level of success feels so uncomfortable. Dropping your prices, or making your messaging super vanilla so you don’t get too big.
• And Causes The Ripple Effect → feast or famine sales cycles, bank balance constantly ending up a zero no matter how much you make, constantly changing your prices, avoiding your numbers and financial statements, unexpected tax bills and penalties, fights with your partner, not being able to invest the way you want in your life or business, saying yes to clients and projects that should be a no, feeling like a fraud in your business…

That reality sucks, and you didn’t start your business to continue living paycheck to paycheck, right? You started it for a lot of reasons, and creating big, beautiful changes in your financial reality was one of them.

Just like the other big feels in this series, stress around money shifts your brain activity into the older, more primal, survival based parts. Your field of vision literally narrows when you feel threatened, and with money stress it also narrows metaphorically.

You can’t see all your options. You can’t think three steps ahead. You can’t connect dots or come up with creative solutions.

This is true whether you’re feeling the stress of I don’t know how to pay my bills, I’m losing clients, I need to sign 5 new clients like yesterday or the stress of it’s all working. I have money in the account. What if it all goes away?

And with money stress, the truth is that sometimes, your basic survival needs are on the line. If you can’t pay your bills? That has real consequences to your safety. If you have a huge launch that sells out an offer, then have a bunch of refund requests after you’ve spent or reinvested the money? That could really mess with your ability to keep your life and business afloat.

Money stress feels so big because it does, in our modern world, tie into our ability to survive, much less live well.

The catch 22, of course, is that trying to navigate money situations while you’re experiencing money stress is a categorically bad idea. You will make reactive decisions, and they will almost always not be the best decisions for you or your business.

So the work, then, is in three parts.

Step One: Soothe Your System

So yes, it can be quite frustrating that our brains are so capable of being hijacked by even the tiniest little thing, or even the thought that a thing might happen. And, we are quite lucky in the fact that our brilliant brains also allow us to soothe our way back into our window of tolerance. Your window of tolerance is the space where you can experience a stressor or emotion and not shift into fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Think of it like flexibility in your muscles: you have a range through which your hamstring can comfortably move, right? If you go too far in either direction, it gets hurt. Same deal with your nervous system, and your window of tolerance is the ‘range of (e)motion’ you can safely move through without the hurt happening. I’m dropping the complementary podcast episode on the stress of too much money or success on Friday, and/or you can drop into this EFT practice from my Regulation Rituals library if you’re in the not enough money stress zone.

Get yourself to a point of neutral. You don’t have to feel good about money, or abundant, or totally safe. Just get yourself in that window where sure, you feel uncomfortable, but you feel safe enough, present enough to look at the situation and make moves…

Step Two: Make Your Plan

This step is going to be short sometimes, because money stress doesn’t always arise because of real life situations that need to be dealt with. But, whenever you’re navigating money stress, I want you to get into the habit of slowing down after you soothe and looking at what, if anything, needs to be done.

When I’m working with clients who feel panicked over needing to bring in more sales, we always start by getting hard data. What exactly is projected to come in, and when? What are the bills and expenses, and what are the due dates for those? Did anything specific cause the panic? Then, once we have that data, we start to make a plan. How much exactly needs to come in, by which dates? That way, we can make a data-informed, strategic sales plan on how best to generate the money needed within that timeframe. We can choose the best offers, invest energy into the most strategic sales and marketing channels, and not waste energy and perpetuate the cycle by frantically posting on the easiest channel or creating a new pop-up offer that feels easy to sell in the moment.

When I’m working with clients dealing with the stress of success, we do some somatic explorations around what they need to feel safe with the money that’s in their account, with any increases in spending, with changes in their self-identity. Then, we make a plan to create a greater sense of safety with their updated reality, so they can stay within their window of tolerance most of the time.

Step Three: Create Your Always-On Sales Assets

Once you’ve got more of your beautiful brain online and have a plan of how to handle the realities of your current situation, it’s time to create what I call your ‘always on’ sales assets. These are the content pieces that support your business by creating and nurturing new leads all the time. Most people tend to think of ads when we talk about this, but as an organic-first friend, when I talk about always on assets, I mean things that show up via longform content that has more of an SEO based discoverability situation. Like YouTube, podcasts, blogs, Pinterest to a degree. You could also consider ads, sure, especially if you’re got an ad running to your email list, but you don’t have to go the paid media route to have your audience growing evergreen.

All three of these are core pieces of creating a calm relationship with your money, and the more you’re able to do all three, the objectively better your financial reality will be.

You’ll have the systems and assets in place to keep supporting your business even when you’re feeling hella panicked, you’ll have the resources to support yourself when panic happens (and use those resources to increase your window of tolerance over time), and you’ll know how to make a plan to navigate whatever money things happens from a more thoughtful, strategic place.

Inside of my 1:1 offer the Empathy Edge, we build all three of these pieces together, so that within the first 90 days you’ve executed on the sales (and money) plan that helps you get closer to the financial reality you want, you’ve increased your window of tolerance so money feels less triggering on a daily basis, and you’ve built out those always-on sales assets so your business is less dependent on launches or short form content that requires you to constantly be creating, posting and engaging.

I’m taking on 3-4 more clients before the end of the year, and if you’re launching in the next 3 months, then getting starting in November means you’ll have completely updated messaging and a detailed sales plan before 2026.

Friday’s podcast is going to be all about increasing your capacity (aka window of tolerance) for things going well, for making and having a lot of money, and whether you’re navigating that reality now or not, I’d really recommend playing with that episode throughout the rest of the year.

Until then, I’ll be holding the vision of you making great money so you can live well, enjoy your work, and contribute to making this world a better place.

Talk soon,

CQ

WEBSITE​​ | CHELSEA'S INSTAGRAM | BOOK A SALES SPRINT | WORK WITH ME 1:1