The Missing Language of Money - S1E5

You can understand exactly why your financial life isn't quite where you want it to be. You can name the patterns, recognize where they came from, and still find that something in you sidesteps the accounts, defers the decisions, and keeps the real picture slightly out of focus. That gap, between what the mind understands and what the body does, is where most financial change quietly stalls out. This episode is about starting to close that gap.

In this episode, we introduce the work of psychologist Eugene Gendlin, whose decades-long study of what actually makes people change revealed something almost no one talks about. The decisions that shape a financial life are not made on spreadsheets. They are made in the body, in the moment of contact, before language gets there. And if you can't hear what your body is telling you in those moments, you are making decisions in the dark.

We begin to change that. You will learn what your body's financial signals actually are, why they are worth listening to, and how to begin recognizing them in four common money situations. This is the first layer of a language your body has been speaking your entire life. Today is Day One of learning your personal alphabet.

This show builds on itself. Start with Episode 1 if you're new, and follow or subscribe so the next episode finds you.

Next week:  You’ll learn how to catch the flinch, the half-second when your body reacts and your mind rushes in to explain, dismiss, or override what you felt. 

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome back to the rhythm of money. This episode's for the woman who's spent a lot of years living from the neck up around money. Reading about it, thinking about it, worrying about it, planning around it, calculating it, justifying it, all this heady stuff. And every time money becomes real, a real bill, a balance, a decision, a conversation, her body has something to say. Maybe fear, maybe dread, maybe a tightening in the chest, a drop in the stomach, a fog that rolls in before she can even clearly think. So the question today is not whether your body responds to money, it probably does. The question is whether you know how to listen to that response without letting it run the whole show. Today we begin there. Now, if this is your first time here, this show is built as a progression. Episodes one through four are still there waiting for you, and what we're doing today will land more clearly if you've heard them. But you're welcome to begin here. Over the last four episodes we've covered a lot of ground. We named the invisible vow, the quiet, inherited belief that goodness and financial security don't quite belong together. You learned the reset, pause, breath, body, as the in the moment way to come back to yourself when the vow tries to take the wheel. We looked at how the vow can dress itself up as overgiving, and we looked at how it can dress itself up as endless preparation that never quite becomes action. If you've practiced any of those things as we've gone along, I want you to let that register for a moment. That is real work. But here's what I also want you to know. You can understand all of that. You can recognize every pattern I've named. You can find your own version of the vow with real clarity. But the next time you go to look at one of your accounts, or pay a bill, or take one financial step you've been avoiding, your stomach can still drop. That gap, the gap between what the mind understands and what the body does, is where a lot of financial progress quietly stalls out. A woman can know exactly why she avoids looking at her balances and still not look at them. She can know she's capable and still feel frozen. She can understand the pattern and still feel her body pull away the moment money becomes real. So today we're going to start closing that gap. Not by overriding the body or by trying to force it to feel differently, but by learning, maybe for the first time, to actually hear what it has been saying. I want to tell you something about my own experience here because I think it matters for what comes next. When I first started paying real attention to what my body did around money, not managing it or pushing through it, but really listening, I was surprised by how much useful stuff it had been saying all along. I had been treating my body like background noise, like the thing I had to drag from one financial task to the next. And what I discovered, slowly, was that my body had been giving me a running commentary on every financial decision I made or didn't make. I had just learned to tune it out. I think a lot of women have done that, especially women who learned early that being good meant being agreeable, and being agreeable meant being pleasant, and being pleasant meant overriding whatever uncomfortable signal was rising in the body, and instead producing whatever response the room seemed to want. When that becomes the habit, you don't just hide your reaction from other people. You lose access to it yourself. It goes underground. And then one day you may find yourself with a financial life that looks responsible on paper, but somehow still doesn't feel like yours. Or it gives you no real confidence, even when the numbers say you should feel fine. Or you keep making decisions that look reasonable, but afterward something in you feels unsettled, and you can't quite put your finger on why. Often the why is this. The decisions have been coming from the part of you that learned how to manage other people's responses rather than the part of you that actually knows what's true. So today we're going to practice listening. Not to the rules, not to the old explanations, nor to the voice that tells you what you should feel. We're going to listen to the body itself. Before we do, I want to say something about where this comes from. What we're going to do today sits inside a body of clinical work that's been around for over 70 years. In the 1950s and 60s, a psychologist named Eugene Ginlin, working at the University of Chicago alongside Carl Rogers, spent about 15 years studying what actually made therapy work. He looked at thousands of recorded sessions, trying to understand why some clients made lasting changes and others didn't. What he found wasn't what most people would expect. The clients who changed weren't necessarily the smartest. They weren't always the ones with the least complicated problems, and they weren't the ones who simply had the most experienced therapists. They were the ones who, somewhere in the session, would pause and check inside themselves. Not for a polished answer or even a named emotion, for something more subtle, a bodily sense of what was true before it had words. Gindlin called that the felt sense, and he developed a method called focusing for teaching ordinary people to do what those naturally successful clients were already doing. I learned focusing during my master's in counseling psychology, and it is the one technique from that entire degree that I have carried forward through every kind of work I've done since counseling, business consulting, volunteer work with people navigating major life challenges. And now the show. What we're doing today is one piece of that technique, the first piece. The piece where you begin to notice that there is a bodily sense of something, and that the bodily sense is useful information, not noise. Now we're not doing the whole method today. We're not ready for interpreting or figuring out what every sensation means. We're not deciding whether a feeling is fear or wisdom or old history, intuition, or something you ate for breakfast. That kind of interpretation is more advanced work. We'll get there. But today is much simpler. Today's just this. Notice that there is a signal. Notice where in your body it lives. Begin to get acquainted with the quality of it. That's it. The body is talking. We are not yet translating, we're only learning to hear that it's saying something worth hearing. This is the alphabet, your alphabet. Most of us were taught some arithmetic around money, maybe compound interest, maybe save a percentage of your income. But we were not taught that the body has a language about money. We were not taught that this language is specific to us. And we were certainly not taught that once we learn to hear it, it can become one of the most reliable guides we have for making financial decisions that actually feel like ours. Now, here's the bottom line. The financial decisions that shape your life are not actually about spreadsheets. They're made in the body, and the instant money stops being an idea and becomes something you have to respond to: a bill, a balance, a request, an opportunity, something you want, or a number on a screen. And then afterward, the mind explains what happened in a way that sounds rational and thought through. But the first movement often happened earlier, below language, before the explanation in the body. If you don't know what your body is telling you in those moments, you can end up making decisions in the dark and writing a story about them afterward. When you can read your body, you can begin to catch the decision while it's still being made. And from there, eventually, you can ask, does all of me agree with this? Or is this coming from something older? Something my younger self concluded about money before she had enough information to know what was actually true. That's the difference between living the financial life you keep meaning to live and living the one that just keeps happening to you. So we're going to practice. I'm going to walk you through four common money situations. We'll bring each one to mind one at a time and notice what your body does. Nothing more than that. You don't need to act on what you find, you don't need to explain it or fix anything. You're simply beginning to learn your personal alphabet. If you can't, find a place where you can give this your full attention for a few minutes. If you're driving or walking or doing something that needs your attention so you don't get hurt, you can do a lighter version, all right? Keep your eyes open. Let the ideas pass through more gently. Just notice in a softer way. But for everyone else, let's settle in. Let your shoulders soften. Let your jaw release. Let the breath find its own depth. No need to force it. Just let the breath move. Whatever is supporting your body right now, the chair, the floor, the ground. Let yourself settle into that support. Now I'll name a money situation. You'll bring it to mind. Then you'll notice what happens in your body. That's all. The first one. Bring to mind your checking account. The balance that's in it right now, as best you can. Hold the number in your mind. If the number is fuzzy, just hold the account itself in your mind. Now notice your body. Where does the response live? Your chest? Your stomach? Your shoulders, your throat, your jaw. Where? Is there a tightening? A softening? A pressure? A heat? A coolness? Is your breath the same as it was a moment ago or has it shifted? Just notice. Okay, good. Let that one go. Come back to empty. Alright, the second one. Bring to mind a bill you received recently. It can be any recent bill. A utility bill, a tuition bill, credit card, insurance, medical bill, whatever is most present, see it in your mind. Or just think of it if an image doesn't form. Now notice your body. Is the response the same as it was a moment ago or different? Maybe the bill produces a stronger reaction than the account balance. Maybe less. Maybe there's a kind of bracing, a shoulder scrunch, a held breath. Maybe there's flatness or numbness. Or a going somewhere else feeling. Numbness is also information. It often means the system is protecting you from something it thinks is too much right now. Just notice. And throughout today, as you focus on the feeling, if the feeling gets to be too dim, bring to mind the topic again, the issue, the idea, just enough to strengthen the reaction enough for you to be able to feel it. But we're not after the thoughts, we're we're interested in the feeling. So just let the thoughts go whenever the feeling is there and present and you can notice it. Okay, so let's let that second one go. The third one. Bring to mind something you bought in the last week or two. This could be anything. It can be a coffee, groceries, a subscription, a meal out, a book, a piece of clothing. But pick one particular thing. See yourself buying it. Now notice your body. This one may feel different again. For some women, a purchase brings a pleasant softening. For others, there's a small contraction, guilt, doubt, second guessing. For others, something more complicated. Pleasure first, then tightening underneath it. What's yours? Where does it live in your body? What quality does it have?

unknown 15:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Let that one go. One more breath, come back to empty. Last one. Bring to mind something you want to buy or want to do that costs money. Something you haven't yet allowed yourself to purchase or commit to. It doesn't have to be huge. It could be a class, a piece of clothing, a trip, a piece of equipment for your work, a service that would help you, a practitioner you've been wanting to see. Something you want that you haven't yet given yourself. Hold it in your mind. And now notice your body. What happens when you imagine actually having, actually doing it, actually paying for it? For many women, this fourth one produces the most complicated response because wanting itself can feel uncomfortable. Receiving can feel uncomfortable. Spending money on yourself deliberately and without justification to anyone can feel uncomfortable. What is your body doing right now? Is it a small clutch in the stomach? Maybe a brightness somewhere, a kind of yes feeling. Maybe mixed with something else. Maybe a complete shutdown, the body saying no, we don't get to want that. Whatever is there, let it be there. You don't have to act on it, you don't have to decide anything. You're only listening. Notice that you spent the last few minutes paying attention to something most women never sit still long enough to notice. That's not a small thing. Come fully back to where you are. What you just did, even if it felt small, is really something. You brought four money situations into your awareness, and you may have noticed that the same body gave different responses, different qualities or locations or amounts of charge. The checking account may not have felt the same as the bill. The bill may not have felt the same as the purchase. The purchase may not have felt the same as the action you've been putting off. That matters because your body was not giving you one big vague money feeling. It was responding to each situation as the particular thing it was. That is intelligence, embodied intelligence, hard won intelligence. And this is the alphabet I was talking about. You just read your first few letters. I want to offer you a way of thinking about what you just did because some of you may be wondering where this is going. You just did in a small way what skilled professionals do in more developed forms. Therapists pay attention to what a client's body is doing while they talk about a topic. Skilled financial advisors, the really good ones, often notice what changes in a client's posture, face, breath, or voice when a particular financial topic comes up, because they know the real answer is not always in the words. Sometimes the words say, that sounds fine. But the body says, no, it doesn't. Sometimes the words say, I don't care. But the body says, actually, I care a lot. Sometimes the words say, I should be able to do this. But the body says, something in me doesn't feel safe yet. You're learning to do the same kind of listening for yourself. And nobody knows your body better than you do. Nobody else is in a better position to learn your signals once you begin paying attention. This is one of the most valuable skills you can develop as a woman who wants a different relationship with money. And it will take time. We're at the beginning. Today was day one. You won't be fluent yet. You may feel the signal and have no idea what it means. You may miss it entirely and realize later, oh, that was what I was feeling. You may notice one thing clearly and then the next day feel like you can't find it at all. That's normal. What matters is that you've started. You now know that your body has something useful to say about your money. You know that the signal is specific. You know that it may live in particular places, your chest, your stomach, your jaw, your shoulders, your breath, your back. And you know that it may have particular qualities. Tight, soft, hot, cold, held, open, numb, alive. This is the alphabet. So this week, I'm not giving you an action to take with any of what you found. What I'm asking is much simpler. Just notice. When money comes up in your day, whether it's a bill, a notification, a purchase, a thought about something you've been avoiding, take two seconds to notice what your body does. Where does the response live? What quality does it have? You don't need to journal it or write it down to track it. You're simply turning up the volume on a signal that has always been there. Now, if you forget for three days, then remember once, good enough. If you catch it ten times in a day, that's great too. There is no right amount. Now, there is one particular thing I want you to begin noticing gently. There is a moment That happens in almost every money encounter. It's very brief, usually less than a second. Your body responds to something financial. And then almost immediately your mind tries to manage the response. It explains it away. It overrides it. It converts it into a thought. It distracts from it. That moment, the moment when your body responds and your mind moves in to override the response, that's where a great deal of financial behavior actually lives. If you can begin to catch that moment, even occasionally, you start to have access to information you didn't have before. And from there, eventually you start to have access to choices you didn't have before. We're going to look at that moment next time, where it happens, what it brings, and how to work with it to make a different kind of decision. Before we close, let me bring together what we covered. We named the gap between understanding something and being able to live it, the place where financial progress often stalls out. We looked at how many women learned to override the body's signals in order to be agreeable, pleasant, responsible, or acceptable. We met Eugene Gindlin's work with the felt sense, the bodily knowing that exists before language that can become a doorway into real change. And we practiced the first layer of that skill, not interpretation or translation, just noticing that your body has a language around money and that the language is specific to you. You brought four financial situations to mind, and your body may have given four different responses. That's the beginning. Before you go, if this episode helped you notice something about your own body around money, the most useful next step you can take is to follow or subscribe wherever you're listening. That way you won't miss what comes next because this show really does build on itself. The next episode rests on what we did today, the way today rested on episodes one through four. Following the show is what lets the work accumulate in your life over time. In the next episode, we're going to catch that flinch, that half second, between what your body knows and what your mind does to override it. This is the rhythm of money. And you are living your true note in this very moment.