The Financial Flinch - S1E6

This episode is for the woman who handles a lot, understands more than she gives herself credit for, and still notices that certain money moments make something in her tighten, rush, avoid, or override. 

 We’re naming “The Flinch,” the half-second between your body’s first response to money and the story your mind tells afterward.

 This isn’t about being bad with money. It isn’t about not knowing enough. And it isn’t about forcing yourself to push through.

 It’s about beginning to notice the moment before the old pattern takes over so that your financial life can become less automatic, more conscious, and more truly yours.

 If this episode gives language to something you recognize, consider sharing it with one woman who may benefit from it too.

The Rhythm of Money
Living Your True Note

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

Transcript

0:03

Welcome back to the rhythm of money. Let me ask you something. Have you ever gone to make a money decision, not a desperate one or an emergency, just an ordinary decision, and before you even thought it through, something in your body had already reacted. Maybe you were about to look at an investment account, or respond to a financial email, or decide whether to hire someone, pay a bill, review a proposal, or talk with your partner about money, or choose whether to spend, save, give, invest, or wait. And before the mind had even made its case, your body had already decided a tightening, a leaning forward, a pulling back, a small rush, a quiet not that, or not now. Or a quick yes that arrived before you even asked yourself whether yes was actually true. Maybe a sense of urgency, a fear of missing some small window of opportunity. Whatever it is, that quick reaction is what I want to talk about today. Because for many women, especially women who are functioning well on the outside, the most important financial moment is not the one everyone can see. It's the half second before the visible decision. That's what I'm calling the flinch. And today we're going to slow it down enough that you can begin to catch it and start to have choice there. If this is your first time here, this show is built as a progression. Episodes one through five are still there waiting for you, and this episode will make more sense if you've at least heard episode five. Last time we started listening to your body's language around money. We noticed that your body may not say the same thing in every financial situation. It may respond differently to a bill than it does to a purchase, differently to a conversation than it does to an investment decision. That was the beginning of the alphabet. Today we start using it in real life because there's a particular moment in financial life where everything can turn. It's brief, less than a second, in fact. So brief that by the time you realize it happened, your mind may already be three steps ahead, explaining, defending, postponing, justifying, or pushing through. But that one little moment matters. So let's look at it slowly. You're about to read an email from your bank, or open a letter from the IRS, or you hear about an investment opportunity, or someone asks you for money, or you're about to buy something. Something money related comes toward you. And before you've made a conscious decision, before you have words for what's happening, your body responds. Maybe your chest tightens, maybe your stomach drops, or your shoulders rise a little. Maybe your breath gets shallow or you go slightly numb. Whatever the response, it happens first. Then the mind jumps in, and the mind's quick. The mind says, this is probably too much to deal with right now, I'll deal with it later. Or I shouldn't be spending this. Or this is probably a scam. Or I deserve this, but I can't afford it. Or this is too good to be true. Or I have bad luck with money. Those words feel like thinking. They feel like decision making, but often they're not the beginning of the decision. They're the explanation that comes after your body has already decided. Then the action follows. You open the envelope or you don't. You make the purchase or you don't. You say yes to the request or you say no or you ignore it. You answer the call or you let it go to voicemail. You make the investment or you don't. And from the outside it looks like you made a decision. It may even feel that way from the inside, but often the decision started underneath that, in your body, before the mind had time to write its story. That gap between your body's response and the mind's override is that flinch I mentioned earlier. Now I want to be careful here. I'm not saying your body is always right. I'm not saying everybody response should be obeyed. If your body says, do not open any bills ever, that's not financial wisdom. And we both know that. What I'm saying is that your body has information. It may not have the whole answer, it may not have the final answer, but it has information, and that information is affecting you, whether you're aware of it at the time or not. And for many women, the mind moves so quickly to manage the feeling that the information never gets heard. The mind takes over before your body has had its moment to fully express itself. And then the same pattern repeats. You read more, you plan more, you promise yourself that this time will be different, or you act impulsively in the dark, then wonder why you don't feel confident about your decisions. But the part of you that's actually reacting in the moment still hasn't been included. So today we include it. Let's walk through a few places where the flinch may show up. Not as a complete list, just as a way to hopefully help you recognize your own. The first place is opening mail. This one could look so ordinary that it's easy to miss. An envelope arrives, it sits on the counter, then the kitchen table, then maybe back to the counter. A few days pass, maybe longer, and every time you walk past it there is a small movement in your body. Not a full panic, just a little not now. Maybe a tiny bit of dread. The mine helps immediately. I'll get to it this weekend. I need to be in the right headspace. I don't have time to deal with this right now. And the envelope stays closed. That tiny moment before the justification, that's where the flinch lives. The second place in life is logging into something. For some women it isn't paper, it's apps. The banking app, the credit card app, the old retirement account from a previous job, the budgeting tool you download it and haven't opened in a while. You go to log in and something in your body moves. Then somehow you're checking something else, maybe the weather. Or closing the phone or the computer altogether, or deciding you'll look later when you have more time, or forgetting what you were about to do. It often feels like a practical delay, and sometimes it is, but sometimes underneath it there was a flinch. The third place is a money conversation. This may be with a partner, an adult child, a parent, a contractor, a service provider, maybe a financial professional. There's something that needs to be said. You know it, you can feel the moment approaching, and before you even open your mouth, your body braces. Then the mind smooths it over. It's not a big deal. I'll bring it up another time. Maybe now isn't the right moment. And the conversation happens later or never, or in such a softened form that the real thing still hasn't been said and nothing has been resolved. The fourth place is the unfamiliar word or phrase. This one is especially important if you ever want to feel confident with your money decisions. You're reading something or talking to someone or watching a video, and a financial term comes up that you don't quite understand. Vested, capital gains, expense ratio, asset allocation, yield, compounding, preferred stock. And in that half second after you hear it, something in your body may tighten, a small feeling of I should already know this, a little shame. Then the mind moves fast. It nods. It moves on. It pretends the meaning is clear enough, or it hides behind an unspoken I'm not smart enough to get this and I don't want anyone to know that. It does almost anything except pause and say I'm not familiar with that term. Can you explain it more? That flinch can be expensive because shame when it's running the show keeps a woman from asking the very questions that would make her stronger. The fifth place is the request. Someone asks you for money a family member, a friend, a child, a partner, a cause, a request that may be reasonable or may not be. And in the half second after the request, your body responds. For many women, especially women who've been trained to give, help, cover, smooth over, or rescue, your body may say yes before the mind has even fully understood the request. Then the mind writes the explanation afterwards. Of course. It's the right thing. It's not that much. I love them. And the money moves. The sixth and final place we'll look at together is the purchase. You have something in the cart. The checkout button is right there, and just before you click, your body does something. For one woman it may be guilt. Then the mind says, I deserve this. For another woman, it may be a little rush of excitement. Then the mind says, This is going to be the thing that finally helps. For another woman, your body may say no. Then the mind overrides it and says, just do it, don't be cheap. The purchase happens either way. But the important part is this: your body had something to say, and the mind moved right past it. I could keep going. There are flinches around looking at retirement numbers, flinches around opening the will in the trust folder, flinches around an inheritance you received and still haven't quite known what to do with, flinches around the money conversation you and your partner have been circling for months. Wherever there's money in your life, there's probably a flinch somewhere nearby. So what do we do with it? That's where the reset comes back. Pause. Breath. Body. We built that back in episode two, but now we can understand it at a more specific level. Hopefully you've been practicing it a little in your life since then. Now the reset is not for figuring anything out. It's not for analyzing your body's response. It's not for deciding whether the flinch is right or wrong. The reset is for slowing down the override. That half second between your body's response and the mind's story, the reset stretches it. Maybe from a half second to five seconds. And five seconds can be enough. In that small stretch of time, two things become possible. First, your body's signal gets to be heard, not obeyed, not interpreted immediately, just heard. Second, the action that follows gets to be more conscious. You may still make the purchase, you may still say yes to the request, you may still say no, but now you're the one acting, the executive you, instead of being carried along by the automatic sequence. That's the difference. The reset doesn't necessarily change what your body is feeling. It doesn't change what the situation requires. It changes who is at the controls when the next action happens. So let's do that together right now. I'm going to ask you to choose one place where you suspect the flinch lives for you. It can be one I named or something else that came to mind that I didn't name. We're going to walk right up to the edge of it together, slowly. Take a breath before we begin. If you're driving right now, please keep your attention on the road. The next part can be soft background. Your body can still receive even if you're focused primarily on something else. For everyone else, settle where you are. Let your shoulders soften. Let your jaw soften. Let the breath flow a little deeper than it was a moment ago. Notice what's supporting you. The chair, the floor, the ground underneath, all of it. Something steady is already here. Now bring to mind one financial moment where the flinch may live. The envelope on the counter, the banking app, the conversation you've been postponing. One of your specific things these days, not money in general. See that encounter with money in your mind's eye. Now imagine yourself right at the edge of that moment and about to do the thing, about to open the envelope, tap the app, begin the conversation. Don't push through all the way into the doing. Just stay at the edge at the beginning and notice what your body does as you begin that action. This is the flinch. Where does it live? Did something just change in your chest? Your stomach? Shoulders, jaw, hands, breath? Where is it? What is the quality of it? Tight? Cold, held, numb, hot, hollow, heavy. Just notice. You don't have to fix it, you don't have to explain it, you definitely don't have to push past it. For this moment, you're simply letting your body's response be known. And remember, whenever we're doing this, if the feeling starts to fade out so that you can't even tell where in your body it is, think about the idea again so that the reaction comes back. Then focus in on the felt reaction again. So feeling into this moment of encountering money. Now do the reset right here with the flinch still present. Pause. One breath in, one breath out, full body scan. Where is the tightness or the holding? Where is the place that wants to leave or rush or collapse or get it over with? Be with it. Give it your attention. Notice that you didn't have to push the feeling away. You didn't have to become calm on command. You only had to notice, and in noticing, something has already shifted. Can you sense that? The flinch may still be there, but now there's a little space around it. A little room. A little time. You're no longer inside the flinch in quite the same way. You're the one noticing it. That matters. Stay with one more breath here. What you just practiced is simple, but it's not small. You felt the flinch, you didn't let it run the moment. You didn't pretend it wasn't there. You used a five-second tool to pull yourself back at the controls. It takes longer than five seconds when we're practicing, but when you do it in real life, it really is just five seconds. A pause, a single breath, and a two-second full body scan. That's the work. Now, take a deeper breath as we begin to come fully back to where you are. Now I want to say something practical about this because this is where a lot of people get discouraged once they start doing this within their daily life. You're not going to catch every flinch. You're just not. Most of the time, especially at first, the whole thing will happen so fast that you'll only notice it afterwards. You'll be three steps past the moment and then realize, oh, that was it, I flinched. That's still something. Catching it late is part of learning to catch it sooner. Catching it sooner is part of learning to catch it in the moment. And catching it in the moment is part of building a different kind of financial life. You don't need to catch everyone. You only need to begin catching some. Everyone you catch teaches your nervous system that something different is possible. I want to point to where this is going next because we're about to make a real turn in the work. For the last five episodes, we've been doing a lot of awareness work. Seeing, feeling, slowing down. That has been the foundation. But awareness isn't the place we live forever. At some point, awareness has to bring us into contact with the actual material of our financial lives, not as homework or as performance or proof that you're doing it right, just as the next natural step when awareness has done its work. In the next episode, we're going to start moving toward that contact. We're going to work with something that for many women is the most loaded financial act of all. Not paying a bill, not making a budget, not investing. Receiving. Letting something come in, letting it stay, letting it accumulate and become actual enduring abundance. A flow that can keep on giving as long as you want it to and never leave you the one running on empty. The places where the flinch we just named lives most strongly are often the places where receiving has been blocked. And for the financial life you actually want to build, receiving is not optional. That's where we'll go next. Before we close today, let me bring this all together. The flinch is that half second between your body's response to something financial and your mind's override of that response. It can exist in many different places in different people's lives or in your life. The flinch matters because it's often where the real decision begins, before the mind has the story, before the explanation or the justification. The reset is the tool for that moment. Pause, breath, body scan. Its job isn't to make the feeling disappear. Its job is to slow the override enough that you can hear your body signal and choose the next action consciously. This week the practice is very simple. Notice the flinch. If you can catch it in the moment, do the reset right there. If you catch it afterwards, just notice that you caught it and give yourself some credit for that. You don't need to do more than that. The catching is the practice. Before you go, one thing. I think this episode might be worth sharing, and I want to tell you why. Most women don't really talk about money, at least not in the places where it feels tender. Even close friends, sisters, mothers, and daughters who talk about everything else often don't talk about this. So you may have no idea which women in your life are carrying a flinch around their finances, but some of them probably are. If you found something useful in this episode, send it to a woman in your life. You don't have to pick the right one, you don't have to know what she's dealing with. You only have to trust that something here might meet her where she is. That's how this kind of thing travels. Not because someone knew exactly who needed it, but because someone passed it along out of simple care. No explanation needed. That's it for today. Next week we'll talk about receiving and why, for so many women, learning to receive is the missing piece in the financial life they've been trying to build. This is the rhythm of money, and you're living your true note in this very moment.