The Skill of Receiving - S1E7

What if earning more money isn’t the thing that creates wealth in your life?

You’ve probably spent a lot of your life being the one who gives. This episode asks what happens when you turn in the other direction, and what that turn has to do with building real wealth.

Receiving is a financial skill. Not a feeling, not a personality trait, but something you develop the same way you’ve developed every other capacity in your adult life. In this episode, we name four things that quietly block receiving, and look at the deeper reasons some women can work hard, earn well, and still feel like money moves through their lives without truly accumulating. Then we’ll do a direct practice to begin closing that gap this week.

This episode is especially for the woman who has spent years being the one who gives, handles, supports, earns, and manages, but is ready to learn another financial rhythm.

New here? Episode 3 is a good complement to this one. This show builds as a progression. Each episode amplifies the effects of the ones before it.

Follow the show so you don’t miss what’s coming.

Next week, we take everything we’ve built so far and bring it to one money situation you’ve been avoiding, so something new can begin to emerge.

This is 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

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome back to the rhythm of money. This episode is for the woman who has spent most of her adult life being the one who gives. And maybe lately she started to wonder what it would mean to be the one who lets something in. Today we're going to talk about receiving. And I mean receiving as a financial skill, not as a personality trait, not as something you either have or don't have. A skill. Something you can develop the same way you developed so many other capabilities in your life. If this is your first time here, welcome. You can trace what we're doing today to episode 3, where we first named the pattern of overgiving, but today's practice also stands on its own. Today we're going to look at the other side of that pattern. This, for many women, may be the most loaded financial act of all. I want to start with a sentence that may sound strange at first. Wealth is not built by earning. It's built by receiving, and then by letting what you've received stay. If that sounds wrong to you, stay with me. There's a whole financial life underneath that sentence. I've spoken before about reaching my early 40s with almost $80,000 of debt, and that's not even counting my student loans. And I've also shared that over the next 10 or 11 years after that, I went from that deep, sunken place to being able to retire in the sun. I don't always get into the details of how that happened, but there's one piece of it that comes to mind very clearly when I talk about the difference between earning and receiving. For a long time, I thought the answer was earning. Earn more. Negotiate better. Raise your rates, ask for the higher salary. And to be clear, learning to negotiate salaries when I was offered a job was a big step for me. That was real progress. But it was still inside the frame of trying to build wealth by earning more. The deeper shift came later, after I started my own business. At a certain point, I had people who wanted to hire my company, but they wanted me to do things I didn't personally know how to do. So I had to hire people who did know how to do those things. And I paid them very well. In some cases, I paid them about 50% more than they were used to making. But I also kept the difference between what I paid them and what I charged the clients. So, just as an example, I might have been earning $100 an hour from each person's work who was working for me. At one point, I think I had nine people working for me, so you can do the math on that. No one was going to hire me personally at $900 an hour. That wasn't a rate I could ask for. Just a couple of years before that, I was so proud of myself for negotiating from a $19 an hour job offer up to a $23 per hour accepted offer. Literally, it was like two, two, three years difference. So $900 an hour was not a rate I could even imagine asking for. But I could have $900 an hour coming in during hours when I wasn't the one doing the work. That changed something for me, and I don't just mean the dollars, because I began to see that wealth wasn't only about what I could personally earn through my own effort, my own hours, my own labor, my own intelligence, my own output. It was also about what I could allow to come in and what I could allow to keep compounding, what I could receive through a structure I had built, a structure that can function without my needing to keep adding new input every hour myself. What I could let move into my life without immediately saying, no, that's too much. Or I have to be the one doing every part of this. Or I'm only allowed to benefit from the hours I personally work. Now, there's more to this than that, and we'll get into more of it as the show goes on, but I want you to hear the shift right now. Earning is one channel. Receiving and compounding is another. And for many women, the earning channel is far more developed than the receiving channel. That was true for me for sure. Let me say it another way. You can earn an enormous amount of money over a lifetime and still arrive at 65 with very little to show for it. And someone else can earn more modestly and arrive at 65 with more than enough. The difference between those two lives is almost never only how much came in as an hourly rate. It's how much was allowed to stay. The math of compounding, the math of accumulation, the math of wealth building only works on the portion that stays. Money that comes in and goes right back out doesn't compound. It doesn't grow. It doesn't become more of itself. And that's true no matter how lovingly it left, no matter how generously, no matter how justifiably. That isn't a moral statement. It's a mechanical one. The same way breath only feeds your blood if you let the inhale finish before you exhale. In and out. Both parts matter. And here's what I've noticed over many years of working with women by phone and in long conversations about money. The women I've known who struggle the most financially are not, as a rule, the women who earn the least. They're the women whose receiving channel is at least partly closed. The money comes in, and almost immediately, sometimes within minutes, sometimes within days, it has somewhere else to be. A bill, a child, a parent, a repair, a cause, a rebellious splurge. Something pulls it back out before it ever really settles into being hers. So no matter how much she earns, her financial life still feels like just barely. Just barely enough. Just barely on time. Just barely keeping up. So she works harder, she earns more. And somehow the just barely feeling doesn't change. And the decisions that support her staying in that feeling also don't change. And I'm definitely going to talk much more about that later. Because the leak isn't within the earning, at least not entirely. The leak is also within the accumulating. I want to be precise about what I mean here and not let this be fuzzy. I'm not talking about gratitude practice. Gratitude is essential. That's just not what I mean today. I'm not talking about manifestation or vision boards or believing the universe wants you to have nice things. Those frameworks have their place. And there's a more science-based version of some of that that I am going to teach you in future episodes. But that's not what I mean today. I'm talking about the very specific physical and emotional capacity to let something come toward you, let it land, let it stay, let it compound onto itself without your continual input of energy being required for it to do so. So not to push it back out, not to redirect it before it's even arrived, not to move it along so quickly that some part of you never quite registers that it came to you at all. Let me give you some examples of what receiving looks like in an actual financial life. It looks like a paycheck hitting your account, and you let yourself look at the number for one full breath before your mind jumps to everything it has to cover. It looks like someone complimenting your work and you say thank you. And then you stop. Thank you is a complete sentence. You don't deflect, you don't minimize it, you don't immediately compliment them back to even out the energy. It looks like a refund arriving in the mail, and you let it sit in savings for one week before you decide what to do with it. Just one week, just to show your system that money can arrive and not immediately leave. It looks like receiving a gift without instantly calculating what you owe in return. It looks like getting a raise and not immediately finding three new expenses that consume the entire difference. It looks like receiving an inheritance, large or small, and giving yourself a long moment to acknowledge that something was given to you before the question of what you owe to everyone else crowds the moment out. It looks like accepting full payment for your work, the actual number you quoted, without shaving a little off at the last minute because you feel guilty. It looks like saying yes when someone offers to pay for the meal, and meaning it, and not quietly finding a way to even it out later either. Each of these is a very small act. Each of them takes seconds to do. And each of them, repeated over a lifetime, affects whether money accumulates in your life or simply moves through your life on its way to somewhere else. So I want to walk you through what gets in the way. Because for most women, it isn't just one thing. Several things are usually happening at once. The first is the reflex to redirect. For many women, money is barely in her hands before it's already been mentally assigned to someone else. The thought so fast she may not even notice it. Oh good, now I can pay that thing. Now I can help her or him. Now I can finally fix that situation. Now there's nothing wrong with using money to take care of things. That isn't the problem. The problem is the speed. The reflex skips over the moment of arrival. The money never quite gets to be hers before it's already going somewhere else. And the speed matters more than it may seem. The second thing is the question of deserving. For many women, especially women who grew up around money tightness or money shame, the arrival of money brings a quick, almost invisible question Do I really deserve this? It may not come in those exact words, it may come as discomfort, a little urge to give it back, a sense that it's too much, or too easy, or too lucky, or that if she accepts it, there's going to be a price. When that question is running underneath, the body can respond to incoming money almost like it's bracing. There's tension there, and you want to release that tension. And the fastest way to release the bracing is to get the money moving outward again. Spend it. Give it. Pledge it to something. Assign it somewhere. Anything that makes the discomfort stop. The third thing is the fear of being seen as the one who has. And has without apology. This one can be harder to name. For many women, especially women raised to be modest or not to put themselves above others, having money can bring a very particular discomfort. It's not the discomfort of not enough. No, it's the discomfort of having more. More than a friend who's struggling. More than a sibling who's barely making it. More than a parent who never had what you have now. More than someone you've never met, but whose image has been drilled into your mind all your life. To let money accumulate is to let yourself become visibly the one with more, and unapologetically so. For many women, that identity feels more disturbing than being the one who is always just barely. So she stays just barely. Not because she's failed to earn, but because some part of her keeps making sure nothing accumulates. Some part of her keeps making sure she is seen giving back at least as much as she has received. And the fourth thing is the fear that letting money stay means caring about money too much to be a good person. For some women, this is the deepest one. Allowing money to accumulate would mean admitting that money matters to her, that she wants it, that she would be disappointed to lose it, that it's a part of her life in a way she may have spent decades pretending it wasn't. And for a woman who has built an identity around being the one for whom money's not the point, that can feel like a small betrayal of self. A loss of the moral high ground. A surrender of the position that has felt safer than wanting. I could keep going. There are other things. The fear of being seen as a bank once people see what she has, the guilt of being lucky in a world where many people are not. The old script that women with money are hard or cold or selfish, or the fear of being seen as stuck up, or that other word women or trained to avoid at all costs comes after Rich and rhymes. The point is not to map every variation right now. The point is to notice this. For many women, receiving is not passive. It is an active capacity that is being blocked. And that capacity has often been blocked in some specific places for a very long time. Clearing that blockage is what we're looking at today. Letting a layer of it dissolve. So, what would it look like to begin opening the receiving channel more fully for you? I'm not going to ask you to change anything today. We've been careful about that all season, and we're going to stay careful. I don't want to activate your mind's defenses of the status quo. What I'm going to ask is much smaller. And you can do it right now, inside this episode. We're going to practice receiving right now, just for a few moments. So your body can have an actual reference experience of what it feels like. Take a breath before we begin. If you're driving right now, please keep your eyes on the road. Let this next part be a soft background. Your body can still receive it. In fact, your body is going to receive something gently right now, whether you participate fully with attention or not. For everyone else though, settle wherever you are. Soften shoulders. Soft jaw. Let your breath find a little more depth than it had a moment ago. Notice the ground beneath you. The chair, the floor, the seat. Something steady is supporting your body right now. Now bring to mind one thing you received in the last week. It doesn't have to be money. In fact, for this first practice, it may be easier if it isn't money. It might be a kind word from someone. A compliment. It might be help with something. Or a meal someone made. And if nothing like that comes to mind, think of a meal you enjoyed recently. Think of all the hands that touched each ingredient before it became the food on your plate. The growing, the harvesting, the transporting, the preparing, all of the good intention and life energy moving toward you to sustain you in that one meal. Just pick one specific thing and see it in your mind. See the person giving to you. Hear their words. Feel what it was to receive from them. Receive it again. Right now. Let it land. Let it arrive as if it's happening again in this moment. And let yourself savor it this time. Now notice what happens in your body when you let something good come toward you and stay. Is there warmth? If so, where? Is there a softening somewhere? Where? Is there resistance? If so, where? Where in your body? Now for some of you, this is going to feel surprisingly easy. The warmth will come, and something in you may think, yes, of course, this is lovely. But for others of you, this may feel surprisingly hard. Something may push back. Something may want to deflect or qualify or move on. Something may start calculating how to repay or balance or give something back. Or there may be just guilt. Whatever happens is information. If it's easy, notice the ease. That's part of your receiving capacity, and it's already working. Your attention to it can help it grow. If it's hard, notice the hardness. That's a place where the channel may be closed. And the noticing is what's beginning to open it. Just notice what arises in your body as you see yourself receiving this thing. Go ahead and receive one more thing right now. Pick something else and relive the receiving of it. But this time, I want to ask you to do one more thing as you receive it. So stay with whatever good thing you're bringing to mind right now. And quietly inside yourself, say something like this. I let this be mine. I let it stay. You don't have to believe that completely. You don't have to feel it fully. Just say it to yourself as if you're speaking to your body. I let this be mine. I let it stay. Now notice how your body responds. This is the receiving muscle, this exact movement, letting something arrive and giving it permission to stay. This is part of what we're going to keep building as the show moves forward, especially when we get into the more direct financial material. Because when we start talking about systems and saving, investing, retirement, and real accumulation, I need you to be willing to let those things work for you. Maybe for the first time. Today is just the first touch. Alright, take a deeper breath now. Okay. Come fully back to where you are. Notice the space around you. And notice yourself in it. Now I want to bring this back to money specifically because I want you to have something simple to work with this week. I'm not going to ask you to save more or start a budget. I'm not going to ask you to refuse the request or change any patterns. What I'm going to ask you to do is one small experiment. This week, something is going to come to you. It might be your paycheck, it might be a payment from a client, it might be a small refund, a Venmo from a friend, a check from somewhere, a transfer between your own accounts. It might also be something that isn't money, but still counts as receiving. An offer of help. A meal someone makes for you. A kind word, a thoughtful inclusion. When something arrives, pause just for one breath and savor it. Notice it landed. Notice in real time this is here. Notice what it feels like in your body to fully take it in. Feel the goodness of it. And if it helps, say quietly to yourself I let this be mine. I let it stay. A small ceremony of receiving and digesting, even though no one else knows you're doing it. You can still do whatever you were going to do with it afterward. You know, pay the bill, move it to the account, follow the plan. The plan can proceed. What I'm asking is for the savoring before the plan. That one breath of yes, this came to me, and I accept it, and I enjoy it. So some small part of you registers that something arrived, that you didn't only give this week, receiving happened, and you were there for it. That's working the muscle. And every time you use it, you're teaching your nervous system that something is allowed to come toward you and become a part of you and increase your capacity further. And you're allowed to fully be there for its arrival and enjoy it. Here's what I've noticed in my own life and in the lives of many women I've worked with over the years. The more you savor receiving, the more there is to receive. I'm not making a metaphysical claim here. I'm not saying the universe rewards gratitude. I'm saying something simpler and more physical. When your body learns through experience that incoming is safe, that receiving is allowed, that arrival can be noticed and nothing bad happens as a result, your whole orientation toward what's available begins to shift. You start to see things that were already coming toward you, but that you were missing. You start to receive what was on the verge of being offered instead of deflecting it before it could fully come in. You become open in a way other people can feel, and people respond to that openness. I've seen this so many times that I'll say it plainly. I expect some good things are going to come to you this week. Things you weren't already expecting. Things you weren't planning for. So here's the second part of that practice. Come back and tell me what came. Bookmark this episode, and when something arrives that you didn't see coming, drop a comment under this episode wherever you're watching or listening. Tell me what unfolded, what came in, what you noticed yourself receiving that you might have missed before. I truly want to hear what happens for you. Let me bring together what we've covered before we close. We named that wealth is built by receiving and by letting some of what is received stay and compound, not by earning alone. For many women, the leak is not only at the earning step, it's more at the receiving and accumulating step. We named four things that can often block receiving the reflex to redirect, the question of deserving, the fear of being seen as the one who has more, and the fear that letting money stay means admitting it matters. We practice receiving directly with a good thing from your week so your body could have a reference experience of what fully receiving can actually feel like. And we named your practice for this coming week. Savor whatever comes. Money, kindness, help, gifts, a good word, a small surprise, let it land. And if it helps, seal the moment with I let this be mine, I let it stay. Then come back and tell me what arrived. In the next episode, we're going to work with one number together. The number you've been most afraid of in some area of your life. We'll use the reset to make contact with it, and we'll keep this receiving practice running underneath. We'll use everything we've built so far, and then we'll go further than the reset alone can take us. Back in episode 5, we touched the first layer of Dr. Eugene Ginlin's focusing practice, just enough to introduce the felt sense in your body. Next time we'll go deeper with that around one specific money issue. You'll begin to hear what your body's actually saying about that situation in the language your body actually speaks. This is the rhythm of money. And you are living your true note in this very moment.