Ep #6: Breaking the Cycle of Not-Enoughness

You’ve felt it, right? That feeling of not-enoughness. We've all been there. Trust me, it happens to women at all income and economic levels. But it's not only not how we want to feel, it's also not the space where we make our best decisions, where we effectively problem solve, or where we feel are most confident. Stay tuned to find out how to recognize when you're feeling not-enoughness and how it affects your decision making.

I'm Kendall, and I'm going to share with you two simple, powerful strategies so you can skillfully navigate your way successfully through a cycle of not-enoughness anytime it happens to you. It's all here for you in this episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. Let's dive in.

Welcome to The Money Coach School Podcast. To really excel at coaching women, you have to be skilled, confident, and even fearless at money coaching. If you're passionate about women holding genuine money power and love supporting women entrepreneurs, then this is the show for you. Now, here's your host, money feminist Kendall SummerHawk.

Hello, beautiful coaches. I want to start today by giving a shout out to the winners of our podcast launch contest. I can't say thank you often enough for each and every one of you who followed, rated, and reviewed the show. I love you for taking that moment to do that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

So our grand prize winner, drumroll please, is Chris Williams of shineabundancenow.com. Chris is a soulful business and leadership coach for women wellness coaches and holistic practitioners. What Chris won is this gorgeous amethyst crystal glass water bottle. So thank you so much, Chris, I am thrilled to send this beautiful gift to you. It's perfect for you.

We also had three additional top winners who each won a gorgeous hardcover journal hand selected by me. So a shout out of thank you to Heather Esposito, Pamela Brewer, and Valerie Priester for being our runner up winners. We promised 100 prizes for 100 reviews. So for all of you who submitted reviews, you also won a downloadable gratitude journal. My sincere appreciation and congratulations for you. Thank you so much.

Speaking of reviews, I was reading through them, and I thought I would share one. This one is titled Kendall is every woman's money BFF. I love that. Then she writes, “Kendall always has solid, encouraging, and superiorly helpful insights for women around the topics of money and business. If you want to learn money coaching from the best, subscribe and listen to The Money Coach School Podcast with Kendall.” So thank you for submitting that review.

Now I have to be completely transparent here with you. Reading reviews out loud is really, really hard for me. It makes me blush, it makes me start to sweat a little bit, and it makes me feel all squirmy. It's really interesting because I can be on stage or on camera in front of thousands of people and totally own the space and love every moment of it. But reading a review, it makes me want to run and hide. It definitely pushes a button about owning our genius, right?

That is something we'll look at in a future episode. Because even though that doesn't sound directly related to money, trust me it is. But for today, I'm just going to practice receiving. So thank you for the reviews. All right.

So today we're discussing money and feeling what I dubbed not-enoughness. Then I'm going to give you two quick strategies to coach yourself out of feeling that you know that you're in a state of not-enoughness when you're feeling less than in some way. I think that it’s, at its heart, not-enoughness is definitely in the category of shame. It's like I'm not enough just as I am.

Now we're focusing on money not-enoughness here. So not-enoughness happens when we take an external circumstance, like our bank account balance or a spending decision we made or that credit card balance or how we handled the last money conversation with our significant other. Or the launch that didn't do as well as we'd planned on. We internalize it to mean that somehow we are not enough.

Not-enoughness robs you of your power, and it makes you feel vulnerable. It's like my launch didn't meet my goal. So I'm not enough and now I feel vulnerable. Or my bank account is low, and my credit card balance is high. So I'm not enough, and now I feel scarcity and insecure. You're getting how this goes, right?

The super sneaky thing about not-enoughness is that it happens at all income levels. You can have a goal to have a six figure launch, but it actually brings in 80,000, which is still amazing, right, and experience not-enoughness. You can have an energetic standard of always having a certain amount of money in your bank account and feel not-enoughness even though the amount of money you do have would be considered incredible by someone else.

Here's the key point. Not-enoughness doesn't go away with bigger numbers and more money. That is because it's like a gateway to feeling shame. If you don't know what to do about it, you can quickly get caught in a shame spiral. I don't want that happening for you. I want you to be able to recognize when you're in that vortex of not-enoughness and be able to skillfully navigate your way successfully through it because you are enough. It isn't a number that makes that true. It just is a fact. You are enough. You can put your hand over your heart, and my beautiful soul, say it with me, you are enough.

So let's talk about what you can do to navigate your way successfully through an experience of not-enoughness. First, you don't want to go into avoidance or pretend you're not feeling that way, but you also don't want to stay in that state for even one second longer. So the answer is having a few simple, quick strategies that you can use to coach yourself so you can coach your emotions at a minimum back to a neutral place. Even better, shift them back into feeling strong, confident, and resourceful. What I call being in your power.

The point is to get back into your power so that you can make aligned, informed decisions so that you see opportunities and choices that are there for you but that aren't visible when not-enoughness has its grip on you. Here's why this is so important. Decisions made when you're in your power are always good decisions, no matter how they turn out.

Maybe the results turn out differently than you expected. I don't want you to think about it. When you make a decision from a place of being in your power, you feel good about the decision. You build on that decision. You don't regret that decision. You can look back and see how that decision led you on your path.

Compare that to decisions made when you're in a cycle of not-enoughness. These are typically never good decisions. These are decisions made from lack or scarcity or fear of missing out or trying to catch up. These are the decisions you look back on and say what was I thinking? These are not decisions you build on. They are decisions you recover from. Trust me, we've all been there. I've been there.

So here are two coaching strategies you can use to self-coach your way successfully through an experience of not-enoughness. All right, so coaching strategy number one, I call it recall abundance. So I want you to think of a time you had more than enough. Maybe you had a big windfall of money, or you got a raise, or you landed a big client. I mean, for me, the biggest one was the first time I sold nearly a million dollars of coaching from the stage at my first big workshop. It felt amazing, right?

What's interesting is my team kept saying are you excited? Are you excited? But honestly, what I felt wasn't excitement. I mean, it was an exciting thing to have happen, no doubt. But what I felt was the deepest appreciation and gratitude for every single person in that room who had invested in themselves through the vehicle of my coaching program. I felt truly blessed to have this kind of opportunity as a woman doing something I love and will love for the rest of my life, which is coaching. I felt proud.

So for you, whatever the amount was, what did you feel having that abundance? We're recalling abundance. What did you feel? What did you appreciate? What did you feel about yourself in that experience? I want you to be really specific about those emotions and tap into that experience again now as if it's happening again, right now.

This is why I call it recalling abundance, right? You're recalling that time, whatever the amount was. It doesn't matter. It could have been $5. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you felt your own version of amazing and proud and whatever it was, and I want you to journal those emotions. By the way, if you had that experience once, you can have it again.

All right, the second coaching strategy is what I call amplifying gratitude. Now, I know you've heard about gratitude over and over again, but stay with me here because I have a twist on how I look at it that you probably have not heard before. I'll share that in just a moment.

So amplifying gratitude is gratitude for what you do have, but this does not mean settling. Gratitude is not acceptance. I think that people often get that confused. Gratitude is not acceptance. Gratitude is saying thank you. So you can feel gratitude and want more. You can be full of appreciation. One of my favorite, favorite ways to feel and one of my favorite words, the word appreciation. You can be full of appreciation and want the situation to be different going forward.

Gratitude works because it gets you to momentarily stopped striving, and instead, add up what is. It's a soothing and calming practice, which is what our hypercritical not-enoughness brain needs in that moment. In the coaching space, I often see gratitude being used truthfully as a smokescreen for guilt or even martyrdom.

This is a hard no for me. This is not saying oh, I should be grateful because. No, when in reality, you're feeling resentment or frustrated. Gratitude is something you never fake. You never just pay lip service to. Gratitude for what you have is a full throated yes, this is what I appreciate. This is what I'm grateful for. It's not a substitute for feeling crappy, but it's an entirely different emotion that you are choosing to step into right now. It's full throated, fully felt, all in on appreciation.

So here's the twist on gratitude I promised you. Usually gratitude is expressed about other people or things that are external to us. But next level gratitude is you are appreciating you. This is saying gratitude statements that start with I am, or I know, or I can be.

So for example, I'll say things like I am grateful I am creative. I'll say I am grateful I know how to truly help someone through my money coaching. I am grateful I can be trying new things. It is impossible to be in a state of not-enoughness in the same moment of practicing gratitude for who you are. You just can't do it. It's one or the other. The more you practice the gratitude for who you are, the less and less unless you're going to feel the state of not-enoughness. Isn't that a cool thing?

Here's the thing, we make amazing decisions. We see incredible possibilities and opportunities for ourselves when we're feeling whole, aligned, and in our power. But if you're in a spiral of not-enoughness, you're just not going to see those opportunities. Decisions are going to feel hard or you're indecisive, that's what happens for me. It feels like all there are, are closed doors. Like every problem does not have a solution. We may know in our brain that that isn't true, but it sure feels like it in the moment.

So the point here isn't trying to avoid feeling that way. It's knowing how to self-coach your way through it using the strategies I just gave you, recalling abundance and amplifying gratitude. Because every problem has multiple solutions. Every number you're looking at that may feel like a low for you right now may have been a high for you at some point in the past. You are not your numbers. Your numbers will absolutely change in the future.

The numbers you want to be experiencing, that bank balance or that amount in savings or paying off debt or how much money you bring in this month, it's all available to you. Did you hear that? It's all available to you. Your job is to stay in your power. Your job is not to judge yourself when you get caught in feeling not-enoughness. Your job is not to shame yourself for anything from the past. Your job is to get back to being in your power anytime you feel wobbly. That's it.

You can do this. Guess what? You can practice recalling abundance and amplifying gratitude anytime you want. Why wait? Why not practice it now today? I think you'll be amazed at how you feel as a result. That, my beautiful coach, is why I'm here to show you the way. You've got this, and I've got you. Thank you for listening, and I can't wait to connect with you again next week in our next episode.

Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you follow so you never miss an episode. Also, I would so love and appreciate if you would leave a 5-star review. Your review supports women just like you in discovering all of the juicy tips and insights I’m sharing here on how to coach women on money.

And if you want to learn how to excel at coaching women on money, definitely go to KendallSummerHawk.com and check out the wealth of money coach trainings that we have for you. Thanks so much for being part of this money coaching movement and for tuning into the show every week.