Tired of the relentless pressure to constantly “better” yourself? In this eye-opening episode of Financial Feminist, host Tori Dunlap sits down with Master Certified Life Coach Kara Loewentheil to dismantle the toxic narrative of self-hate that’s often ingrained in the self-development industry, especially for women. They delve into how societal expectations, particularly for women, fuel a cycle of self-criticism and never-ending striving for external validation.
This conversation will challenge you to rethink your approach to personal growth and goals, offering a fresh perspective on how to achieve success without sacrificing self-love. Kara shares her own transformative journey and provides actionable insights on how to rewire your brain for self-acceptance, create your own validation, and break free from the emotional vending machine trap. Tune in to discover how to fuel your personal development with self-compassion, not self-loathing.
Key takeaways:
- Reframe self-development. Shift away from self-hate as a motivator and embrace self-compassion as a driving force for growth.
- Challenge societal expectations. Recognize and reject unrealistic standards that promote self-doubt and the need for external validation.
- Create your own validation. Learn to trust your own decisions and create internal sources of validation rather than relying on others.
- Change your thoughts, change your brain. Practice intentionally choosing new beliefs and rewiring your brain for self-acceptance.
- Redefine success. Understand that true success comes from a place of self-love and authenticity, not from conforming to external pressures.
- Practice self-mercy. Be kind to yourself, forgive yourself for past mistakes, and embrace the journey of personal growth with grace.
Notable quotes
“You cannot hate the journey and love the destination, that’s not how the brain works.”
“What if it’s possible that you’ve achieved what you’ve achieved not because of all your relentless self-hatred, but in spite of it?”
“Women are socialized to believe that they can’t trust themselves at all, they can’t make their own decisions. We’re constantly crowdsourcing for what decision to make…Women will say that they’re indecisive, but you’re indecisive because you’ve been literally taught that you can’t trust your own decisions. It’s not a personality trait, it’s socialization.”
Episode at-a-glance:
≫ 01:35 Unraveling feminist self-help
≫ 07:36 From Ivy League lawyer to life coach
≫ 11:07 The state of women’s rights and financial empowerment
≫ 20:40 Bridging feminist beliefs and personal feelings
≫ 26:14 Navigating social anxiety and people-pleasing
≫ 28:32 Society’s impossible standards for women
≫ 29:41 Rewiring thought patterns to combat anxiety
≫ 32:03 The self-hate cycle in self-development
≫ 41:35 Seeking external validation and emotional vending machines
≫ 45:38 Embracing self-compassion and changing our thoughts
Kara’s Links:
The Feminist Self-Help Society
RESOURCES:
Feeling Overwhelmed? Start here!
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Meet Kara
Kara Loewentheil, J.D., is a Master Certified Life Coach, Host of the top-rated podcast UnFck Your Brain, and creator of The Clutch: A feminist mindset revolution. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, she did what every Ivy League feminist lawyer should do: Quit a prestigious academic career to become a life coach! Five years after leaving the law she has taught thousands of women how to identify the ways that sexist socialization impacts their brains, and how to literally rewire their thought patterns to create true authentic confidence from within. Her podcast, UnFck Your Brain, which combines evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and feminist theory in concrete and practical teachings and tools, has more than 18 million downloads. In 2019 she launched The Clutch, a feminist coaching community aimed at spreading the feminist mindset revolution across the globe. Since then thousands of women have joined and learned how to overcome insecurity, anxiety, imposter syndrome, people pleasing, and their dependence on external validation. Kara specializes in teaching a step-by-step system that identifies and removes internalized oppression and creates new and unshakeable self-confidence. Because true self-love is a radical act for women, and because women who love themselves are women who change the world.
Transcript:
Kara Loewentheil:
One of the reasons humans are so sensitive to rejection is that we evolved in small tribes of hunter-gatherers where you get to depend on your neighbors, et cetera. But what’s missing was all the social context of yes, and women are taught the key to not being rejected and dying is make everyone happy with you all the time, look a certain way, don’t be too mouthy, don’t have needs, put everyone else first. These things wrap into each other. The reason that it feels so physically terrifying not to people please is not because you’re weak, or you’re stupid, or you’re whatever. It’s because society has taught you that a woman’s role in life essentially is to serve other people.
Tori Dunlap:
Hello, financial feminists. Welcome to the show. If you’re new here, hi, my name is Tori. I am a New York Times bestselling author, I am the host of this podcast. I have hair on my mic. I’m trying to pick it off because it’s in my face. And we are a community of over five million and financial feminists. We teach people all over the world how to save money, pay off debt, start investing, start businesses and fight the patriarchy by getting you rich. If you’re an oldie but a goodie, you knew all of that.
Welcome back to the show. I will do a shameless plug that Financial Feminist is best listened to with friends. You can share our podcast wherever you listen to whomever you think you would be into it. You can also tag us at @financialfeministpodcast on Instagram. You can share posts there. You can also watch most episodes on YouTube. The YouTube link is down below in the show description. If you’re more of a visual person, you want to watch the video, great. We’d love to see you there.
Yeah. This is a fun episode with somebody that I’ve admired for a very long time. And if you feel like your brain is the enemy, if you feel like you don’t know how to become better friends with all of the racing thoughts in your head, today’s episode is going to help. Kara Loewentheil, JD is a master certified life coach, founder of the School of New Feminist Thought, and the host of the internationally top-ranked podcast Unfuck Your Brain: Feminist Self-Help For Everyone. Which has 50 million downloads and counting. Her first book, Take Back Your Brain: How A Sexist Society Gets In Your Head and How to Get It Out has been called a galvanizing debut by Publishers Weekly, chosen as a must read by the Next Big Ideas Book Club for May 2024. And has been praised by New York Times bestselling authors, including Mel Robbins, Dr. Marissa Franco, and yours truly, Tori Dunlap.
A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, Kara did what every Ivy League lawyer should do, quit a prestigious academic career to become a life coach. Eight years after she stepped down as director of a think tank at Columbia Law School, again no big deal, she has created a multiple seven-figure business, taught millions of women how to identify the ways that sexist socialization impacts their brains, and helps women all over the world rewire their thought patterns to liberate themselves from the inside-out.
We get into a few great topics surrounding feminism, philosophy and psychology. We’re going academic, y’all. It’s going to be very fun. All of the ways our brains are programmed by patriarchy, especially if you were raised as a woman. The impact that women’s rights, or lack thereof, have had on our finances. We’re going to talk about navigating self-help culture, because it often feels like self-hate culture. And we talk about how to find validation from within, rather than from external sources. I’m looking at myself when I say that. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and get into it.
But first, a word from our sponsors.
I’m digging the bust behind you.
Kara Loewentheil:
Thank you. That’s from our rebrand. We just became the School of New Feminist Thought, went through a whole rebrand. We had a real Greek philosopher, goddess theme going on.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it.
Kara Loewentheil:
The person who did our rebrand, who’s now my marketing sales director, was like, “Good news and bad news. We do have some busts. Some of them are not returnable or rentable, so here you go.”
Tori Dunlap:
I want to be clear to our audio-only listeners, it is a bust you would find in … Well, you can find both busts in a museum. It is a sculpture.
Kara Loewentheil:
It’s a sculpture, yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Of a person, not of titties.
Kara Loewentheil:
It’s Athena. I think it’s Athena.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh! Cool.
Kara Loewentheil:
She’s light, she’s not made of marble.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, okay.
Kara Loewentheil:
She’s plastic.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s very classy, let me tell you.
Kara Loewentheil:
Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
It really classes up the vibe.
Kara Loewentheil:
Listen, having a rare book dealer for a father just really gets you off on a good foot for your backgrounds.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m sorry, I wasn’t expected to talk about … Rare book. Tell me everything. How does that work? We’ll get into the official questions in a second.
Kara Loewentheil:
Listen, a segue is fine. I learned a lot of about value and business from him so it’s a perfect segue. Yeah, he’s a rare book and photography dealer. That’s behind me, you can see if you’re watching video, there’s a first edition of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. There’s a first printing of the first book that was published in English about women and the law, so it’s from 1670 or something. Got a Virginia Woolf back there. It’s a whole …
Tori Dunlap:
We might have to edit down my gasp because that was the most dramatic gasp. You have a first edition of P&P?
Kara Loewentheil:
I do, I do.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s in good shape?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. I can show it to you if you want. I don’t know how much time we have. You live in New York too, right?
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t live in New York, I live in Seattle, but I come to New York all the time.
Kara Loewentheil:
There you go. You can come hold the first edition.
Tori Dunlap:
Which one behind you? Which one is it?
Kara Loewentheil:
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice is the flat red.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay.
Kara Loewentheil:
Those two flat reds.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
One is Virginia Woolf, Room of One’s Own.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, cool.
Kara Loewentheil:
Classic feminist literature.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Kara Loewentheil:
On top of that is Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
Tori Dunlap:
That is lovely!
Kara Loewentheil:
Then the green one next to it, the green one next to it is yeah, 1632, The Laws Resolution of Women’s Rights. The first book written-
Tori Dunlap:
Wow!
Kara Loewentheil:
About women’s rights in the law.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m sure he has seen many of them, but I haven’t because this is not my thing. Gatsby is my favorite book.
Kara Loewentheil:
Gatsby? All right.
Tori Dunlap:
I own multiple different versions. If he ever finds a first edition Gatsby-
Kara Loewentheil:
I’m on it.
Tori Dunlap:
Please let me know.
Kara Loewentheil:
Listen, I’m sure he can find. First edition Gatsby, I’m on it.
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t even know how much that would cost. I probably should look that up before I say.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah, you’d get to decide before you … I’m not just going to have him purchase and send you a bill. He’s like, “Great, it’s 100 grand, here’s a bill.”
Tori Dunlap:
No, but I haven’t even looked up is it $500, is it $5 million? I have not looked up how much it would be.
Kara Loewentheil:
I have no idea. It’s not going to be either of those. Honestly, if I had to guess, it would be in the 10s of thousands?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, that might be out of my budget.
Kara Loewentheil:
I honestly don’t know.
Tori Dunlap:
But we’ll talk.
Kara Loewentheil:
I honestly have no idea. It so depends on-
Tori Dunlap:
That’s so cool.
Kara Loewentheil:
It’s what you get.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I have so many questions for you and for your father.
Kara Loewentheil:
This is going to be his favorite podcast interview I ever do. Listen, anytime. Come to New York, we’ll take you out, you can hold the books.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it! When I talk to interesting people, there is a version of me that’s like, “Oh, I could have done this for a living.”
Kara Loewentheil:
Totally, yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
I have that with all of my musician friends. I literally had a conversation with my friend who’s a producer.
Kara Loewentheil:
Oh, that one I could not have done. I could have been a rare book dealer, but not a musician.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I ended up talking for five hours with him about shit. I’m like, “Oh, this could have been my life.” I just love books, love libraries. That’s just so fascinating.
Okay. Hi, welcome to the show. I’m so excited to see you.
Kara Loewentheil:
Thanks for having me.
Tori Dunlap:
If you want a rare book, reach out to her father.
Kara Loewentheil:
Reach out.
Tori Dunlap:
Shameless plug. Talk to me first, I love the background of went to Harvard Law, no big deal, like it’s hard. Then decided to quit and become a life coach.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Talk to me about that. How did that happen?
Kara Loewentheil:
I call that the Ivy League lawyer to life coach pipeline. I went to Yale undergrad, I went to Harvard Law School. I was a reproductive rights litigator, and then an academic. I would say the through line is I’ve been a professional feminist my whole life, in one way or another. But I also, in my personal life, was always a … Not a seeker, because it wasn’t spiritual and I wasn’t going to Ashrams. But from a very young age, I just remember looking around at humans and being like, “There’s got to be a better way of doing things.” It just feels like people have a lot of thoughts and feelings-
Tori Dunlap:
Miserable.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah, just a mess. It seems like a lot of things are a mess and there’s got to be a better way. When I was 16, I told my parents I wanted to go to therapy. I was the first person in my family to go to therapy. I was always into psychology, and self-help, and self-development. I think from two motivations. One being this more positive one of always being interested in how can we live more intentionally and create the life we want. One of them being the patriarchal socialization in a woman’s brain of, “I’m broken, I need to be fixed, there’s something wrong with me. I’m not good enough, I’m not lovable. I’m too fat, I’m too much, I’m too loud,” all the socialization we get.
I tried a variety of different things. I got really into yoga for a while and meditation. It’s the white girl self-development journey. I went to therapy for many years. Then I found coaching. The first coach I found, bless her heart, the system was … She worked for a big coaching company in New York, actually. She was a lovely woman. But the system was you decide something you want to change, let’s say you want to stop smoking. You pick a reward and a punishment for yourself. Then you just implement those. I was like, “But I’m over three years old so I know that I could just give myself the reward. What are you talking about? That doesn’t work.” But I’m not actually going to throw $5 out the window if I smoke a cigarette and I just know that no one’s coming along to make me. How does this work? That was my ignominious introduction to coaching.
But eventually, I found the teacher I learned from, Brooke Castillo of the Life Coach School, and learned that you could actually change the way you think on purpose. And that your thoughts were what were creating your feelings and your actions, and that was pretty fucking mind-blowing. I applied the work to myself for about a year, it made such a huge difference in my life. I experienced it as a wake up revelation like, “I’m going to become a coach and I’m going to work with lawyers.” But I, six months later, was talking to a friend that I saw maybe every two years, only when I went out to California. I was like, “Oh my God, wild news! I’m doing this thing.” She was like, “You’ve been joking about moving to Costa Rica and becoming a life coach for years.”
I realized that was true but I had never even been able to admit that to myself because I was on this extremely traditional career path of go to an Ivy League law school, clerk for a Federal judge. Do a litigation fellowship, do an academic fellowship. I was supposed to become a law professor in my brain. It took a lot of self-development work to even get to the point that my brain could allow into consciousness as a real possibility that I could do this thing that I obviously had been really wanting to do.
Tori Dunlap:
Something else.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
You got your start in the women’s rights world. What did you learn during that time about the state of women’s rights in this country? Which, abysmal.
Kara Loewentheil:
Only good things because it’s all in such great shape.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s all roses! It’s unicorns and butterflies.
Kara Loewentheil:
It’s amazing.
Tori Dunlap:
Talk to me about what you learned. Then, tell me how that effects our ability to do things like make money, stand in our power, be the best versions of ourselves?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. My experience in the women’s rights movement, was I think like a lot of people’s experience in social justice movements, which is a lot of burnout, a lot of anger, a lot of stress. Some of that is situational. I cared a lot about abortion rights and reproductive rights, you’re working on an issue that people’s lives are at stake. The stakes just feel very high. But also, there’s such an endemic level of burnout in social justice work and in women’s rights work. I think it’s partly because, and this is what I came to realize and why I changed careers, because we’re paying so much attention to, and we should be paying attention to, the social structures and the policy problems. Like we need new laws protecting reproductive rights, we need mandatory maternity leave and parental leave in general. The feminist movement was 99.9% focused on policies and structural changes. Nobody was really paying attention to what living in a sexist society does to your brain.
I would be working at the highest level of reproductive rights organizations in the country, the ones who are bringing the cases to the Supreme Court, be sitting in a staff meeting with the women who argue it at Supreme Court. Literally, the top experts in the world in their field. People are still starting things in meetings like, “Well, maybe this is stupid.” Or, “Maybe this has already been said. Or, “I don’t know if this makes sense.” I just had this moment in a meeting where I was like, “Oh, this is in our heads.” It’s both. The structural problems exist and we’ve internalized it in this way where you can’t achieve your way out of it. You succeed enough to change the thoughts in your brain. That’s what started me down that coaching journey.
I think that shows up so much in women’s relationship to money because there’s so much socialization around money. I have a book coming out called Take Back Your Brain. In the book, I talk about the three money lies and the three new money mindsets that women need because there’s so much socialization that money is not for women, that we’re bad at it, that we can’t be trusted with it, that we can’t understand it. Also, it’s math and math is for boys, too. That we just need to be … If you just put your head down, and work, and don’t ask for anything, and don’t want anything, maybe a nice man will come along to reward you someday.
Tori Dunlap:
All things I talk about in my book, too. The narratives that are just perpetuated that, frankly, keep us underpaid and overworked, and playing small. Because if we believe that money is bad and that the pursuit of money is bad … If we believe that, to your point and it’s also in my book that just be a good little girl and do your work, and somebody’s going to come along, you’re exactly right, and reward you. Or that loyalty wins. Yes. Put your head down, be a good employee and later, somebody will just give you a raise. I wish that’s how it worked.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. Or some man will come rescue you by marrying you.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
The level at which … Working in this nonprofit, I had colleagues who were very devoted, wonderful people, and also a lot of them were married to investment bankers.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Kara Loewentheil:
This is very culturally and demographically specific obviously, not everybody’s raised with this expectation. But a lot of at least middle class to upper class white women I think are raised with the even unconscious expectation. Even if the conscious expectation is yes, you’re going to work, and have a job and a career, the unconscious expectation is probably if you’re straight and you marry a man, he’ll make more than you, and you can work in a lower paid career.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
Or you can take time off to be a stay-at-home mom.
Tori Dunlap:
Even if you work, he’s going to be the one that handles the finances.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right, right.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re handling the day-to-day, you’re handling the-
Kara Loewentheil:
Right, you’re managing the household but not the purse.
Tori Dunlap:
Right, but not investing.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
And buying a house.
Kara Loewentheil:
Totally.
Tori Dunlap:
And negotiating your salary. And all of these really big decisions that actually make a difference.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. When we talk about patriarchy and money, we were already talking about some of the narratives that we hear as individuals that we internalize. The other one is, like you said, money is math and you’re bad with math, which is a whole conversation about how you’re actually told growing up as a girl that math is for boys. By the way, money is not math, money is emotions. It’s psychological. It’s more about how you manage your brain, to your point, then how you actually look at numbers on a spreadsheet.
Give me some examples throughout history where patriarchy has impacted women and still is today. I’m thinking about couldn’t open a credit card in your own name until the 1970s.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Or a bank account in your own name.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
Give me some of those things that is impacting our money from the patriarchy.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. This goes back very far. One of the things that I loved about writing a book is that you can weave in this context, because the context actually is important. I think that when women understand the historical context, it not only helps you understand our problematic structural, again, policies and laws. But it helps you understand why these things may feel so true, be so reflected in the culture. I think the experience that a lot of women have in this day and age is being like, “I don’t even know why I believe this thought. I didn’t pick this thought, it’s just in my brain. I don’t want to believe it, but it’s just there.” The historical context helps you understand why.
In Western society, for certainly since the Middle Ages up until, I don’t know, 30 years ago, women were legally subordinate financially. For a long time, until in the US about the 1830s, when the first state passed the first Married Women’s Property Act, married women were under what was known as coverture, couverture if you’re French, which was the legal fiction that a man and his wife were one legal person, and that legal person was the man. You weren’t forming a third new legal person. It wasn’t like picking a new surname for both of you. You were just now the man. You were subsumed under him, like his child or his livestock. He owned you and was in charge of you. Married women couldn’t own property. You couldn’t have a bank account. You couldn’t have a job. If you did have a job, you were not entitled to own the wages from your job.
If you weren’t married, sometimes … If you were upper middle class and had any money, and weren’t married, you could sometimes control your own money if you were a widow with no male relatives. But if you were unmarried, it was your husband or your brothers. Somebody was always in charge of you. Women literally, until very recently historically, in the West did not have control over their money. Women have always worked outside the home and made money, or done economically productive activity in or outside the home. But you had no legal right to it. Again, it wasn’t until 1830 was the first Married Women’s Prop … I think that date is right, I should check. But it was the first Married Women’s Property Act that allowed just married women to own their own property.
When you think about that historically, it’s not that long ago. It wasn’t until 1974, as you say, that in every state in the country, a woman could open a credit card without a man guaranteeing it. In 1972, there were states in which you still had to haul your uncle, or your brother, or your father, or your husband down to the bank to sign your credit card application.
Tori Dunlap:
To get a cosigner.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. Whether or not … You could be making five times as much money, but you needed a man to sign the account. When you think about it that way, it’s really not a surprise that we think money’s not for us. The social expectations are still that it’s we don’t understand it and it’s not our thing, and someone else is going to take care of it for us.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. It’s an industry that exists primarily to keep straight white men employed.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
They’re employed because they tell you, “Aw, you can’t manage your money on your own. Give it to us and we’ll manage it for you.”
Kara Loewentheil:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Which is a whole other conversation, too. We’ve talked a lot on this show about the other policies that don’t seem necessarily economic immediately. But paid family leave is an economic policy.
Kara Loewentheil:
Absolutely.
Tori Dunlap:
Abortion rights is an economic policy. A lot of the things that we’re battling for and dealing with now, in 2024, are also financial issues.
Kara Loewentheil:
Birth control coverage in health insurance is an economic policy.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Right. The rising costs of daycare and the fact that we don’t have any sort of government support.
Kara Loewentheil:
Formula.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes.
Kara Loewentheil:
When there’s a national shortage on formula, that is an economic policy and decision that impacts women in the workforce.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally, yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
Then women who are working in the home are so devalued. I just coached somebody on a society coaching call who had a big, successful career, and then decided to stay home with her kids for a few years. The identity shift from having a job that society “valued,” to a job that felt unvalued. I was going through with her, “Okay, how much did you have to pay someone to do all this stuff when you weren’t doing it?” It was economically productive labor then, it’s economically productive labor now. But if you’re doing it for your own family, then of course that’s stigmatized.
Tori Dunlap:
Right, right. I want to transition to talking about your book, Take Back Your Brain. You talk about this idea of a brain gap. Can you share more about what that is and how you work at the School of Feminist Thought to change that?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. The brain gap, there’s two version of the brain gap. The first is there’s this gap between how men and women are socialized. There’s a gap between the thoughts that are fed into our brain. If you think about you’re born as a baby, you have some instincts to move to nurse, to cry if you’re hungry. That’s about it. You don’t have any beliefs about the world, you don’t know anything. Then when you grow up, you are taught literally everything you know about what is a chair for, and what’s safe to eat, and when are you supposed to wear clothes, and who is valuable, and who needs to look a certain way. How do people interact? All of that is social programming you get.
Some of that’s all the same. We mostly all learned to wear clothes at the same times and places. But then, there’s gender-based socialization that you get, and it’s explicit and implicit. Sometimes it’s very explicit, like you might have been in a family where your parents said to you, “Well, it’s very important for you to marry a man who will take care of you.” As a girl, you might have noticed nobody saying that to your brother. Or it might have been more implicit. I grew up in a family that was very focused on education and career, but it was still always assumed that I was going to get married and have kids, and that that was a part of life that needed to happen. Then you absorb the media, you absorb stuff from your friends, what you read.
I think that kid’s movies have gotten better. But I’m 42 and when I grew up, the Disney movies were still all you meet the prince, kiss the prince at the end and that’s the happy ending.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Kara Loewentheil:
There were no feminist empowerment Disney movies when I was growing up. You learn all of this.
We end up with this widening gap over time, where men’s brains are socialized to think that they understand money, they understand finance, they can invest and grow wealth. They can feel confident. They can-
Tori Dunlap:
Take risk.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right, they can take risks. Also, just that in general, they don’t need to prove their worth, they’re allowed to just exist.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Kara Loewentheil:
Their value and contribution to society is taken for granted, and they’re the star of their own show. Then women are socialized in the opposite direction. That’s the first brain gap, different socialization you get.
Then what that produces is an internal brain gap, which I referenced earlier, which is that thing I think a lot of us experience between, “I want to think this but I feel completely differently.” Me feminist belief might be that women of course can understand money as well as men, and that money isn’t gendered, and blah, blah, blah. But what happens emotionally for me is that the minute that a dude in a suit named Chad starts talking to me about the stock market, I start to feel insecure and like I don’t know what’s going on, and that I’d better listen to what he says, and probably I should hire him and pay him to put my money in an index fund, which I could have done myself.
We get that gap between how we want to think and feel, and how we do. We’re here talking about money, but I saw this the most in my life in dating. Where yes, intellectually I understand that a guy that I went on two dates with off of Tinder who ghosted me is probably not a big player in my life story, but emotionally, I was completely fixated on what went wrong. Are they going to text? You’re a Pavlovian dog, waiting for the ping on your phone.
Tori Dunlap:
They must not have liked me. Why didn’t they like?
Kara Loewentheil:
Why didn’t they like me?
Tori Dunlap:
What could I have done-
Kara Loewentheil:
Right. What did I do wrong?
Tori Dunlap:
To get somebody to like me?
Kara Loewentheil:
What’s wrong with me?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
You know that you are sitting there with a split brain experience. Being like, “Why the fuck do I care so much what this idiot thinks?” And yet, you cannot stop caring.
That is the experience I think so many women have and that is the brain gap in action. You have one set of formative beliefs that male attention is very important, you need to be chosen by a man, that’s your value as a woman. That, you learned when you were four. It was unconscious and implicit, and you didn’t even know it was there. Yeah, when you were 22 at a feminist seminar, you learned about the male gaze and de-centering men. But both these things still exist in your brain.
That was a very long answer.
Tori Dunlap:
No, it was great.
Kara Loewentheil:
But the short version, at the School of New Feminist Thought and in the Feminist Self-Help Society, which is our coaching community and classroom, the way you bridge that gap and bring your brain closer together is literally by changing the way you think on purpose. Which is why it’s so important to understand, and why in Take Back Your Brain I go through, “Here’s all the thought patterns you have you may not even be aware of,” because we have to know what we’re thinking. A lot of self-help, or coaching, or positive affirmations, or whatever, doesn’t work because it skips the step where you have to unearth what’s in there now. It just tries to layer on another new positive thought, but that doesn’t work. We’ve still got the socialization underneath.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. It’s not getting to the root of the problem. That’s what I realized in writing my book and even doing this podcast, is its people want, “How do I budget?” People want, “How do I pay off debt?” Those fixes are great and I will get there, I promise.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
I will teach you step-by-step on how to do that. But I can’t teach you how to do that in a sustainable way until we talk about your financial trauma.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
I get that’s not fun. I get that’s not exciting.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
I get that that’s going to be hard.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s the real work is understanding all of the narratives you’ve been taught about money, and what your triggers are, and the bullshit the patriarchy’s fed you that you’re believing.
I love, to your point, because I, even as a confident feminist in my own right, there is part of my brain that is so strong and so confident, and knows 100% the people that are worth her time, the people that are worth her energy, the things that are worth my time and energy. And at the same time, I also have this little anxious brain that is always like, “Yeah, but what if people hate you?”
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
“What if people don’t like you?”
Kara Loewentheil:
Right. When I came into coaching, the coaching world was really based on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, social psychology. It’s totally true that one of the reasons … I believe it’s true, that one of the reasons humans are so sensitive to rejection is that we evolved in small tribes of hunter-gatherers where you get to depend on your neighbors, et cetera. But what’s missing was all the social context of yes, and women are taught that the key to not being rejected and dying is make everyone happy with you all the time, look a certain way, don’t be too mouthy, don’t have needs, put everyone else first. These things wrap into each other. The reason that it feels so physically terrifying not to people please is not because you’re weak, or you’re stupid, or you’re whatever.
Yes, it may be partly your childhood. But also, I think a lot of what I would see is women whose like, “My childhood was fine and I didn’t have this problem with my parents, and I’m still like this.” It’s because society has taught you that a woman’s role in life essentially is to serve other people and make other people happy. Of course, it feels like … Your primitive brain literally thinks you’re dying when you try to tell Chad that you’re not going to pay him 10% to put your money in an index fund, or whatever it is that you’re trying. Or tell your husband that you want to have an equal say in the finances.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Kara Loewentheil:
Or that you’re not going to put all your money in the joint account, or whatever it is you’re trying to do.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Now, Kara, I say that all the time to my community as well. It’s like, “Yeah, your brain literally doesn’t know.”
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Your brain doesn’t know the difference between, “I’m taking this very seemingly minor risk” versus, “Yeah, I’m literally going to die.” Your body has the same response. Because at a time, any decision was a risk. If I leave my cave, I could die. If I eat at a berry bush that I haven’t already confirmed isn’t poisonous, I could die. If I talk to this person that I’ve never met, or this thing I’ve never met, it’s an animal that could eat me.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s a person that sees me as a threat. We don’t know the difference.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
Our bodies don’t know the difference.
Kara Loewentheil:
Society has taught your brain, if you’ve been socialized as a woman, what you need to be … All the things that women obsess about, let me put it this way, are the things society has taught them they need to do or be to be accepted. Your primitive brain thinks that looking a certain way, or being a certain weight, or not having wrinkles, or being married, or having children, or everybody in the world agreeing about their opinion of you at all times, that all those things are what you need to do to survive. Of course, you’re obsessed.
Tori Dunlap:
Is that your concept of socially programmed anxiety? Is that what’s happening here?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. I talk about socially programmed anxiety as this anxiety that is specific to people socialized as women, which is the anxiety that we have when we are not able to live up to these impossible expectations. Society is like, “Don’t worry, you’ll be safe, and loved, and accepted, as long as and as soon as you look perfect, act perfectly.”
Tori Dunlap:
Play small, you’re controllable.
Kara Loewentheil:
No one’s ever upset with you, at any given time. You’re doing everything for everybody else. You look like a 17-year-old fashion model for your whole life. You are sexy but not too sexual. All of these impossible standards. Of course, we have all this anxiety and it doesn’t respond to some of, I think, the techniques that are used on, there’s a lot of different kinds of anxiety, on other forms of anxiety. Because if you’re not rewiring those thought patterns, they’re coming back the next day. You can’t yoga away the anxiety that comes from being socialized to believe that your life is basically in danger if you don’t look a certain way. You have to change your brain.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s exactly what we all experience on a day-to-day basis. Then I think, to your point, we can’t start doing any sort of work on ourselves if we’re building from a foundation that’s already really shaky. That’s not our fault.
Kara Loewentheil:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
That is yeah, what we’ve been conditioned to believe or conditioned to feel or think.
Kara Loewentheil:
That’s why I think your work, my work … I just remember, I would read self-help books. I’d buy a book about eating and diet, and I would just skip straight to the diet plan.
Tori Dunlap:
Right, right. I want the quick fixes, I want the action.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah, I want the quick fixes and the action. Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Kara Loewentheil:
But I think that there wasn’t enough emphasis in the personal development world on well, we have to understand that social context. You’re not just a brain in a jar, you’re not just a diet pattern.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Kara Loewentheil:
You have to understand why … I coach on this all the time. We have something we feel ashamed about and we’re like, “Well, just let me change the thing and then I won’t feel ashamed anymore.” We call it the llama in the electric fence, which is a very weird metaphor but I just said it on a coaching call once and it stuck. But it’s like we’re always trying to skip … This is with money, too. Its like, “Okay, I just need to budget.” Or, “I just need to be better with money.” Or, “I just need to invest.” How many women will say they need to be better with money? When you’re like, “Well, what does that mean?”
Tori Dunlap:
All of them.
Kara Loewentheil:
“I have no idea.”
Tori Dunlap:
All of them.
Kara Loewentheil:
Or it just means-
Tori Dunlap:
It’s not specific.
Kara Loewentheil:
Not spending it. I don’t know.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, right.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right. It’s just like, “I feel bad, and maybe if I were better with this, I wouldn’t feel bad.” But actually, you feel bad because of your thoughts. I can guarantee you that you could be the CEO of a multi-million dollar business, and you would still feel you’re bad with money. Because I’m in a mastermind because I have a multi-million dollar business, and I’m in a mastermind with women with multi-million dollar businesses and everybody’s coaching everybody about their thought of, “I’m irresponsible with money, I made the wrong decision.” You can get some results with those thoughts, but they don’t make those thoughts go away.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Well, the question, literally probably five minutes into our conversation today wrote down. This question which is I think, with self-development, you were talking about reading diet books growing up, there is so much self-hate wrapped up in self-development. Which is if you want to change yourself, first you have to hate yourself enough to make a change. I think of the classic example of, “I saw myself in a photo and I didn’t like the way I looked, so I went and lost weight.”
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, with money. It’s to your point of, “Well, this just needs to change because I’m bad with money and I’m a bad person.”
Kara Loewentheil:
Look at your credit card balance and feel bad about it.
Tori Dunlap:
Right, right.
Kara Loewentheil:
Then you’ll be motivated to change.
Tori Dunlap:
This is anything. I think especially with women, there is this self-development almost pornography, where it’s just constant. It’s so seeped into our experience as a woman, it’s just constantly be bettering yourself.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Constantly be bettering yourself. Also, never be satisfied with who you are.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
The version of that self-betterment is always, “Well, we’ve got to hate ourselves before we get there.” I think my question, or something I wanted to talk with you about, is one, how can we actually be content with ourselves as we are now, while still aspiring as a person? And still having goals. The second thing is when we do set those goals or when we do embark on some sort of journey to adjust a part of our lives, how do we do it without fucking hating ourselves? And without the motivation being, “I don’t like myself, I don’t like this part of my, so I’m going to change it.”
Kara Loewentheil:
I think that’s a really great question. I’ll just say first, I totally agree with you that a lot of the self-development industry, the way I think about it is they’re hitting your pain point that comes from impossible social expectations, and then they’re selling you a solution to try to help you conform better to social expectations.
Tori Dunlap:
Sorry, I’m just laughing because of course. It’s the cycle, all of it.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right. It’s like you feel bad about your body, here’s a program to lose weight.
Tori Dunlap:
The program is setting you up for failure. So then when you can’t do it, then you feel bad about your body again, so then you buy a program.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
The program’s unrealistic because diets are unrealistic, so you fail that, and then you hate your body.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right. Right.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s just a cycle.
Kara Loewentheil:
Same thing. That could be in money, it could be in time management. You feel bad because it’s literally impossible to work like you don’t have kids and parent like you don’t have a job, so here’s a time management program that will make you a super-person. It’s preying on that fantasy. You feel bad about yourself because you’re not partnered, here’s a coaching program to help you get married in six months.
It’s really important to me that my work and what I offer is not, “Here’s how you can better conform to social expectations.” Now sometimes, things do get easier when you change your thinking. I did a ton of work on dating and my brain was making me not make great strategic decisions in dating, and I was not getting outcomes I wanted. Changing my thoughts, I did end up with a partner, but that wasn’t the point of the journey. The point of the journey was how am I think about myself?
I think the way I would articulate the core question that I know you get asked all the time too is I think that people assume that … Women assume that, I should say. People socialized as women assume that their self-criticism is what has driven them to achieve what they have achieved and that it’s merited. They’re very attached to their self-criticism for that reason. Because they think that if they stop beating themselves up, they will just lie on the couch. Which first of all, maybe some of y’all do need to lie on the couch. That’s not the worst outcome in the world. There’s a whole fixation on productivity we could have a different conversation about.
But if you look at what I love about the coaching model I teach, which is adapted from cognitive behavioral therapy, from the model I learned from my coaching teacher, everybody has their own version. But if you look at the way that you think, it causes the way you feel, which causes the way you act, which creates a return in your life. When you are thinking, “I just got to get that promotion, or make that next money, or lose that weight so I can finally feel okay about myself,” it’s like putting coal … You’re fueling your machine with coal. It’s sooty and there’s a lot of pollution, and it smells bad and it gets on everything. It’s dirty energy. It’s not morally bad but it just means that you feel like shit. You’re running on adrenaline and your nervous system being activated all the time because your brain thinks you’re running away from a danger, which is just your own self-critical thinking. You feel terrible.
You’re also training your brain to keep thinking that way. It’s magical fantasy thinking to believe that you can berate yourself up to the point of a goal achievement. Then, when you achieve the goal, suddenly a new, nicer brain appears that says, “Congratulations, you did amazingly.” It’s like if you berate yourself through losing weight, you may lose weight in the short term, which a lot of people can in the short term. But then at the end, your brain is still like, “No, it’s not good enough. Now your skin is saggy. Now you look wrinkled,” now whatever else.
Same thing with money. You can save a certain amount. I guarantee you if the thought the whole time is, “I’m bad with money, I’m so irresponsible, I should have been saving more before,” you’re going to hit that saving goal and then your next thought is going to be, “Well, if I’d started 20 years ago, I would have had twice this much. I would have started before.” You cannot hate the journey and love the destination, that’s not how the brain works. It’s literally like a muscle. If you train yourself to eat with your right hand, you can’t just wake up one day and eat with your left hand.
What I always tell people when I’m coaching on this is what if it’s possible that you’ve achieved what you’ve achieved not because of all your relentless self-hatred, but in spite of it? What if it’s actually been an albatross around your neck or a weight you were dragging with you, and if you let go of it, you would actually go so much farther. That was my experience. My self-loathing had me looking very successful in a very mainstream, prestigious career. I don’t think I was having or would have had near the impact I’ve had on the world of quitting that, starting this, right now having a podcast with 50 million downloads and a business. All of these things I’ve done were because I was willing to like myself instead.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s almost though like no pain, no gain version of life. That’s not fun, that’s not sustainable. That’s not generous towards ourselves.
Kara Loewentheil:
No. Listen, it’s going to be uncomfortable to change your thoughts.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
You’ll get some pain either way, don’t worry. But it can be discomfort that’s moving you towards something better.
That’s the only thing about self-criticism. It’s just a rerun all the time. You’re not really learning anything from it. You’re not getting anything new from it. You’re just thinking the same shitty thoughts about yourself, over and over. Trying to change your thoughts on purpose will feel uncomfortable at times, but you’re actually creating something. It’s a productive discomfort.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I remember I went to see Liz Gilbert speak in 2019. Author of Eat, Pray, Love, Big Magic. One of my favorite people to listen to. Her whole talk was one of the most incredible I’ve ever seen, but the focus was on mercy. We associate even the word mercy as why would I offer that? Definitely not to myself.
Kara Loewentheil:
No, certainly not.
Tori Dunlap:
I might offer other people mercy maybe, but definitely not to myself. It was just so incredible to hear her talk about one of the most difficult but also truly most generous things we will ever do is offer ourselves mercy for our choices, for when we fucked up. For just us trying to exist as people. To your point, what she was saying was that doesn’t mean that you don’t love yourself. That doesn’t mean that you don’t want yourself to be better. We think that we have to make ourselves suffer in order to see results and that’s just not true.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. I think that’s very Christian, also.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, sure.
Kara Loewentheil:
There’s that Western Christian-
Tori Dunlap:
Original sin.
Kara Loewentheil:
Socialization, right.
Tori Dunlap:
All of it, you’re born.
Kara Loewentheil:
Original sin.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Kara Loewentheil:
If we really want to go philosophy, it goes back to Rousseau and Locke, and what is your theory of human existence. There’s two competing visions. One is that humans are base, and miserable, and mean, and violent. They have to be corralled and repressed by society in order to have civilization. One is that humans are naturally creative, and collaborative, and blah, blah, blah. And can live peacefully. Probably, the reality is somewhere in between, looking at the world.
But it’s just interesting. Even just thinking about what is my premise? My premise is that people can only be motivated by cruelty. If you have a child or an animal, you probably have figured out that trying to motivate them with cruelty is not really effective in creating longterm behavioral change, but we’re still doing it to ourselves.
Tori Dunlap:
I just need to take a deep breath. Okay. That’s sometimes how I feel when I having these conversations is I’m like, “Yes, yes, yes!” And also, “God, fucking patriarchy.” It’s just so fucking frustrating.
I want to talk about external validation.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Something you’ve discussed in your work is how women often seek external validation when they make decisions. You even said this of, “Does that make sense? This may be a stupid question, but …”
Kara Loewentheil:
“Let me crowdsource this.”
Tori Dunlap:
Right, right, right. Make decisions, handle their money, careers, it’s external validation. I will say as someone who’s a little validation whore, I’m asking this for myself as well. What are some examples of how you’ve seen women do this? Where you’re naming a couple. Talk to us about what you call an emotional vending machine.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. I think women are socialized to seek external validation. If we think about the two examples, men are taught to see themselves as the hero of the story. It’s almost hard to articulate because it basically is just being socialized to believe that you’re allowed to exist for your own sake. You just get to be the subject. Women are socialized to believe that, I call it your value’s like the stock market, it’s going up and down, and it’s a sum of everybody’s opinions about what you’re doing at any given time. That’s why you can leave the house feeling confident and then if somebody, even a stranger, says something insulting, then your self-confidence plummets. Then it might go back up, and then it goes back down.
Women are of course always seeking external validation because we’re socialized that what we think of ourselves is irrelevant. What matters is what other people think of us. Also, we are not reliable. At least, that’s what we’re socialized to think. We’re emotional, we’re irrational, we’re short-sighted, we’re frivolous, we’re vain, we’re all these things. We’re not authorities. Women are socialized to see other people as the authority in their life. Men are socialized too far the other way. Men are just like, “I have a dumb opinion I came up with, and I’m going to do what I want,” and often it doesn’t matter what anybody thinks.
But women are socialized to basically believe that they can’t trust themselves at all, they can’t make their own decisions. We’re constantly crowdsourcing for what decision should I make. It’s like texting three of your friends. “Can you read my email to this client? Does it sound okay? What do you think this meant? What would this person mean? What should I do?” All of that. Women will say that they’re indecisive, but you’re indecisive because you’ve been literally taught that you can’t trust your own decisions. It’s not a personality trait, it’s socialization.
If you’re always trying to get validation from other people, you end up treating other people like what I call emotional validation vending machines. Which is we go the long way around rather than change our own thoughts to create our own validation, because we don’t know how. We’re just constantly punching the machine to try to get it to spit it out. That can be anything as simple as being like, “How do I look in this outfit?” To we all know the elaborate paths we sometimes lay to try to lead people down to a compliment or giving us positive feedback, or to doing a certain thing. All the ways that we try to get our romantic partners to act in certain ways so we can think that we’re lovable and desirable. Or trying to hint things to our friends so they’ll do a certain thing, then we can feel and believe that they value our friendship, and we’re lovable and worthy.
If women took all that mental energy, you could spend 10% of it learning how to create your own validation, and then 90% of it doing some other shit out in the world. But this is how patriarchy keeps women frittering away their mental and emotional energy.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. Can I ask you a question of fix my life please?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
We can cut it if-
Kara Loewentheil:
Yes, let’s do it.
Tori Dunlap:
Again, I’m a little validation whore. But also, I’m very confident, and I know I’m lovable and I know my worth, and I know all these things. But sometimes, I just want my partner to tell me I’m pretty and I just want my partner to tell me that he loves me. I know that, but I need that in that moment.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Is that bad? Can I ask for it? Because that’s sometimes what I do. I’m like, “You know what, I just really need you to tell me you love me right now.” I just really need that comfort or what’s going on. But also, part of me is like, “I don’t need it. I know. I know that you like me.”
Kara Loewentheil:
What if you change need to want, does that change it for you? What if you just want it?
Tori Dunlap:
Maybe that’s what I’m saying because you’re right, I don’t need it.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. Number one, of course you get to decide if it’s okay.
Tori Dunlap:
Sure.
Kara Loewentheil:
I can’t tell you if it’s okay. That’s the initial coaching. Up to you, you get to decide.
Number two, this is what I always think about. Sometimes when I teach about socialization people immediately get sucked into black-and-white perfectionist thinking. It’s like, “Okay, so I shouldn’t ever want validation. I should ever want to hear I’m pretty.”
Tori Dunlap:
Which is what I basically just did right now.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Which is like me going, “I can never ask him ever again.”
Kara Loewentheil:
Feel confident with makeup. Right.
Tori Dunlap:
[inaudible 00:46:18] to say you love me.
Kara Loewentheil:
If I like a compliment, I’m a bad feminist. It’s very black-and-white. First of all, we don’t want to completely erase socialization. Socialization is why, when somebody comes to your house, they don’t just pee in your living room.
Tori Dunlap:
Sorry. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
That’s socialization.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Kara Loewentheil:
Knowing which foods, don’t eat raw chicken.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
All of this is socialization so we’re not trying to get rid of it all.
Here’s my defining line. Number one, the baseline principle is everybody gets to decide for themselves.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
The second principle, the rule I use for myself or the guiding principle is it’s totally fine to want whatever I want. Do I feel like I need it to feel okay?
Makeup is a great example. People are like, “So should I not feel confident when I wear makeup?” I’m wearing lipstick, I’m not here to judge whether or not to use makeup. Here’s my question to you. Can you feel okay leaving the house without makeup? Can you let your partner see you without makeup? Can you feel sexy or pretty without makeup? If you can’t, again you still get to decide if that’s a problem. For me in my life, that would be a problem for my values and my principles. I don’t want my feeling of confidence, sexiness, desirability, whatever to depend on whether or not I’m wearing makeup.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Kara Loewentheil:
It’s not like should I never, should I always? It’s is my validation self-worth hinging on this or not?
I ask my partner for compliments all the time.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
I’m fine doing that. What I don’t want and what I’d be watching for in myself is am I putting my emotional state on how he responds?
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. I think that’s great.
Kara Loewentheil:
There you go. Problem solved.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Because at the end of the day, first of all he’s not going to go, “No, I don’t fucking love you. You’re a hag.” He’s not going to do that.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
If he does, well that’s not the partner for me, clearly.
Kara Loewentheil:
I call it dopamine shopping.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, dopamine shopping.
Kara Loewentheil:
We all go dopamine shopping.
Tori Dunlap:
Sure, yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
It’s fine!
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
This is the thing. People get into self-development or wellness stuff and it’s like, “Oh, I shouldn’t want any …” Yes, I absolutely sometimes ask my partner for a compliment or go buy something.
Although, I did see something yesterday that I think is going to change my financial life. I don’t think you shared it. It may have been you, in which case, this’ll be funny. It was somebody sharing something about converting impulse shopping to impulse saving or investing, that you get the same dopamine hit. That is you. That’s your idea, somebody else must have posted it. I was like, “Oh yeah, that would totally work.” At least I’m very aware that I’m just dopamine shopping right now.
Tori Dunlap:
Somebody else might have done it, but we’ve had a post that’s gone viral. We’ve recreated it a couple times, where we take all of the energy you’re putting into running to Target or shopping, and shop for stocks instead.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yes!
Tori Dunlap:
Put in savings instead.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yes, I love that.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
I think that’s so brilliant. I’ve done enough of this work that I absolutely know when I’m … I planned my wedding while I was writing my book draft because it was so hard and I needed dopamine.
Tori Dunlap:
Wow.
Kara Loewentheil:
I was just like, “Okay, I’m going to look at villas in Italy and that’s what we’re doing,” to get my brain going in the morning before I had to write. I’m fine with it.
Tori Dunlap:
Are you getting married in Italy? I have to ask.
Kara Loewentheil:
We’re technically having the wedding here, and then we’re going on a friends and family honeymoon to Italy.
Tori Dunlap:
That sounds lovely. I’m going with my partner, actually. One of his members of his family is getting married in Amalfi.
Kara Loewentheil:
Well, there you go. I hope it will be lovely. It’s a lot of people with a lot of feelings in one place. But we’re hoping for the best.
Tori Dunlap:
I love Italy, big fan. I want to round out our conversation with your book. It comes out this month. What can someone expect to learn?
Kara Loewentheil:
Oh my God, so many things. In the first half of the book, you’re going to learn how your brain works and why you think and feel the way you do. You’re going to learn both the basic neurobiology, you might call it. Just basically how your brain works, and why and how you learn things. It is not overly scientific, although it is all scientifically valid and fact-checked. But it’s just so you understand the basics, because in order to work with your brain, you got to know a little bit about what’s going on in there. In the first part, you’re going to really learn how your brain works and you’re going to learn how you can change your brain. Thinking something new on purpose is a skill that just most of us are never taught. The book is going to teach you how to actually choose a new belief and then believe it. That’s the first half of the book.
Then the second half of the book, you’re going to learn … There’s five different topic chapters and you’re going to be able to take everything you’ve just learned about how to change your thinking, how to understand your brain and apply it in each of these areas. You’re going to learn what are the common thought patterns. You’re going to read some that you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I knew I thought that.” Some you’re going to be like, “Oh my God, are you in my head? How did you know that I’m thinking that?” Because sexist society teaches to think a certain way.
Then in each chapter, there’s also exercises for you to go through because having coached so many women, one thing I know is that just asymmetrically delivering information does not change your brain. This is a big also misconception, is the idea that insight is going to change the way you think. It’s absolutely not. You need to actually change it on purpose. You’ll be led through exercises to actually literally create new little neural connections in your brain and believe new things. We’ve got body image, money. Mindset chapter. Work and money. Time management and time organization, domestic labor stuff, all go together. Sex and romantic relationships.
Then at the end, the book talks about how do we bring this back to the broader world. We didn’t really get into that as much here. One of my core beliefs about self-development work is that if we want to change the world, we have to change our brains first because we’re the ones who have to come up with the solutions and we’re the ones who have to implement them. This idea that self-development or working on your own mind are privileged or out-of-touch I think is stupid and wrong. No one’s stupid for thinking that, you’ve heard that. But I just don’t agree with it.
Tori Dunlap:
No, but it’s the only thing we can control.
Kara Loewentheil:
Where are these ideas coming from to change the world? Our current policy struggles are not going that well. I don’t know if anybody’s noticed, the feminist movement is having some trouble. We obviously need some different ideas and ways of communicating, and those have to come from our brains. We’re the ones who have to do them.
That is what you’ll learn from the book. You can find the book anywhere you buy books.
Tori Dunlap:
Amazing. Thank you for being here. I could talk to you for about 16 more hours. But thank you so much for your time. Go check out the book. I’m just really excited for everybody to read it.
Kara Loewentheil:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you so much to Kara, for joining us. You can get a copy of her brand new book, Take Back Your Brain, wherever you get your books. You can also listen to the audiobook or get an ebook. I’m really, really, really excited to read the full thing. I got an excerpt to be able to plug it and it is fan-flipping-tastic. It is fan-flipping-tastic. Highly recommend it. It pairs very well, if I do say so myself, with Financial Feminist. Get her book wherever you read your books.
Thank you, as always, for being here. Team, appreciate it. Have a great rest of your week. Okay, bye!
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K Podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields. Associate producer, Tamisha Grant. Research by Ariel Johnson. Audio and video engineering by Alissa Midcalf. Marketing and operations by Karina Patel, Amanda Leffew, Elizabeth McCumber, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Kailyn Sprinkle, Sasha Bonar, Claire Kurronen, Darrell Ann Ingman, and Jenell Riesner. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratten. Photography by Sarah Wolfe. Theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K team and community for supporting this show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over one million women negotiate salary, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of almost 250,000 on Instagram and more than 1.6 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
