Real confidence has nothing to do with power poses, hype playlists, or faking it —
and once you understand what it actually is, everything changes.
Today I’m sitting down with return guest Kara Loewentheil, founder of The School of New Feminist Thought, host of the internationally top-ranked podcast Unfuck Your Brain, and author of the instant New York Times bestseller Take Back Your Brain, and we’re getting into the real, evidence-backed truth about what confidence actually is — and why everything you’ve been told about building it is probably doing you more harm than good. Kara breaks down her Confidence Compass framework — self-knowledge, self-compassion, self-belief, and self-actualization — and why real confidence has nothing to do with a feeling or a pose, and everything to do with building a trusting relationship with yourself so you can take risks, go after your financial goals, and create the life you actually want.
Key takeaways:
Real confidence is a skill set, not a feeling
The biggest misconception holding people back from building genuine confidence is the belief that it’s an emotion you either have or you don’t. Kara makes clear that what we typically call “confidence” — that burst of euphoria before a big presentation or after a compliment — is a transitory chemical reaction, not a sustainable state. True confidence is made up of four learnable, buildable skills: self-knowledge, self-compassion, self-belief, and self-actualization. This reframe is critical, because once you understand that confidence is something you build rather than something you feel, you stop waiting to feel ready and start developing the actual tools that let you show up, take risks, and go after what you want — in your finances and in your life.
“Fake it till you make it” isn’t just ineffective — it’s impossible
We’ve all heard it, and most of us have tried it. But Kara argues that faking confidence doesn’t work for a simple reason: your brain doesn’t know what your truly confident self would actually look like, so you can’t fake something you’ve never experienced. What “fake it till you make it” really means in practice is trying to hide that you feel insecure, which doesn’t address the underlying thoughts and beliefs driving that insecurity in the first place. Building real confidence, the kind that shows up consistently in your financial decisions and your daily life, requires developing the internal skills to support yourself through uncertainty, not performing a version of confidence you don’t yet have access to.
Shame is not a motivator
One of the most powerful threads running through this episode is the relationship between shame and personal finance. Kara explains that almost every woman she’s ever coached believes she’s irresponsible with money — and almost none of them actually are. The problem isn’t behavior; it’s the internalized story, often rooted in gendered messaging from society and family, that she’s bad with money, frivolous, or incapable. That shame doesn’t inspire change; it triggers avoidance, whether that’s not opening the bank account email or refusing to invest because it doesn’t feel “responsible.” The path forward isn’t more discipline or self-criticism; it’s self-compassion grounded in reality, which creates enough emotional safety to actually engage with your finances clearly and confidently.
Confidence isn’t certainty
We tend to think we’ll feel confident once we know something is going to work out, but that’s not confidence, that’s certainty, and certainty over outcomes isn’t something any of us can manufacture. Real confidence looks more like what Kara describes as a secure attachment relationship — with yourself. Just like a child who feels safe enough to venture out on the playground because they know they have a safe place to return to, you can take financial and personal risks not because you’re guaranteed success, but because you trust that you can handle whatever happens. Confidence is built not by eliminating doubt, but by showing up for yourself through the doubt.
The “10% less shitty thought” is how you actually change a belief
Self-belief (the third skill in the Confidence Compass) is not about making yourself believe something wildly positive that your brain can’t accept yet. Kara introduces what she calls the “thought ladder”: rather than jumping from “I’m terrible with money” straight to “I’m amazing with money,” the goal is to find a thought that feels just 10% less bad. Something like, “It’s possible that my brain is lying to me about this” or “I did manage to save for a car once.” This approach works because it gives your brain believable evidence to build on, gradually shifting your baseline without triggering the skepticism that shuts down affirmations before they can stick. The same principle applies to any financial goal — small, consistent steps compound over time, just like investments do.
Confidence is what creates the life you want — not the other way around
We’ve been told the story backwards. We look at someone with the money, the career, or the relationship we want and assume their confidence came from having those things. But Kara is clear: external circumstances don’t create internal confidence. Fashion models at the height of their careers still hated their bodies. High achievers who’ve checked every box still feel like the goalpost keeps moving. The confidence has to come first — or more accurately, it has to be built alongside the pursuit, not waited on as a reward at the end of it. If you’re waiting to feel confident before you start investing, negotiating, or going after a financial goal, you’ll be waiting a very long time.
Notable quotes
“That little light is still in you and you just have to give it space to flicker back into a flame.”
“Some people are able to drive themselves to the thing with self-loathing and fear and anxiety, but they don’t feel any better when they get there.”
“I think when I coach anyone about money, it is just everyone I’ve ever met thinks she’s irresponsible with money — and also almost none of them are.”
Episode at-a-glance
0:00 Intro
0:59 Confidence Is a Skillset, Not a Feeling
2:08 Why Power Poses and Beyoncé Songs Don’t Work
4:19 Does “Fake It Till You Make It” Actually Work?
5:19 Kara’s Background: Yale, Harvard Law, and Becoming a Coach
5:34 Betting on Yourself Without Feeling Confident
7:55 Confidence vs. Certainty and Control
9:30 Confidence as a Relationship with Yourself
12:02 The Confidence Compass Framework
14:40 Money, Shame, and Which Block Shows Up Most
16:47 How Shame Disguises Itself as Responsibility
19:37 The Permission Slip Problem
27:31 How to Uncouple Shame and Build New Beliefs
38:28 Unlearning Selflessness Without Feeling Selfish
43:04 Confidence Doesn’t Come from Having Things
45:37 Using the Confidence Compass for Money Goals
48:52 The Seeds of Who You Want to Be Are Already in You
Thanks to Rocket Money for sponsoring this episode!
Kara’s Links:
Website: http://unfuckyourbrain.com/HSC
Unf*ck Your Brain podcast: https://schoolofnewfeministthought.com/podcasts/
Take Back Your Brain book: https://www.takebackyourbrainbook.com/
Visit herfirst100k.com/ffpod to find any resources mentioned in this episode!
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Meet Kara
Kara Loewentheil is the founder of The School of New Feminist Thought, the host of the internationally top-ranked podcast UnF*ck Your Brain: Feminist Self-Help for Everyone (55 million downloads and counting), and the author of the instant national bestseller Take Back Your Brain: How A Sexist Society Gets in Your Head – and How to Get It Out, which made six bestseller charts including USA Today and The New York Times and has been translated into multiple languages.
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! Nine years after leaving her role running a think tank at Columbia Law School, she has bootstrapped her company to $27,000,000 in total revenue, spoken at organizations like Google and Experian, and held events all over the world.
Every day she teaches women how to live more confident lives through her programs at The School of New Feminist Thought, and trains coaches in her signature coaching method through The Socratic Coaching Academy.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
This episode has the exact formula you need to build confidence this year. Kara Loewenthei is the founder of the School of New Feminist Thought, the host of the internationally top ranked podcast, Unfuck Your Brain: Feminist Self-Help for Everyone, and the author of the instant New York Times bestseller, Take Back Your Brain: How A Sexist Society Gets in Y Head and How to Get It Out. She is a return guest on this show, and we are so excited to talk through her exact formula for building confidence called The Confidence Compass, but also how all of those things that you’ve been told build confidence like power poses in the bathroom and Beyonce songs before you negotiate are actually doing you more harm than good. She also has all of the science around the psychology of the thoughts that are going on in your brain that are actively sabotaging you from building the kind of life you want and achieving your goals.
And if you’re new to the show, my name is Tori. I’ve helped over five million women be better with money and you’re listening to the number one money podcast for women in the world. Let’s get into it.
But first, a word from our sponsors.
So one of the things that I love that you say is that confidence isn’t a feeling, it’s a skillset. So for everyone listening who spent years trying to feel confident, why isn’t that working?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah, the psychological literature tells us that confidence is actually a set of skills. There’s a feeling we call confidence, which I think is sort of just like elation. It’s like when you feel you walk down the street and you’re like, “I look good today.” Or someone gives you a high five because you crushed a presentation and you get a little burst of euphoria. It’s like we call that confidence, but that’s really just a transitory chemical reaction in your brain. Whereas living a truly confident life requires having a set of emotional and cognitive skills, which I distill down to self-knowledge, self-compassion, self-belief, and self-actualization. And so the good news is if you don’t quote/unquote “feel confident,” that makes sense. You’re really not supposed to. That’s not really a thing to feel confident all the time. What you can create is a set of skills that allows you to produce and access confidence in a kind of real underlying way, not in a feel good in a moment, then it’s fleeting kind of way.
Tori Dunlap:
One of the things I think about with confidence all the time is the advice we got, let’s call it mid 2010s that was like, “Power pose in the bathroom and listen to your favorite Beyonce song before you go on and negotiate.” Why isn’t that information or that advice helpful anymore?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. When you do that, I think similarly, you’re sort of trying to call up a short-term somatic experience of some kind. I mean, the research on confidence poses or power poses kind of undermined the original findings. And so I think those are kind of proven to not really work the way we originally were told. Some music can definitely get you pumped up. Humans evolved in tribes that made a lot of music around a fire, you’re accessing something in your body and brain. But I think it’s sort of like the difference between when you first fall in love and you feel giddy when someone texts you versus what is it like to love someone over the long term in a way that involves showing up, being there for them, even when it’s not feeling fun, even when you’re not having hot sex, even when they’re pissing you off, like being in that relationship of care long term, that’s kind of how I think about like living a truly confident life is analogous to like a momentary burst of euphoria or positive feeling in your body that we call confidence.
It’s just like, it’s not that that’s not sort of confidence, it’s just like temporary and fleeting and it’s not resolving what’s underneath. So if when you think about going into the meeting, you feel insecure because you have a constant litany of thoughts that’s like, “Well, I don’t really know as much as these other people,” or, “They all have a degree in this that I don’t have,” or, “I only got promoted because my boss was trying to be nice to me,” or whatever self undermining second guessing thoughts you tend to have. Even if you can artificially induce a little euphoria for a minute to get you through, it’s like taking a drug that covers up this underlying condition, which is impacting you at every moment. So you’re not really solving your problem. It’s like a bandaid, but you’re going to start bleeding again after the meeting.
Tori Dunlap:
And I think it feels inauthentic for most people as well.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. I would feel ridiculous. Are you kidding?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. There’s a reason we have a phrase fake it till you make it. Does fake it till you make it actually work?
Kara Loewentheil:
No, I don’t think fake it till you make it works. And it makes me mad every time I see it on Instagram because I coach women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s who have been quote/unquote, “Faking it until they make it.” And I mean, I don’t know, maybe it works after 50 years, but like who has the time to wait and see if that’s how long the experiment has to run? First of all, I don’t even think you can fake it. What does that mean? Your brain that isn’t confident doesn’t know what your confident brain would say. You can’t fake it because you don’t even know what it would look like. We don’t know what your truly confident self who understood herself, had that self-knowledge, had strong self-compassion, had strong self-belief, knew how to create more belief in herself, knew how to be a self-actualized person.
The version of you that has all those skills, I don’t think that you now even knows how that person would show up. So what are you even faking when you fake it to make it? You’re just sort of trying to like… I think fake it until you make it just means like try to hide that you feel insecure, which isn’t really solving a problem.
Tori Dunlap:
Before we get into the rest of this, because there’s so much to unpack here, you were a previous guest on the show. You have this career arc that I think a lot of people dream about, which is Yale, Harvard Law, think tank at Columbia, and then becoming a feminist coach whose work has helped millions. What was that moment of life where you decided to bet on yourself, to be confident in that instead of just staying at this prestigious law firm or this prestigious lane that everybody expected?
Kara Loewentheil:
I love the idea that everybody wants to go to Harvard and Yale and then quit and become a life coach. I think more people should do that. I think that’s a perfect example because people would say to me all the time like, “Oh my God, that’s so brave. You must have felt so confident.” And I did not have that euphoria feeling of confidence in every moment or possibly any moment during that transition. Obviously what I was doing, on some level, was insane. Although I didn’t have the words for it then, I had really deep self-knowledge that this decision aligned with my values, would allow me to fulfill a purpose that I felt called to, was a match for my skills and my talents and my weaknesses, would allow me to work around the things that I wasn’t good at or didn’t like doing.
So I had deep self-knowledge. I had a lot of self-compassion. I’m still building my self-compassion. I think all women and marginalized people are, because we’ve been so socialized to be terrible to ourselves, but I had built at least some self-compassion. So I wasn’t beating myself up that I was leaving this job or that I had spent all this money on my education, that I now wasn’t going to be a lawyer or that I was abandoning the cause, right? I had built up some self-belief that I could become an entrepreneur. I could become a coach. I could develop these skills and I had built up the ability to self-actualize.
But most of that time I did not feel like a superhero. I felt like, “Oh my God, this is crazy. I hope this works. I hope I’m not making a mistake.” I had all these normal thoughts. And so I think that’s another big piece of it is people think, “Oh, if I’m second guessing, if I have self-doubt, if I don’t feel 100% sure, I’m not confident.” But I think that truly being confident is about being confident enough in yourself and your ability to be self-actualized in the world, to enable yourself and have the support from yourself to do the things that you aren’t sure will work, that feel hard, that feel risky.
It’s not about being like, “Nope.” It would’ve been honestly deranged if I had been like, “Well, I feel 100% confident that this will work out exactly the way I want.” This whole quitting, being a lawyer, starting a business, which I have no background in as a life coach on the internet. If I had had 100% belief that that was perfectly going to work out, I would’ve needed a psychiatric examination.
Tori Dunlap:
Something that you just said, flipped a switch in my brain. I wrote down, “Confidence the way we define it as a society actually just means control.” When we say, “Oh, I want to be confident enough to go for it,” whether that’s starting that business or ending that relationship I don’t want to be in anymore, really what you are asking is, “I want to have complete control over a hundred percent of this outcome. I want to have all of this be a known factor before I make a decision. I want to know that I’m going to be successful. I want to know that I’m not going to hit roadblocks. I want to know that I am going to be okay.” And you are asking something that is not realistic. You are asking-
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah, you want to feel certain. People associate confidence with 100% certainty. That’s not what it means. And that’s impossible.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. So really what you’re describing is, “I didn’t have confidence that all of this was going to be sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. I had confidence that I had the tools or was going to get the tools to figure it out.” And this is something that I don’t think a lot of people listening have made the switch on is if you’re waiting to feel confident in order to go for it, you will never feel ready. Ready is not a feeling. You just have to say, “Okay, I’m going to build the necessary tools and the necessary strategies inside of me so that I can handle whatever happens as opposed to I’m going to prevent any catastrophes from happening.” That is not in your control. You do not have control over that.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. And confidence is one way of seeing it also it’s that it’s a relationship with yourself. So if you think about little kids and their attachment, and we know what we know about attachment science, a little kid that’s confident means a kid that feels safe to venture out from their parent on the playground to talk to other kids, not because they know for sure every other kid is going to like them and no one’s going to throw sand in their face, right? It’s because they feel confident enough to put themselves out there because they have a safe place to return to. And what I think makes women not confident in this bigger picture life sense I’m talking about is not having a safe home with themselves, not having a safe home base and a safe relationship to return to.
For instance, if you have a parent who anytime you take a risk or try something new, you want to try to learn to ice skate and the minute you fall down, they’re going to be like, “See? You’re such a klutz. I can’t believe that I paid for ice skating lessons. You’re not even good at it and you’re…” Whatever. They’re going to curse you out. You’re not going to try things, right? And then of course you’re not going to feel confident. So that’s why so much of this framework of confidence, and the tool that I use to encapsulate this, I call the confidence compass, is about creating this relationship with yourself where you can go out and try things and self-actualize because you got your own back. You have a safe place to return to.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and in that metaphor of you falling in the ice skating rink, it might be a parent or somebody saying, “Oh my gosh, you can’t do this. You’re such a klutz.” It also might be, which is what my parents often did, “Oh, this is no longer safe and we want to make sure you’re safe. We don’t want to see you get hurt.” That, I think, might be more common, especially with women. Because we have all of these scenarios where we worry about our own safety, which is totally understandable, but then we’re told, “Yep, don’t take risks, don’t do these things because somebody might not like you or it might not work out or yes, all of the beliefs that you’re a failure are going to come true.” So that I think is another version of this, which is like we’ve said, “Okay, safety is the priority or making people comfortable is the priority.”
So yeah, of course we’re not going to go out and take risks even if it’s the most minor risk in the world because it feels so high stakes. It feels like, “Oh, I’m risking my own safety or my own comfort to do this.” And it’s like, yeah, in order to get a lot of the things that you want in life, you’re probably not going to be comfortable, but to your point, it’s because you have this level of understanding of, “Okay, there’s going to be uncomfortable situations and I have the skillset to navigate that.”
So you mentioned the confidence compass. Talk to me about what that is and why it’s such a powerful shortcut compared to all of the other stuff out there.
Kara Loewentheil:
So I think the confidence compass is essentially understanding confidence as the sum of those four skills, of self-knowledge, self-compassion, self-belief and self-actualization. And I think that the way that it works really effectively as a shortcut is if you have a problem you’re facing, let’s say you are not looking at your bank account, something you and I have talked about on your podcast because you are struck by terror in your heart every time you think about seeing what’s in your bank account or you get an overdraft notice from the bank and you don’t even open the email because you feel so much shame, whatever it is. So it’s a problem you need to solve, right? You can look at the confidence compass, obviously when you’ve learned the tool more in depth and use it to determine what skill am I lacking here? What skill do I need to bring into play?
So if you don’t know why you’re not looking at your bank account, for instance, if you are saying to yourself, “I’m totally going to get to it. I just keep not getting to it. It just hasn’t been the right time. I’m going to do it after Thanksgiving.” You’re avoiding it and you don’t even really know why. Okay, so that means you need self-knowledge. You need that first skill, right? We don’t even know what the problem is, we can’t solve it. Maybe alternatively, you ignore that email because you know that you’re avoiding it and you feel a lot of shame about that. So now you have a story that’s, “I’m bad with money, I’m irresponsible, a good person who’s good with money would never get an overdraft notice. I’m going to end up living under a bridge,” all of that. Okay, now we know you need self-compassion. You’re not going to be able to solve this problem until you take the emotional activation down a little bit that you’re getting with that shame.
Maybe you are someone who actually has done a little bit of work, you’ve gone to some therapy, you’ve read some books, you’re like, “Okay, I see I have this money scarcity story, but I just can’t get out of it. I just keep believing it and I’m still not making any more money.” Okay, what we’re missing is self-belief. You haven’t created a new set of beliefs around money, so that’s the skill you need. And all of those skills add up to self-actualization because what we all do, of course, is if we don’t know about coaching and self-development and all these things, we’re like, “Okay, I’m doing a bad thing. I just need to do the good thing instead.” We just try to go straight to action and make ourselves act differently does not work. That’s why you have a job. That’s why I have a job. That’s not how the human brain is. And it’s because we don’t have these three skills you need. You can’t be self-actualized. You can’t show up and act differently in the world and create a different outcome.
If you don’t understand yourself, if you don’t have self-compassion, and if you don’t know how to create different beliefs, you’re never going to get different actions.
Tori Dunlap:
When we talk about money in particular, we have discussed many times on this show, you talk in your work about how emotional it is, right? Everybody thinks it’s about math. It’s not about math, it’s about your emotions, it’s about your trauma. So when it comes to money, of the four blocks you just mentioned, the self-avoidance, self-criticism, self-doubt, self-sabotage, which block do you see people falling into most when it comes to personal finance and why?
Kara Loewentheil:
I think that it is mostly self-avoidance and self-criticism, but I think it’s really mostly self-criticism. In that case, the whole reason we’re avoiding, often with money, it’s like you get the story growing up before you even have any money, you’re developing your money story and most women and marginalized people are developing a story that they’ve been taught by society and sometimes also by their families that’s like, “You’re bad with money, you’re frivolous.” The story of my family was that I was spent too much and was frivolous with money, which is like a story I still carry. And listen, I do have expensive tastes, but also I’m very smart with my money, but there were all these gender stereotypes that bled into that. What was considered a good expenditure of money by who in the family and what was considered frivolous by whom? All that stuff is there’s social construction that goes into that.
I think that when it comes to that money avoidance, it’s really, there’s so much shame. I feel like when I coach one about money, it is just everyone I’ve ever met thinks she’s irresponsible with money and also almost none of them are. It’s not totally an objective thing, but nobody’s ever like, “I bought that first Lamborghini and then I just felt like I really needed a second one that matched it. So I took out debt to get my Lamborghini.” That’s never the story I’m hearing. The story is like, “Whatever, I have student debt,” which yeah, almost everybody does if they had to take out loans for college or like, “I tried to start a business. We bought this thing that didn’t sell.” You made an investment that didn’t work out. It’s almost never irresponsibility. So I really think that self-criticism is at the heart of… As you and I have talked about, if you’ve resolved your emotional mental stuff, it is just basic math that you can understand, right? So it’s really that self-criticism.
Tori Dunlap:
How does shame disguise itself as responsibility?
Kara Loewentheil:
I think women often hide from their money under the guise of being responsible. So this is not the person usually who’s avoiding looking at their bank account, but it’s more the person who just tries to just not spend money and calls that being responsible. And that’s what women are taught is being responsible. And like you and I have talked about before on one or both of our podcasts, all the studies showing that the media that’s aimed at women around money is like being thrifty, budgeting. Just like diet culture. Do less, have less, spend less, eat less, just be less, try to disappear if at all possible, just like don’t even exist. And the media aimed at men is, “Make money, go out and kill the day, invest.” So women have this idea that was being responsible with money means essentially never spending it. And I think that’s driven by shame.
If you have this story that you’re bad with money, you’re irresponsible with money, you don’t understand money, you’re not good with it, then you’re like, “Okay, I’m just trying to keep the shame at bay, so I’m just going to be really conservative and I’m not going to learn how to invest. I’m not going to invest my money. I’m not going to spend money. I’m going to constantly be running everything through some kind of responsibility matrix in terms of any of my expenditures.” I see this in my own brain, I have to coach myself. My husband and I bought a very dilapidated 1850s farmhouse upstate and we are renovating it. And the amount of money drama that I have had to work through… And I’ve done a lot of work on money, but this is the biggest expenditure I’ve ever made. Old stories are coming up, but if you don’t need that to survive or it’s not, it’s a second house or we actually rent in New York, so it’s actually our first house.
But just all of that kind of… I just see, even in myself with all the work I’ve done and having enough resources. And I think I do what I see women do all the time, which is try to get an expert opinion to make them feel okay about it. So I go to my financial advisor and I’m like, “Is this okay?” And she’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine.” And I’m like, “Suss. I don’t think it’s still probably not okay. I still don’t feel right about it.” So I think that that noticing where you’re afraid to invest in yourself, your own education, to even hire a financial planner, I’m not going to pay a financial advisor because maybe that’s not responsible to work with someone like you and learn how to think about their money to hire a coach for your mindset or to just spend the money however you want.
I think that’s sort of trying to avoid shame by being “responsible” in quotes when you don’t even really know what that means and you’re only seeing one side. Maybe it’s irresponsible to not invest your money if investing your money would make more money that you could then use to do the things you want in the world. It’s not really necessarily responsible to not invest. So just, I would say for listeners to think about, “Oh, when I say responsible, what do I even mean? What is my definition of that? How do I know what that means?” Because the odds are you’re on autopilot with it, just assuming it means being conservative and hoarding.
Tori Dunlap:
Let’s talk about that permission slip feeling too that you just mentioned because I think that is a product of us having this disconnect from our own intuition and our own quiet voice telling us what’s right or what’s wrong for us or what feels good. What is that feeling stemming from when we say, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I need to go talk to somebody before I do this. I need advice or I need guidance,” when you actually don’t need advice or guidance at all?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. I can look at my accounts and be like, “Would spending this money be aligned with my values and leave me in a stable financial place?” Yeah, I mean, I think women in general are socialized to defer to external authority. And if you think about all the messages women get in a given day about everything, it’s amazing we get out of bed. If you scroll Instagram in the morning, it’s like, “You’re probably sleeping wrong, first of all. You were supposed to have face tape and hair things. It’s like whatever insane things people are doing at night when they sleep, trying to produce beauty as a product while they’re sleeping.” Then you’re supposed to, “Are you supposed to drink tea in the morning or hot lemon water and are you supposed to exercise on a full stomach or not? And then what are you supposed to eat for breakfast? And now it’s all protein. No, it shall be fiber. And then are you dressing right for your shape?”
And by the time you haven’t even gone through your shower and there’s been 17 different things that the world has told you you can’t figure out for yourself. You can’t even figure out what you’re-
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, and by the way, you’re showering wrong too. You’re showering wrong as well.
Kara Loewentheil:
What are you supposed to be doing in the shower? Is it in everything shower? It’s insane, right? As though you, a grown human being, homosapien, are not able to figure out what to eat for breakfast and what pants to put on your body. So when you think about like your whole day being like that for decades, it’s amazing we could make any decisions. So I think there’s all of that socialization.
And then just these sort of premises, like one of the things I realized with my house renovation was that I had the thought, which I had just picked up or been taught or whatever, that a house was supposed to be an investment. So you should only put money to a house if you knew that you were going to get a certain financial return in a certain amount of time. So it’s that control thing also. I’d feel confident investing in the renovation if I knew for 100% certain that I was going to get this kind of return in this amount of time and there was no risk to it. So like for me, that was the unlock in that particular case. So that’s that self-knowledge piece. So I had to do that self-compassion piece first of, “Okay, this is an old story that I’m frivolous and irresponsible. Let’s look at the facts. I’m a multimillion-dollar business owner. I bootstrapped this business by myself with no investors. I’ve grown it to this amount. We’ve made whatever it is, $28 million total. I’m probably not bad with money, so let me…” Self-compassion, check myself on my story.
And then that self-knowledge of, “Well, what are my beliefs that I don’t even know I have?” I wasn’t aware I had that belief subconsciously. It had just seemed part of the background. It was just true until I started doing this and was like, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s an assumption.” For me as a business owner, maybe that’s not true. Maybe real estate is not my own personal real estate, is not the engine of wealth in my life, my business is. I have to decide that for myself, but that’s what’s so hard for women and I think other marginalized people is that’s me taking the authority to be like, “Well, I get to decide how I’m going to build wealth. What do I believe is the cash flow generator in my life? What do I think is worth it just for my own enjoyment of something that may or may not end up yielding a certain profit in a certain amount of time?”
We women want there to be that right answer, that control because we’ve been taught that we don’t know the answer to anything and that we have to have the right answer to be acceptable. So we don’t know the answer to anything, but we also have to have the right answer for us to be allowed to live.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep. And that we have to know it’s 100% going to work out or else why would I do it?
The other part of shame that I want to touch on is so many of us think that shame is working for us that I am going to criticize myself into changing. And the thing I always say is that if shame works, it would have worked by now. And how is that message of shame that we are saying is necessary for us to change our bodies or change our mindset or change our careers or… How is that not working even though we’re convinced we need it?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. I know it’s so fascinating because the psychological literature is extremely clear that this doesn’t work.
Tori Dunlap:
It doesn’t work.
Kara Loewentheil:
But we’re always like, “But maybe this time. Let me try again.” So what I often talk to people about that I think is a helpful reframe, and this is why I think coaching is like philosophy, is that when we’re trying to think about what motivates behavior change, we’re operating on some implicit model of how a human works. And so we have two models and these go back to like fights in enlightenment philosophy about what people are like. Are people essentially creative, curious, contributory, interested in building things and figuring things out and learning and contributing? Or are people essentially like lazy schlubs who are greedy and mean who have to be shamed and scared into behaving in a cooperative civilized fashion? And I think if you look at little kids, you know your answer to that.
Little kids have not been socialized as much as we have and almost every little kid you’ll ever meet is like curious and mostly friendly and wants to like figure things out and build things and make an art project with you or like play with you right there. That I think is what human nature really is. And so when we are relying on shame to motivate ourselves, it makes sense because we’ve been taught this very Christian Puritan really view of what humans are, which is inherently bad and sinful and need to be scared by the fear of God and shame into doing anything. Sometimes it’s easier to work on thoughts about your model of human behavior in general and then let your brain apply it to you than to coach yourself directly because…
And then the other thing that I often offer people is we’re confusing correlation and causation. So like you’ve achieved what you’ve achieved in your life and you’ve been really self-critical and shaming. And you think those things are causative, that the self-criticism and the shame was the fuel that drove the accomplishment. And so I just invite anyone who thinks that to consider that perhaps that was actually the albatross around your neck. Imagine what you might have done without that. I have women who go through this. I do a high end mastermind called the Mission Impossible Mastermind. And almost every woman in that is exactly someone who’s been like really high achieving, like ran an international organization, has a business, is a whatever. And they are in a period of their lives where they’re ready to stop motivating themselves with shame and fear. And then they’re like, “What? How do I even do anything now?” And that journey, it can be destabilizing, but you have to go through that process.
It’s sort of like when you do intuitive eating, you go through a process where maybe you will eat just pizza and ice cream for like two or three weeks, right? It’s like you’re sort of proving to yourself, your body and you have to get into a different relationship where you prove to yourself that you’re not going to beat yourself up. And so it can be destabilizing. So for anybody who’s listening to this and it’s like, “Oh, maybe I’m willing to believe that I don’t have to shame or beat myself up to do things. I don’t have to shame myself into looking at my money. I can make more money by not driving myself with criticism.” It may feel shaky for a little bit. Stick with it. I do believe we all have internally that curiosity, creativity, drive, it’s different for all of us. We’re interested in different things, but that little light is still in you and you just have to give it space to flicker back into a flame.
Tori Dunlap:
How do we do that? How do we uncouple the shame if we said, “Okay, this is the year I’m going to try to not shame myself”? What does that practice actually look like?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. So I think this is where the third element of the confidence compass, which is self-belief is really important. So part of it looks like literally just learning how to think new thoughts more specifically. So I have an entire episode on my podcast called The Thought Ladder, the book, the bestseller, Take Back Your Brain. I go all the way through the Thought Ladder and that. So you can get this for free or low cost, even if you don’t work with me, but literally that’s one of the skills and self-belief is learning how to actually think a new thought. And this is where a lot of coaching that’s out there kind of drops… It’s like they get you there and they’re like, “Great, now believe something new. You’re welcome. Goodbye. You’re done.” It’s actually a new skill. It’s like going to the gym and trying to deadlift 400 pounds when you haven’t trained.
So the very quick version of it is you need to stop trying to believe the beautiful thought you’d love to believe right away, which is like, “I’m amazing with money.” If your current thought is, “I’m terrible with money.” And we had to go for what I call the 10% less shitty thought, which is just a thought that feels 10% less bad in your body. So it might be like, “It’s possible that I’m good with some aspects of money. Maybe it’s possible that my brain’s lying to me about this. I am good at…” Pick any money thing you think you are good at or at least neutral at. “Maybe I’m not great with money yet, but I did save to buy a car,” anything, just to give your brain that little bit of evidence. And so then you’re going to over time build up to more positive thoughts, but you really have to start with…
It’s just like a savings goal or an investment goal. It’s like people want to be like, “It’s not worth investing because I don’t have like a million dollars to put in the stock market.” And you hear that all the time and you’re like, “For the love of God, just put $10 in right now and just start.” It’s the same thing with your thoughts.
Tori Dunlap:
We did an episode that was super popular, I think last year, we’ll link it down below as well, basically that the all or nothing mindset is killing you. And that’s basically what we’re talking about. I either go to the gym for an hour every single day or two hours and I walk out looking like a drowned rat or it doesn’t count. That 10 minute walk around the block doesn’t count because it’s not enough. And I’m like, “Okay, so you are telling yourself that I either do it perfectly or I’m doing nothing.” How does that make sense? If you actually are trying to progress towards a goal, the answer cannot be I’m doing nothing. So the answer might be I’m taking very small steps and that’s great. That’s better than I am either doing it perfectly, which by the way, you can’t do. You cannot do it perfectly every single time or I do nothing. Okay, then there’s got to be an in between. There has to be a different answer.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. It’s like magical thinking. It’s like, “Well, I did cook at home and eat some vegetables three days, but then I had a piece of chocolate cake.” But okay, your body still digested the vegetables. You still got the nutrients. Okay, you went to Pilates twice and then you skipped the third time. That doesn’t mean that your body didn’t get the Pilates the first two times.
It’s like that’s how you know when you are in that all or nothing thinking that you’re not actually looking at what is the material improvement to your life that you’re trying to create. You’re just doing a little moral purity play for yourself to try to… You’re sort of like the Greek gods would set up the impossible challenges for the mortals so they would fail. It’s like that’s what you’re doing. You’re just doing a whole little routine where you set up an impossible challenge to watch yourself fail to then beat yourself up. It actually has nothing to do with the thing you’re actually supposedly trying to accomplish because if it were, you would be thrilled that you went to Pilates twice and then even though you didn’t go the third time, you’d just go again next week.
Tori Dunlap:
And you have a absolutely crucial moment when you’ve had the two days of clean eating, then the chocolate cake where you can either say, “You know what? Fuck it. I screwed up. And so this whole week’s a wash and I’m going to go eat an entire pizza even though I don’t want an entire pizza or I’m going to be reckless the whole rest of the week.” It’s the same thing with debt. “I already have $10,000 of debt. What’s another five?” It’s like, “It’s another five. It’s another $5,000 of debt. What’s another whole pizza?”
Kara Loewentheil:
It’s 50% increase in your debt.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re not hungry anymore. So you’re just saying, “I made this one decision in a line of good decisions that I’m not proud of.” And also let’s not demonize chocolate cake. Chocolate cake’s amazing.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah, yeah. Also, it could just be, you could be thrilled that you ate both vegetables and chocolate cake. That’s what I would advise.
Tori Dunlap:
But I think you’re at this moment typically where you weren’t checking the box or it wasn’t perfect. And you can either say, “Everything’s fucked, so I may as well just go on a spree,” or, “You know what? Okay, did this thing, it happened.” Again, I’m just talking very neutrally. I’m not mad at myself. I’m not shaming myself. It’s just like, “Oh, that thing happened. Okay. I’m going to do a different thing tomorrow and see how that feels.” Great, great. It’s the same thing with money. It’s the same thing with anything you want out of life is you’re going to have these moments where you feel like you’ve backtracked. The key is to not add shame to the mix. And this is what we’re discussing here is, how do you give yourself the 10% less shitty thought? And also, the way we build self-trust is through these little tiny moments where you say, “No, I’m going to do the thing that actually I know will feel good for me.”
That’s how you build self-trust is these small little moments. It’s not this big, sweeping romantic gesture. It’s very similar-
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah, you’re not a bride there.
Tori Dunlap:
… to how we build relationships with partners.
Kara Loewentheil:
Exactly. Like you’re going to be disappointed. Sometimes you’re going to fight with your partner. It’s like getting married and, “Okay, I only want to get married if we can promise that we’re never, ever going to have a fight. We’re never going to disagree. We’re never going to be bored with each other. We’re only…” This is not-
Tori Dunlap:
It’s never going to be a roommate phase. We’re going to have crazy hot sex every single fucking day.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right. I mean, I think it’s really helpful. Let’s say you’re trying to set a financial goal and you’re like, “Okay, I want to invest more, cut down on this kind of spending or not eat out as much,” whatever the goal is. Deciding ahead of time, I’m 20% flex on this. I know it’s going to be, I know I’m going to not do it 15% of the time. It’s not about picking an exact percentage. But when you pull back the viewfinder and you just think, “My goal is to do this more often than not over the long term,” it really changes the stakes of each thing.
I have a lot of resistance to seeing my trainer and going to physical therapy. And so when I decided to start doing those things, I was just like, “Sometimes I’m going to cancel these at the last minute.” That’s like the out that I need. I need to know that sometimes I’m going to cancel it, even though I still have to pay for my session, I’m not going to go. But even if I canceled 30%, which I don’t, and you won’t either, but like even if I canceled 30%, even if I canceled 50%, at the end of three years, I have still done this thing now so much more than I would have otherwise when I would have done it zero. So thinking about that, my goal is to, it’s not being consistent and doing it every time. It is my goal is to inconsistently do this thing over a long period of time so that at the end of this time, I have done it sometimes.
It’s very hard to maintain your drama with yourself when that’s the goal and like to get it to feed into the cycle with yourself where you’re like, “I’m amazing. I’m so proud of myself. No, I hate myself.” It’s like all this drama, it just all gets cut off at the head when you’re just like, “Well, I’m just trying to do this some or most of the time.”
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. And I will also say to that, my version is I tell myself, “Oh, okay. We’ll just watch the YouTube video because it’s a free workout and we’ll do it there.” Nine times out of 10, maybe like nine and a half times out of 10, if I choose that path, I quit halfway through or I don’t actually do it because I have no stake. I have no buy-in. And there’s the phrase like people who pay, pay attention and it’s true. So it’s like, yeah, if you want to better your fitness or feel better in your body, it might be, I’m going to pay $30 because that’s what Pilates costs, but like I’m going to pay $30 for that class. And that’s how I started going to fitness and feeling better in my body is I would pay whatever money it was for the bar classes in my mid 20s. And even for me, if it was Saturday morning and I was a little hungover, I was getting my butt to bar because especially at that time in my life, I did not have the money to waste. I had to show up.
And so for you, it’s like, “Yeah, okay, I’ve paid this personal trainer. I might bail a couple times. That’s fine. But I have made this commitment because I have paid either with money or time or energy, so I have to pay attention.” And I think that’s one of the other things that, especially with money, we’re like, “Oh, we want free because we’re trying to save money.” And, yes, we love free shit. Libraries are great, things that are free can be helpful. And also, if you’re trying to progress in your life, trying to progress towards your goals, you have to figure out what is going to actually get you to show up. And for me, it was putting money down. It was like, “If I pay for this thing, you better believe I’m showing up,” because I did not like wasting money and it made sure that I had the accountability as well because I was in a room full of other people. I wasn’t just going to walk out of class in the middle. I don’t have that same motivation at home because I can bail and no one cares.
So I think that you also have to find that sort of level of commitment with yourself. What does it look like to make a commitment and actually keep it?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. I mean, I think that why am I willing to pay for a trainer even though I sometimes won’t go? Because I know that if I’m supposed to do it myself at home, I’m just not going to. And I could coach myself around that and work on my mindset. I mean, to me, it’s like a effort, money, time thing. It’s like I have to use some resource. So do I want to have to spend three hours a day coaching myself to work out or do I want to just invest in that accountability structure, even though I occasionally won’t do it? So I think it is a shortcut and there’s known psychological effects that if you pay for something, you value it more. So a lot of being a, I think, conscious mindset, growth, self-development person is, which biases in the brain am I going to coach myself out of and which one am I just going to run with them and depend on that?
But I’m going to use them to my advantage. Just like the new year is like there’s a well documented boost in your kind of willingness and interest in changing things in January. Okay, let’s just use that. If we know that, then this is a good time to invest in self-help and personal development work because there’s a documented boost you’re going to get. Let’s ride that.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. For women and marginalized folks who have been taught that our worth is being selfless, being small, being good girls, how do we begin unlearning these roles without feeling like we’re being selfish?
Kara Loewentheil:
I mean, I feel like my answer to this depends on the day because sometimes I’m just like, “Learn to be fucking selfish.”
Tori Dunlap:
I agree. I think that actually being selfish is one of the best things a woman can do.
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah, of course. Right. What does that even mean? For a woman, the way we’re socialized, that means ever caring at all about what you think or feel.
Tori Dunlap:
Truly. Or putting your needs above somebody else’s wants.
Kara Loewentheil:
Anybody’s, even a stranger. There’s however many billion people in the world, your name is supposed to be at X billion, point billion at the bottom. And if it’s above, if you move yourself two rungs up, you’re selfish. So yes, I mean that word doesn’t mean anything. I think that as with all things with the brain, we tend to think of how can I stop something? But what we know from behavior change and psychology is that it is much easier to start something than to stop something. Your brain doesn’t really know how do I stop feeling bad? How do I stop thinking this about myself? How do I stop this? What you can do is try to start something new.
So if what you’re trying to solve for is like putting yourself last, rather than try to ask yourself, “Well, how do I stop putting myself last?” What’s helpful is thinking, “What’s one thing I really would like to have more time for in my life? What’s one thing I really miss doing or wish I could do? What’s one thing I really enjoy? How can… Let me schedule that. Let me agree I’m going to spend the $30 on the spa visit, whatever it is.” And then you’re going to probably need to coach yourself or get some coaching about all the shit that’s going to come up, right? So there’s still that mindset work.
I think the other thing to do is, and this is where the self-knowledge piece comes in, is we all have a big story about how selfless we are and we’re supposed to be. If you get real about how you behave when you think and feel that way, it’s not so great. It’s just like when we think that we’re good at not showing when we’re upset. Ask your partner and your kids if they know when you’re upset. They know. You’re not actually an amazing actress. So I think that part of self-knowledge for me is just being real. When my thought is that I have to do everything and no one else does anything and I’m such a martyr, I do not show up as some beatific saint, right? I show up as a cranky, resentful person. So I think that the…
And I don’t say that with self-judgment. I have all the self-compassion, that’s how my brain is working, but I think that we have to like disrupt our story kind of, that we are this, that it’s even possible. Humans are just not able to be like truly self-effacing martyrs. That’s just not a thing that happens. You’re not showing up the way you think that you’re showing up. And I think that when you can start with that reality, because the reason that people get stuck in it is they’re kind of believing this story that they are actually able to be so selfless and give so much to other people. And so if they were to stop that, it’s taking away from those people. But you’re not actually showing up that way. You’re actually probably low energy and cranky and resentful and your relationships suffer because of it. You have a disconnect between the story you have and how you’re actually being.
And when you get more aware of that, it makes it a lot easier to change it because you realize you’re not giving up some sort of amazing situation that you’ve created.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I think we’re all worse actors than we think we are absolutely.
Kara Loewentheil:
Totally. Yeah. Are you kidding? Right. We’re like… Yeah. I mean, my husband is a huge people pleaser. He knows I talk about this all the time. He’s from the Midwest and I could totally tell when he’s upset. He’s not fooling anybody.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. That’s like, yeah, the classic mom thing where it’s like, “I’m fine.” I’m like, “No, you’re not. You’re not fine.”
Kara Loewentheil:
Everybody knows you’re not fine. So what’s the point of this? You’re not actually producing the selfless experience that you’re going to tell people.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re not fooling anybody.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right. Or yourself. So let’s just all try telling the truth and accommodating each other. Everybody’s needs can be accommodated because I think that’s the lie, right? It’s sort of like the capitalism, only one person can win, right?
Tori Dunlap:
There’s one seat. Yeah.
Kara Loewentheil:
There’s one, as opposed to… Know, in a relationship, in a family, in a workplace, whatever, these things can be balanced. There’s room to accommodate everybody. Nobody’s going to get exactly what they want, but everybody can get a little bit of what they want.
Tori Dunlap:
So you say confidence doesn’t come from having the things we dream about. It’s what allows us to actually create them. So what does that look like when it comes to setting goals, specifically goals around money?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. So I think this is the big lie we’re sold about confidence. Well, there’s two big lies. One is it’s a feeling. Two is it’s a power pose. Maybe there’s three. Really, it’s a feeling and you get it from having things. You get it from accomplishments. So you look at somebody who has the amount of money you think you want or has the partner when you’re single or has the body you want or whatever. And your thought is like, “Well, yeah, it’s easy for them to be confident. They have that thing. That thing gives them the confidence.” But that’s backwards. Having a thing doesn’t give you confidence. I mean, you read any magazine article expose written by a fashion model from the ’90s who was considered at the height of female attractiveness at the time and it’s entirely about how they shitty felt about their body the whole time.
Those external accomplishments do not create confidence because confidence is an internal state and set of skills. So you can inherit a bunch of money, but it’s not going to make you confident. Why would that make you confident? You didn’t do anything to create it. You didn’t build any skills in the production of it. It’s just a circumstance. It’s like being born with a certain color hair. And we have to understand it’s the other way around, and this is, we have to build the belief that we can create something. We have to build our confidence that we are capable of putting ourselves out there and creating what we want in order to create it. So it’s a virtuous cycle. You don’t have to believe at the beginning.
When I started my business, I wasn’t in a hundred percent full belief that I could make millions of dollars. That wasn’t even my goal at the beginning. I just had to have enough self belief to believe that it’s possible that I can get someone to pay me for coaching. It’s possible that this is valuable enough for one person to pay for it. Then I am able, I have the confidence to put myself out there. Then I get that client. Then I’m like ready to believe it’s possible I could get five clients. Then I get that. But you have to start with the belief. If you are waiting for the thing to make you feel confident, you’re going to have a much harder time creating the thing. Now, some people are able to drive themselves to the thing with self-loathing and fear and anxiety, but they don’t feel any better when they get there.
So a lot of my clients are people who actually are quite high achieving, highly educated, high achieving, but that goalpost keeps moving. It’s always like, “Well, I’m going to feel better, I’m going to feel confident when I get to be director. I’m going to feel confident when I’m managing director. I’m going to feel confident when I’m a partner. I’m going to feel confident…” No, it never comes. Has to come from the inside.
Tori Dunlap:
When we think about the compass tool you mentioned, what would it look like for someone to use that tool weekly or even daily to check in on their financial confidence? How do you practically use this on a daily basis?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah. I would say, so for financial stuff, I would use it if I have… One way to use it would be to have a goal. So if you’re like, “I want to make a certain amount of money this year.” So you then are going to do a little audit kind of like, “Okay, well, let’s see, what are my self-knowledge? What are my current thoughts about how I make money, how much money I can make?” You’re going to discover all sorts of shit. “I’m not in charge of how much money I make. Someone else has to agree to pay me that money. It’s up to my boss.” You’re going to discover all this stuff. You’re then going to work on creating new thoughts to replace those with self-belief. You’re going to discover that you probably need some self-compassion. You probably have some thoughts, everyone I’ve ever met has a thought that she’s behind. Behind where? Who knows? She’s not where she’s supposed to be. She doesn’t even know where she’s supposed to be. She’s just not there.
Tori Dunlap:
And she doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows she doesn’t like life now. Yep.
Kara Loewentheil:
Right. She doesn’t know who she’s supposed to be, but she knows whoever she is as bad. Right.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep.
Kara Loewentheil:
So there’s going to be some self-confidence work. There’s going to be some self-belief work. So if you are working on a set of actions, like you’ve decided, “Okay, I’m starting a business. I’m trying to get this many clients. I want to get promoted. And so every week I’m emailing my boss with what I did that week and whatever.” So if you use the confidence compass if you find you are not taking those actions, first and foremost, why? This is like the example we talked about earlier. Do I not understand why I’m not doing it? Do I know what I’m avoiding it because I feel bad? Do I just can’t get up the gumption to hit send so I need some new self-belief? So you can use it that way.
The other way you can use it is if something unexpected happens and you’re having a big reaction to it. The confidence compass can help you figure out when something happens and then we get like put back on our heels, like we get fired or an investment doesn’t work out or the stock market tanks and we freak out or something like that happens, we can use it to figure out and diagnose like, “Okay, which of these skills do I need to pull in and use? Is it that I am now beating myself up? I shouldn’t have made that investment. You didn’t know enough about what you were doing. You should have asked-“
Tori Dunlap:
You’re stupid.
Kara Loewentheil:
“… that man named Chad who could have told you what to do with your investments, whatever. So then you’re like, “Okay, it’s self-compassion I need.” Are you starting to have thoughts that are like, “I’ll never get out of this. I’ll never be able to make enough money. I must be bad at my job”? Okay, now we need to pull in self-belief. So it just gives you a way of figuring out where to start. Sometimes you’re going to need to use more than one skill, sometimes you’re going to need all of them, but if you break down any problem or any goal into essentially, “Do I know what’s going on in my brain that’s creating my current outcomes? Have I worked on my self-compassion to be accepting of myself in this process? Do I know how to create new beliefs to propel new action so I can become self-actualized and create this?” That’s always going to cover what you need in any kind of problem you’re trying to solve.
Tori Dunlap:
You have said before, quote, “The seeds of who you want to be are already inside of you,” which is very poetic. What do you want listeners to know about their capacity to change, especially when it comes to money?
Kara Loewentheil:
Yeah, that’s that English major creative writing major in me. I really don’t think that we are called… I don’t mean called like there’s some spiritual divine, whatever. I don’t think that our unique brain and body chemistry puts into our head real true intrinsicals that we’re not capable of achieving. I think we can absorb external social goals, be told that we should do things that we don’t actually care about or may not be capable of, usually because we don’t actually care about them. But I don’t really think that we come… I have never wanted to be a visual artist. I cannot even draw anything. I did want to write a book and I didn’t get there the way I thought I would, but I got there.
If you have a financial goal that really is intrinsic to you, it’s not being driven by scarcity, it’s not being driven by fear, it’s not being driven by, “I got to make more than my sister so I feel good at Thanksgiving dinner,” whatever it is, if you really have a financial goal that aligns with your values, which there’s a whole other conversation of how this is what I teach around, decision making for women is making decisions with your values. If you have a financial goal that is really intrinsically motivated, the person who came up with that goal is the person who can achieve it.
I was just coaching a client in my mastermind yesterday who’s buying another business and she was having all of this anxiety that what if she’s not the person who has the capacity to hold that and to do that? And I was literally coaching exactly this. I was like, “But you’re the person who had the capacity and the ability to come up with this idea, find the business, negotiate, come to an agreement, do the due diligence. You had the capacity to start this. You might not have all of it now. You’re going to grow it as you go along, but you already have those seeds because you’ve gotten this far.” So wherever you are in that financial journey, if you are called to it and it’s truly intrinsically motivated, I believe you have the capacity to develop the ability to do it. And that’s where that self belief comes in of even starting with a 10% less shitty thought that’s like, “It’s possible I’m capable of more than I think. It’s possible my brain currently doesn’t know how much money I’m able to create,” opening up those glimmers of possibility.
Tori Dunlap:
I love that so much. Thank you so much for coming back on this show. You’re one of my favorite people both on this podcast and in real life. So feel free to plug away. Tell me about the book, tell me about your podcast, tell me about your programs, whatever you want to chat about.
Kara Loewentheil:
People can find my podcast, it’s called Unfuck Your Brain. My book is called Take Back Your Brain. You’re seeing a theme. And we have a free mini course on how to stop caring so much what other people think because that is often the first step to creating those confidence skills is detaching from that obsession with what everyone else thinks about you. So to get there, you can go to unfuckyourbrain.com/hsc, just those initials, unfuckyourbrain.com/hsc.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it. Thank you for being here.
Kara Loewentheil:
Thanks for having me, guys.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First $100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to http://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
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 five million women negotiate salaries, 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 over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 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.
