What Can A Financial Therapist Do For You? With Amanda Clayman

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0:45Learn more about how Notion can support your business at Notion.com slash Achiever. That's all lowercase letters, Notion.com slash Achiever and try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Do you want to have a better relationship with your money? Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code Achiever at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off, just$50. Go to Monarch.com and use code Achiever. Do you want a family safety app, but you also want to make sure that it's private and that it doesn't feel like surveillance, especially for your kids?

1:29Try HeyPolo and protect your loved ones without spying on them. Go to heypolo.com slash achiever or use code achiever and get 40 % off your first year. Go to heypolo.com slash achiever. There's a business book that you really need right now, and it's called Life at the Speed of Play. Launch products people love by Mark Pincus. He's an entrepreneur's entrepreneur known in Silicon Valley as one of the most prolific idea generators. I guarantee you've played one of the games that he has invented. and he's going to give you his book, two for the price of one. If you go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious, he will send you a second copy for free.

2:11If you're thinking about starting an online business, launch before Black Friday, a time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy. If you're ready to launch before Black Friday, just go to shopify.com slash anxiousachiever and start your free trial. Hi, I'm Maura Ahrens-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm going to bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes, and honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever. You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee but the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before.

3:06If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

3:21If you had more money, do you think your anxiety would go away? It's a question I often pose to myself. You see, money is my thing, my biggest hang-up, the issue I ruminate over and fixate on. It's a huge issue in my marriage, my business, and my daily anxiety. The good news is that I'm now aware that money is often how I channel my anxiety, and I'm less reactive to the scary feelings I get around my money issues. As you'll hear from today's guest, most people are anxious about money. Amanda Klayman is a financial therapist. She helps her clients ask the right questions and investigate the reasons why money stresses us out so much.

4:10Anxiety, Amanda says, is a signal whose purpose is to bring attention to something we need to attend to. And we can project that anxiety onto money in a million different ways. money says Amanda isn't always a problem to be solved and when we ask the right questions and uncover the motivations and roots behind our money anxiety we're more free to make sensible decisions so if your own money anxiety has you feeling trapped and unable to make changes in your life ask for what you want switch your career start that business I hope that this episode will give you some great tools on how to understand how to make changes and not let money anxiety stop you.

4:56And also, what I hope you'll hear come through in this interview is Amanda Klayman's love and passion for her work. She could have chosen a more lucrative career. She's honest about that. But her ingenuity and her creativity and her hustle in figuring out how to maximize her earnings in one way, while staying true to her mission of helping people get out of financial distress is inspiring to me. So enjoy my interview with Amanda Klayman. So on your website, you say, you ask, what does money mean to you? And I want to ask you what money means to you. Money for me is, it's a language that we speak.

5:39It is, it's a symbolic language. It's a concrete language. And it is it's a meditation for me. It's a way of centering in my life. I noticed whenever anything feels kind of off balance or particularly scary, paying attention to money and specifically what I'm feeling around money is a way that I can really reground and reorient myself. Do you have any particular sort of money? I don't know if triggers is the right word or like what's your money? What's your money thing? I, I have a go to kind of strategy where if something feels bad, if something feels scary, my inclination is to freeze and shrink, meaning I just kind of want to control the outflow.

6:34It's when I get really twitchy in particular about living in a big city because big cities are very expensive. Or like, what are the things that we're spending money on? And how can we spend less money? Well, today, I want to look at the lens of money and financial therapy. from a workplace perspective, because you are a financial therapist, but you're also an entrepreneur of sorts. You're a small business owner. And one of the things that I really like to focus on in the show is the way that we bring our emotions, our childhoods, our relationships, all the baggage into our work lives. And so I don't think you'd disagree with me if I said that we probably bring our money feelings into our work money lives.

7:30Is that true? That is absolutely true. One of the things that I assess for in speaking with clients is sort of what the fit is between the different areas, the dimensions of their financial self. So like, what are their earning values or their income values? Do they value freedom to take work that's creatively stimulating to them or or meaningful and purposeful? And how does that balance with lifestyle that values? How fancy do they like their life? How well do these things sync up with each other? And for I will say for me, you know, one of the areas of tension in my professional life is that I have chosen to to pursue work with a client population, if you will, that is 100 percent in financial distress of some kind.

8:29I mean, talk about threading a needle. And so how do I do work that I feel is is mission driven, which is, you know, what what drew me into this field from the start, while still feeling valued for for the work that I do for my expertise for just, you know, paying my bills and and how to make that work. And I've tried a million different things along the way. Well, so what works? How do you? Well, what I'm doing currently is I work with institutions. For example, I have a partnership with Prudential and I'm their financial wellness advocate. I talk a lot about sort of what people are experiencing in their financial lives.

9:23I do a lot of interfacing with the media and communications for them and having that partnership and then doing speaking, doing some other sort of media projects as well. that allows me to have a little bit more flexibility in terms of being able to work with a wider variety of people without having to like charge Los Angeles or New York rates for psychotherapy. But that is something that is working for me now. And I would say like trying to get here along the way has there been many points where I did not feel like it was working as well. Well, let's take a step back because you talked about values.

10:10And someone might be listening and thinking, well, I'm not happy right now in my work. I want to do something different. But I'm so anxious about money, especially because of what's going on in the world. I can't possibly do different work. I can't possibly live a different life. And it probably feels like a mess and might make them just freeze. And I speak from experience because I've been there where your anxiety about scarcity stands in the way of a lot. What do you, where do you start if a client comes with to you with, with that, that feeling that, that either is a reality or they think it's a reality?

10:56One of the first things that I would do is, is try to differentiate between a signal that we need to listen to, and a problem that we're trying to solve. So when somebody is feeling unsettled or uncomfortable in their lives, and, and that feeling is telling them that they need a change. One of the things that I try to do to help people calm that process down so that they can move through it more deliberatively is to first say, okay, let's just take that uncomfortable feeling and identify what it's saying. What specifically are the things that don't feel right to you about this job? What are some things that when you think about a future feel like you don't know how you would address those needs, like if you're starting your own business.

11:53And once we have a fuller picture of just being able to look at these things, then that clears the way for us being able to move through a sequence of different steps in this process, which number one, helps us calm down immediately, because we're taking action. But we're not doing it in a in a heedless kind of a way. And we're able to really, I think, sort of put into two different categories. What are the things that I can investigate more, learn more about even make potential changes? And then what are the things that I'm not going to know until I'm I'm in it and I just have to make myself or get to a place where I'm feeling a little bit more comfortable with just the sense of not being in complete control which is hard it's it's hard but when we don't make a distinction between those two kind of categories if we don't have the answers to some things it feels like we don't know anything so at least if we can sort of make the things that we don't know smaller so that they can maybe feel a little bit more manageable.

13:09We can build confidence through the process. We can identify some different like if if my income goes down by X, here's my plan for how to adjust my expenses. Like there's a lot of kind of preparatory work that we can do. Not I'm going to go broke and it's all going to be like, yeah, like the minute you decide that you hate your job. I mean, that becomes a kind of stressful feeling that one has to carry and tolerate. And that that's difficult. But it also doesn't mean like I'm doing nothing until the moment that I pull the trigger and quit my job. Like I'm not working on my dream until I do that.

13:42That's silly. There's a lot that we could do ahead of time. You know, the other day I was talking with my friend who is both certified financial planner and a financial therapist. We were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and sense. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money. Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. It has easy to read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month.

14:30And it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say to how the S &P is doing. All kinds of great tools that help me frankly take some of the emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me. Most apps only tell you what you've already spent, but Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code achiever at monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core at half off just$50. That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever.

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18:07Are most people anxious about money? Yes. And why? Like, how are we born that way? How do we become that way? So anxiety is, it's not a characterological state. It is, again, it's a signal. It's information. Its purpose is to bring our attention to something to kind of shock us out of just automatic thinking and say, what is this thing that that feels yucky that I need to kind of attend to? And we can project that onto money in a million different ways. So we can project that into money, as in, I don't have enough, or I have enough right now, but I'm not going to have enough in the future. or I have enough, but this other person is threatening my control over it.

19:04Or this person stands in the way of me having enough, or I have more than other people. And I'm worried that they'll find out and judge me. Like you, you show me a hundred different people and I can show you a hundred different anxieties that people can bring to their financial lives. And, and do they come from our childhoods? Like how are they developed? um well again like it's it's there to keep us safe boy our anxiety over money is there to keep us safe anxiety in general it is the reason that we still get anxious is because anxiety is supposed to alert us to a danger but its job is to alert not to assess you know like like it's our executive functions job to then listen to the alert and go, okay, is this something that I legitimately need to worry about?

19:57Or is it not? Like, when we look at something and we say, is this signal anxiety, or is this noise anxiety? So noise anxiety. And by that, I mean, it's just, you know, it sort of gets our attention, but it's a distraction. It's kind of a drag on our ability to process and make good decisions, that can absolutely come from childhood or it comes from maybe experiences that we've had that were traumatic, like getting fired from a job or being in a relationship and having your partner take advantage of you financially. Like we learn through experience what we need to what we think we need to be afraid of in the future.

20:44So anxiety is almost always reactive to something that's happened to us in the past. And do you find that people tend to have a comfortable pattern of money anxiety or that their money anxiety takes sort of different forms? We do have a preferred pattern. So like I was saying before that my money anxiety turns into control, control, shrink, smaller, spend less. And my husband goes, oh my God, I cannot spend less. I need to make more. Me too. My relationship is the exact same. I'm like, I'm like the squirrel getting all the acorns for the winter when I get anxious and he's just, you know, looking for new forests.

21:28Yeah. It's fascinating to me. Yes. Any of these sort of preferred patterns, like they're, they're just, they're a hypothesis about what will work. And what I mean by that is, this is a strategy that has probably that we've probably deployed in the past. It has hopefully worked more than it hasn't. And so now it's kind of our go to, and we don't think about it very much, it feels right to us. Any strategy, though, can or any sort of pattern here, if it's too rigid, and if it's not suited to the circumstances that we're in, then it becomes dysfunctional and problematic. And, and honestly, like, it's not my job to come in and say, this is a bad strategy, it's unhealthy, we need to work on this.

22:23It's more like, let's look at the fit between where what you've been trying to do and how well or not well that's working like what give me an example like I don't want to share any financial information with my partner I was brought up that that is that's just wrong or it's it's impolite for somebody to ask about that. I don't want to have to support my partner. Any money that I make is mine. And you could say that's a valid or not valid way of managing money. But if it's causing stress in the relationship, if the relationship is jeopardized because another person has a different view of what the right thing to do with money or the right way to partner financially, then that's going to be tough.

23:17And if a person really wants to stay in that relationship, that may be enough motivation to say, you know, I know this comes from a place of fear and it feels very scary for me to be out of control. And so that's enough of an incentive for me to really try to work on this and see if I can, I can trust more and extend that trust into the role that money plays in my relationship. I want to shift and think about achievers listening to the show, people in various phases of their career, and what they need to know about their own money emotions before they're starting, say, a negotiation for a salary, or they're starting a small business, or they're thinking about partnering with someone.

24:10I'm almost wondering if there's a checklist or a financial wellness intake form, you know, that you should think about because, you know, I think a lot of us don't realize how our attitudes about money both help and hurt us until it's way after the fact, you know, in retrospect. And so I'm wondering, like, what advice you have for people who are embarking upon a change in which having awareness about their money feelings could be really helpful? Well, I just want to frame this answer as like thinking about money, again, not as a problem to be solved, which I think is like the reason I went into this work in the beginning is it seems like we only think about money as a problem to be solved.

25:01Meaning if we only had enough of it, all our problems would be solved or what? or just like that there is an external answer all the time for money and and our our job to solve our feelings about money is to make that external answer happen right so like if you are really nervous about negotiating a salary um or fee instead of getting stuck in like i'm i'm not good at this. This is a problem for me. If only I were better, like this is think of it instead as like, this is a way where I can learn to grow. And this is a place where, where an issue that I have that probably exists in other realms of a person's life to around worthiness, and around going to a a powerful figure and saying, I deserve or I want.

26:00Look at how that's showing up as a money challenge in your life. And as you work through that, you have the opportunity to grow as a person. So would you take a monetary value out of it totally? I mean, if a client said to you, well, the real problem is I want to make$100 ,000 a year, but they're only offering me$80 ,000 a year and I'm never going to get there because I don't deserve it. I hear a lot of deserving in that, like fighting against, like, like fighting against the message that you don't deserve it in that scenario, like not wanting to accept that, wanting to push back. And so maybe there were some messages around like, how can you ask for those sneakers?

26:42Like how selfish of you? Like It's that direct a lot of times, the way that our caregivers responded to things that we wanted or needed or asked for. It sounds like you even hear shame in that. Like, I'm ashamed that I feel like I deserve. Oh, my gosh. Shame and money. Shame and money could be its own series. Let's do it. Because shame is a signal, not that something is necessarily bad. We think of it as something bad, but shame is really something that disrupts connection. The purpose of shame from an evolutionary psychology standpoint is like shame protects us from being cast out of the tribe and, you know, dying of exposure back in the day, but we still have shame.

27:33So when somebody is saying, like, how can you ask for those sneakers, you are getting the message of like, ooh, selfish people don't get love and approval. So I better not be selfish and asking for something that I need is selfish. Oh, it's so fundamental, though. I mean, it cuts to the core. This is why money work can bring us to really powerful transformation. The reason I said it's like a language was because like this is a way that the external world engages our internal world. So like we are in situations where we need to negotiate for a rate or salary. and and so our self-worth stuff is going to come up in that exchange in that experience shame is going to come up and just I would say a maybe more flexible and fluid way of of handling that is again just to treat this as sort of signal as information like oh there it is again but I can make a decision now that I know that to to say here's what I want to do with that information.

28:46I, for example, like, I just want to give myself tools, like you and I, I think more, I have a mutual friend who I have used this advice a million times around negotiation, who said, ask for the biggest number that you can without laughing out loud. And I have thought that is such a useful, like rule of thumb. If we want to go back to the example of like leaving a steady paycheck or career and doing something more entrepreneurial, it's like, what are some of the things that I can do, I can try to have six to 12 months of expenses in the bank. So we can work really strategically with some of the like the concrete properties of money that allows us to grow and to shift in like the symbolic and emotional aspects of money.

29:36Does that make sense? It really does. And one of the things that I was thinking of, and I think it was a conversation I had with you several years ago when I was working on my book that really helped me spark it, was that I decided that I had to grow out of one money attitude and into another, which is that I grew up with the typical child of divorce whose parents used money as a weapon against each other. and I was caught in the middle. And so I learned to use money as a weapon. And I would spend money to get revenge on my father. Frankly, I'd run up his credit card. And so I always grew up feeling that when I accrued any kind of debt, I was being a bad girl.

30:23Dad would be mad at me. And so when I was a small business owner, that became really problematic, right? Because I would act out all those feelings. and I was still a 13-year-old at some level. And it was my stepfather who said to me, you know, Maura, debt that is really about building a business is not bad debt, it's growth. And I sort of had this moment of like, oh, I need to grow up here. It was really profound for me. This episode is brought to you by Vinted, a secondhand marketplace app. You know, I love clothes. And I love when the seasons change to spend a good amount of time, you know, moving out, reviewing my summer stuff, bringing in my fall stuff.

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32:26We were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money. Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. It has easy to read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month. And it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say, to how the S &P is doing. All kinds of great tools that help me, frankly, take some of the emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me.

33:16Most apps only tell you what you've already spent, but Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code Achiever at Monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core at half off, just$50. That's$50 off your first year at Monarch.com with code Achiever. You know, I love mushrooms. I am fascinated by them. One of my favorite things to do is in New Hampshire to go on mushroom exploring walks with a renowned naturalist, Riley McHugh. Riley has taught me to put on my seeing eyes.

34:01And when I do, I see purple mushrooms and red mushrooms, big mushrooms, gross mushrooms, cute mushrooms. And I was thinking about the holidays upcoming and how we use mushrooms as a decorative theme. Think about it. You probably have a mushroom ornament or a little mushroom figure that you may put out sometime in the fall or holidays. Mushrooms. If I had an online store, I would sell all manner of decorative mushrooms. I know it sounds silly. And I would do it on Shopify. Shopify is the platform for a record-breaking, reliable holiday selling season at every stage. There's a reason why so many businesses thrive on Shopify.

34:43You can easily sell everywhere people shop, online, in person, across social media, even in AI chats. If you launch your store before Black Friday, a time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy, you can take advantage of the extra online traffic. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com slash anxiousachiever and start your free trial. Shopify.com slash anxiousachiever to hear your first. And money, because you saw yourself as a person who wanted to achieve, that part of yourself was in conflict with that older piece that understood money in a different way.

35:31And so that provided the incentive for you to address and heal that piece through being able to do something different. Well, so how do I know if I need a financial therapist? I can tell you who I tend to work with, who seeks me out. people who feel very anxious and avoidant around money that, that feel overwhelmed by the prospect of really engaging with money, directing it in their lives. I work with a lot of couples who experience conflict around money or decisions relating to money. And then I work with a lot of people in in life transitions, you know, like going into a new career, having a baby, death of a parent, a lot of people when they inherit money.

36:27And so those are are just examples of some common things that that I see a lot. Do you ever work with people who, you know, sort of feel guilty about the money they earn, like they don't deserve it? Or does no one feel that way um there are a lot of self-worth issues with family money and um a lot of secrecy like we don't talk about that kinds of cultures and families that have money um people who earn money generally at least feel like they're that's a compensation for something that they have done I talk to a lot of people because I'm I'm trained as a social worker. A lot of people who are attracted to social work, but are like, how can I make a living as a social worker?

37:20Like wanting to do work that's that's good and meaningful work, but knowing that that's not always the work that's most highly valued in our in our economic system. And that's a reality. In fact, I want to ask a listener question, which I thought was so interesting. about your class, your background, and how it relates to your feelings around money. She says that I'd love to hear Amanda's take on how she sees feelings and anxieties manifest differently in lower income families or people who grew up in lower income backgrounds. And if your advice on how to understand those feelings is different than someone who grew up economically comfortable?

38:10So we always inherit kind of our original software, our original programming about what money is and how it works from our families and the financial circumstances that we grew up in. And for a lot of people who struggle with having enough money, so like one of the ways that that people adapt to not being able to have enough money and not being able to necessarily plan for the future is that there's more of a um focus on the needs of today and just making sure that the needs of today are met um there's often a distrust of of systems and authority. And then when people maybe experience a class transition, one of the most difficult pieces of that is sometimes like, I am trying, I have this money, I believe I'm supposed to save it.

39:15Like now that I'm a person who has money, I'm supposed to do something with this money. But how do I, how do I make a plan for having future money when I am talking to a loved one who doesn't connect with why that would even be a value. Well, you know, it's funny because you you've asked this question on Instagram a few weeks ago, and I thought it was super interesting. You said when our role is caretaker and problem solver, is it OK to also be a real person? What happens when we ourselves need support? And what you posed just before that reminded me of that question, you know, and and I think a lot lot of people may have a very human impulse to say, no, this is my money, or I want to do this for myself, or I need support, I need this.

40:06But they're so enmeshed in the role of caretaker. Like, what is what is your answer to that question? What happens when we ourselves need support when everyone looks to us as caretaker and provider? And to recognize that there is a real difference in in sort of go to strategies like when when you don't have a lot of money when when you don't have a lot of resources the community or the family is the main source of stability and help so like if I if I don't have diapers and my sister has diapers I can borrow diapers from her and she knows that if she doesn't have diapers she can get them for me next week.

40:49That sort of like a community and shared resources is critical to survival and stability. The more affluent we get, the more we think of individual problems and goals as just that individual problems and goals. But when we have been in this network, and we still value these relationships, how do we then even conceive of, let alone negotiate a different set of financial boundaries? It's a really complex process that one goes through both personally and relationally, and it is expressed or the way that it's showing up is as a problem with money. The last question I want to ask is a listener question, and I'm also going to broaden isn't it to think about leadership and the role of a leader?

41:41You know, I always like to think on the show, what is the role of the healthy leader in sort of modeling all these behaviors that we are sort of leery of and asking questions that are typically uncomfortable? And so Linda Davis Taylor says, how do we get people to talk about money? Friends, family members, colleagues, it remains so taboo. And my additional question would be, is it ever appropriate if you're the boss to talk about money? And if so, in what context? The boss question is really interesting. And the challenge with the boss angle is that you want to be careful that putting a value on sharing and encouraging sharing isn't seen as coercive to people who don't want that.

42:37and aren't asking for it and feel exposed by that. Let me maybe start then with just like the more people in general. Because I was just having this conversation yesterday with a client whose family did not talk about money. And she was kind of in the dark in lots of ways about just normal sort of behaviors and expectations about making financial decisions and plans. And the phrase that I used for her was like, to expand her circle of awkwardness, like, who are the people that you can have an awkward conversation with? So you don't necessarily pick a non-intimate stranger, you know, to share this very intimate sort of topic with, but to think like, who's a close friend, who's a family member that I feel like I can open up to and might give me a straight answer.

43:43So on a peer level, I think that's the easiest place for us to network, first and foremost, is to really strengthen and expand our peer communication around money. When it comes to sort of moving up or down the power ladder, or the financial status hierarchy, I think it becomes a more of an issue of coercion and consent. And really wanting to make sure that this is not a sort of prescribed behavior. Like I have decided that you all need to talk about money. But if you are perceiving that there is a need that's coming up, to think about how you can facilitate that very organic need that's coming up.

44:40Yet another reason why we need a financial therapist. I'm here to help. Amanda, thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much, Maura.

44:53That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends, and please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Ahrens-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.