Financial Feminist - 158. Is People Pleasing Ruining Your Life? with Kara Loewentheil

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Tired of the relentless pressure to constantly "better" yourself? In this episode of Financial Feminist, host Tori Dunlap sits down with Master Certified Life Coach Kara Loewentheil to dismantle the toxic narrative of self-hate that's often ingrained in the self-development industry, especially for women. They delve into how societal expectations, particularly for women, fuel a cycle of self-criticism and never-ending striving for external validation. This conversation will challenge you to rethink your approach to personal growth and goals, offering a fresh perspective on how to achieve success without sacrificing self-love. Kara shares her own transformative journey and provides actionable insights on how to rewire your brain for self-acceptance, create your own validation, and break free from the emotional vending machine trap. Tune in to discover how to fuel your personal development with self-compassion, not self-loathing. Read transcripts, learn more about our guests and sponsors, and get more resources at https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/158-is-people-pleasing-ruining-your-life-with-kara-loewentheil/.  Not sure where to start on your financial journey? Take our FREE money personality quiz! https://herfirst100k.com/quiz. Kara’s website The Feminist Self-Help Society The Unf*ck Your Brain podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the reasons humans are so sensitive to rejection is that we evolved in small tribes of hunter gatherers where you had to depend on your neighbors, etc. But what's missing was all the social context of yes, and women are taught that the key to not being rejected and dying is make everyone happy with you all the time, look a certain way, don't be too mouthy, don't have needs, put everyone else first. So these things wrap into each other. The reason that it feels so physically terrifying, not to people please, is not because you're weak or you're stupid or you're whatever. It's because society has taught you that a woman's role in life,

essentially, is to serve other people. Hello, financial feminists. Welcome to the show. If you're new here, hi, my name is Tori. I am a New York Times bestselling author. I am the host of this podcast. I have hair on my mic. I'm trying to pick it off because it's in my face. And we are a community of over 5 million women and financial feminists. We teach people all over the world how to save money, pay off debt, start investing, start businesses and fight the patriarchy by getting you rich. If you're an oldie, but a goodie, you knew all of that. Welcome back to the show.

I will do a shameless plug that Financial Feminist is best listened to with friends. So you can share our podcast wherever you listen to whomever you think would be into it. And you can also tag us at Financial Feminist Podcasts on Instagram. You can share posts there and you can also tag us at financialfeministpodcasts on Instagram. You can share posts there and you can also watch most episodes on YouTube. The YouTube link is down below in the show description. So if you're more of a visual person, you want to watch the video. Great. We'd love to see you there. Yeah. This is a fun episode with somebody that I've admired

for a very long time. And if you feel like your brain is the enemy, if you feel like you don't know how to become better friends with all of the racing thoughts in your head, today's episode is going to help. Kara Lowenthal, JD is a master certified life coach, founder of the School of New Feminist Thought and the host of the internationally top ranked podcast, Unfuck Your Brain, feminist self help for everyone, which has 50 million downloads and counting. Her first book, Take Back Your Brain, How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head and How to Get It Out, has been called a galvanizing debut by Publishers Weekly, chosen as a must read by the Next Big

Ideas Book Club for May 2024, and has been praised by New York Times bestselling authors, including Mel Robbins, Dr. Marisa Franco, and yours truly, Tori Dunlap. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, Kara did what every Ivy League lawyer should do, quit a prestigious academic career to become a life coach. Eight years after she stepped down as director of a think tank at Columbia Law School, again, no big deal, she has created a multiple seven figure business, taught millions of women

how to identify the ways that sexist socialization impacts their brains, and helps women all over the world rewire their thought patterns to liberate themselves from the inside out. We get into a few great topics surrounding feminism, philosophy, and psychology. We're going academic, y'all. It's going to be very fun. All of the ways our brains are programmed by patriarchy, especially if you were raised as a woman. The impact that women's rights or lack thereof have had on our finances. We're going to talk about navigating self-help culture because it often feels like self-hate culture. And we talk about how to find validation from within rather from external sources.

And I'm looking at myself when I say that. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors. To uncover your potential with the all new LG Gram Pro laptop. Staying as light as a gram, this powerhouse is here to elevate your workflow. Powered by Intel Core Ultra Processor with AI enhanced capabilities,

you can keep your cool and staying control of your work with advanced power dual cooling. Welcome to the pro life with LG Grand Pro. Experience the power of pro. Get your LG Grand Pro today. Pro anytime, anywhere. I'm digging the bust behind you. Thank you. That's from our rebrand.

We just became the school of new feminist thought, went through a whole rebrand and we had a real kind of Greek philosopher goddess theme going on. I love it. And the person who did our rebrand, who's now my marketing and sales director, was like, so good news and bad news, we do have some busts. Some of them are not returnable or rentable. So here you go. I want to be clear to our audio only listeners, it is a bust you would find in a, well, you can find kind of both busts in a listeners, it is a bust you would find in a, well, you can find kind

of both busts in a museum. It is a sculpture. It's a sculpture. Yes. Of a person, not of titties. It's Athena. I think it's Athena. Oh, cool. She's light. She's not made of marble. Yeah. Okay. You know, she's plastic. It's very classy. Let me tell you. Thank you. Like it really classes up the vibe. Listen, having a rare book dealer for a father just really gets you off on a good foot for your backgrounds. I'm sorry, I wasn't expecting to talk about rare book. Tell me everything. How does that work? We'll get into the official questions in a second. But like, listen, it's segues fine. I learned a lot about value and business from him. So it's a perfect segue. Yeah.

He's a rare book and photography dealer. So that's behind me. You can see if you're watching video, there's like a first edition of Pride and Pregnancy, Jane Austen, like a first, there's a first printing of the first book that was published in English about women and the law. So it's from like 1670 or something. Got Virginia Wolf back there. It's a whole.

We might have to edit down my gas because that was the most dramatic gas. You have a first edition of P&P? I do. I do. And it's in like good shape? Yeah. I can show it to you if you want. I don't know how much time we have. You live in New York too, right? I don't live in New York. I live in Seattle, but I come to New York all the time. There you go. You can come hold the first edition.

Which one behind you? Which one is it? Jane Austen is Pride and Prejudice is the flat red. Okay. Two flat red. Yeah. One is Virginia Woolf, Remove One Zone. Okay. Cool. Classic feminist literature.

Totally. And on top of that is Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. That is lovely. And then the green one next to it, the green next to it is, yeah, 1632, The Law's Resolution of Women's Rights, the first book written. Wow. About is yeah 1632 the laws resolution of women's rights. The first book written. Wow. About women's rights in the law. If you I'm sure he has seen many of them but I haven't because this is not my thing. Gatsby is my favorite book. Gatsby. All right. I own multiple different versions. So if he ever finds a first edition Gatsby.

I'm on it. Please let me know. Listen I'm sure he can find one first edition Gatsby. I'm on it. I don't even. Listen, I'm sure he can find one. First edition Gatsby. I'm on it. I don't even know how much that would cost. I probably should look that up before I say. Well, yeah, you get to decide before you. I'm not just going to have him purchase and send you a bill. He's like, great. It's a hundred grand. Here's a bill. No, but like I haven't even looked up. Is it $500? Is it $5 million? I have not looked up how much it would be. I have no idea, but it's not going to be either of those. I honestly, if I had to guess, it would be in the tens of thousands. That might be out of my budget, but we'll talk.

I honestly have no idea. I mean, it so depends on like... That's so cool. That's what she gets. Oh, I have so many other questions for you and for your father. This is going to be his favorite podcast in JYF or Jew. Listen, anytime. Come to New York, we'll take you out. You can hold the books.

I love it. When I talk to interesting people, there is a version of me that's like, oh, I could have done this for a living. Totally. I have that with all of my musician friends. I literally had a conversation with my friend who's a producer. That one I could not have done. I could have been a rare book dealer, but not a musician.

Oh, I end up talking for like five hours with him about shit. And I'm like, oh, this could have been my life. And it's just like, I just love books, love libraries. That's just so fascinating. OK, hi, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to see you. Thanks for having me. If you want a rare book, reach out to her father.

Through a channel. Shameless plug. Talk to me first. I love the background of went to Harvard Law, no big deal. What like it's hard and then decided to quit and become a life coach. Talk to me about that. How did that happen? I call that the Ivy League lawyer to life coach pipeline. I went to Yale undergrad, I went to Harvard Law School, I was a reproductive rights litigator and then an academic. So I would say the through line is I've been a professional feminist my whole life, one way or another, but I also in my personal life was always a, not a seeker, because it wasn't like spiritual and I wasn't going to ashrams,

but just I like, from a very young age, I just remember looking around at like humans and being like, gotta be a better way of doing things. Just feels like most people are like, really, I just have a lot of thoughts and feeling miserable. Yeah, just a mess, just a lot. Seems like a lot of things are a mess and there's gotta be a better way.

So when I was 16, I told my parents I wanted to go to therapy and I was, you know, like the first person in my family to go to therapy. And so, so I was always into psychology and self-help and self-development. And I think from two motivations, one being this like more positive one of sort of always being interested in how can we live more intentionally and kind of create the life we want. And one of them being the patriarchal socialization in a woman's brain of like, I'm broken, I need to be fixed, there's something wrong with me, you know, I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable, I'm too fat, I'm too much, I'm too loud, I'm too what, you know, all these sort of all the socialization we get.

And so I tried like a variety of different things. I got it really into yoga for a while and meditation. And you know, it's like the white girl self-development journey and into, I went to therapy for many years and then I sort of found coaching. And then the first coach I found, bless her heart, the system was like, she worked for a big coaching company in New York actually, and she was a lovely woman.

But the system was, so you decide something you wanna change, let's say you like wanna stop smoking, and you pick a reward and a punishment for yourself, and then you just implement those. And I was like, but I'm over three years old, so I know that I could just give myself a reward or not get like, what are you talking about? That doesn't work, right? Like, but I'm not actually gonna throw $5 out the window if I smoke a cigarette and I just know that no one's coming along to make me, so how does this work? So that was my ignomiest introduction to coaching.

But eventually I found the teacher I learned from, Brooke Castillo of the Life Coach School, and you know, learned that you could actually change the way you think on purpose and that your thoughts were what were creating your feelings and your actions. And that was pretty fucking mind blowing. And I applied the work to myself for about a year. It made such a huge difference in my life.

And then I, you know, I mean, I experienced it as a like wake up revelation, like I'm going to become a coach and I'm going to work with lawyers. But I like six months later was talking to a friend that I saw maybe every two years only when I went out to California and I was like, Oh my God, wild news. I'm doing this thing. And she was like, you've been joking about moving to Costa Rica and becoming a life coach for years. And I realized that was true.

Like, but I had never even been able to like admit that to myself because I was on this extremely traditional career path of like go to an Ivy league law school, clerk for a federal judge, could do a litigation fellowship, do an academic fellowship. I was supposed to become a law professor. And my brain, like, it took a lot of self-development work to even get to the point that my brain could allow into consciousness as a real possibility that I could do this thing that I obviously had been really wanting to do. Something else.

Yeah. So you got your start in the women's rights world. What did you learn during that time about the state of women's rights in this country, which, you know, abysmal? Only good things, because it's all roses. It's unicorns and butterflies. It's amazing. Talk to me about what you learned and then tell me how that affects our ability to do things like make money, stand in our power, be the best versions of ourselves. Yeah. So I mean, my experience in the kind of women's rights movement

was I think like a lot of people's experience in social justice movements, which is a lot of burnout, a lot of anger, a lot of stress. And some of that is situational. Like you're working on really, I mean, I cared a lot about abortion rights and reproductive rights. You're working on an issue that's, people's lives are at stake. So the stakes just feel very high. But also, there's such an endemic level of burnout in social justice work and in women's

rights work. And I think it's partly because, and this is what I sort of came to realize and why I changed careers, because we're paying so much attention to, and we should be paying attention to, the social structures and the policy problems. Like we need, you know, new laws protecting reproductive rights. We need mandatory maternity leave and parental leave in general. We need, so the feminist movement was 99.9% focused on policies and structural changes. And nobody was really paying attention to what living in a sexist society does to your brain. So I would be working at, you know, the highest level reproductive rights organizations in the country, the ones who are bringing the cases to the Supreme Court, be sitting in a staff meeting with the women who argue it

at the Supreme Court, like literally the top experts in the world in their field, and people are still starting things in meetings like, well, maybe this is stupid, or maybe this has already been said, or I don't know if this makes sense, or, you know. And I just had this moment in a meeting where I was like, oh, this is in our heads. This is not like, it's both. The structural problems exist, and we've internalized it in this way where you can't achieve your way out of it, right?

And you can't do, you can't succeed enough to change the thoughts in your brain. And that's restarted me down that coaching journey. And so I think that shows up so much in women's relationship to money because there's so much socialization around money. So in my, I have a book coming out called Take Back Your Brain. And in the book, I talk about like the three money lies and the three new money mindsets that women need, because there's so much socialization that money is like not for women, that we're bad at it, that we can't be trusted with it, that we can't understand it. Also, it's math and math is for boys too. And that we just need to be, you know, if you just like put your head down and work and don't ask for anything and don't want anything, maybe a nice man will come along to reward you someday.

All things I talk about in my book too. And the narratives that are just perpetuated that frankly keep us underpaid and overworked and playing small because if we believe that money is bad and that the pursuit of money is bad, if we believe that to your point. And then it's also in my book that like, just be a good, good little girl and do your work and somebody is going to come along. You're exactly right. And like reward you or that loyalty wins or that. Yeah, just yes. Put your head down, be a good employee. And later somebody will just give you a raise like that. I wish that's how it works. Or some man will come rescue you by marrying you. Yeah. I mean, the level at which, like, working in this nonprofit, you know, I had colleagues who were very devoted, wonderful people, and also a lot of them were married to investment bankers, right?

Because it was like that, I think they were, I mean, this is very culturally and demographically specific, obviously, not everybody's raised with this expectation. But a lot of at least, you know, middle-class to upper-class white women, I think, are raised with the even unconscious expectation. But a lot of at least, you know, middle class to upper class white women, I think are raised with the even unconscious expectation. Even if the conscious expectation is like, yes, you're going to work and have a job and a career. The unconscious expectation is like, well, probably if you're straight and you marry a man, he'll make more than you and then sort of, you know, you can work in a lower paid career, you can take time off to be a state home mom. And even if you work, he's going to be the one that handles the finance. Right. Like,

you're handling the day to day you're handling.'s going to be the one that handles the finances. Right. Like you're handling the day-to-day, you're handling the... You're managing the household, but not the purse. Yeah. Right. But not, yeah, investing and buying a house and negotiating your salary and all of these like really big decisions that actually make a difference. Yeah. Totally.

So when we talk about patriarchy and money, I mean, we were already talking about like some of the narratives that, you know, we, we hear as individuals that we internalize. The other one is like, like you said, you know, money is math and you're bad with math, which is a whole conversation about like, how you're actually told growing up as a girl that math is for boys. that math is for boys. And by the way, money is not math, money is emotions. It's psychological. It's more about how you manage your brain to your point than how you actually look at numbers on a spreadsheet. Give me some examples throughout history where patriarchy has impacted women and still is today. I'm thinking about couldn't open a credit card in your own name till the 1970s or a bank account in your own name. Like give me some of those things that is impacting our money from the patriarchy. Yeah. So this goes back very far. And one of the things that I loved about writing a book is that you can weave in this context because the context actually is important. I think that when women

understand the historical context, it not only helps you understand our problematic structural, again, policies and laws, but it helps you understand why these things may, like, feel so true, be so reflected in the culture, why you may... I mean, I think a lot...the experience that a lot of women have in this day and age has been like, I don't even know why I believe this thought. Like, I didn't pick this thought. It's just in my brain. I don't want to believe it, but it's just there.

And the historical context kind of helps you understand why. So in Western society for, you know, certainly since the Middle Ages up until 30 years ago, right, women were legally subordinate financially. And for a long time until in the US about the 1830s when the first state passed the first married women's property act. Married women were under what was known as um, coverture, couverture if you're French, which was like the legal fiction that a man and his wife were one legal person and that legal person was the man. You weren't like forming a third new legal person. It wasn't like picking a new surname for both of you. You were just now the man. You were subsumed under him like his child or his livestock. He was owned you and was in charge of you. And so married women couldn't own property. They couldn't, you

couldn't have a bank account. You couldn't have a job. If you did have a job, you were not entitled to own the wages from your job. Right? And if you weren't married, sometimes you, even if you were upper middle class and had any if you weren't married, sometimes you, even if you were upper middle class and had any money and weren't married, you could sometimes control your own money if you were like a widow with no male relatives. But if you were unmarried, it was your husband or your brothers, right? Somebody was always in charge of you. And so, I mean, women literally until very recently, historically in the West, did not have control over their money. They've always, women have always worked outside the home and made money or done economically

productive activity in or outside the home. But you had no legal right to it. And again, it wasn't until like 1830 was the first Married Women's, I think that date is right, I should check, but it was the first Married Women's Property Act that allowed just married women to own their own property. So when you think about that historically, it's not that long ago. And it wasn't until 1974, as you say, that in every state in the country, a woman could open a credit card without a man guaranteeing it. So you did not, that was like in 1972, there were states in which you still had to

like haul your uncle or your brother or your father or your husband down to the bank to sign your credit card application. To get a co-signer. Yeah. Whether or not he was, you could be making five times as much money, but you needed a man to sign the account. So when you think about it that way, it's really not a surprise that we think money is not for us and that the society, the social, you know, expectations are still that it's like, we don't understand it and it's not our thing and someone else is going to take care of it for us. Yeah.

And it's an industry that exists primarily to keep straight white men employed. And they're employed because they tell you, oh, you can't manage your money on your own. Give it to us and we'll manage it for you, which is a whole other conversation too. And we're talking about, you know, we've talked a lot on this show about the other policies that, you know, don't seem necessarily economic immediately, but paid family leave is an economic policy. Abortion rights is an economic policy. So a lot of the things that we're battling for and dealing with now in 2024 are also financial issues. Birth control coverage and health insurance is an economic policy.

Right, right. The rising cost of daycare and the fact that we don't have any sort of government support. Formula, when there's a national shortage on formula, like that is an economic policy and decision that impacts women in the workforce. Totally, yeah. And then women who are working in the home are so devalued. I just coached somebody on a society coaching call who had a big successful career and then decided to stay home with their kids for a few years. And like the identity shift from having like a job that society valued, quote unquote, to a job that felt unvalued. Right. And

we were talking like I was going through with her like, okay, how much did you have to pay someone to do all this stuff when you weren't doing it? It was economically productive labor. Then it's economically productive labor now. But if you're doing it for your own family, then of course that's stigmatized. Right. Right. I want to transition to talking about your book, Take Back Your Brain. You talk about this idea of a brain gap. Can you share more about what that is and how you work at the School of Feminist Thought to change that? Yeah. So the brain gap is there's two, there's sort of two versions of the brain gap. The

first is there's this gap between how men and women are socialized. So there's a gap between the thoughts that are sort of fed into our brains. If you think about you're born as a baby, you have some like instincts to move to nurse, to cry if you're hungry, that's about it. Like you don't have any beliefs about the world. You don't know anything. And then when you grow up, you are taught literally everything you know about like, what is a chair for and what's safe to eat and when are you supposed to wear clothes and what, you know, who is valuable and who needs to look a certain way

and how do people interact? Like all of that is social programming you get. And so some of that's all the same. We kind of mostly all learn to wear clothes at the same times and places. But then there's gender-based socialization that you get. And it's explicit and implicit, right? So sometimes it's very explicit. Like you might have been in a family where your parents said to you like,

well, it's very important for you to marry a man who'll take care of you. Right? As a woman, as a girl, you might have noticed nobody's saying that to your brother. Or it might have been more implicit. Like, I grew up in a family that was very focused on education and career, but it was still always assumed that I was going to get married and have kids and that that was, like, you know, a part of life that needed to happen. And then you absorb the media, you absorb stuff from your friends, what you read. I mean, I think that kids' movies have gotten better, but I'm 42.

And when I grew up, like the Disney movies were still all, you meet the prince, kiss the prince at the end, and that's the happy ending. Like there were no feminist empowerment Disney movies when I was growing up. So you learn all of this. And so we end up with this widening gap over time where men's brains are socialized to think that they understand money, they understand finance, they can invest and grow wealth, they can feel confident, they can take risks. Right. They can take risks. Also just that in general, like, they don't need to prove their worth. They're allowed to just exist and they're, you know, they're sort of value and contribution to society is taken for, and they're the star of their own show. Then women are socialized in the opposite direction. That's the first brain gap, different socialization you get.

Then what that produces is an internal brain gap, which I referenced earlier, which is that thing I think a lot of us experience between, well, I want to think this, but I feel completely differently. My feminist belief might be that women, of of course can understand money as well as men and that money isn't gendered and blah, blah, blah. But what happens emotionally for me is that the minute

that a dude in a suit named Chad starts talking to me about the stock market, I started to feel insecure and like, I don't know what's going on and that I better listen to what he says and probably I should hire him and pay him to put my money in an index fund, which I could have done myself. Right? So we get that gap between like how we want to think and feel and how we do. And you know,

we're here talking about money, but like I saw this the most in my life in dating where, yes, intellectually, I understand that a guy that I went on two dates with off of Tinder who ghosted me is probably not a big player in my life story. But emotionally, I was completely fixated on like what went wrong and are they going to text and you're like a Pavlovian dog waiting for the ping on your phone. They must not have liked me. Why didn't they like me? Why did they like me? What could I have done to get somebody to like me?

Right. What did I do wrong? What's wrong with me? Yeah. You know that you are sitting there with a split brain experience being like, why the fuck do I care so much with this idiot things? And yet you cannot stop caring. So that is the experience I think so many women have. And that is the brain gap in action. You have like one set of formative beliefs that male attention is very important. You need to be chosen by a man. That's your value as a woman.

And that you learned when you were four and it was unconscious and implicit and you didn't even know it was there. And yeah, when you were 22 in a feminist seminar, you learned that, you know, about the male gaze and decentering men, but both these things still exist in your brain. So that was a very long answer. But the short version at the School of New Feminist Thought and in the Feminist Self-Help Society, which is there, our coaching community and classroom, the way you bridge that gap and bring your brain closer together is literally by changing the way you think on purpose, which is why it's so important to understand and why and take back your brain. I go through like, here's all the thought patterns you have you may not even be

aware of because we have to know what we're thinking. A lot of like self-help or coaching or positive affirmations or whatever doesn't work because it like skips the step where you have to unearth what's in there now and it just tries to layer on another new positive thought. But that doesn't work. We've still got the socialization underneath. Right. It's not getting to the root of the problem. That's what I realized in like writing my book and even doing this podcast is it's like, people want, how do I budget? People want, how do I pay off debt? And I'm like, those fixes are great. And I will get there. I promise. I will teach you step by step on how to do that. But I can't teach you how to do that in a sustainable way until we talk about your financial trauma. And like, I get that's not fun. I get

that's not exciting. I get that that's going to be hard. But like, that's the real work, is understanding all of the narratives you've been taught about money and what your triggers are. And yeah, what the patriarchy, the bullshit the patriarchy's fed you that you're believing. And I love to your point because I, even as you know, a confident feminist in my own right, like there is part of my brain that is, you know, so strong and so confident and knows 100%

the people who are worth her time, the people that are worth her energy, the things that are worth my time and energy. And at the same time, I also have this like little anxious brain that is always like, yeah, but what if people hate you? Right. Like what if people don't like you? Right, because I mean, humans, when I came into coaching, I was like, okay,

so coaching, the coaching world was really based on like evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, social psychology. And it's totally true that, you know, one of the reasons humans are, I believe it's true, that one of the reasons humans are so sensitive to rejection is that we evolved in small tribes of hunter-gatherers, where you had to depend on your neighbors, et cetera.

But what was missing was all the social context of yes, and women are taught that the key to not being rejected and dying is make everyone happy with you all the time, look a certain way, don't be too mouthy, don't have needs, put everyone else first. So these things wrap into each other. The reason that it feels so physically terrifying, not to people please, is not because you're weak or you're stupid or you're whatever. And yes, it may be partly your childhood, but also this, I mean, I think a lot of what I would see as women who's like, my childhood was fine and I didn't have this problem with my parents.

And I'm still like this. It's because society has taught you that a woman's role in life essentially is to serve other people and make other people happy. So, of course, it feels like your, your primitive brain literally thinks you're dying when you try to tell Chad that you're not going to pay him 10% to put your money in an index fund or whatever it is that you're trying to, or tell your husband that you want to have an equal say in the finances or that you're not going to put all your money in the joint account or whatever it is you're trying to do. To uncover your potential with the all-new LG Gram Pro Laptop. Staying as light as a gram, this powerhouse is here to elevate your workflow. Powered by Intel Core Ultra Processor with AI-enhanced capabilities, you can keep your

cool and staying control of your work with advanced power dual cooling. Welcome to the pro life with LG Grand Pro. Experience the power pro. Get your LG Grand Pro today. Pro anytime, anywhere. Now, Cara, I say that all the time to my community as well as it's like, yeah, your brain literally doesn't know. Your brain doesn't know the difference between I'm taking this very seemingly minor risk versus yeah, I'm literally going to die. Your body has the same response because at a time, any sort of decision was a risk. If I leave my cave, I could die. If I eat at a berry bush that I haven't already confirmed isn't poisonous, I could die. If I talk to person that I've never met, or this thing I've never met. It's an animal that could eat me. It's a person that sees me as a

threat. Like we don't know the difference. Our bodies don't know the difference. And society has taught your brain, if you've been socialized as a woman, that what you need to be, like all these things, all the things that women obsess about, let me put it this way, are the things society has taught them they need to do or be to be accepted, right? So your primitive brain thinks that looking a certain way or being a certain weight or not having wrinkles or being married or having children or everybody in the world agreeing about their opinion

of you at all times, like that all those things are what you need to do to survive. So of course you're obsessed. Is that your concept of socially programmed anxiety? Is that what's happening here? Yeah. So I talk about socially programmed anxiety as this anxiety that is specific to people socialized as women, which is the anxiety that we have when we are not able to live up to these impossible expectations. Society is like, don't worry, you'll be safe and loved and accepted

as long as and as soon as you look perfect, act perfectly. Play small, you're controllable. No one's ever upset with you at any given time. as long as and as soon as you look perfect, act perfectly. Play small, you're controllable. No one's ever upset with you at any given time. Right? You've never, you are doing everything for everybody else. You look like a 17-year-old fashion model for your whole life. You are, you know, sexy but not too sexy. Like all of these impossible standards.

So of course we have all this anxiety and it doesn't respond to some of, I think, the techniques that are used on, you know, there's a lot of different kinds of anxiety on other forms of anxiety because if you're not rewiring those thought patterns, they're just, they're coming back the next day. Like you can't yoga away the anxiety that comes from being socialized to believe

that your life is basically in danger if you don't look a certain way. You have to change your brain. It's exactly what we all experience on a day-to-day basis. And then I think to your point, we can't start doing any sort of like work on ourselves if we're building from a foundation that's already really shaky. And that's not our fault. That is what we've been conditioned to believe or conditioned to feel or think. That's why I think like your work, my work, like this, when I was growing, I just remember like, I would read self-help books and, you know, I'd buy a book about, you know, eating and diet. And I would just like skip straight to the diet plan, right? It's just like, I don't want any of that.

It's like, I'm going to try to skip. I want the quick fixes. I want the action. I want the quick fixes and the action. Yeah. Right. But I think that like, there wasn't enough emphasis in the personal development world on like, well, we have to understand that social context. You're not just a brain in a jar. You're not just, you know, a diet pattern.

Like you have to- Right. You have to understand why you, I mean, this is, I coach on this all the time that it it's like we have something we feel ashamed about and we're like, well, just let me change the thing and then I won't feel ashamed anymore, right? So we're always trying to, we call it the llama in the electric fence, which is a very weird metaphor,

but I just said it on the coaching call once and it stuck. But it's like, we're always trying to skip. And this is with this one with money too. It's like, yeah, okay, I just need to budget or I just need to be better with money or I just need to invest. Like how many women will say they need to be better with money and when you're like, well, what does that mean? They're like, oh, I have like, yeah, okay, I just need to budget. I just need to be better with money or I just need to invest. Like how many women will say they need to be better with money? And when you're like, well, what does that mean?

They're like, I have like no idea. And, or it just means not spending. It's not actual. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. It's like, just like, I feel bad and maybe if I were better with this, I

wouldn't feel bad, but actually you feel bad because of your thoughts. And I can guarantee you that you could be the CEO of a multimillion dollar business and you would still feel you're bad with your thoughts and I can guarantee you that you could be the CEO of a multi-million dollar business and you would still feel you're bad with money because i'm in a mastermind because I have a multi-million dollar business and i'm in a mastermind with women with multi-million dollar businesses and everybody's coaching everybody about their thought of i'm responsible with money I made the wrong decision. I like So you can get some results with those thoughts, but they don't make those thoughts go away

Yeah Oh, well and the question I literally, probably five minutes into our conversation today wrote down this question, which is, I think with self development, right, you were talking about like reading diet books growing up. There is so much self hate wrapped up in self development, which is like, if you want to change yourself, first you have to hate yourself enough to make a change, right? Or, and I think of the classic example of like, I saw myself in a photo and I didn't like the way I looked, so I went and lost

weight, right? Or yeah, with money, it's to your point of like, well, this just needs to change because I'm bad with money and I'm a bad person. Look at your credit card balance and feel bad about it and then you'll be ready to change. Right. I mean, this is anything. And I think especially with women, there is this self-development, almost like pornography, where it's just constant and it's just like, it's so seeped into our experience as a woman is just constantly be bettering yourself. Yep. Constantly be bettering yourself and also never be satisfied with who you are. And the version of that self betterment is always, well, we got to hate ourselves before we get there. So I think my question or something I wanted to talk with you about is like, one, how can we actually be content with ourselves

as we are now, while still aspiring as a person and still having goals. And the second thing is when we do set those goals or when we do embark on some sort of journey to adjust a part of our lives, how do we do it without fucking hating ourselves and without the motivation being, I don't like myself. I don't like this part of me. So I'm going to change it. So I think it's a really great question. And I'll just say first, I totally agree with you that a lot of the self-development industry, the way I think about it is they're hitting your pain point that comes from impossible social expectations, and then they're selling you a solution to try to help you conform better to social expectations. Sorry, I'm just laughing because of course,

it's just like, it's just like, it's the cycle, all of it. Right. It's like you feel bad about your body. Here's a program to lose weight. The program is setting you up for failure. And so then when you can't do it, then you feel bad about your body again. So then you buy a program and the program's unrealistic because diets are unrealistic. So you fail that and then you hate your body. It's just, right. It's just the same thing. And that can be in money, can be in time management. Right. It's like you feel bad because it's literally impossible to sort of work like you don't

have kids and parent like you don't have a job. So here's the time management program that will make you a super person. So it's like preying on that fantasy. You feel bad about yourself because you're not partnered. Here's a coaching program to help you get married in six months. So it's really important to me that my work and what I offer is not, here's how you can better conform to social expectations. Now, sometimes things do get easier when you change your thinking.

So when I was, I mean, I did a ton of work on dating and my brain was making me crazy, was making me not make great strategic decisions in dating and I was not getting outcomes I wanted. And changing my thoughts, I did end up with a partner, but that wasn't the point of the journey. The point of the journey was like, how am I thinking about myself? So I think your second, the sort of the way I would articulate the like core question that I know you get asked all the time too is like, I think that people assume that women assume I should say people socialize as women assume I should say, people socialize as women assume,

that their self-criticism is what has driven them to achieve what they have achieved and that it's sort of merited. And so they're very attached to their self-criticism for that reason because they think that if they stop beating themselves up, they will just lie on the couch. Which first of all, maybe some of y'all do need to lie on the couch. That's not the worst outcome in the world. Like there's a whole fixation on productivity we could have a different conversation about. But if you First of all, maybe some of y'all do need to lie on the couch. That's not the worst outcome in the world. There's a whole fixation on productivity we could have a different conversation about. But if you look at what I love about the coaching model I teach, which is sort of adapted from cognitive behavioral therapy, from the model I learned from my coaching teacher, it's

like everybody has their own version. But if you look at the way that you think, it causes the way you feel, which causes the way you act, which creates a return in your life. So when you are thinking, I just gotta, I just gotta like get that promotion or like make that next money or like lose that weight so I can finally feel okay about myself. It's sort of like putting coal.

You're like, you're like, you're fueling your machine with coal. It's like sooty and there's a lot of pollution and it smells bad and it gets on everything. It's like dirty energy, right? And so it's not morally bad, but it just means that you feel like shit. You're running on adrenaline and kind of your nervous system

being activated all the time because your brain thinks you're running away from a danger, which is just your own self-critical thinking. So you feel terrible. You're also training your brain to keep thinking that way. So it's magical fantasy thinking to believe that you can berate yourself up to the point of a goal achievement. And then when you achieve the goal,

suddenly a new nicer brain appears that says, congratulations, you did amazingly, right? So it's like if you berate yourself through losing weight, you may lose weight in the short term, which a lot of people can in the short term. But then at the end end your brain is still like, no, it's not good enough. Now your skin is sagging. Now you look wrinkled. Now whatever else. Same thing with money. You can save a certain amount. I guarantee you if the thought the whole time is I'm bad with money. I'm so irresponsible. I should have been saving more before. You're going to hit that saving goal. And then your next thought is going to be, well, if I'd started 20 years years ago I would have had twice this much and I should have started before and now it's so you can't, you cannot like hate the journey and love the destination. That's not how the brain

works. It's literally like a muscle. It's like if you train yourself to eat with your right hand, you can't just wake up one day to eat with your left hand. So what I always sort of tell me when I'm coaching on this is like, what if it's possible that you've achieved what you've achieved, not because of all your relentless self-hatred, but in spite of it, right? What if it's actually been like an albatross around your neck or like a weight you were dragging with you and if you let go of it, you would actually go

so much farther. I mean, that was my experience. My self-loathing had me looking very successful in a very mainstream prestigious career. And I don't think I was having or would have had near the impact I've had on the world of quitting that, starting this, right now having a podcast with 50 million downloads and a business. All of these things I've done were because I was willing to like myself instead. It's almost the like no pain, no gain version of life. And it's like that's not fun. That's not sustainable. That's not generous towards ourselves.

No. And listen, it's going to be uncomfortable to change your thoughts. Yeah. So you'll get some pain either way. Don't worry. But it can be like discomfort that's moving you towards something better. I mean, that's the thing about self-criticism. It's like, it's just a rerun all the time. Like you're not really learning anything from it. You're not getting anything new from it. You're just thinking the same shitty thoughts about yourself over and over. Trying to change your thoughts on purpose will feel uncomfortable at times, but you're actually creating something.

It's like a productive discomfort. Yeah. I remember, um, I went to see Liz Gilbert speak in 2019 and, um, author of E! Pray Love, Big Magic, one of my favorite people to listen to. And she, her whole talk was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, but the focus was on mercy. And we associate even the word mercy as like, it's just, why would, why would I offer that? Like, definitely not to myself, right? I'm gonna offer other people mercy, maybe, but definitely not to myself. And it's almost like, yeah, it was just so incredible to hear her talk about like one of the like most difficult but also truly most generous things we will ever do is offer ourselves mercy for our choices

for when we fucked up for just us trying to exist as people. And to your point that doesn't you what she was saying was like that doesn't mean that you don't love yourself, right? That doesn't mean that you don't want yourself to be better. We think that we have to make ourselves suffer in order to see results. And that's just not true. Yeah. And I think that's very Christian also. There's a Western Christian socialization.

And if we really want to go philosophy, it goes back to like Rousseau and Locke and like what is your theory of human existence, right? There's like two competing visions. One is that humans are, you know, base and miserable and mean and violent and they have to be, you know, sort of corralled and repressed by society in order to have civilization. And one is that humans are like naturally creative and collaborative and blah, blah, blah.

And, you know, can live peacefully and probably reality is somewhere in between looking at the world. But it's just interesting, like even just thinking about what is my premise? My premise is that people can only be motivated by cruelty. Like if you have a child or an animal, you probably have figured out that

trying to motivate them with cruelty is not really effective in creating long-term behavioral change, but we're still doing it to ourselves. She need to take a deep breath. I'm like, okay. That's sometimes how I feel when I'm having these conversations is I'm like, yes, yes, yes. And also God fucking patriarchy. It's just so fucking frustrating. I want to talk about external validation. Something you've discussed in your work is how women often seek external validation when they make decisions. You even said this of like, does that make sense? You know, okay, this may be a stupid question, but

make crowdsource this. Right, right, right. Make decisions, handle their money careers. It's external validation. And I will say as someone who's a little validation whore, I'm asking this for myself as well. What are some examples of how you've seen women do this, right? Where you're kind of naming a couple and talk to us about what you call an emotional vending machine. Yeah. So, you know, I think women are socialized to seek external validation, right? Women are taught to see, like, if you think about the two examples, men are taught to see themselves as like the hero of the story and just, you know,

it's almost like hard to articulate because it basically is just being socialized to believe that you're allowed to exist for your own sake. That's just, you're just get to be the subject, right? And women are socialized to see, to believe that I call it like your values like the stock market. It's like going up and down and it's a sum of everybody's opinions about what you're doing at any given time. So that's why you can like leave the house feeling confident and then like if somebody, even a stranger, right, says something insulting, then your self-confidence plummets and then it might go back up and then it goes back down. So women are of course always seeking external validation because we're socialized that what we think of ourselves is irrelevant.

What matters is what other people think of us. And also we are not reliable. This is what we're socializing to think, right? We're like emotional, we're irrational, we're short-sighted, we're frivolous, we're vain, we're all these things. And so, and we're not authorities, right? Women are socialized to see other people

as the authority in their life. And men are socialized too far the other way, right? Men are just like, I have a dumb opinion I came up with and I'm gonna do what I want. Often it doesn't matter what anybody thinks. But women are socialized to basically believe that they can't trust themselves at all, they can't make their own decisions.

And so we're constantly crowdsourcing for like, what decision should I make? Like, it's like texting three of your friends, right? You read my email to this client, what is it? Does it sound okay? What is it? What do you think this meant? What would this person mean?

What should I do? All of that, it's not, women will say that they're indecisive, but it's like you're indecisive because you've been literally taught that you can't trust your own decisions. So like, it's not a personality trait, it's socialization. So if you're always trying to get validation from other people, you end up treating other people like what I call emotional validation vending machines,

which is like we go the long way around rather than change our own thoughts to create our own validation because we don't know how. We're just constantly punching the machine to try to get it to spit it out, right? So you're like, and that can be anything as simple as being like, how do I look in this outfit, right? To like, we all know the sort of elaborate paths we sometimes lay to try to lead people down to like a compliment or giving us positive feedback or to doing a certain thing. Right? All the ways that we try to like get our romantic partners to act in certain ways so we can think that we're lovable and desirable or trying to, you know, hint things to our friends. So they'll do a certain things and we can feel and believe that they value our

friendship and we're lovable and worthy. So we spent all this, if women took all that mental energy, you could spend 10% of it learning how to create your own validation and then 90% of it doing some other shit out in the world. But this is how patriarchy keeps women sort of frittering away their mental and emotional energy. Okay, can I ask you a question of like fix my life, please? Yeah. We can cut it if we do. Yes, let's do it.

So again, I'm a little vulgarish and whore, but also I'm very confident and I know I'm lovable and I know my worth and I know all these things. But sometimes, you know what? I just want my partner to tell me I'm pretty. And I just want my partner to tell me that he loves me. And I know that, but like, I need, I need that in that moment. Is that bad?

How can I ask for it? Because that's sometimes what I do is I'm like, you know what? I just really need you to tell me you love me right now. I just like, I just really need that comfort of what's going on. But also part of me is like, I don't need it. Like, I know, I know that you like me. What if you change need to want I know that you like me. What if you change need to want?

Does that change it for you? What if you just want it? I mean, maybe that's what I'm saying because you're right. I don't need it. Yeah. I mean, number one, of course, you get to decide if it's okay. I can't tell you if it's okay. So that's the initial coaching.

Up to you. You get to decide. Number two, this is what I always think about. So sometimes when I teach about socialization, people are like, okay, so then, right, immediately get sucked into black and white perfectionist thinking and it's like, okay, so then I shouldn't ever want validation. I shouldn't ever want to hear I'm pretty. Which is what I basically just did right now, which is like me going, I can never ask him ever again.

Right. Right. So I can never like a comp... If I like a compliment, I'm a bad feminist, right? It's like very black and white. We're not ever gonna... First of all, we don't want to completely erase socialization. Socialization is why when somebody comes to your house, they don't just pee in your living room. Like everything you've... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bad socialization. Right. Like knowing which foods don't eat raw chicken. Like all of this is socialization. So we're not trying to get rid of it all. Here's my defining line. Number one, I mean, the baseline principles, everybody gets to decide for themselves. The second principle, the rule I would use, the rule I use for myself or the guiding, the principle is,

it's totally fine to want whatever I want. Do I feel like I need it to feel okay? So it's as like makeup is a great example. People are like, so should I not feel confident when I wear makeup? And I'm like, I'm wearing lipstick. I'm not here to judge whether you're not use makeup. Here's my question to you. Can you feel okay leaving the house without makeup?

Can you let your partner see you without makeup? Can you feel sexy or pretty without makeup? If you can't, again, you still get to decide if that's a problem. For me in my life, that would be a problem with my values and my principles. I don't want my feeling of confidence, sexiness, desirability, whatever, to depend on whether or not I'm wearing makeup. So that's really, it's not like, should I never, should I always? It's, is is my validation self worth hinging on this or not? I ask my partner for compliments all the time. I'm fine doing that. What I don't want and what I'd be watching for myself is am I putting my emotional state on how he responds?

Totally. Right. No, I think that's great. And I would say, yeah, no, I'm also, yeah, because at the end of the day, first of all, he's not gonna go, no, I don't fucking love you. You're a hag. Like, he's not gonna do that. And if he does, well, that's not the partner for me, clearly. It's just dope. I call it dopamine shopping. Yeah, we all go dopamine shopping. Sure. Yeah. And it's fine. Yeah. This is the thing. It's like people get in self development or wellness stuff. And it's like, oh, I'm like, I shouldn't want and I'm like, I guess I absolutely sometimes ask my partner for a compliment or go buy something. Although I did see something yesterday that I think is going to change my financial life,

which was like, I don't think you shared it, but it may have been you, which is this will be funny. It was somebody sharing something about converting like impulse shopping to impulse saving or investing that you get the same dopamine hit, that is you. That's your idea. Somebody else was supposed to post it. But I was like, oh yeah, that would totally work. Cause at least I'm very aware that I'm just dopamine shopping right now.

Somebody else might've done it, but we've had a post that's gone viral and we've recreated it a couple of times where it's like, hi, basically, yeah, we take all of the energy you're putting into running to Target or shopping and shop for stocks and stuff. Yes, yes. Yeah and put in savings instead.

Yes, I love that. I think that's so brilliant, especially because I've done enough of this work that I absolutely know what I'm doing. I mean, I planned my wedding while I was writing my book draft because I was like, so it was like so hard and I needed dopamine and I was just like, okay, I'm gonna look at villas in Italy. That's what we're doing to like get my brain going in the morning before I had to write. I'm fine. Are you getting married in Italy? I have to ask. We're technically having the wedding here and then we're going on like a friends and family honeymoon. That sounds lovely. I'm going with my partner actually,

one of his members of his family is getting married in a mafia. I hope it will be lovely. It's a lot of people with a lot of feelings in one place, but we're hoping for the best. I love Italy. Big fan. I want to round out our conversation with your book. It comes out this month. What can someone expect to learn? Oh my God. So many things. You can expect to learn, in the first half of the book, you're going to learn how your brain works and why you think and feel the way you do. So you're going to learn both the basic, like, neurobiology, just the basic, like, how your brain works and why, how you learn things. It is not overly scientific, although it is all scientifically valid and fact-checked,

but it's just so you kind of understand the basics because in order to work with your brain, you got to know a little bit about what's going on in there. So in the first part, you're going to really learn how your brain works, and you're going to learn how you can change your brain, right? Thinking something new on purpose is a skill that just most of us are never taught. And so the book is going to teach you how to actually choose a new belief and then believe it. So that's the first half of the book. And then the second half of the book, you going to learn, there's five different topic chapters, and you're going to kind of be able to take everything you just learned about how to change your thinking,

how to understand your brain, and apply it in each of these areas, and you're going to learn what are the common kind of thought patterns. You're going to read some that you're like, oh yeah, I knew I thought that, and some you're going to be like, oh my God, are you in my head? How did you know that I'm thinking that? Because the page, you know, Sexist society teaches us to think a certain way. And then in each chapter, there's also exercises for you to go through because having coached so many women, one thing I know is that just asymmetrically delivering information does not change your brain. And this

is like a big also misconception is the idea that like insight is going to change the way you think. It's absolutely not. You need to actually change it on purpose so you'll be led through exercises to actually literally create new little neural connections in your brain and believe new things. We've got body image, money, mindset, chapter, work and money, time management, time organization, domestic labor kind of stuff, all go together, sex and romantic relationships. And then at the end, the book talks about how do we bring this kind of back to the broader world? We didn't really get into that as much here, but one of my core beliefs about self-development work

is that if we want to change the world, we have to change our brains first because we're the ones who have to come up with the solutions and we're the ones who have to implement them. And so this idea that self-development or working on your own mind are like privileged or out of touch, I just think is stupid and wrong. I mean, no one's stupid for thinking that you've heard that, but I just don't agree with that. No, but it's the only thing we can control. And where are these ideas coming from to change the world? Where like our current policy struggles are not going that well. I don't know if anybody's noticed the feminist movement is having some trouble. So like, we obviously need some different ideas and ways of communicating and those

have to come from our brains. We're the ones who have to do them. So that is what you'll learn from the book and you can find the book anywhere you buy books. Amazing. Thank you for being here. I could talk to you for about 16 more hours, but thank you so much for your time. Go check out the book. I'm just really excited for everybody to read it. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Go check out the book. I'm just really excited for everybody to read it. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much to Kara for joining us. You can get a copy of her brand new book, Take Back Your Brain, wherever you get your books. You can also listen to the audiobook or get an ebook. I'm really, really, really excited to read the full thing. I got an excerpt to be able to

plug it and it is fan flflippin-tastic. Tasic? It is fan-flippin-tastic and highly recommend it and pairs very well, if I do say so myself, with Financial Feminist. So get her book wherever you read your books. Thank you, as always, for being here. Team, appreciate it. Have a great rest of your week. Okay, bye. Bye. Research by Arielle Johnson, Audio and Video Engineering by Alyssa Medcalf, Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel, Amanda LeFeu, Elizabeth McCumber, Masha Bakhmakeva, Taylor Cho, Kaylen Sprinkle, Sasha Bonar, Claire Karonin, Darrell Ann Ingman, and Janelle Reisner, Promotional Graphics by Mary Stratton, Photography by Sarah Wolf, and Theme Music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire her first hundred K team and community For supporting this show for more information about financial feminist her first hundred K our guests and episode show notes visit financial feminist podcast calm you