More Money Podcast - Everything but Money Excerpt – Chapter 1 - Jessica Moorhouse

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

To continue from last week, I wanted to share another excerpt from my now bestselling book "Everything but Money: The Hidden Barriers Between You and Financial Freedom" so you can get a feel for the book (and audiobook especially since I narrated it), to see if it’s something you’d like to buy or borrow from your local library. This excerpt is from Chapter 1.To buy a copy of my book, visit https://jessicamoorhouse.com/bookFollow me:Instagram @jessicaimoorhouseThreads @jessicaimoorhouseTikTok @jessicaimoorhouseFacebook @jessicaimoorhouseYouTube @jessicamoorhouseLinkedIn - Jessica Moorhouse Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello Lulu and welcome back to the More Money Podcast. I'm your host Jess Morhouse, but I'm also your author because this is a special episode where I read an excerpt from my book. Now I am, you know, last week I read an excerpt from the introduction. Now I'm going to read a little part from chapter one and then next week I will read another excerpt which I haven't decided if I'm going to go deep into, you know, like chapter five or six or near the end. I don't know. I haven't decided yet. I haven't decided yet. But for this excerpt, I'm going to read a part of chapter one where it's all about figuring

out your feelings with money. Also, because I forgot to mention the title of my book, it's called Everything But Money, The Hidden Barriers Between You and Financial Freedom. You're Not an Ostrich. Confronting and sharing our feelings about money can feel like standing on a soapbox naked in the center of town proclaiming, my life is a mess, and I have no idea what I'm doing. No wonder most of us would rather bury our heads

in the sand than address our feelings. When your head is buried, you can't see any of your deep-rooted issues with money. And if you can't see them, do they even exist? Yes, they still exist. Just like if a tree falls in a forest, even if you weren't there to hear it, that doesn't negate the fact that it made a thunderous sound on its way down. Burying your head in the sand, also known as the ostrich problem, is simply a cognitive bias that causes people to avoid information, to avoid the unpleasant

emotional impact that they expect it to lead to, even if this avoidance will lead to a greater emotional cost later on. This is why so many people avoid their true feelings about money and go decades without making any headway with their finances, even if this avoidance results in bigger financial problems and could potentially exacerbate those negative feelings down the road. It's a coping mechanism to ward off negative emotions temporarily, but it

usually causes greater suffering over the long term. But that's not you, is it? There's a reason you chose this book, and there's a reason I needed to write it. You don't want to be an ostrich anymore. You want to try something new, because it's not fun having tiny grains of sand make their way into your eyes, mouth, and nose.

You want to dig your head out and breathe again. Well to do that, you're going to have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. You're going to have to embrace being vulnerable. The only way to detach your negative feelings from money and thus create a healthier relationship with it, is to acknowledge those feelings and put them into words. Putting it into words. It can be easier said than done, putting your feelings into words, pun intended. Most of us don't know what our feelings are in the first place because we've pushed them down for so long. It can be difficult to recall those feelings when you finally want to, but they're still there, somewhere.

This is where starting a mindfulness practice comes in, for which I'll share some exercises in the next chapter. Before you roll your eyes, because the term mindfulness has become a buzzword in recent years, let me share what it is and how it can help. I'll also tell you straight up that I'm the furthest thing from a woo-woo guru or an early adopter of any kind of trend. Just ask my wardrobe. But more importantly, mindfulness is backed by science. Too often we're either looking back or looking forward instead of sitting still and looking at the present moment. Not only that, even when we think we are in the present moment, we're actually spending

most of our brain power reliving the past or pre-living the future. That's where integrating a mindfulness practice into your daily life can make all the difference. It can help you become aware and pay extended attention to how you really feel in the moment, both internally and externally. A typical mindfulness practice could involve activities like meditation, journaling, yoga, and Tai Chi to help your body and mind focus on the present and your place in it. A similar practice for money mindfulness can be used to help you identify your feelings about money and connect them to words. When feelings and words connect, it can be a powerful thing. Not only can it help you describe that feeling and validate it, but

ultimately, it can help you change how you think and behave with money in general. In the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig describes the importance of words this way. Whenever life feels chaotic and uncertain and everything runs together, words offer us a sense of clarity and definition with clean lines that separate one thing from another. Just the act of putting something into words can give you the impression that everything is under control. If you can name it, you can better control it. It's when you keep your feelings hidden from yourself and from others for that matter that they maintain a firm hold over you instead of the other way around. In order to start healing

and rewiring old patterns, you first need to acknowledge and define the problem. Okay, I'm gonna leave it there. It just gets better from there. So you're gonna have to continue reading and if you don't have a copy of your book, well you can go to jessicamorehouse.com slash book and purchase a copy. You know, go to your local bookstore, go shop online, do whatever you want, or go to the library. I've been getting some messages from people saying it's at their local library, which I think is exciting. Also, just because this is a really cool moment for me and you, especially for everyone who's been listening to me for

years, if you do have a copy of my book, let me know. And there's a couple of ways you can do that. Number one, leave a review on Goodreads, Amazon, Indigo, your local bookstore's website, wherever. Leave a review. They're really, really helpful for me so people can discover my book and know if it's something that they should pick up as well. But also take a photo, make a reel, make a story and take me on Instagram at Jessica I. Morehouse. You can take me on LinkedIn. You can take me on Facebook. Yeah, TikTok. I'm on there sometimes. What else is there on social media? I have no idea. Do whatever. Take me. Let me know. And I will say thank you forever. Okay. So that is it for this

week. And next week, I'll share what I've got going on. We're gonna do another re-listen episode and then I'm gonna read one last excerpt of the book and just because you know I've really curated the episodes that I'm gonna kind of re-listen to you you know with you I'm gonna have my friend Kate be one of those re-listeners. She's been on my podcast. She was episode three, because I think she's been on my show three times. But I'm going to do episode 144 for next week. And I'm really excited to relisten to that one. And she's still a really great friend of mine, which is really cool. We've known each other for a really long time and it's been cool to, you know, I definitely got some tips for her writing, let me tell you. So yeah, so look forward to that. And with that, have a good rest of your week and I'll see you next week for another episode.

The More Money Podcast would not be possible without the amazing talents of podcast producer Matt Rideout, who you can find at mravcanada.com.