Money anxiety is real for entrepreneurs. And it’s rarely about the actual dollars in the account.

In this Three Thoughts for Thursday episode, I share three practical rescue tips you can use when money anxiety starts spiraling your nervous system into fight, flight, or freeze.

We’ll talk about separating the math from the meaning, shrinking the horizon so you can regulate in the present moment, and taking one revenue-generating action to break the anxiety loop.

If you’ve ever stared at your bank account and felt the story spin out of control… this one’s for you.

EP 25 T3 money anxiety

It's not about that. It's about what money brings you. And for any business owner that is a lot of things. It's survival, it's identity, it's perceived safety, and all [00:01:00] of those things, when they get upset, they're gonna upset your nervous system because those are things that can send us into the red zone of fight, flight, freeze really quickly because that's where it starts to trigger our nervous system.

So my first thought, my first rescue tip for this particular episode around money anxiety is to separate the math from the meaning. Numbers begin to tell us stories when we start to let our anxiety read the spreadsheet. If we go back and we really foundationally look at the math is numbers.

Realize, stop for a moment. Take a breath. Look at those numbers. They are numbers and yes, they tell a story, but they don't necessarily tell the story that your anxiety is trying to keep in your head. What you need to do is start separating the math from the meaning. Take a look at the numbers, ask

That's when you start to get back into a measure of control over what is going on. And that's really where we want to be. When we're solving money problems. We don't wanna be doing that from a space of anxiety, that fight flight zone. We want to be doing it from the zone of regulation and of flow, if at all possible.

My second thought is around shrinking the horizon for your concern. Entrepreneurs love to be future perfect. And what happens with that is it causes a lot of anxiety when you look down the road and you go, oh my gosh, how am I gonna get from where I am to where I need to be in six months or a year or five years?

If you're one of those individuals, you might fall into this a lot in your business and it can be very unsettling to not know how you're gonna get from here to there. Like I said, it's unsettling for me. I can't imagine what it's like for somebody that really needs to see all of those steps in between.

So now I can move on and I can look at the future because I can settle or regulate my nervous system, my subconscious, and my conscious mind to say, Hey, we're safe right here, right now. That means we can problem solve for the future. And so I'm able to do that. I am able to problem solve for the future because I've regulated in the moment.

Now, if shrinking that down to right now is not good enough, maybe ask yourself, am I okay today or am I okay this week or am I okay this month? And then look at it in that chunk of time. I find the smaller that you reduce that time down to like the moment, the easier it is to say that I'm okay. But some people have a struggle with going, okay, but what about the next moment?

I'm gonna give you a laundry list of things here, but I recommend that you do just one and take a breath. And then if you wanna do another, go ahead and do another. Do not get yourself into another state of anxiety, doing a ton of them right in a row, throwing kind of paint at the wall type of a situation to see what sticks.[00:07:00]

I've been there, done that it's not the best solution for the problem. Alright, so here's some ideas. Send out a follow-up to somebody who's expressed interest in your business or to somebody whom you might joint venture with, who you've talked to in the past. There's usually a pile of follow-ups on every entrepreneur's desk or in their phone or in their email.

Go grab one and follow it through. Make an offer. Make someone an offer, raise one price to maybe offset a future situation where you can see it coming down the line of I'm not gonna have enough revenue if I keep maintaining this price structure. Raise one price. Ask a client for a referral. If you're a service oriented business, well, heck, even if you're a product oriented business, asking current customers to provide referrals

if you try it and you have some place to throw some money at some advertising, a lot of times that can help as well. The important thing here is that you're making motion into the right direction, and that helps you regulate.

It helps you be more okay in the space that you're in. Money anxiety is not fun. Money anxiety is something that I think probably drives most entrepreneurs who quit entrepreneurship out of being entrepreneurs. I think it sends a lot of people back to what they perceive as the safety of the corporate paycheck.

They downsize, they move people in their jobs. They change situations that cause a lot of problems. As an entrepreneur, I am the captain of my own ship and I can choose where I wanna go and how I wanna navigate the situations that are coming toward my business. And yes, there is some anxiety, but at the end of the day, I can have the most ability to be able to

I'll see you in the next episode.

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