If you’re constantly busy, then you’re obviously getting a lot done, right? Right?! Well – hate to break the bad news, but just because your calendar is full and you feel frazzled all the time doesn’t mean you’re being productive.
The good news is that there is a way to do less while still making money. Possibly even more money than you’re making now. And it’s not some secret hack that only the most successful people know about. Do Less is the newest book by entrepreneur and bestselling author Kate Northrup, and Kristen’s conversation with Kate in this episode is eye-opening on so many levels.
So if you’re looking for a way to free up time while increasing your productivity, you’ll want to listen in:
- Exploring the 80/20 rule in your business
- Kristen’s explanation of Productive Procrastination
- Importance of being brutally honest with where your time truly goes
- How to avoid lifestyle inflation and still attract business builders
- Where rest comes into the equation in how you show up on social media
Reframing how your brain perceives rest is a worthy endeavor. Just like with growing nutritious crops – you need a period of rest in order to be your most productive self. Step back. Take a deep breath. Live in the moment. Then come back and smash those goals.
If you’d like to stay in the know with what Kate is doing next, you can follow her on Instagram at @katenorthrup. And if you want to pick up her Business Pressure Relief Kit, visit theorigincompany.co/strategies.
Don’t miss out on the in-person social selling event of the year! Announcing the Rising Leader Summit, April 14-15, 2023, in Denver, CO. The LIVE EVENT that has historically been exclusive to 6-7 figure earners is now AVAILABLE to anyone who is hungry and willing and desires to step into higher levels of leadership. Go to kristenboss.com/rise to register today.
Thanks for listening! Do you have a question about network marketing? Kristen can help! Drop your question here, and she just might answer it live on the podcast: https:/Kristenboss.com/question
Connect with Kristen:
If you’re ready to learn the simple process of running your social selling business online, you have to check out Kristen’s live group coaching program! The Social Selling Academy: www.thesocialsellingacademy.com
Transcript for Episode #152 Do Less + Make More with Kate Northrup:
Kristen Boss (00:03): You are listening to the Kristen Boss Podcast. I’m your host, Kristen Boss. As a bestselling author and performance coach, I’m on a mission to share about sustainable and purposeful approaches to both business and life. Each week I bring relevant topics that I believe are necessary to create a life of purpose, significance and meaning. Entrepreneurship is about so much more than growing your bottom line. It’s about who you are becoming in the process and building a life that is truly extraordinary. Entrepreneurship is really just the beginning.
Kristen Boss (00:57): Hey, bosses. Welcome to another episode of the show with me. I have a super special guest. It is my honor to introduce you to Kate Northrop. If you do not know who this woman is, if you have loved my anti Hussle message, I am going to really introduce you, somebody that kind of helped me embrace that message. And Kate Northrop is a bestselling author. She’s a CEO O of the Origin Company. I have been following her for quite some time. So Kate, having you on is such an honor. Thank you for being here.
Kate Northrup (01:25): Thanks so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
Kristen Boss (01:28): Yes. So there’s two things. You don’t even know this about me, but you had a pretty big impact on my own journey. I found you on Amy Porterfield’s podcast when you had just released your book Do Less. And this was in, yeah, 2019. And funny enough, I just had Amy on my podcast last week, so it feels like a full circle moment. I’m like Amy and Kate. Oh, amazing, isn’t she? So you were a part of that. But I had heard Do Less was not the first book I read of yours. It was actually Money, A Love Story. That book was so pivotal in changing my own story about money and feeling safe around money. And there needed to be a feminine voice around the story of money. And I loved Jen Sincero’s You’re a Badass at Making Money, but I loved your self-reflective process. And since then I have now gone on to build an eight figure company. And you were a big part of me feeling safe with money. I did your journal prompts and everything. So Kate, for my audience, if they don’t know much about you, tell me about your journey maybe from Money, A Love Story to this really kind of radical countercultural message of Do Less in a society that is all about do more to make more.
Kate Northrup (02:51): So both of those stories, both books, both kind of bodies of work came from my own personal experience. So with Money, A Love Story, I had gotten myself into a bunch of debt, was just really unconscious about money and had really kind of spiritually bypassed the whole thing and thought, well, if I, I have what I want, then it’ll all work itself out. And that’s not really what act as if means, which we can talk about that later maybe. So I just spent as if I had the amount of income that I wanted and that got me into debt because we do live in a 3D reality. And so it was healing my own relationship with my I mean, not a hundred percent, but being on the healing journey with my own relationship with my self worth and my power that dramatically changed my financial life.
Kate Northrup (03:49): Within six months, I paid off all my debt, doubled my savings, tripled my income. I mean, it was dramatic. And that’s what happens when we do the inner work and then with Do Less. Very similarly, I mean my path, this is not everyone’s path, but my path is kind of life roughs me around and then I just talk about it. And that is a, I don’t know if you follow mm-hmm. Same human design, but I’m a manifesting generator. Three five, same. Yeah, okay. Exactly. Same up in public. You’re just meant to screw things on fire and then talk about it. It’s like, yeah, <laugh> really funny. Yes, I relate. Yes. So when I got pregnant with my first daughter, my relationship with work shifted so dramatically and through a really traumatic birth process and very difficult first year of her life, my whole identity shifted. And what was wild is that she was really sick.
Kate Northrup (04:54): And in that first year, it was such a brutal year and I worked 10 hours a week that I didn’t even. I mean it was so hard. And then a year after she was born, we realized we had made more money than we’d ever made in our adult lives working less than half the amount. And I thought, well, I am really not interested in repeating this year ever. This sucked. However, maybe there’s something I could apply that I learned from making more money than I’ve ever made before, working less than half the amount. What was I doing the rest of my time? And so that’s where Do Less came from. So both very much just from lived experience and being like, well, if I’m having this happen, probably other people are too. So let’s talk about it.
Kristen Boss (05:47): Yeah. You ask this one really powerful question that if you are in the Enneagram as well, I would guess you’re a three. I’m a three. I joke I even.
Kate Northrup (05:55): I’m a seven wing.
Kristen Boss (05:56): Oh, you’re a seven. Oh, a bunch of my besties are sevens. I love sevens.
Kate Northrup (06:00): Very enthusiastic. What’s a three? Tell me about a three.
Kristen Boss (06:04): We’re the performers. The overachiever, we tend to find our worth in our work. So this one question that you asked that triggers every Enneagram three on the planet is who am I when I’m not busy? And that is a deeply, can be a deeply painful question, but the is the start to a radical healing journey with yourself. And so this idea of who are we? Who are we when we’re not producing, when we’re not chasing accolades, when we’re not, I believe living on the adrenaline and the cortisol of production because that jacks with our hormones and you are kind of a hormone queen because you talked about this.
Kristen Boss (06:45): This is so amazing. I love that you have brought feminine into success because we have a very masculine narrative of hustle, grind, go just perform, perform, perform. And women were just not wired that way. And so you even talk about bringing that into how we show up on our work with Do Less.
Kate Northrup (07:03): Yeah. We need new models. I was raised by a woman who worked so hard and had so many glass ceilings to break, and I’m so grateful to her generation for opening up the possibility that you and I can be sitting here right now having this conversation because it wouldn’t have been possible without women coming into the workplace and essentially learning how to be better men than men. And then that opened up the possibility for us to take that evolution to the next step and say, okay, but what if there’s a model of success that’s not just trying to be a really great man? And so that’s what I am thinking about all the time and exploring all the time.
Kristen Boss (07:49): And I love that you are a keen advocate for burnout prevention because anytime we are finding our worth in our work and we’re addicted to the busy, addicted to the adrenaline cycles. It’s just a recipe for burnout. So how do you introduce somebody to this concept of doing less because there is a natural resistance. Wait, hold on. How can I have better results? More qualitative results by doing less. A lot of people have a lot of roadblocks around that. Mental barriers.
Kate Northrup (08:18): A hundred percent. So there’s so many layers to this, and I’ll just start with the first one which meets people where they’re at. Because by the way, I was totally that person the first time I heard about this, I was like, that’s stupid. And for people who want an excuse, I really was like, that’s for people who are trying to get an excuse from not working hard. But I’m a very serious ambitious person. Well, not that serious, but I am ambitious. And so I was like, that’s not for somebody like me who has real dreams and goals and doesn’t wear feathers in her hair. Not that there’s anything wrong with feathers, but you know what I mean. There’s a particular vibe of the goddessy thing, which I’m also super into, but for people who are in that place of this isn’t possible or this won’t work for me, you don’t understand how busy I am. You don’t understand how many people depend on me. You don’t understand if I don’t keep the whole world up, it will fall down. So what I would say is there are two particular pieces of it’s not really data, but evidence-based things that I like to point to. One of them is Pareto’s principle, which if you run this analysis on your work life, it doesn’t lie, which is 80 20 rule, 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts.
Kate Northrup (09:44): It just is. So if you look at your revenue streams, for example, and you look at your marketing efforts, well, 20% of your marketing is going to lead to 80% of your revenue. So do that calculation and then come talk to me. And then the second one is Parkinson’s law. And Parkinson’s law says the, a task will fit itself into the amount of time we allot for it. Yes. Basically, if we give ourselves all day long to do things, we can be busy all day long, but if we decide this thing’s going to take me 30 minutes, it will take you 30 minutes. It’s just again, it’s just true. I don’t make the rules. It’s just how. And so those two principles, when you apply them, you begin to realize, oh, then the third thing that I want to say became a little more available to realize, which is we have been brainwashed to base our worth on how much we do and that’s what is actually happening.
Kate Northrup (10:50): So when somebody suggests maybe you could get as good results or better results by doing less, that is in direct conflict with the identity of someone who gets their sense of self-worth from how much they do. So that’s cognitive dissonance that just becomes like, well, that shouldn’t possibly be possible. But when you begin to do the analysis on your workflow and you realize certain data, like David Rock in his book, Your Brain at Work, we are only working on things that move the needle six hours a week, not six hours a day.
Kristen Boss (11:28): I thought it was four.
Kate Northrup (11:28): Six hours a week. Yep. It’s not very much. So what is it that we are doing the rest of the time?
Kristen Boss (11:36): Oh, I can tell you what my people are doing. They’re getting lost. They’re getting lost in scroll holes. They’re researching. I’m going to call it productive procrastination where they’re getting false little dopamine hits from consuming things and doing nothing with it and just busying themselves. When we learned to, this idea of things taking as long as we allot the time for is the first time I heard that aside from in your books was when I saw it in practice was writing my book. And they’re like, well, how long does it takes to write a book? And someone said to me, as long as you decide it takes. If you want it to be a week, it’s a week. If it’s six months, it’s six months. And of course me being my baby author self, I was like, it, I need six months. I need eight months. Guess how long it actually? It’s so funny. All I did in those six months was I procrastinated probably five and a half of those months and with a sense of dread and terror and just thinking about the book I had to write. And then when I actually sat down, I cranked it all out in two weeks. I’m like, oh, writing a book takes two weeks. It doesn’t take six months. It takes two weeks.
Kate Northrup (12:40): And did you do it? I’m curious, did you do it in did you write all day or what was that structure like for you?
Kristen Boss (12:48): Yeah, once I was in flow, I had to write all day. I tried to do, I’m going to write on Fridays, and it was hell. It was absolute hell for me. So my next book, I’ve already told my publisher, I’m like, listen, I’m just going to disappear for two weeks and crank it out because once I am in workflow I go. I also, that’s when I learned, I had ADHD too when I wrote a book, I was like, oh, oh yeah, my brain.
Kate Northrup (13:13): Now, it’s so interesting because the way I wrote my books is I did it right up against the deadline very similarly. So I had my book deal and then I just did nothing for months and months and months and months. And then six weeks before the book was due, I did one hour a day for six weeks. And that really works for me, but I’ve never tried it your way. So anyway, I just love the different methodology. But Parkinson’s law, it can take, it takes us, it’s true. It takes as long as you give it. And so we can be, and it’s not to be like I am all about feminine flow and I’m all about aligning our bodies with nature and that things take as long as they take. But the truth is most of us are just screwing around a lot of the time. And that’s fine because we’re all just going to die anyway. So we might as well enjoy ourselves in the meantime.
Kate Northrup (14:04): But let’s not lie to ourselves. If I’m like, wow, I’m just screwing around, great. I’m down this worm hole on Instagram, I’m shopping online, I’m like toodling around my apartment, I’m organizing papers. Great. I actually need a significant amount of that in order for me to do good work. I am a puter. It’s very nourishing for me. And now I know that that’s not actually, I’m not lying to myself and saying that’s productive work, but it is an important part of my constant creative process of actually then sitting down and doing the moving the needle work.
Kristen Boss (14:40): Yes. This is such good self-awareness too. And you brought up a really great point of we don’t lie to ourselves in saying I’ve been working 30 hours a week, but I do see if we lack that self awareness, I do have people coming up to me saying, Kristen, I work all the time and it’s just, I’m just not seeing results. I’m like, oh, you are doing likely. They’re messing around in the 80%, not doing much. They’re not putting their time because they have the most drama around the 20% of the most impactful work in marketing. That’s where most of the resistance is. And so I’m, once my students, once we kind of clean up all the stories and we help them work efficiently, they’re like, I’m getting so much more done in less amount of time and I’m getting more time with my family, more time to have hobbies. I’m like, what a concept. What a concept. But we have to start being honest with our time first and not fooling ourselves saying, I’m working a 30 hour week. No, you’re just, you’re on the internet scrolling for 28 hours of that week. Yeah, let’s just be honest.
Kate Northrup (15:38): Yes, or having meetings that could have been an email or there’s just a lot of things that we do and we just need to be honest about what we’re doing. Doesn’t make it bad or wrong, we can just be honest about it.
Kristen Boss (15:48): I’m so curious with, because we talked about our workflow a little bit and realizing, because when I understood manifesting generators, I also understood my creative process and understanding. We have a birth phase where it’s really intense and we birth something and then we go into a recovery phase and then it moves into our buildup. And I used to judge myself in the recovery phase like, Ooh, I’m so lazy, why am I puttering? But now that I understand that about myself, like you were saying, my puttering actually is regenerative for me on some level because for me, I started to understand, oh, I’m just storing up kinetic energy, so to speak, that as soon as I get in flow it, it’s explosive. But this is my self-awareness is so key. Not everyone is a manifesting generator like us three line five total.
Kate Northrup (16:35): No, not everyone is. But I will say something that is fairly universal is the seasonal approach to creativity and the seasonal approach to creativity. You can take it in a macro or a micro. So if you’re going micro, you can really look at the menstrual cycle or the lunar cycle and see that during the month. We have four different specific phases. And those four phases, if you actually honor all four of them, you get every ingredient you need to get for the creation of something like a book. Not to say that you need to write a book in a month, but obviously you could and you can. And then there’s the more macro, which is that every project that we have will have these four specific seasons. You’ll have the springtime energy of new beginnings in a project. You’ll have that full bloom energy of it’s public.
Kate Northrup (17:28): We’re going for it. You’ll have that wrap up energy where you’re bringing it to a close kind of that autumn energy, and then you’ll have the winter energy. And that puttering is what I call the fertile void where it looks like nothing is happening, but a lot is happening under the surface. It’s the same thing as in wintertime. When you look out your window, I live in Miami, so it doesn’t really count, but I used to live in Maine and I would look out my window and in the winter everything is frozen. You can’t see anything. It’s just dark, it’s just gray. And then all of a sudden, those late days of march, you get these little crocuses and those could not have come unless there had been winter. So we have this false idea that the only time that matters is the time we see a visible result.
Kate Northrup (18:18): But what we’ve lost track of as a culture is that all the other time is critical to that visible result. And so the puttering is part of that. I see it as an integral part of the creative process.
Kristen Boss (18:32): And then we can let go of judgment and shame in our rest because that’s where, that’s why people become so averse to rest or replenishment is because shame comes up or judgment comes up, but I should be doing more. I need to be doing more and letting go of the shoulds and the needs. And I had heard fertile void that stuck with me for years, Kate, I heard it on your podcast with Amy, and it was so profound when I heard fertile void and I moved to Colorado from California, and I remember experiencing my first winter to spring, and I remember looking out the window in winter, I’m like, it’s brown, it’s dead, it’s gray.
Kristen Boss (19:06): It looks like nothing’s happening. And then I experienced my first magical spring moment and I was like, this is what people are talking about. This is why people get excited with spring. And it feels like this. You see these tiny little greens here in Colorado, I feel like spring happens in about a seven day window. It goes from a hint of green to an explosion. And the visual of that for me gives me so much grace and trust in the fertile void knowing like this, no, there’s so much happening beneath the soil. Yes, there’s stored nutrients, there’s all those things. And I even think of with our work we do, there is something called the law of diminishing returns. And that happens with our work too. There comes a point where the more we do, the less we get in return for it. And if we don’t honor the fertile void, I’ve given people this example with our US agriculture that today, an apple today has a nutritional value of a fifth of an apple from the fifties.
Kristen Boss (20:00): You would need to eat 10 apples today to have the same nutrient value of one apple 50 years ago. And it’s because of our crop rotation practices, we weren’t resting the soil. That’s where the nutrients replenishing the soil to create great nutrient dense food. It’s the same for our work. If we aren’t resting the soil, the quality of our work does end up suffering. And it’s hard for people to see that when they’ve attached, again, self-worth identity, they’re still buying into the cultural conditioning. Even the traditional 40 hour work week, that was an industrial revolution for factory workers. It’s not, but here we are still practicing it in corporate culture to our detriment. I’m like, we need some European practices over here. Stat.
Kate Northrup (20:49): Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, I’m so glad about what you said about resting the soil. So last year I created a curriculum and this exploration around regenerative business and really looking at regenerative agriculture as a model for how we could run businesses that put into the system as opposed to deplete the system. And one of the things I learned about was the practice of using cover crops. So in between planting seasons for cash crops regenerative farmers put in cover crops and cover crops. I think this is really interesting. As entrepreneurs as a model cover crops are planted to replenish the soil and to keep the soil there, otherwise it can blow away and get all this runoff. So it’s meant to nutrient the soil and to keep the soil where it is basically. Yeah. And they’re not meant to be sold though. And so I think about that for us as entrepreneurs in terms of our hobbies and the things that we do, because people here do less and they think, oh, so you’re suggesting I just slide down on the couch all day? And I’m like, no. I mean, sure, but also my puttering or going to an inspiring boutique or taking a walk on the beach with a girlfriend or whatever it is, watching documentaries.
Kate Northrup (22:12): That’s cover crops for me that nutrienting the soil. Like you said, after that big creative push, there’s kind of that fallow period. So I like thinking about it more from a perspective as cover from of cover crops as opposed to full on doing nothing. Because I think that we can relate to that a lot more. Like, oh, doing nothing doesn’t like we’re not actually doing nothing. There’s something happening, but it’s not meant for sale. It’s not a commodity. Yeah.
Kristen Boss (22:42): Yes. My husband used to tell me, he’s like, babe, have you ever just done something just to do it and not produce a result? And I was like, what kind of sorcery are you discussing here? And he’s like, I would go on a walk and he’d be like, he’d see me being like, okay, I’m going to beat my time. He’s like, no, no, no. Notice the sounds and the nature. I was like, what? Or I’d try to be on a podcast. And so I had to slowly work on dismantling those parts of myself and being like, how can I just be how can I live in this moment? And I started taking up hobbies again for sure. And it was so restorative. And turns out I get genius idea ideas in my hobbies. I get some of the most creative aha moments when I’m so far from my work, not intentionally thinking about my work, it’s the shower moments, but it’s like you’re going to have hobby moments. And it’s so important because I also think our work becomes attractive because my audience, they sell the business opportunity to their audience or social sellers. So I’m like, is your opportunity all that lucrative when you have dark circles under your eyes, you’re on your phone twenty four seven, you aren’t seeing your kids and you are wiped out, woo-hoo, join the opportunity. That’s not appealing.
Kate Northrup (23:55): No, it’s not. And I come from a background of social selling and I can tell you the most magnetic thing is your lifestyle. And it’s how, because people will feel your energy in any business, but specifically when you’re selling an opportunity, people feel your energy and they’re joining you. They’re not really joining the company that you represent because they’re have, were plenty of times when I would be talking to a prospect and somebody else would be talking to that same prospect in the same company, and they would join one or the other or somebody might say no to somebody else for that same company. But then once they heard about it through a different person, they had a frequency match, would that person and that person seemed to have what it was that they wanted. So even though it was the same product, the same compensation plan, the same whatever, it was a totally different experience. So yeah, I love how you pointed that out.
Kristen Boss (24:53): You bring up something that’s so perfect that kind of creates a nice full circle into back to your Money, A Love Story. You said we’re selling a lifestyle, but that comes with a nuance. We’re like who you are being and your life, not what you have. Not material things, but that’s kind of the hole that you got into with I buy the fancy things, and this is what I see a lot of social sellers doing. They’re like, I need to have the bag. I need to have the car. I need to have the clothes. I need to have the house. And they will run themselves into debt and lifestyle inflation is a very real thing, and then they become a prison to their business. So let’s revisit that concept and clarify that for our people.
Kate Northrup (25:29): Okay, I love this so much. So there was this couple that I knew in the company I was in, and they lived in the same teeny tiny house. It was a two bedroom house in not a super nice neighborhood, and they lived in that house until their business was making, I don’t know, very, very high six figures a year, if not in the seven figures, because they loved the freedom and the relaxation of having a lifestyle that they could really easily pay for. So they had all this extra, they created a situation of abundance for themselves, and we can create abundance for ourselves through lowering our living expenses or increasing our income. Unfortunately, in a consumerist culture, we’ve gotten pretty addicted to increasing our experience of financial abundance through increasing our income and then buying more stuff. And then you have to keep making that same income or even make more because we increase our income, then we match it with our expenses, then we increase our income, then we match it with our expenses.
Kate Northrup (26:41): So we never give ourselves the gift of actually experiencing the overflow. And so it can be a beautiful discipline, but also a healing practice and a loving practice to learn to feel really abundant while deciding not to spend money on certain things so we can give ourselves permission. Something that I practiced a long time was that I would give myself permission to have the thing that I wanted, but I would just wait instead of buying it immediately. So I remember this one time I wanted to buy this zebra print rug from Pottery Barn, and at the time I was in my early twenties and a Pottery Barn rug was very, very expensive for me. And so instead of doing what I would’ve done in the past, which is buy the rug the minute I wanted it and put it on a credit card and then pay extra for it with the interest of the credit card balance, I decided, you know what I’m going to do?
Kate Northrup (27:39): I’m going to put, I don’t remember what it was, but let’s pretend it was $25 a week. I’m going to put $25 a week in my online savings account, which I have renamed rug, and then I’m going to buy the rug in cash and enjoy the process of savoring and waiting and desiring that rug. And I will tell you I loved that rug. And when it finally came, I enjoyed it so much more than if I had just bought it the minute I wanted it because I had created this energetic relationship with what the rug represented. Because nothing we ever buy is actually a thing. It represents something. So we want to get more into relationship with what it represents and what we think it’s going to allow us to feel, and then just start feeling that way now because we get to feel however we want right now. It has nothing to do with a handbag or a car.
Kristen Boss (28:37): I was just telling someone the other day that I was coaching, I said, financial freedom has nothing to do with the amount that’s in your bank account. It’s with how you feel with what is ever in your bank account right now. It’s your relationship with what’s in the bank account right now. And we tend to think financial freedom is a certain number, but it’s like, but if you have done this lifestyle inflation, if you have become a slave to your own consumerism, because it’s never just the one bag, then there’s the another bag, and then there’s the other thing, and then there’s the next house and a bigger house. And this is where when people, they lose the abundance, they lose the joy, they don’t savor it, they don’t practice delayed gratification, they don’t.
Kristen Boss (29:14): And because they live in such tiny margins now, there’s no abundance. Now there’s just scarcity. And then the business now, instead of it being expression of joy, now the business must perform in order to meet my own scarce needs because I had kind of impulsive desires with consumerism instead of learning delayed gratification. And I know for me, that was something like when money started coming in, I did really embody and practice, wait, nope, we’re going to have peace. I’m not going to. And I remember specifically, there was a car I wanted to drive, and I made the decision of how I wanted to feel driving off that lot. And I told my husband, I was like, I will only drive that car off the lot if I never think about the car payments. I want to be in the place where it’s not even a thought in my head, but if I have one single thought of I need to sell X number of spots into my program so I can drive this car, I refuse to drive that car.
Kristen Boss (30:09): And you know what it ended, I waited seven months and I got to drive off the lot. And I never thought about what my business had to do so I could drive the car. But a lot of people are like, my business has to do this so I can have the things instead of living in that abundance space, being in abundance without the things. It’s an interesting, it’s a beautiful lesson to learn, actually.
Kate Northrup (30:29): Well, it really comes back to something that I’ve been learning about a lot over the last three or four years, and it’s our nervous system and how safe do we feel? And so what we’ve been taught to do is, or what we’ve been taught is unconsciously by our culture is you will be okay once you have this kind of bag, have this kind of car, have this kind of house, have this kind of money in the bank, you will be okay.
Kate Northrup (30:59): And granted, I want to say this up to a certain point, money will bring you more well-being. If you’re living below poverty level and you can’t cover your food shelter, you are on the verge of having the electricity turned off. That’s real. And so yes, we’re not talking about that right now. Yes. What we’re talking about right now is the illusion. And in the United States, the data shows now probably it’s changed because of inflation, but the most recent data that I’ve read shows that after $75,000 a year or more, money doesn’t actually bring you more happiness. I’m not saying not to make more than $75,000 a year, because you can have a lot more impact in a lot of different ways. However, let’s not get confused about what we’re doing it for. So what we actually need to learn to do is feel whole and complete inside ourselves no matter what.
Kate Northrup (31:56): And then when we do that, great, go buy a Gucci bag every now and again. Great. Go to a fancy dinner so that you can enjoy it from a place of I am whole and complete. Me eating at this fancy restaurant doesn’t make me different than who I was when I was eating at Wendy’s or my peanut butter and jelly. Mm-hmm. Take home, take out sandwich, whatever, from home. So that’s very, very, very important. The other thing is in terms of social selling, you want to attract people who are a match for your values. And so if you are embodying, because it just makes more fun to build your team, it just makes it easier. People are far fewer headaches when people are more or less aligned. They don’t have to all be the same. I’m really into diversity of thoughts and backgrounds and all those things, but value alignment is important.
Kate Northrup (32:54): And so if you want people who align with your values, be careful about what values are you’re portraying, and we can tell what we are. There’s a difference between what we say we value and what we actually value and what you actually value you can see because you vote with it for your time and with your money. So what you’re spending your time on and what you’re spending your money on is what you are voting for. And saying this matters. But often we’ll say if somebody says, what matters to you in my kids, my health, my faith being in nature, okay, great. So then look at your calendar. Look at your most recent credit card bill. How much of your spending time-wise and money-wise went towards essentially voting for that thing? And it’s a good reality check to actually honor what’s true, and then see if you can realign more of your spending with your actual values, with what you actually say matters to you.
Kate Northrup (33:53): And when you have that kind of alignment, you will be so magnetic because the truth is so attractive When people are telling the truth with their words and with their actions and what is behind the scenes matches what’s in front of the scenes, you will have people beating down your door and you won’t even know what happened. That’s what happens when you have alignment.
Kristen Boss (34:20): That’s the secret, friends. I want to just pick up my podcast mic and drop it on the floor because that was so good. And I would say that’s true for my experience as well, is just being value-driven first. Even with our company, with our hires, our hires show that. My audience sees that. It’s like, and I love that because I’d be like, well, if I was to pull up my bank statement, it would show that you would clearly be able to see, wow, spending time with her family and making memories with her children is very important to her because that’s where she’s putting her money and that’s important.
Kristen Boss (34:50): Oh, giving to these charitable causes that’s important to her and that’s what matters. And so I’m just so thankful that you brought that up. And I think it’s so important that people understand how attractive alignment is. And the fact that you brought up nervous system work, praise, that could be a whole nother podcast episode because that truly has been kind of my work for the last 18 months. And it has been intense work, getting back with my therapists, understanding somatic practices, understanding bringing trauma-informed practices into my coaching, understanding how someone’s nervous system comes up with business and with money. And I had to have my realization with money as I realized, I got to a point, made a lot, and I realized there was still this kind of compulsion make more until I had this moment of reckoning, I’m going to call it, where I realized what I was actually chasing was some form of safety.
Kristen Boss (35:47): And I had to do this deep work in realizing there is nothing externally that can create safety or the feeling of safety and security and comfort. That is an inside job. And it was a hard moment. I would even say it triggered some depression for a while because I was like, oh my gosh, all this money, and I’m dealing with this kind of dark feeling. I don’t feel better, and realizing, oh crap, this is my work. This is my, and realizing what I was doing was I was in just a fight-flight, hyper state of vigilance of like, ah, have more to keep myself safe. And I was just creating, I was telling people scarcity creates more scarcity, and that’s what I had done for myself. So when I started doing real nervous system, love for myself in body and in mind, I was like, all right, now I’m talking to my audience about trauma and nervous system work. So, I’m so glad you brought that up in your work as well.
Kate Northrup (36:49): It’s so important. And my most recent work has been around money and the nervous system. So I’m really glad you told your story because what will happen is we have this illusion that the more money we make, the more safe we will feel. And that’s what happens with we make more money, but then we have a nervous system set point for an amount of abundance. We actually will give ourselves permission to feel unconsciously based on our nervous system and based on essentially the thermostat setting for how much abundance and relaxation and safety and calm was available in our childhood. And so that thermostat, we will, anything that happens in our life will come back to that thermostat setting unless we do the work to shift that setting. And so I’ve been working with this curriculum called Relaxed Money to really help people to combine financial management with nervous system healing and mindset work.
Kate Northrup (37:47): But to realize that money mindset alone is not going to make a shift when there are nervous system imprints and when your body actually feels unsafe making more because that’s also a very real thing. If we were imprinted in childhood with negative messages around people with money, it’s not going to feel safe. It’s going to feel like betraying your family of origin to expand. And of course then you would maybe make more money but then have so much expenses that you’re still living really close to the bone so that you’re not actually allowing yourself to become one of those people. There’s all these things that happen with us. And so I’m so glad you’ve been having that experience because then you actually get to open up your receptor sites and really receive the abundance that’s already there because so often our life is already actually really great.
Kate Northrup (38:45): And for many people listening to this podcast, you may already be experiencing a certain level of abundance that quite frankly, according to global statistics is gargantuan. And so let’s actually experience what we have so that we can be more present and then have a bigger impact, really do the change that we’re meant to do. So I think that a lot of the work is actually opening up to fully allow ourselves to feel how good it already is, and then we can always create more from that place.
Kristen Boss (39:22): My therapist once asked me, how much joy can your nervous system tolerate? And it was quite profound that she asked me that. And literally right behind me, there’s a clipping journal with a lot of catalog clippings. That’s actually my money story journal as told through my nervous system that I did with my therapist for three days. And she’s like, what if you were to actually let yourself have joy, even if it’s sometimes fleeting? Because it was this idea of like, oh, I’m going to let myself have it, but then what if it’s gone? And she’s like, so I was didn’t want to give myself the experience of vulnerability, of letting myself be happy in the moment as Brene Brown calls it, foreboding joy. If I let myself feel this, then this part of me that’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. And that’s kind of what was happening with money in my nervous system of being like, I went into a state of hypervigilance and I love, it’s so important that you did say there’s this mindset work about money, but now we have a nervous system that comes into play with child wounds and those things. And my mindset got me quite far, and then my nervous system was like, oh, we have a say in this.
Kristen Boss (40:31): We actually have a lot of say in this, and we’re going to need some help. And so it still is, and I think it’s so important that someone that’s hearing us talk about this is, I just don’t think there’s a place of arriving with our healing. It’s work we are always doing, and we’re not subscribing to a toxic form of positivity where it’s like, I’ve arrived, I’ve done all my work. I’m a healed whole human. It’s like no, I’ve healed that layer and I’m about to heal another layer. It’s like we’re like ogres, ogres, I like on layers or whatever, onions, o ogres, like onions with layers. You know what I’m saying?
Kate Northrup (41:03): I love that. I love that. Totally.
Kristen Boss (41:06): So I am so thankful you came on this podcast. You just gave so, so much to my audience and you’ve given so much to me, and I’m just going to encourage all my people. Please, if you have not heard of the book Do Less or Money a Love Story, I encourage you to do both. Go get it, buy it now. Where can my audience find you and learn more about you, Kate?
Kate Northrup (41:26): The best place to connect with me is on Instagram at Kate Northrop. So that’s where I hang out online the most. Send a dm, if you listened to this and just want to say hi, I’d love to say hi back. So that’s the place. And then if you want something, I mean for sure, I would love for you to go grab my books or get them at the library but a real nice tangible tool that I have that’s for free is called the Business Pressure Relief Kit. So if you’re feeling this feeling of like I am under pressure to get a certain amount done, I’m under pressure to make a certain amount, I have these six strategies to relieve that pressure right away, and you can get that over at theorigincompany.co/strategies.
Kristen Boss (42:08): Perfect. And we’ll link that in the show notes just so they’re not like, ah, what is it? Can’t write it down. So we’ll put all of your goodies in our show notes. Kate, I can’t thank you enough for being here and just sharing a part of your story.
Kate Northrup (42:19): Thank you for having me.
Kristen Boss (42:29): That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Listen, if you love what you heard here today, I would love for you to leave a real quick rating and a review. This helps the show get discovered by new people. Be sure to take a screenshot of today’s episode and shout us out on Instagram. We’ll shout you right back out. If you’d like to find additional resources or discover how to work with me, head to kristenboss.com.
