Why You Keep Getting Paid Less Than You Should

What we tell women is like, know your value, know your worth. And that's actually terrible financial advice in my view, because your value and your worth are infinite. Your financial value in a negotiation is just an economic question of what the other person is willing to pay. Your economic worth is not objective. If you believe you can do something, you will do it. If you don't believe you can do it, you won't. What's up, rich friends? And welcome back to another episode of Net Worth and Chill with me, your host Vivian Tu, a.k.a. Your Rich BFF and your favorite Wall Street Curly. Today, we are diving deep into a topic that affects every single woman listening, whether you realize it or not, how society has literally shaped the way we think about money. And I'm not talking about the budgeting tips or the investment strategies. I'm talking about the invisible forces that have been working against our financial confidence since we could even spell paycheck. I mean, women couldn't even get their own credit cards without a husband or a father sign off until 1974. Not to mention the pay gap and motherhood penalty that women are still facing today. But if some of this sounds unfamiliar, no worries, that is exactly what we're covering today. I'm so excited to welcome today's guest, a lawyer, turned life coach, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. Everyone, please welcome Carl Lohanthal. Thanks for having me here. I'm excited to chat. Kara, you and I have been longtime friends, but only over text, only over phone, my digital screen. So I want to talk a little bit about a concept behind your book that if some of us aren't familiar, it's called Take Back Your Brain, How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head and How to Get It Out. You talk about a phrase called the brain gap. What the hell is that? If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the Eater app at eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Yeah, so the brain gap is, I always make you think of the subway gap right between the subway and the thing. Like the London Tube, mind the gap. Exactly, mind the gap. The brain gap is the difference between how men and women are socialized and taught to think about themselves. So women are generally socialized to believe that their value comes from what other people think of them, how they can be of service, how they can be helpful to other people, whether they're attractive enough. There's all these different vortices, but they all come back to like, other people are observing you and evaluating you and judging you, and you need to be proving that you're doing a good enough job to be allowed to exist, essentially. Whereas men are more socialized to just be like, yeah, you exist, good for you. You're allowed to. You don't really have to. It's not that men don't experience socialization that's not good for them or pressure. I'm not saying that. I think patriarchy is bad for everybody. But I don't think men get the specific socialization. That's like, if you're not of service to and attractive to other people, then you basically don't deserve to be alive. Which sounds extreme, but that is really what women are taught growing up. So we have this gap in how men and women are taught, and that leads to this gap really in confidence between men and women in terms of the way that they think. And then for women, it leads to this weird dichotomy in this day and age of like, well, mentally, and as an adult, I might identify as a feminist, or I might just think like, of course, women are equal or should have equal rights, or women are good enough. I want to believe that. But there's this programming deep down subconsciously that is counter to that. So you also get this weird gap between what I want to believe and how I actually feel. Of course, I cognitively, intellectually think, of course, women can make money. Of course, women can invest. Of course, women can be good with money. But I myself feel panicked about looking at my bank account. Get anxious about making investments. Beat myself up if I ever buy a stock and it goes down or something doesn't work out. So we have these sort of gaps running in these different ways. Yeah, I heard a specific dating influencer kind of like, also talk about this topic. I don't think she had the words for it. But her question for a lot of young women who are in the dating pool, she was like, you're constantly worried, does he like me, does he like me, does he like me? Do you like him? Right. That's like the last thing you think about. You're like, maybe I'll get to that if I'm sure he likes me. I always think about this New Yorker cartoon that's like, but did you marry me or marry me as a friend? Yeah. Right? It's funny because it speaks to something that seems ridiculous, but we have in the back of our brain. That's so crazy. I have a question. Why does the patriarchy want to keep women financially illiterate? And what are some of the examples of patriarchal structures that exist that are still really impacting women today? Yeah. I mean, I think that patriarchy, one of the things that's weird about that concept is that it makes it sound like there's a cabal of six men in a room who are like, what shall we do to the ladies today? And that's not what we mean. You know this. We just mean these social institutions were built originally by men. So let's just look at America. If when the country starts, the only people who can vote and own property are white men, then the institutions they create are going to be more beneficial to them. If they've found a bank, that bank is only going to serve white male property owners. Probably have to be Christian also. And so legally, sure, that's different today, like on the surface. But the whole purpose is to keep women disenfranchised. For better or worse, we live in a capitalist society, you need to be able to exchange money for things like food, shelter, not to mention your Sephora Hall or whatever. So if a woman is dependent on a man for food and shelter, because she can't own a business, she can't get a job. She's not to do that. Couldn't get that credit card till 1944. But not that long before that, couldn't vote, couldn't, if you had a job, your earnings still belong to your husband. So if a woman doesn't have access to full financial equality and civic rights, then she can be required to do a lot of unpaid labor. She will have to put up with whatever treatment she gets. She's just in a much more vulnerable, powerless position. So if a system is sexist overall, it is in the interest of that system and the way that system operates is going to be to keep women from being full financial actors. And you mentioned this earlier. You said the patriarchy is bad for everyone. And I think there are a lot of, and let me play devil's advocate here first. There's a lot of folks online who are like, the patriarchy doesn't exist, da, da, da, da, da, but you said the patriarchy is also bad for everyone else, not just women. Can you explain that to me? Totally. So when we talk about patriarchy, what we're talking about is a system that has a couple of like premises that it's built on, right? And yes, one of them is like, men are better than women, but it's also very like men and women are very different and have these different roles. So we think in the financial context, there's all this pressure put on men to be a financial provider, right? The man can't feel good about himself if like he doesn't earn enough money or he doesn't have a certain kind of career. So let's say you are in a relationship, a heterosexual relationship, and the female partner starts earning more money, or she's more interested in climbing the corporate ladder or working, right? A lot of men will feel emasculated. And we talk about that like that's this like character flaw they have, but that's how they've been socialized, right? That's what they've been taught, is that they are the provider, that's their value. And so of course they're gonna feel bad about that. And so we end up with a system that's bad for everybody because what we want is for everybody to be able to decide in their partnership or wherever else. Like I am someone who wants to like, I'm the entrepreneur, my husband is the, you know, is a stay at home, he's retired, he's a little bit older, but like he's the primary caregiver for our kids when we have them, partly because I'm the stepmom and they're his kids, but also because he's more student, like he's very nurturing and loving and likes to do that stuff. And I'm like, I wanna build this business. Like I love my stepkids, but like we have very different personalities. So the goal of feminism and kind of a financially feminist approach to me is not like all women must be in the corporate workforce. And you know, it's like, it's not a must, but like people should be free regardless of their gender. To do what they want. To choose, right, and not be socialized, that you're supposed to be like this, and if you're not, there's something wrong with you. What are some of the money lies you think we've been taught as women? So many. I think first of all, we just kind of think money is like men's thing. Just sort of like, it's just like four men, they somehow know it, right? Like the number of like educated, smart, impressive women I know who are letting a 26 year old named Brad who happens to work at their bank, like decide where their investment should go, and like, cause what, I don't know, he went to Duke and you know, took an economics class. I think that the women are just socialized to believe that men are better with money. And you look at all this, there's like those famous studies of the media, the financial media that's aimed at women versus men, right? And for women, it's like, budget, be thrifty, restrict. Confessions of a shopaholic. Right, it's all like, right, it's all like you have a personality failing, right? You're either binging, it's like very similar to diet culture. You need to try to be smaller, do less, be more frugal, be thrifty. If you are shopping or spending your money, you're doing something wrong, you're being impulsive, you're frivolous, and the media aimed at men is like, invest, build wealth, be a wolf out there, like what else? Who knows? Pound your chest. Right, rain money down, like whatever. So I think money is for men is a big one. And that leads to women just thinking that like, they don't know how to deal with money, they're scared of it. The number of women I've coached who are, think they're irresponsible with money, and it's never like, well, I bought one Lamborghini and then I thought, I'll go into debt to buy another one. Like it's never actually irresponsible, right? It's just like, I bought a sweater and now I feel bad about myself. The second lie is that caring about money makes you a bad person. This is again, very gendered, right? No one says specifically, like, it's only bad for women to care about money, but if you look at who feels plagued by this idea, it's women, because women are socialized to believe that they just sort of owe the world everything, right? It's just like, if anybody wants anything from you, you already now have an obligation to give it to them. And if you want to have anything for yourself, that's like bad and selfish. Do you think about where the idea that money is morally bad comes from? I just always imagine it's like, the Cardinals and the Catholic Church and the 1200s who are sitting in luxury for the time, and they're like, let's tell the peasants out there that they shouldn't want money, that's bad for them, right? And that they should tie that all to the church. Right, so where does this belief come from? Just notice when it's like people with power and wealth telling you, you shouldn't want those things, that makes you a bad person, right? Money is a tool. You can use it to feed a family, or you can use it to sit on it like Scrooge McDuck. It's not inherently good or bad. And then the third one is that kind of the game is stacked, so there's no point in even trying, right? And I think that women, a lot of what happens is like, and I think some of this comes sometimes from the feminist movement, when we're not doing a good enough job of articulating what's possible, not just what's wrong. Like, yeah, the pay gap does exist. There's systemic discrimination in economic institutions against women, and especially against people of color, and women of color, especially, right? That's all true, and not everywhere is like that. So when we just sort of, when we acknowledge systemic discrimination, but then we don't talk about the agency you do have to try to change your own life, we end up being even more disempowering, right? It's like, well, your boss is sexually harassing you. All bosses are like that, so there's no point in looking for something else. But like, no, there is a point. There are places that won't happen, right? There is good out there as well. Yeah, I also feel like, and you tell me if this, you have come across as well, I feel like the generation after me, probably Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been born into like a very hard environment, more so than you and I probably were, but it's led to like a very defeatist attitude, especially when it comes to finances. And there was that trend on TikTok that was like, I'll be, I'll make the money back, but I'll never be 20 riding around the back of a moped with this cute Italian boy or whatever. And I was like, wait guys, that's not how that works actually. Like that's not how compounding works. We're gonna talk about this. You actually won't make it back. Yeah, like it's gonna be much harder actually to do that. So yeah, 100%, I feel like those lies are so pervasive. Yeah, and I think that, you know, there's a positive side of, I think the generation's behind us, and I'm probably, I'm 44, so I'm like a half generation ahead of you. Like, I think there's a positive of people being more aware of systemic issues, more aware of structural problems, but it's that exact same problem. I mean, and I should say like, I come from the social justice world. When I was a lawyer, I was a reproductive rights lawyer, and then I ran a think tank at Columbia. So like, I came all the way up through a very structural way of seeing the world. Like there's these systems, they oppress people, which is all true, and there's always human agency. And I feel like maybe part of what it feels like is going on with the generations behind us is, like you said, that the economic conditions are hard. There's also more understanding of structural stuff that that can lead to more defeatism. And then we're seeing, I mean, we can have a whole other podcast about this, you know, the turn towards like, Tradwife influencer content. I was just about to ask. Oh my God, we can like get on such a soapbox. Like the idea that those women are not running a business, like that's what's happening. I know how difficult it is to run my business, and I get to film, and I get to green screen, and teach something. Imagine having to make Cheez-Its from scratch. Like that takes eight hours. What? But this has always been true of the anti-feminist movement, right, Phyllis Schlafly in the 80s, was traveling the country, telling other women to stay home. Like she's getting paid to go give speeches to tell you that you shouldn't wanna have a job, right? And so, but that's where that- Does that frustrate you? Cause I feel like there's a lot of people right now who are like, especially, you know, certain women who I'm not gonna name names, but there are women who are very, very powerful, very career oriented, telling women to, you know, submit to their husband, telling them that they should not want a career, that their place is in the home, it's in the kitchen. And like, it's very like, do as I say, not as I do, but like, how do you, as like someone who's, you know, has a law background, like, you know, rectify that? Yeah, I mean, I think, I feel like, it's like feminism always needs a better PR campaign, cause people just don't understand what it means, and it's always being demonized. Like, and any woman who's a tradwife influencer, and has an Instagram account, and has a bank account, that her earnings go into, that's because of feminism. Like, I was gonna say, do you like wearing pants, but tradwives maybe don't wear pants, but like, being able to have a driver's license, and vote, and all of that, you know? I know, well, I sometimes also, I don't know if I can say this on this podcast, you can cut it if not, but I sometimes, I'm not gonna curse, but I just sometimes wanna be like, you wanna submit to your husband, like there's kink for that, you don't have to turn it into a whole lifestyle. Like, we don't have to enforce it on other people, that can just be a bedroom thing, and then you can have a job if you want, but you obviously do, because you've built a career, traveling around, or being online, telling other women to submit to their husbands. Like, these things can be separate. Yeah, so a little strange. You said just now that feminism needs like, a better PR team, can you like, just pretend I'm dumb, can you define the word feminism for me? Yeah, absolutely, so I think that feminism is, not just I think, a lot of people, this is a theory, not just me, feminism is the belief that people should have equal rights and opportunities, regardless of their gender. It's not even actually just about male, female, right? Like, that's a very outdated view. Like, there's a lot of different genders, a lot of different gender identities, a lot of different sexual orientations. The idea is just that your gender, or the sex you're assigned at birth, or anything else, should not be in charge of who you're allowed to be, what legal and economic rights you have, and what role you're allowed to have in society, that everybody should have equal opportunity. It does not mean that like, no women are allowed to stay home with their babies under families, right? Or like, all men should die, that's misandry. That's a different thing, it's not the same thing. But I think that, you know, like, a lot of social justice movements, when you get enough success and it gets kind of, just absorbed into society, so it's like the baseline now, people just don't understand. Like, most, like you said in the beginning, most people don't know that you would not have been allowed to take out a credit card in some states without your husband coming down to be like, I'll pay for it when her little lady brain screws this up, and to get a business loan, it was even later, I think 1984 or something before in every state, you could get a business loan. I mean, imagine if like, I take my husband, who I love dearly, has not an entrepreneurial bone in his body, right? And drag him down to the local brand. Right, to be like, okay, I have a multimillion dollar business and he's here to co-sign for my credit card. Like, what? But I think it just gets absorbed into the background, and so people don't really realize how much of what they take for granted, and that's true in many social, right, all kinds of civil rights movements, like people don't understand how much, wasn't that long ago that you had none of those rights. Yeah. Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's gonna be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree, and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. And I wanna pivot us a little bit because we talked about this briefly, but you said, women oftentimes believe that our values derive from other people's opinion of us. Do you think that's why we've had some notable women, like incredibly affluent women, like feel more obligated than, say, their former rich ex-husbands to donate so aggressively, and I'll just say the name, like Mackenzie Bezos is literally trying to give away pretty much half of her wealth every single year. Obviously, the interest is just making that money grow and grow and grow, so she can keep doing that pretty sustainably. But we haven't seen Jeff make such lavish donations to great causes. We did see him throw in incredibly tacky wedding in Italy. I would know I had a wedding in Italy, and mine was better. I also didn't spend 50 million. We didn't spend 50 million dollars. Neither did I, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. It's hard to say what an individual's psychology is. I think it brings up this interesting thing that a lot of the times when women, I see specifically women do this, are trying to teach other women to be comfortable with having money. They rely on this idea that women do good things with money and men do bad things with it. Now, there's some sociological literature showing, not for billionaire, showing when you give small cash sums to families and poverty, women are more likely to spend that money on the family. So it's like we're extrapolating a lot from that. I'm not against that theory, but I also kind of want to be like, I don't care, you're a equal human. Like as a human, do I hope that you use your money in ways that align with your values and are good for the world? Yes, but you don't have to be like a better person to be allowed to have a man, to be allowed to have money. Like it's a little bit, feels like kind of this weird leftover like angel at the heart of women or more spiritually pure kind of reasoning. I too can purchase a Rolex. Right, like I just want to be like, you're a human. You have human autonomy. You don't have to justify it any more than a man does. And it's sort of like, often what I'm trying to teach, a lot of the work I do comes down to like confidence and self-worth, right, and money or anything else. And it's not that I want women to feel like, well, whatever I did was perfect because it happened, right? I'm like, no, how about just you're a human? So sometimes like you don't act like your best self, but you're still allowed to exist and you don't have to beat yourself up about it. So I kind of go back and forth on that, look at the women billionaires giving away their money. I do think probably they don't have the same like, I got to have the biggest bank account at the billionaires table to show how cool I am. At the list. Yeah, they're not socialized in that same way and that probably is to their benefit because I do think humans are inherently mostly generous and collaborative, right? You have to be as a hunter-gatherer to survive. You're gonna die. But people are also competitive. They are competitive, I think, but I think also socialization is what partly like, if we tell people like, if you have the most money, you're the coolest and everyone will love you and wanna have sex with you, and like we're gonna get that direction of these male billionaires. But I do get nervous when like the rationale for women making money is like, but you're gonna do good things with it unlike the men. Like I hope you do, but you don't have to. You like, can just be a person. Yeah. Do you think women conflate like economic and moral values? Yes, yeah, I think that we really, and we give really bad advice that leads to that. So I think one of the reasons women have so much difficulty is that that's conflated for them, right? And then what we tell women is like, no, your value, no, your worth. And that's actually terrible financial advice in my view because your value and your worth are infinite. That's just for being a human. Like it's not okay for me to kill you no matter what. Like you have value as a human. Your financial value in a negotiation is just an economic question of what the other person is willing to pay. And it's not objective, right? There are people who will pay me $25,000 for a VIP day and there are people who would pay me $0 for a VIP day. Repeat this, because I feel like that was really important. You said that in a negotiation, when a woman knows her worth, you have to realize the person on the other side of the table has a subjective decision based on what that worth is. Yeah, your economic worth is not objective, right? Economic worth is a negotiation in terms of- So if we're negotiating, I might believe my worth is something, but you might believe it's something else. Right, like so if I'm using the example of like, if I do VIP days, or if somebody can work with me independently, one on one. Okay, for some people, $25,000 is a bargain to do that. They're like, I'll do three. Some people that's like, that seems like a lot, but I think it's worth it. I'm gonna make this investment. Some people are like, I would never ever pay you that much money. I mean, my own mother, who I love dearly, is like, people pay you what to do what? Just to talk to you, right? That doesn't, my inherent worth as a human is unrelated to any of that, right? And the worth of my service is still subjective because it's worth a lot to some people and nothing to other people. A Lamborghini is worth a lot to some people. It's worth nothing to me. I don't want a Lamborghini. I don't even know how to drive that kind of. Right, I would never spend that much money on a car. Not because I think it's bad or wrong. I'll spend it on like a house or a vacation, maybe. I don't know how much a Lamborghini costs, probably not vacation. But I think that because women are so socialized, I mean, this all connects to the fact that women are socialized to look externally for like authority and validation. And so we get really hung up on like, well, I have to prove that I am worthwhile. So I like need all these people to agree with me or I need it to be objectively correct that I'm worth this much. So I think it's really important for women to separate their financial, and it's not even your financial worth, like what's your net worth? That's a specific number. What's the amount someone's willing to pay you for whatever economic value you offer? That's a subjective negotiation between you and that person, whether it's a salary, whether it's so you might work in a corporation, whether you're selling a product, whether you're selling your time. And then there's your personal worth as a human, which is completely different. And the problem is that it makes you really emotional about these negotiations, right? So if you think that when you negotiate with your boss about your salary, you got to get him to agree on like your personal worth, you are gonna be crazy in that negotiation. You'll never get there. Yeah, and you're gonna feel terrible, and it's gonna be so high stakes, and you're not gonna be strategic. And then if you don't get it, you're gonna feel awful about yourself, and now you're gonna discount yourself. Like you really have to separate these things out. And really like the idea that your economic value is subjective is actually very freeing if you just accept it. Because then if somebody doesn't recognize it, that's fine, you get to go to the next person. Just like if you're trying to sell a Lamborghini, don't try to sell it to me. Try to sell it to someone who wants a Lamborghini. Right. What would you give as advice to women who want to be able to negotiate more effectively? I would be practicing like thoughts that get to this distinction. So I'm a big advocate of what I call the 10% less, can I curse on this podcast? Yeah. Okay, the 10% less shitty thought. So people are always trying to go with a thought that's like, I am of infinite worth, and whatever, right? It's too far from where you are now. It doesn't feel good. It's fake, it's woo-woo. Yeah, and also, I mean, the study show can make you feel worse, because it just, it amplifies the gap between where you are and what you wanna believe. So you might wanna start practicing like, it's possible that my worth as a human and what someone pays me are not related, right? Or it's possible that two people can have different ideas about how much money something's worth. So we're like really starting with very neutral sounding statements that just help us disentangle. My personal worth is inviolable. It's not okay for someone to off me no matter what. And whether or not my boss thinks I should get a 30% raise next year is like a very different question. So practicing really kind of neutral. And it's not life or death. It's not life or death, yeah. Yeah. Practicing those little neutral step thoughts is how you start changing your, and I have a whole podcast episode called The Thought Ladder. People can go look up that I teach you how to like come up with these sort of neutral baby step thoughts. Also, how do we like de-emotionalize some heated conversations around money, especially when it comes to say, you and I are married, and we're thinking about talking about that wedding or that home we're trying to buy or kids. Like it does feel like financial conversations are always hugely emotionally charged. How do we make them objective, smart, effective conversations versus, you hate me because you have debt? Yeah, so I think it again goes back to that like de-personalizing it. One of the reasons it's so high stakes is that it's like subconsciously you're asking like, do you love me enough to spend this much on our wedding? Oh. Do you think I'm worth it? Okay. Do you trust that I'm gonna make money in the future? Do you think I'm bad with money? Just like I think I'm bad with money, right? We're acting out all of this stuff. If your thought is that secretly, subconsciously, you fear you're bad with money or irresponsible with money, whatever, you go into a conversation already heightened, right? You're already on high alert because you think that you're bad at it and everybody's gonna find out. And if your partner says anything that disagrees with you, that sets off the like, oh my God, see I am bad and wrong and I don't know what I'm doing and we get like super agitated. So the more that we can de-personalize and similar with the examples of separating your economic and your financial worth, it is like acknowledging that subjectivity. Like one person can think that it's worth it to spend a lot of money on a wedding and one person can think it's not. And that doesn't mean anything about the people, right? I mean, we spend quite a bit on my wedding. My husband would never have spent that much on my wedding, right? But it wasn't emotional. I mean, partly because I make money. Yeah, so you're like, I'm spending it, I'm making it. But if he had been really, you know, like, I'm uncomfortable, don't do that. I would have taken that into account, obviously. But it's also just like, I didn't make that mean anything. I wasn't like, oh, so you don't love me. You don't wanna celebrate me. You don't wanna invite a bunch of people to this. You think I'm irresponsible with money, right? Because I've done all of the work. I was just like, no, we just have different experiences, different ideas about where to spend the money, different thoughts about it. So I think the women are part of, it's a vicious cycle where women are very concerned with external validation and authority because we think there is an objective right answer and we don't know it and therefore we're bad and in trouble and in danger. So the more that we can just see like, everybody just has different thoughts and your thoughts are just as valid or invalid as anybody else's, it allows us to not take everything so personally and just be able to hear what are the other person's values and priorities? What are yours? How can you come to something that works for both of you? To talk about like going all the way back to the cradle, there's like this discussion of like nature versus nurture. Have you seen if there's any specific subset of women who are just not bound by the shackles of all of these thoughts? Like is there just like a group of women that are particularly good at money, that are particularly good with managing negotiations and like doing all of these behaviors? And like how do I make my kid one of them? Well, I think the nurtures are important. It's like, how do you talk to your kid? How do you, it does start very early. Like there's studies showing that parents are more likely to like jump in and rescue little girls compared to little boys if they're like about to make a mistake or about to hurt themselves or something. So we're teaching this like perfectionism and risk aversion to little girls earlier than we are little boys. And I think that's really important with financial stuff because like one of the biggest misconceptions I see in women I coach around like investment is that like you're good at investing if you never make a bad investment and you never lose money, right? Which is like not how investing works, right? Every great investor has made a bad investment. Right, at least one, right. I've made bad investments, but my net worth has grown because I'm willing to take those risks. So like why are women so risk averse? It's not genetic, it's not inherent. It's because we're socialized into perfectionism. So it's like if you have a little girl, one of the things you can do is like let her fall down. Let her make a mistake, like let her figure things out. You know, give her messages that are about resilience, making mistakes is okay, like it's okay to be upset, it's okay to hurt yourself, it's okay to figure it out, not like jump in and protect. And then make sure I think you're counteracting those social messages around money, right? Because if you just leave it alone and don't do anything by default what she's gonna get is like budget, be thrifty, frivolous, whatever, right? And I think we grow up so much with that messaging. I mean, for me, one of the biggest, the first really big money mind shift that I had because again, I became an entrepreneur coming from the social justice world. So I was like money is bad, people who wanna make money are bad, you know, all of that. And then I was like, oh, it really hard to be an entrepreneur with this mindset was like looking at, you know, just taking some people in my life, let's say, and looking at like what they spent their money on and then kind of being like, oh, I spent my money on this, these people spend their money on that. We just have different ideas about what we wanna spend our money on. It's not actually like, oh, they're good with it, so that's the right thing. And I'm bad with it, so whatever I'm doing is wrong. The tea is piping hot and I'm like dying to ask you who it is, but I'm not going to. It's fine. Let's just say we all learn money in our family, right? And I feel like the story when I was growing up was sort of that I was like a spendthrift and frivolous with money. And then that's like, I don't really take that personally, I think that's such a gendered story. Like that's what we tell women about money and themselves, right? And I have expensive tastes, like I'm the first to own it. I'm like, don't take me to Europe all the time if you don't want me to like nice things. But I think that for me, it was really powerful to be like, oh, if I even think about the people who I think who are like are coded in my family or my community as being like good with money, they do spend money on stuff. It's just like different things and those are just different subjective priorities, not right or wrong. Yeah. And you've mentioned a bit throughout the show that you are a life coach. But you used to be a lawyer, you used to work in non-probable, like what got you into that? Yeah, it's a normal pipeline of just, Ivy League lawyer to life coach. I was supposed to become a law professor, instead I quit and became a life coach. I mean, I think, ironically, like a lot of women, I had the belief that there's something wrong with me that I gotta fix about myself, right? There's just always so many things wrong with me, just always in a state of like, not enoughness, not good enoughness, what's the next thing I gotta fix to finally feel okay about myself? And I did like the your 20s in New York starter pack, like yoga and meditation and like therapy and whatever. And all those things were helpful in some ways. And then I heard about coaching and then actually the first coach I went to was hilariously bad. So you went to a life coach? I did, yeah. I hired a coach. It was very behaviorless coaching, which was like, now I'm just like, was it for dumb people? Or like, how is this supposed to work? Because it was basically like, okay, you pick like a punishment for yourself and then if you do the thing, you have to do the punishment. I know, and I was like, but I'm not five. So I know that I could do the thing and not just a punishment. Yeah, it was like, you have to like give $5 to someone, you don't like a politician you don't agree with. And I was like, but I could just not do that. Whatever. So that didn't work. But I did, that did get me interested in like, okay, that doesn't work, but like what is the model of the human mind that's going on here? And then I found my teacher and her kind of method of coaching, which is based on cognitive psychology, but pulls in like some meditation and mindfulness principles and even a little bit of what I would call, it's not manifestation, but it's sort of like, I don't believe in manifestation, but it's kind of, it's like that. You don't? I believe that when people think they're manifesting, what they're doing is changing a belief that creates a different feeling and a different action. And they create a different outcome. So you actually have to do stuff. You can't just be like money, money, money, money, money. Or what I always say about dating is like, if you're going to sit home and manifest, you better hope you like your UPS man, because like that's the only person you're going to need. You got to go on dates. You got to go on dates, right. But I think we call it manifesting because like when you have done the belief work, it all flows very naturally. And so then you're like, oh, look at that. I manifested it. It's like, no, your brain's very powerful and it was working. And you like did the work. And you did stuff. You felt differently. You took different actions. Maybe you didn't have to hustle and grind, which you don't always have to do, but like you were doing something. You were going to the bar, you were smiling back at that guy at the bodega. You were going to your friend's picnic and talking some more. It's like little imperceptible things. Yeah, you don't even notice you're doing it, but you're doing all that stuff. Anyway, so I found coaching. I, it really changed my life. And then I just, I kind of took it crazy. Like in retrospect, it does seem like an insane thing that I did, but I was about to become a law professor. So I was, I guess, I think lucky that there was this moment where I was like, okay, if I've been thinking about this either, I'm going to like, you know, and when you become a law professor, it's like, nobody starts at Harvard. You got to like move to Kansas and teach torts. So then maybe you can work your way up. And I was at that moment of having to like go on the job market, which is a huge undertaking. I was just like, it's going to be totally been deranged. If I do all this, move to Kansas, teach torts for a year, and then quit and become a coach. So like if I'm going to do it, I should just do it now. Do it now. Yeah. And then here we are. What is your advice? Or I guess like, what is your response to people who are like, life coaching sounds woo-woo? It doesn't make sense. Is this fake? Yeah. Cause I feel like I'm quite a like staunch believer in like analytics. Like I don't, like I don't really believe in the woo-woo. But what you're describing to me doesn't sound as woo-woo as I thought. Oh, I'm not woo-woo at all. And in fact, a big, a big joke on my team is that I'm secretly a witch, but I won't accept it. Like I don't believe that that's how this works. So I think, let me put it this way. Like the same way that therapy is a term covers everything from like Freudian analysis to cognitive behavioral therapy to like art therapy. Right? It's a huge term. Coaching is the same way. So there's some coaching that's like completely bananas to me is totally out there. And then also like the NFL has coaches, right? And like we don't think that that's a woo-woo, right? So it covers just a huge amount of things. What I focus on and what I know works is cognitive behavioral psychology, right? So it's combining like the core cognitive behavioral psychology insight is that your thoughts create your emotions, create your behaviors, right? So the way you think is gonna determine how you feel and act, which when you think about it, it's pretty straightforward, right? For instance, if you- Makes sense. Don't believe you can ever negotiate that you are never gonna negotiate. If you do believe you can negotiate then you're going to negotiate, right? So that's like the core insight. And then there's a lot of other stuff that goes into it, but for me really, I think the other reason, the other thing that I always say about coaching is like, the proof is in the pudding since it's not manifesting, right? It's like, I'm gonna teach you a bunch of tools, you're gonna try using them, see what happens. Like if you change a thought and you feel differently and you act differently, you're gonna get a different outcome. So to me, it's pretty like you can see this happening. And now at this point, I've been doing this for a while, like my work's been in a double blind peer reviewed starting to know randomized controlled trial, which is like the gold standard. So now there have been RCTs done of coaching, my work's been in a couple of them, there's more and more evidence now that it works as a methodology. But for me, and not very well at all, like I went to Harvard Law School, I'm not like, let's speak to the star season side of you. But I think we all, on some fundamental level, we all know mindset matters. Like when you think about someone you know in your life who's like, always grumpy and pessimistic and never thinks anything's worth doing and it's always shitting on everyone out. Like you're like, that person's probably not gonna get a storm cloud because they want in life. Yeah, like that's just, that's really what we're doing is shifting that mindset. Yeah. And something that you talk about while coaching is called the confidence compass. What is it? How do I use it? How can the folks at home use it? Yeah. So the confidence compass is a way of understanding what really makes up confidence. So I think at a really fundamental level, if you believe you can do something, you will do it. Yeah. Or you might choose not to, but you're gonna try if you want to. If you don't believe you can do it, you won't. And sometimes the coaching world mystifies things a lot and I'm not into the like, it's your enneagram, it's your human design, it's your whatever, right? So like fundamentally, if you believe that you can do the thing, you are gonna go do it. So let's just work on getting you to believe that you can do it. You can do it. So that's what I think of as confidence. Like I think confidence is misunderstood to be the fleeting emotion you have when you're like walking down the street and you're like, the sun is shining and I feel amazing today, you know? Where somebody gives you a compliment and you feel like high for a minute. That's fleeting, it doesn't last. It's like an orgasm and feels nice, that's great, but you can't build your life on that, right? Real confidence is made up, I think of four and the psychological literature backs me up on four cognitive and emotional skills. And those are self-knowledge, self-compassion, self-belief and self-actualization. What is all of that? So self-knowledge is actually understanding what is going on in your brain, which most of us have no idea, right? We're just conscious of like the surface thoughts. The estimates are up to 60% of your thoughts are unconscious. So it's like, you think you're driving the ship and there's like a bunch of mice down there, but you know, it's like ratatouille. They're driving the ship, you have no idea what's going on. Three kids in a trench coat. Exactly, raccoons probably. And they're hungry and feral. Like that's what's driving you. So self-knowledge is like, how do we get access to that? How do we start to actually be able to tell ourselves the truth about what we actually think and feel? Like this whole conversation we've been having, a lot of the thoughts I've been describing that women have, they've been listening to this being like, oh my God, yes. Like I hear all the time, how are you inside my head? How did you know I was thinking that? Because we're not even conscious that we think it. But then someone says it and we're like, oh, oh yeah, I do think that, right? So that's self-knowledge. You can't really change your thoughts if you don't know what you truly believe. That's why a lot of positive thinking seems woo and doesn't work because it's like three, you've got three raccoons in a trench coat and you're like, I'm just gonna put a nice little neck tie on them and like not pay attention. Yeah, not pay attention to what's going on under there. So you just try to like plug in some new positive thought but the raccoon and the trench coat are still scrabbling around in there. So you gotta figure out what you actually believe. Self-compassion is so crucial, everybody hates it, nobody wants to do it. But the truth is you actually can't have self-knowledge without self-compassion because just think about someone who's mean to you. Do you tell them your innermost fears and thoughts and vulnerabilities? No, same is true for yourself, right? If you beat yourself up, you're not gonna ever find out what you really think because you're not safe with yourself, right? So self-compassion, absolutely crucial. We also, we're always trying to solve a problem without understanding it. We're like, I'm just really bad with money. So if I just learn some facts, I'll be good with money and then in fact are important. That's why like your work is so important, like financial literacy is so important for women who have been shut out of it systematically. But if your thought is still, I'm bad with money and every decision I make with money is wrong and bad, like it's not gonna really solve your problem. Self-belief is the ability to create new beliefs, right? And it's really believing in your own capacity, right? So what we wanna do is like, well, just make a bunch of really good investments and if those work out okay, then I'll believe in myself and think that I can do it. Right? It's like, that's not how it works. That's backwards, right? Because then any stumble, any challenge, any small failure knocks the entire thing off, right? Cause you've been like holding your breath for it all to work out so you can believe you know what you're doing or that you're good at it or that you're allowed to do it. And then the minute anything goes wrong, you're like, okay, well see, I knew that I couldn't do it and I knew that I'm terrible and bad and I should never have tried. So self-belief is, it's actually a skill to know how to create a new thought and practice it and believe it to change what you think. And then self-actualization in some ways is like the sum of all those things. When you know what you actually think, you can actually have your own support and kindness. You know how to create new beliefs, then you show up in the world in a different way, right? Then you can actually act. And self-actualization I think is a lot of self-responsibility which is often used in a shaming way. And for me, that's why we need self-compassion. It's never about like, well, look what you did now, take responsibility, right? It's really like, I'm gonna take radical authority over my own life. I am going to, I can't control everything, but I'm gonna control the things I can control without beating myself up. I'm going to show up and act in a different way. So with that confidence compass, those four skills, you can use that to kind of diagnose any time, let's say you're facing a challenge like you get laid off and now you're panicking about your finances, right? You can look at that and see like, okay, which of these skills am I not using right now? Oh, I noticed what I'm saying to myself is, see, I told you that you shouldn't have taken that vacation that your boss knew that you weren't committed and now you got fired and now you're never gonna get another job because now you're so old and you're, whatever. That's, we gotta build up self-compassion now, right? We can't, we're not gonna be able, people just wanna jump to self-actualize. They're like, okay, let me send out a bunch of resumes. The way you show up in your cover letters and your interviews and your networking, if those are your thoughts, not good, right? So you can look at your self-compassion. Let's say you avoid looking at your finances, right? It's like, you know, you've heard, you're supposed to have a money date every month and you're supposed to whatever, but like every time you think about it, you feel shame and panic and you don't. Okay, we probably need self-compassion again, but looks like we need some self-knowledge. Like why are you avoiding it? What are your thoughts in there, right? How do you get to know those? So you can use, there's obviously, you have to build each of these skills, but you can use them to figure out how to solve any challenge or how to achieve any goal so you know what to practice. I love that. Thank you. Do you think I'm self-actualized? I'm sorry. I would say yes. If we look at your outcomes, you're producing a lot of- Do you think someone can have good outcomes even if they aren't self-actualized? Yeah, I mean, I think that it depends how we define a good outcome, right? I think people can rack up external accomplishments driving themselves with anxiety and fear, right? So before I got into coaching, that's what I did and I had a pretty prestigious career. Like I went to Harvard Law School, I clerked on the federal appeals court, I ran a think tank at Columbia, I had the only reproductive rights fellowship my year that I was out, so I was in the top of whatever, one to 3% of lawyers of the country, right? I got all of those being horrible to myself the whole time. Like I was able to do it, but, and this comes up all the time with women that would they don't wanna be nice themselves, right? If I tell myself I'm good with money when I'm not, then I'm gonna make bad decisions and then I'll be in a financial ruin, right? I was able to do those things not because I was so mean to myself, despite the fact that I was so mean to myself. So I was producing these outcomes, but I wouldn't say I was like really self-actualized because I wasn't living what I really wanted to do. I didn't really love being a lawyer, that's why I ended up quitting it, right? I grew up in a Jewish New York family that was like you could be a doctor or a lawyer or maybe a Supreme Court judge, those are your options, right? So I was like, okay, I can't be a doctor, I'm gonna be a lawyer. And I cared about the work in that I care a lot about women and their liberation, that's why I do this work. So I cared about reproductive rights, but I did not really care about the law as a concept and I didn't enjoy it. And I was not being my authentic self, right? I was acting like a lunatic in dating because I was like so crazy about my self-esteem and dating. Like I was just not showing up in a lot of ways with the whole other podcast. So I think you can have a lot of outcomes, but that's not the same as self-actualization. So really the question, it's like if you were looking at it, it's like, but how do you feel? Now I know you a little bit and I feel like you are living your purpose. And especially for people with these self-created jobs, I feel like it's a little more likely in it. Because nobody was like- You had to make it yourself. Yeah, nobody was like, okay, since you were a little girl, what you should do is become, right? You had to come up with it yourself. So it's more likely that, right? There's more self-actualization going on. But I think it's all about like, how does it feel, right? Is it like, because you could totally be like a famous author, influencer, whatever. But if you're showing up from like, oh God, I have to control what everybody else thinks about me and I have to prove that I'm good enough. And like, if this book doesn't sell, I'm gonna beat myself up. Like, then that's not really what we're, what's the point at the end of the day, right? You're gonna get into your death bed and be like, so glad I shamed and braided myself into that. Into those accomplishments, you know? Yay, woo. Right, exactly. I kind of wanna wrap us up with something that's a little, you know, we gotta hit home. What is the meanest limiting belief you've had about yourself and what age were you? And how has that belief changed and what do you believe now? Yeah, I think on some level, we all have the same meanest limiting belief, which is like, I'm not lovable the way I am, right? I have to be different for people to love me and accept me. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us. Yeah, definitely. I've had like tens of thousands of women by the way, I feel like my mom put that in my head. Yeah, we get that from various places, let's say. My mom. Yeah, and often, I can't speak to you or chat, but obviously I think often our parents are like, they're also people who got that message as well, right? It's like generations back, people don't have emotional skills. Be more than you are, don't be so brash. Like, why are you, like being a loud Asian woman was so strange for my parents. Right, well, that's like that intersectionality, right? Because it's not just gender conditioning, it's also what are the specific expectations of Asian women and from your culture and your parents' culture and what did they think? And especially if your parents are immigrants, like I don't know how long your parents, so all this stuff goes into it. But I think that that's really, I just had this belief that like, for me it was especially focused on dating. It's like everybody has their areas that really light up in their brain. And like, it was hard to change my money mindset and whatever, but I more or less always had this belief that like, probably ultimately I'd be successful professionally. That doesn't mean I wasn't like, what the hell am I doing when I quit my job and had to start a business with no experience? Like, I had a lot of doubt along the way, but I did just have that confidence, kind of like ultimately I'm a person who's like successful professionally, so this will probably work out somehow. Did not have that in my dating and personal life. Like really felt like I'm never gonna find like whatever true love is. You know, I'm not gonna find a partner, I'm not gonna get married, I'm not, I wasn't particularly hung up on marriage, but like, there's just something fundamentally flawed and unlovable about me in this context. I hate that. Yeah, it was not fun. That was like, till I was probably 35, but I did a ton of intensive work on it through coaching. I'm now married to a wonderful man. And so I think that I had that until I was probably, I met him when I was 40. I started working on it in my 30s, but really the big, I sometimes hate telling the story because I, one of the things I think makes my work very different is that from a lot of other coaches is that I don't sell like, in three days you'll have the biggest transfer. You know, I'm like, if somebody tells you you can run a marathon in three days of training, you can't and the same is true for your brain. So I had, I just wanna say I had done a lot of work to build up to this, but I did have a breakthrough moment where that I had laid the groundwork for over time, where right before I met my husband, actually like three weeks after I'd met him, where I just realized like, oh, I'm so fixated on getting this kind of love to prove something to me. It was my 40th birthday, my mother had done this very sweet thing where she'd gotten a bunch of people to like record videos for me and those little like video cards. So I watched the whole thing, it was just all these people from different parts of my life. Yeah, it was like all these people from different parts of my life just telling me like, how much they loved me, what they thought was great about me, what impact I'd had on them. And I really did have like one of those click moments where I was like, it's like I have 17 kind of apples here. And I'm just like, if I get that 18 different apple, I'm gonna feel totally different about myself and my whole life. I was like, I already have so much love and like if that happens, great, but it's just another kind of apple. It's not a big deal. And that really was like, I think what enabled me to like actually be emotionally available, be able to be with my husband for us to be able to like, because like a lot of people who thought, I thought I was emotionally available because I was really desperate for intimacy. Those are not the same thing. So I think I had that belief till I was basically 40, but I started working on it at 35. And now what do you believe, you know? Now I just think like, yeah, I'm a fucking catch. Yeah, I love that. But I think more importantly, I just, I'm like, oh, I have my own, like I have my own love. My husband's mind could change, I hope not, but like, you know, people change. But I just think, I know now that if we broke up, I would not have a negative, you know, I would not, I'm not saying I'd have zero negative thoughts, but I would not throw myself into the bus or abandon myself or blame it on myself. Because I now, you know, whereas in the past, any breakup was just like, well, see, right? You're unlovable, that's why that ended. And I now know like, I would never say that to myself again. And that my friends is what we call growth. Yeah, that's for sure. Cara, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been so much fun. And also I feel like I've learned a lot. Tell everyone listening where we can find you, where we can listen to you. So I have a podcast called, Unfuck Your Brain. You got the picture. And then I have a book called, Take Back Your Brain. Again, we're on a theme. So those are the best places to start with me. You can always find me on social media. My last name is very hard to spell. But if you just look up Cara, Take Back Your Brain, you'll find me. Don't worry, we'll add the at in the show notes so you can click it there. Yes, or by website. You can go to carloandthou.com or school of new feminist thought is my business. Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of Network and Chill, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the episode, make sure to leave a rating and review and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Got a burning financial question that you want covered in a future episode? Write to us via podcast at yourrichbff.com. Follow Network and Chill pod on Instagram to stay up to date on all podcast related news. And you can follow me at yourrichbff for even more financial know-how. See you next week. Bye.