Episode 140: [Step 10] Your Money, Your Energy: The Hidden Connection to Success
In this episode of the F*ck Saving Face podcast, Judy Tsuei delves into the complex relationship between money, self-worth, and personal growth. She shares her journey of healing her money story, emphasizing the importance of understanding money as energy and a reflection of self-value.
Through personal anecdotes and insights from her experiences, Judy discusses the impact of financial trauma, the necessity of raising rates as an entrepreneur, and the transformative power of asking the right questions to shift one's money mindset. The conversation aims to empower listeners, particularly Asian Americans and voices of color, to break free from limiting beliefs around money and embrace their worth.
Sound Bites
"Money is an extension of how you feel about yourself."
"Trust in the abundance and the understanding."
"There is no one else in the world like you."
"You have to know you're good at what you do."
Takeaways
Money is energy and reflects self-worth.
Healing financial trauma is essential for personal growth.
Raising rates can attract ideal clients.
Your unique value is irreplaceable in the market.
Asking questions opens up possibilities for abundance.
Financial education is crucial for empowerment.
Challenging conventional views on success is necessary.
Trusting oneself is key to financial success.
The relationship with money can be transformed.
You are not alone in your financial struggles.
Episode Highlights
00:00 Empowering Conversations on Money and Self-Worth
09:33 Transforming Money Mindset and Healing Financial Trauma
20:08 Raising Rates and Attracting Ideal Clients
Transcript:
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast where we're empowering mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and voices of color by breaking through taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Make your story beautiful today.
Judy Tsuei (00:02.668)
I have been focused for a while now on money, but now actively doing the work to heal my money story. And guess what? It's totally working. I hired a mentor specifically to work on this. She's a fellow woman of color. I've been reading the most remarkable books around this by Dr. Dane here. It's completely changed everything, my understanding of how much I value myself and
I have raised my prices exponentially and immediately booked two high ticket clients who paid in full. And this whole episode is going to be about rewriting your understanding of money because money isn't everything. And people used to tell me all the time, or I've learned that money is energy, right? Money is a currency. It's not about the money. The money is an extension of how you feel about yourself, how much you value yourself.
how much energy you are allowing in to receive, how much you're stopping when you reach a goal, all of these things. And in the book, I talk about buying crypto or more importantly, challenging conventional views on success and financial security. And there's a lot of reasons why this is important. I think that there is a fallacy that if we have a certain amount in the bank, that that's gonna keep us safe. And I can tell you firsthand that recently one of my friends was hacked, her accounts were hacked.
and her huge liquid savings because they're about to purchase a building, went away in a matter of seconds. And the fallout from that, the mental, emotional toil, the feelings of worry, stress, failure, shame, all of these things, she's a woman of color. She has created such great success and she's now faced with this understanding of
Judy Tsuei (02:27.78)
so that was a false belief. I thought that if I had this much money that I would be safe. And that's not true. So that's one element of it. Another is I grew up with my parents constantly in debt and increasingly so to the point that they were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. There was no filter. My parents were talking to us about it all the time. They were fighting with each other about it all the time. It was always about the money.
The stress, the pervasive feeling of scarcity, of fear, of not having money for groceries, which happened to us, having the phone line cut off when I was in junior high, which was my lifeline at the time to be able to talk to my friends, going to Beverly Hills High School and seeing kids driving Range Rovers while I was taking the public bus. wasn't even the school bus. It was a Santa Monica blue bus. And having to stay overnight in junior high and my parents
cold warehouse, sleeping in a sleeping bag in the minivan because they were too tired from working late to drive the 45 minutes home. So then I had to take a sink shower in order to go to school the next day and get dropped off like that. When Trevor Noah in his book talks about sleeping in a car and sleeping as his stepdad's, you car repair warehouse, I know what that feels like. I know what it feels like to live in a cold warehouse surrounded by my dad's construction tools, you know.
not being able to truly wash your face right, not even knowing that that night that's what you were going to be doing, and then just racing around all of the time exhausted, tired. It was miserable. And I think that's one of the reasons I hate the feeling of sleeping bags. just hated slipping and sliding and not getting comfortable in the backseat of the car. There's all these things that I know about debt, about feeling like not enough, like
seeing the impact that money has. And I told myself that I would never get into the situation that my parents did. Well, I didn't at first. I became a freelancer and then a consultant. And then I was making thousands of dollars a day when I was 26. And I was fine. I had an accountant and a financial investor, all of whom were telling me how remarkable I was doing, but I had no idea about it. I hadn't learned about money. I hadn't really learned about investing and what it meant. you know, I was just trying to check off whatever
Judy Tsuei (04:46.978)
boxes that I thought I could, learning from the periphery and seeing what not to do. But that wasn't enough. And so because I didn't learn about what money really meant or what prosperity and abundance and having good fortune actually meant, other than what I was told every year during Chinese New Year, seeing families giving red envelopes and my parents always working.
at these houses in the country in Diamond Bar where Snoop Dogg has a house or all of these huge mansion houses. And meanwhile, the house that we were living in had holes in the floor that I would fall into or it was always so cold and drafty because we didn't have right insulation or fleas would get in or it was just terrible. And I actually distinctly remember getting hand foot mouth disease, which is pretty common for kids and stuff, but feeling the utter shame of it because
My cousin told me that it was because we were dirty. just, the feelings around money were so convoluted and complicated. And then I got married. And even though I had this huge savings from my twenties, I had to spend like 15 years of finding my path and healing myself. So much therapy, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in healing my eating disorder and healing my mental and emotional state in.
moving through suicidal ideation when I was in high school or as I got to college or again after having my daughter and getting married to someone who wasn't acknowledging his role in our finances and then finding myself in tens of thousands of dollars of debt, two thirds of which I acquired to get out of the marriage. And the amount of arguments that my ex-husband and I have had or the amount of bullying that I experienced.
because of the way that he approached it and how I am the financial breadwinner in the family, even though we were no longer together. And I provide and pay for most of Wilder's things. All of this, I never thought I was going to get to that place, but I did. And I found myself with 200 bucks in my bank account coming back from Taiwan and having to rebuild from scratch, having to find a place to live, not knowing how I was going to pay for it, having to find any job that I could.
Judy Tsuei (07:01.036)
to scrape together everything, then having to get into this debt refinancing so that my credit wouldn't get totally demolished and that I would have to file for bankruptcy and just, again, still not really knowing. Doing my best to do my due diligence to learn about money, but then getting a referral to a terrible financial advisor who put me in IULs that then sucked my money more.
or even when I was advocating for myself with an accountant and a bookkeeper and all of that and still not getting the right information, you can imagine how just utterly like head banging against the wall it was feeling to have to go through all of that and to go through it alone. I've had to ask close friends at two points in my life to help float me to buy a bed so that my body, which was wrecked from all the stress and the emotional abuse from my marriage,
to be able to sleep in and not have my neck and my shoulders go out until I could pay her back. Or another friend who could help me put the deposit down for a place in Austin when we first moved there and that I would pay her back. And the amount of times that I thought I am a smart, educated woman, I went to Berkeley, so what the fuck is happening right now? How do I, how am I here? And it wasn't until I started really...
learning about how broken our financial system is, how broken the education is around it, learning about crypto, learning about why our financial system was broken to start understanding why crypto even came about. And then from there, asking the hard questions, starting to trust myself really.
And this last part of this podcast episode is going to be for you. If you found yourself in any of those circumstances that I've described, anything similar to that, and you're in business for yourself and you want to raise your rates, but you also want to do good. You're a heart centered entrepreneur. You are someone who wants to help the people who may not have all of the means to pay for the things that you're offering because you care, because you want the world to be different. This is for you.
Judy Tsuei (09:06.678)
So several months back, I went out to lunch with a woman who was a director of marketing as one of the clients who I worked with. She's since left and started her own company and has always just been so generous and open-hearted. And I know she comes from a family of money, but also kind of divorced herself from that to create her own life from scratch. So we were talking and at the end of our lunch, she told me something surprising that I didn't think.
was up her alley, but she was telling me about energetic healing. And that's something that I do believe in. But she was telling me about this clearing statement. She realized that the support that she needed was around energy healing. And so she showed me this statement, sent me this YouTube video to watch. I'm like, all right, it sounds pretty woo, pretty out there, but I'm going to put this statement on my phone like she recommended. And that's what I did. I had it. I didn't really, wasn't really sure, wasn't really noticing anything when I would say it, but I just had it.
And then I went to my HUNA training for neuro-linguistic programming. I'm honored and grateful to be able to experience these Hawaiian healing modalities because Hawaii is my spiritual home. And to be able to do it with someone who has a deep lineage, 127 generations back, to be real elders in Hawaii who carried on all of these HUNA techniques. So we were learning this and there were two of my friends there.
We went out to lunch and one of them mentioned she had asked a mentor, you know, what books would you recommend that have changed your life? So he said, definitely you have to read this book called Being You, Changing the World by Dr. Dane here. So I remembered that, added it to my Amazon cart, ordered it, brought it home, started reading it. We had finished our training. They went back to Texas.
And the second that I started reading it, I was like, my gosh, I screenshotted the wallpaper on my phone, sent it to my friends and said, this book has this clearing statement. I had no idea that, you know, the clearing statement, the YouTube video that I watched was from this person. And the energy of this book just, I was all in. I was reading it. It was amazing. I think it's actually a compilation of a bunch of his talks. And I truly started practicing it a lot. And I started noticing things shifting. And then,
Judy Tsuei (11:21.954)
I was like, all right, whatever else that he's produced and put out there, I'm going to look into it. He's created or works with the person who is the founder of access consciousness, this approach around healing and clearing energy. And so there's another book called Right Riches for You. So I started listening to it on Audible and the things that I've learned about money through that, about the relationship with money, everything just finally sunk in and then I got it.
And as I've been doing this work, and it's been a very short amount of time that I've been doing this, I have seen remarkable results. Clients coming to me out of the woodwork, me raising my rates, me doing the things that my money mentor has told me just from a practical, pragmatic business standpoint of what I should be doing, changing the way that I'm structuring my offers, know, changing what I do when I offer a payment plan, all of these things. And
they've been the easiest sales. So I am going to share with you this approach that is inspired from this book by Dr. Dane here. And I hope that it resonates with you. Take what works, leave the rest. And that you also start to create a different relationship with money, especially if you did not have the most positive imprint since you were young. So in NLP, we learned that, and this is also rooted in
you know, basic psychology that from the ages of zero to seven, you are being imprinted by everyone in your surroundings. And then from seven to 14, it moves towards socialization with like a broader network. But those first key years, you know, those form a lot of your core fundamental beliefs. And Dr. Dane here will say, you are a psychic receptor the second that you arrive on this planet. So whether it's overt and explicit or whether it's implicit,
and subliminal, you are getting all of these messages and you're picking it up. And it's not just you, but it's from the other people around you. And sometimes all of that gets mixed up and you're not sure what is yours and what's not yours. And he also shares a technique that I use with my clients to differentiate what's yours and what's not yours. So first and foremost, I'm going to tell you that this idea of
Judy Tsuei (13:32.844)
generation versus creation. So we are taught that matter, space, energy and time are the elements we need to create anything in this reality. Creation requires a constant addition of energy from you. So for example, if you were thinking of the example they gave us building a house, so you build a house and you you basically make it appear from nothing. You get all the supplies, you build a house, you move into the house and then you have to maintain the house. So that's constantly requiring.
in addition of energy from you. Generation, on the other hand, is energy that continues to bring things into existence. So for example, you think of someone and they call, so that's that connection that happens, and that's just easy flow, generation. Create is making, which takes work, and that's this contextual reality that we live in. Generate is contributing to what is already in existence, rather than fighting what's already there, so you don't have to reinvent the world.
because there's energy and space and consciousness and what they call prima materia, which is what was used to create the universe. And this is a non-contextual reality. So this is where expansiveness, possibility, you know, all of that limitlessness lives. So money does not have to be hard. Money can be easy because we are psychic beyond our wildest dreams. We can pull energy. And I love the example that they gave of, you know, when a dog needs to go out.
and the dog pulls energy, it can sit by the door and just call for your attention. Or when someone's giving a presentation and you want them to call on you, you can pull things to make them happen. So the entire approach that Dr. Dane here and Gary Douglas, who formed Access Consciousness, is always ask a question.
You don't need to figure out the answer to that question. You need to ask the question so the possibilities start to be called into existence. When we answer or we say it as a sentence, we've cut off that energy and we want to continue to have that limitlessness. So you can ask, you know, I like to do this. Can I make money with this? How much money can I make? Is there a limit? If yes, and you know, there's no problem with the limit when you get that answer, what's the top end I can make with what I'm doing?
Judy Tsuei (15:53.486)
Or when you ask, is there a limit? And no, what else could I be, do, have, create, generate that would be fun for me and make me more money? Will this make me all the money I would like to make? What can I add to my life that'll bring me up to the money that I want to make? So you might have heard, you know, cutting back on certain things, which I've definitely done, having had eating disorders, I know about restriction or overindulgence.
When you ask, can I cut back on? That's about making your life less. When you ask, what can I add to my life? How can I provide more value? What is it that I can think about that maybe I haven't thought about? That moves you into that generative direction. So check in with yourself if you have a point of view that making money is drudgery or it's painful or you don't know how to do it. It's time to reframe that question. And NLP is all about pattern interrupts. It's all about working with your unconscious mind to understand how it's thinking.
and to access more of that limitless possibility. So as an entrepreneur who's a service provider, you know, there's always this question, are you charging enough? If you've asked that question to yourself, know this, a lot of people undercharge because they think no one will hire them if they raise their prices. They don't value the work that they do, the product they create or the service they perform. I've done this a lot. I've offered deals and savings and all of those things.
Trust me that the resentfulness can come that the clients that you attract may not be your ideal clients and you're probably working harder for less. So what do you get when you do this? You get low quality clients. What do you get when you raise your prices? The worst case scenario, you get more time. The best case scenario is you get more time and better clients. And that's something that my money mentor is working with me on too. So over and over again, let me know if you've heard this, that people say, well, I raised my rates and suddenly I have more business now I'm charging more than ever.
When clients say, can't afford that, the thing that I've done is, okay, let me work with you on that. What I am starting to do is, okay, well, can send you to someone else. And there's that non-attachment, that trust in the abundance and the understanding, you know what? I provide value and what I provide is pretty friggin' awesome. So if you need someone else to work with you where you are, that's totally fine. And it just means that it's not right now. We're not a good fit right now. Maybe eventually that'll come around.
Judy Tsuei (18:13.826)
Do use a sliding scale? I've done that before too. So suddenly you're charging based on what you think your client can afford. The reframe is, I'm valuable to me and the rate is worth what I charge. If people aren't willing to pay your rate, they are not going to be willing to receive the gift you're giving to them, which is why you're doing this in the first place. Hopefully you're doing something that you love, something that you believe in. And so if people aren't willing to pay your rate, hear this.
They are not going to be willing to receive the gift that you are, the gift that you are giving to them. You want to be able to give a gift that they will receive so it's not about the money. The more you charge, the more people receive from what you give. If you charge 10 times more, they receive 10 times more. The gift that you offer people, which is the gift that you are, people receive it in so much more of a dynamic way the more you charge.
Remember this, and I used to say this a lot when I was teaching yoga, there is no one else in the world like you. From the beginning of time, ever after, there will never, ever be another you. So there is no competition for you. You might do market analysis, you might see what other people might be charging, but there's no one like you in the entire world. So someone may do something that's similar to what you do, but there's no one like you. So the way that you bring it out, the way that you express it, the way that you offer it, the way that you provide it will only be unique to you.
And if someone wants you, they want you. And whatever you charge only makes you more valuable to them. So hear this as well. If you're charging a lot, people know you must be good at what you do. All you have to do is make sure you're delivering a good product or service or offering. If you raise your rates, yes, you may lose one or two people, but you'll gain 10. If you have your own business or you do a specialty thing that only you can do, you have to charge an amount that makes you happy to do it.
Don't work for cheap, never charge the going rate. It's not about what the traffic will bear, it's about the product or service you create for them and how much you will enjoy the money that they give to you. You have to know you're good at what you do. Do your due diligence. I know I'm freaking amazing at what I do. I know that the coaching that I offer is unbelievable because I'm intuitive, because I am an exceptional interviewer. So I can get down to the core of your greater problems.
Judy Tsuei (20:36.716)
and I know how to release it. I'm a creative being who has creative problem solving. I've also lived a fucking lot of life and I know the experiences that I've had have made me the valuable guide, coach, teacher, leader who I am because I've been through this shit and I've worked through it. My ability to overcome and to rise is unbelievable and unparalleled. I've not met anybody else who has a life like mine and has shown up with the open heart.
generosity and caring that I do. So I know I'm really amazing at what I do and I've done the work. I've done the healing. I've done the trainings. I've done the learnings. I've done the falling on my face, making the mistakes, picking myself back up, learning again. I've done the putting myself in rooms that I didn't know if I belong in or not. And then seeing those people gravitate towards me. Those people need my services. Those people want my help because I am a unique being who is attracting all of the right people for me right now.
you have to know you're good at what you do. And the only people, the only way people will know if you're good at what you do is if you charge a lot of money. So I want to ask you how many evidentiary contrivances, things that you've bought into and believed, decisions, judgments, contradictions, conclusions that you have so that you don't charge as much as you're worth. And why is it that you're never charging people enough?
so that people actually desire to throw money at you and pay you everything that is as Dr. Dane here would say, will you please destroy an uncreated all right and wrong, good and bad, pot and pock, all nine, boys, shorts, POVADs and beyonds. That's a trademark statement that he has. I will include the YouTube video in this link for you to find out what that means. I worked with a client on this and she's like, you know, there's a part of my brain that was totally skeptical, but then I'm seeing these results happening in my life. I'm like, I know. So.
If it feels light for you, it's true for you. If it feels heavy for you, it's not true for you. Check in with yourself. Ask the questions. Always ask the questions. Keep asking the questions and you will live your way into the answer. I hope that this was helpful for you. There's so much more I want to say on this and I just want you to know what's possible and probable for you. So if you want to work with me and you want to work with me one-on-one, you can go to my website judytoe.com and you will see the services that I have.
Judy Tsuei (22:58.67)
They're all pretty much variations on the same service depending on how much in depth you want to work together and how quickly you want to see results. And then I'm also offering a mastermind, which is limited to six people. So if that speaks to you, you can go to judycoy.com forward slash mastermind. If you're hearing this in time, you can use the code CNY up until spring festival to get $888 off of your package. If you don't hear it in time, reach out to me. There are payment plans available.
And if you have any questions, reach out to me and I'm here for you. And I'm living what I've shared with you. I'm taking my own advice and you know what? I'm gonna tell you the results are amazing. I also wanna let you know that this mastermind is one of the last times that you're gonna be able to work with me at this price point. In the middle of the year, I'm raising my rates again to celebrate my birthday. And you know, I'm just so excited and so happy because I'm gonna continually raise my rates and it's been so fun.
And the caliber and quality of people that I'm working with is so amazing and the opportunities that are coming are so amazing that I want you to have that too. So I look forward to hearing from you and potentially meeting you and working with you. Aloha.
Judy Tsuei (24:11.608)
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you'd like to support me and this show, please go to iTunes and leave your review. It means so much to me and it'll help others find this podcast. I'll catch you in the next episode. And if you'd like to stay in touch between now and then, please visit wildheartedwords.com and sign up for my weekly newsletter. I've had people share with me that it's the best thing to arrive in their inbox all week. Aloha.
LIKE WHAT YOU HEARD?
Help us get more content like this out into the world!
Support our podcast or make a donation here.
Keywords: money mindset, financial trauma, self-worth, Asian American mental health, entrepreneurship, healing, raising rates, client attraction, energy healing, personal growth
