706. Emotional Safety: Why Money Won't Fix Your Internal Security

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08:21

In part one of this two-part safety series, Lesley Logan digs into why so many people tie their sense of safety to the money in their bank account. She traces where that wiring comes from, unpacks the difference between financial security and real emotional safety, and gets honest about the seasons every business and every life moves through. With warmth and a few hard-won stories, she offers a grounded way to feel steady.

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In this episode you will learn about:

  • The 1974 credit law that still shapes women today.
  • Why one slow week can make you feel like sinking.
  • Where real safety lives when the money disappears.
  • How broken promises to yourself erode your confidence.
  • Reframing a hard season as evidence of a new season.


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Episode Transcript:

Lesley Logan 0:00  

Emotional safety and security comes from boundaries. Sometimes we blame it on the money, but it's really the people we're letting in our brains, letting rent space there, letting treat us a different way. So, you have to have some non-negotiables. You have to have daily practices that keep you grounded. So, no matter when the numbers fluctuate, you do these things anyways. 


Lesley Logan 0:19  

Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast, where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world, and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity, and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guests will bring bold, executable, intrinsic, and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and be it till you see it. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.


Lesley Logan 1:02  

Hi, Be It babe. How are you? We're back with a solo series. This is going to be more of a safety series kind of a thing, but also talking about money and uncertainty. And I think I've had many of you in the DMs sharing how you're loving these solo episodes and sharing some of your wins and some of your questions and needs, and we thought that this would be a really fun series that we could probably build off of as time goes along. Where the series kind of starts is like, if you've ever looked at your bank account and then questioned your entire life, you're not alone, you're just not. The reality is that somehow we really conflated what is in our bank account with the certainty that we need in our life, and then we've equated uncertainty with feeling unsafe. This is not a money episode, although if you need to listen to some money episodes, our episodes with Tess Waresmith are amazing. But what I'm hoping that you get from today's episode and this two-part series is just that financial fluctuations are real, so you're not alone. It's totally normal to have that, and your financial fluctuations and personal safety are not always the same thing. They can be, and I understand, because not only have I been homeless, I have also seen what being unhoused over time can look like, and especially if you're a woman. So, I do understand that, but I do think it's important that we just have an honest conversation, maybe have a dialogue. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, because there's a lot of different reasons why financial security makes us feel secure when it's actually not. 


Lesley Logan 2:33  

In fact, in doing research for this episode, I was kind of like, I want to chat a bit about the history, especially in the States, but I think in most of the world, right? If you were a woman, you had to marry well so that you would have a house and, in air quotes, "safety and security." But if we read stories, we watch things like Game of Thrones, all these different things, we see historically how they treated women, but yet somehow we were conditioned that, well, that is the safe thing to do, and that's the safe thing to be in. The reality is, because women didn't have access to bank accounts, it was literally the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, women needed a male co-signer for credit. And so the reality is, like most of us listening to this, our mothers didn't even have access to their own credit card with their own name on it until they were probably sometime during the marriage to our parents or someone, right? So very few women had access to bank accounts. I had an eLevate member here who was sharing how her mother could not get money out of the bank account that her husband had to fix something because he was out of town, and this is like in the '50s and '60s, but that's not that far away.


Lesley Logan 3:46  

These are in the lifetimes of the people who raised us, and so, because of that upbringing in their minds, we have this generational feeling in our bones that money equals security. And so a lot of us, for better or for worse, have taken jobs or not taken jobs based on the security the money will give us, but that doesn't always mean that we are safe, right? That does not mean that the people that have that are going to treat you well, does not mean that that is the safest place for your personality and what your needs are. But I just want you to know, like, if you have that feeling and you're wondering, why can't I just let this go? Because I know there's money there. I know that I'm okay. I know that I have savings. I know this is a bad week, and this has nothing to do with who I am as a person. If you know that in your heart and it's hard to get into your head, you are not alone. It is this historical thing that we all have, and it's been raised into us. 


Lesley Logan 4:40  

I remember not thinking I wanted to date this one person, but all the women around me going, "Oh my god, he has a great job and a great car, he's got like a legitimate career path," because I was a retail girly, and so what kind of career path did I have? Right, that's what they're really saying, but I was too young to really get that. Another reason why we can have these feelings and conflate financial security with certainty and safety is like that idea of being a good girl, traditional conditioning, being polite, and don't talk about money. And so if we don't talk about money, then we don't know what other women are making in the same field, and so we don't know that in some areas we're being undercharged or underpaid. In fact, if you remember when the Sony emails were hacked, all these people were able to see how much the men were getting paid for less lines than the women were getting paid. What it really reveals is the men asked for money and women didn't, and the women weren't asking other people what they were getting paid, so they didn't know that there was more money to ask for. Because we have to be the good girl, and if we're asking, then there must be something nefarious about asking, and so we then are conditioned to be polite, right? 


Lesley Logan 5:46  

And so, if we go against that conditioning, we become an entrepreneur, we work for ourselves, we can constantly feel like we are in friction with society, like, "Ooh, am I allowed to negotiate? Am I allowed to charge more than other people? Am I allowed to have these boundaries, or should I just be grateful that these clients will pay what I want?" So then they can say that they want to come at a different time, and all of that stuff goes through our heads, and so you're just not alone, right? So this brings us to the brain and the business and the worth, but I know not all of you are working for yourself, so I want to just honor that you might be an employee, and there is some security in that, right? Like, our financial institutions definitely believe that if you have a W-2, you are more safe to give a loan to than someone like me. And I get so frustrated, not because I'm jealous of you or anything like that, we all have our different things that are going to work best for us. So, there's nothing wrong with being an employee versus being an entrepreneur. You should do what is right for you, but it does make me laugh that the bank thinks that's more secure when I know I can bet on myself, and companies can let go of people at any time. So we fool ourselves into what is technically, in air quotes, "safe" versus what could be safe, and it might be safer to be in a job, so just know that I'm not saying that. But in life every single day, there are these little tricks we play to make us think, "Oh, I'm safe now that I have this, now I'm safe," right? And we're not really getting to the root of what is safety, what is it, right? 


Lesley Logan 7:10  

So let's get into some brain, business, and worth stuff. Entrepreneurship, most people in our lives have told us how it is the most uncertain thing, and it is. I'm just going to tell you right now, absolutely everything is, none of us are actually psychic, unless you are, right? So, the reality is, it doesn't matter if you work for yourself or someone else, it is uncertain always what's going to happen tomorrow. We don't know. And so I wanted to say, being a small business owner is really hard. It's fucking hard to compete with companies that have way more money, and also in the way that the customers expect a small business to be, because these big businesses can have your stuff within four hours to your house, and I have to take four days, right? And I have to charge you for shipping, and they don't, and so it's really hard, right? And so you can feel like you're constantly two steps forward, seven steps back, three steps forward, two steps back. You're just like, oh my god, sometimes you feel like you're just treading water and going backwards.


Lesley Logan 8:07  

Revenues do fluctuate, like clients change and seasons shift, and the thing is, no matter what business you're in, people are always like, "What's the safest thing?" It's like, what are you talking about? Every single business has a season, we as humans have seasons, the earth, the universe has seasons. So, there are seasons for harvest, and there are seasons for planting, and there are seasons for rest, which means the money is not going to be the same all the time, right? And so, then, until you can get to a place where you can trust in yourself and the seasons, you end up in this nervous system trap where your brain reads the vibes of a slow financial month as just physical danger, right? And our brain is primed to prioritize survival, and that's not a good long-term strategy, because what ends up happening is you will constantly be doing these random things to get money versus taking time from a regulated nervous system space to make decisions on your business that will help with the long haul. I had a business coach who told me this. She said, "Your business should be boring. This is not a place where you get entertainment." And so getting to have a boring business is really great, but the boring business that I have means that I know that April is a terrible financial month for us when it comes to income, and so is July. They just suck, and if we don't have great months going into April, and then between April and July, we could be fucked, right? And so we can scramble, and we've had that happen, because there are years that are just, oh my god, thank god for this year, and there are years going, "Okay, am I going to keep doing this?" But what we have to make sure with our nervous systems is that we're never just going off of vibes, we do need to make sure we're going off the data. And if your bank account is saying zero, then we actually need to go into the data of what brought your bank account there to zero. Oh, you invested in yourself. Oh, you paid this thing out, but this is coming in next week. Sometimes we forget that we planned for it, right? So, scarcity versus fact is something else we need to just take a moment.


Lesley Logan 10:13  

That brings us to that. So, like, it's really easy to catastrophize a shitty situation and jump like, "Well, that's gonna make that bad, and then that's gonna go bad." We're not gonna have time for that. And I definitely do this. If you have read The Big Leap, you know that one of the best ways to get yourself out of your genius zone is to worry. And when you take the shitty issue that you have of, "Oh, my bank account isn't reading the way I want," and then you catastrophize it, not only do you create doom and gloom loop stories, it makes it really hard to look at the actual data. And the actual data might show, "Oh, all these bills got paid, I am debt-free in this area over here, and my paycheck comes in 48 hours." Okay, great, you are slaying, you are in fact the opposite of unsafe, you are so secure, right? But we can forget the things that we did, especially my ADHD, high-achieving, over-achieving, perfectionist people, it's really easy to forget the plan when we check something out and it just hits a little differently than we expected it to.


Lesley Logan 11:18  

And then we have to just also talk about, a lot of times as women, how we have been raised to feel worthy, as opposed to just knowing we are worthy, are very different things. You know, there is so much that we tie into our identity of like, are we a good sister, are we a good daughter, are we a good friend, are we helping the people in our house, all the unpaid caregiving labor that women do, especially the daughters listening. I do have an episode coming out with a statistician on good daughtering, but there's just so much unpaid labor. But then we wrap our identity on the revenue we create, but if most of our time is spent with unpaid things, then we think we're not worthy, but in fact we're the most worthy person that anyone in our life has. We are worth so much to them, but we don't feel that way, because we think our worth is tied into the revenue of what's in our bank account and not to what we bring to the table, which is probably just so much more.


Lesley Logan 12:04  

And by the way, the way that society is going right now, this is fucking awful, right? It's like every other day that I pull up my Instagram, and there's some guy who's shitting on some guy who should be shat on, to be honest, who's talking about like, you know, she needs to carry the bags and take care of all the things, and my work is having the response of bringing the money in. It's like that is not a team. I mean, yes, you've delegated tasks, but that's just not how it goes. And to be honest, I fear for that girl in that video that I saw. So he makes all the money, and then what? What do you get when he moves on to somebody else? There's no security in that, that's why it was so uncertain and so unsafe for women for so long, who could not get jobs, who could not have bank accounts, who could not have credit cards, who could not get their names on deeds, they were not safe at all, right? Because they couldn't leave their husband, because where were they going to go? How'd they get money? He could leave at any time, and they'd have nothing, right? And, by the way, he's not safe, a lot of people died mysteriously because divorce wasn't a possibility, right? So we have to remember, ladies, like we are so much more worthy than what we are being paid for because of the worth we bring to the people in our lives, what we do for them, right?


Lesley Logan 13:36  

So don't make your bank account a report card on your value, because that's not what it is. And you know, I feel this, 2023 was this weird year, because we had this server issue, a bot sent infinite traffic to one of our servers, and it overwhelmed our server, and then to get rid of the thing that that bot was attacking, it caused our website to run like it was 2005. And so we had to rebuild a 1,000-page website as quickly as possible, and it fucked with our SEO and all this stuff, and it cost so much money, because that was not what we were anticipating on spending money on. At the same time, we were trying to wrap up buying this house, so to make sure we had all this money in our bank, and it was just so stressful. We actually ended up having, and then we have to pay our taxes at the same time, because you pay your taxes so we could have the deed on the house, like all these different things were going on. And we had the money for the taxes, we were not expecting to build a website when we were planning for that, and so just all these things hit at once. And there was this one other unforeseeable bill that was not $100, it was like thousands of dollars. And it just in that moment when we're buying this house that I get to sit in and I love so much, I couldn't have felt more rich and poor at the same time. Like, I can afford this house, and yet every dime I have is gone to make all of this stuff keep going, and we did have to borrow and put a thing on it, and give it to pay our friends and family back, with interest. That's the right thing to do. And it can affect your self-worth. You can feel embarrassed about it, or you can go, "Wow, this is a fucking shitty time. I have a friend or family member who can help me. I'm going to do the right thing, and I'm going to be out of this," right? And so there's no reason to be embarrassed, and I'm still great friends with the people who helped me out through that time. That wasn't the first time in my life when I had to ask for help, and none of those things make my worth less, right? It just actually helped me through a tough time, and you would do that for someone else if you could, and there will be a time when you have to, right? 


Lesley Logan 15:44  

So the other thing when it comes to security and safety, and when you wrap it up with your money, my neurodivergent listeners, hello, I see you. We already live in overwhelm. There's already so much going on in our brain. Our brain is three steps ahead all the time, and so when you have some financial uncertainty, not only is it easier to go into catastrophe situations, but you can go there much faster than anybody else. You can amplify the heck out of it, and you could add shame and panic to that quicker than anybody. And the reality is that you have to fall into the data over the vibes, you have to pull yourself back. "Hold on, let's back it up, back it up. What is real? What do I know? What about this makes me feel unsafe, but what's actually true? What's the actual reality?" 


Lesley Logan 16:38  

And so, my perfectionists, that all-or-nothing mindset: "My business is failing." Just because you have a slow week. It's not failing. You're jt having a slow week. If you're in the first couple years of any project you're doing, you don't know the seasons yet, so it makes it really difficult. And if you are working for yourself or you're taking a hobby to be a side hustle, and you don't take the time to really get clear about your self-worth and what matters, and what is going to be something you can lean on for certainty in your business, and what will always be uncertain, and how you're going to handle getting the data so that you don't go off the vibes.


Lesley Logan 17:15  

If you don't do that stuff, you're just going to live in a constant state of emotional dysregulation and decision fatigue, and you're not going to actually be able to... you're not gonna have fun. I mean, I'm not saying that work is always fun, but it shouldn't make you feel like shit, right? Whether you're an employee for someone or you work for yourself, we have to figure out what are the actual things that I can say make me feel safe. How can I request those at my place of work or in my life if I work for myself? What numbers am I going to go off of so that I know what's going on, so that I have a bit more predictability, right? What will always be a little uncertain in this business? And where can I have certainty? Here's why I have certainty: I will show up every day and work hard. I'm so certain of that. I am so certain that I am very resourceful. If this shit hits the fan and spews it on the walls, I can find new ways of cleaning it up, even if every other tool is gone. Like, I am a resourceful person. I have certainty that the human that I am and the way that I put things out into the world, people will always want what I've got. Now, I have uncertainty in when they will want that. I have uncertainty in, if I put it out there, will people buy it? I have uncertainty of when people are gonna be ready for the thing I have to offer. All that's uncertain. I cannot predict when people are ready to buy. I can't choose the people who are ready to listen to this podcast, but I can predict that I will show up to work tomorrow, right? And so I think that's really important. 


Lesley Logan 18:47  

So that leads us into rewiring our brains for safety and those harder seasons, like we need a little toolkit. There's a difference between emotional safety and financial safety, they are two different things. And so while money can create stability, your emotional safety actually comes from internal self-trust, community, and boundaries. And I want to just talk about internal self-trust. That would be confidence. That's where a lot of people struggle the most, because they actually consistently, on little bitty things, failed to do what they said they were going to do. And because of those little tiny things, "I'm going to go for a walk in the morning. Oh, I'm going to get up and read this book. I'm going to journal..." and you don't do it, you are just carving out at your confidence, your self-trust, right? So it is important if you want to feel safe that you ditch the all-or-nothing mindset and commit to doing things that make you feel good in your life, or that you can do that are at doable dosages, right? Not like, "I'm going to work out every day for an hour" no one can say and do that, there's so many days I want to work, right? 


Lesley Logan 20:03  

So, also, emotional safety and security comes from boundaries. Sometimes we blame it on the money, but it's really the people we're letting in our brains, letting rent space there, letting treat us a different way. So, you have to have some non-negotiables, you have to have daily practices that keep you grounded, no matter when the numbers fluctuate, you do these things anyways. You guys, I have so much work on my plate, so many things that I am excited about and equally stressed about, and I do not start working on them any earlier than my day starts with work, because my non-negotiables have to happen so that I can do that with love, grace, energy, stamina, endurance, excitement.


Lesley Logan 20:46  

If I come out to those jobs out of fear, out of rush, out of like, "I gotta get this done," then, like, no. My daily practices that keep me grounded allow me to show up and have emotional security, so no matter what is going on with the finance of the businesses, I know that I can show up and move the needle forward in the direction it has to go. And then if you're like, "I have all those things, and I still see the bank account in a certain way," then we need a little bit of a gentle reframe, right? We need to say, "What if this season I'm in is not evidence of failure, but instead just evidence that I'm in a different season?" right? Like, this is just a different season. I'm out of the other season, I'm in the new season right now. What if we reframe how we feel about things, and go, "Okay, so I invested X, Y, and Z in this, and so because I made that investment..." as opposed to, "I spent, ...I made that investment, I now will have these things coming to me on these dates," and then tell them this is what I'm going to be doing, right? Like, we have to change how we talk about ourselves and talk to ourselves, and talk about what we're doing in a way that is not toxic and gaslighty, but actually a pick-me-up, actually makes you feel like things are possible. Because if you don't, you're never going to feel safe in anything you do, whether you work for yourself or other people. It's just not going to work. You're going to constantly feel like you're sabotaging yourself, right? There are seasons, there are ebbs and flows. It is a real thing. And so, if nothing changed in your life but what the money in the bank account is, then how would you be any less safe than you were the day before? 


Lesley Logan 22:26  

So, if you take nothing else away from our conversation today, I just want you to remember that your financial anxiety is not personal failure. It's part of a historical echo and a biological response, and you are building a system to help yourself in this world that wasn't built for us to have those systems, right? It's only in our generation that women are allowed to do the things that they're able to do, and so it is hard, and it is exhausting, and it is uncertain, and you're doing it, you're doing all the things. And so there are going to be days that feel like shit, but it doesn't mean you are shit. There's gonna be days that feel like failure, but you are not a failure. There are gonna be days that feel like they suck, but you don't suck, right? So, you have to take some time to write down what are the things that I can bet on, that I have certainty around, that I have security around. And when you're feeling like, "My bank account has shifted, and I'm fucked," you can look at those things and go, "Do I have these things still? Oh, I do. Okay, great. So, my bank account sucks, but I have all the things that I need right now." Knowing why we feel this way and why these things happen, it's helpful. It's half the battle. 


Lesley Logan 23:40  

So, I know most of us are over 40 here. I know we also have some young listeners, hello, babes, I'm happy you're here. And we don't just need mindset shifting, like, I hope that this got your mindset to shift, we are going to need a new framework for safety. We have spent decades thinking safety means controlling every variable and overfunctioning and building a fortress of hyper-independence. And I'm not going to take away your independence. I want all of you who want to just live your life of independence that way. But also, I want you to have wonderful, amazing relationships, and that means friends who lift you up. It doesn't have to be partners in life that support your amazing boundaries, that can help be that reminder that everything is okay when you forget. And what if true safety isn't about ensuring nothing ever goes wrong?


Lesley Logan 24:24  

I kind of really want to get us all to what if true safety is knowing that you are entirely capable of navigating it when it does, right? Like I said, I have certainty around, like, if shit hits the fan, I can be resourceful. I want that's the security I want for you. So, in our next episode, we are going to dive into part two of this conversation. We are shifting from the brain and the history to the somatic and the strategic, and so we're going to kind of just dismantle the trap of doing things all alone, even if you are all alone, so that you can feel like you are safe wherever your harbor is, even when your revenue is going to fluctuate. And I love this quote, and it comes, I've heard it many times, but I know we heard it on our podcast a few times, and one of them was Launa Jae, and it's, "You've survived 100% of your hardest days so far." You have. So we have to start trusting our track record. Until then, Be It Till You See It. 


Lesley Logan 25:18  

That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.


Brad Crowell 26:00  

It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.


Lesley Logan 26:05  

It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.


Brad Crowell 26:09  

Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi..


Lesley Logan 26:17  

Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.


Brad Crowell 26:20  

Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time. 



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