12. Coming Out of the Money Closet

Transcript

Welcome to Episode 12 of HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY, a podcast that helps you get seriously good at the game of making serious money.

I’m your host Kelly Hollingsworth, and I’m so glad you’re here. Before we get started, there’s something I want to clarify from our last episode. Episode 11. At the 11^th hour before that episode went live, I was wrestling with something internally that I sort of hap hardly addressed in that episode, and I’ve since resolved it in a direction other than what I conveyed in the episode. In other words, I changed my mind. Specifically, I was saying that underearning in men tends to look different than underearning in women. From what I’ve seen, when women underearn, it’s because they second-guess what they know. When men under-earn, it’s because they don’t second-guess what they don’t know.

I’ve since gotten clarity around this and decided that this is utter nonsense, in this respect: If you know something and you’re not making money from it, you’re under-earning. This is the problem that I help you solve, and this solution is available to everyone who has this problem.

If you don’t know something and you’re out there blowing up the world because of it, I don’t know what to call that, but it’s not underearning. What is it? Acting irresponsibly? Getting too far over your skis? Blowing up your own little corner of the world? I asked a friend, and she said it’s just plain old hubris. I tend to agree, but the label doesn’t matter, because this is not a problem I solve. It’s not under-earning, it’s something else, and it has nothing to do with what we’re doing in this show, which is solving the problem of entrepreneurial under-earning. So with this clarification, I’d like to invite you, no matter how you identify in terms of gender, to contact me for help if you need it. I’m here for you.

At some point, I may go back and revise that episode to clean this up for future listeners. But for now, since the episode is out there, I appreciate you listening to this clarification and for your grace and understanding on this topic.

And with that, let’s get on with today’s episode. Today we’re talking about something super important: coming out of your money closet, and specifically we’re going to talk about four things.

• One, what is a money closet?
• Two, why is it so easy to get stuck in a money closet?
• Three, why coming out of the closet makes you more money.
• And four, how to do that without feeling terrified.

What is a Money Closet?

So now let’s dive in. What is a money closet? They basically come in two flavors.

One type of Money Closet: Hiding the fact that you want to make more money

One type of money closet is hiding the fact that you want money. If you’re in this kind of closet, you would be thrilled if money fell out of the sky and landed all around you in a giant cloud of cash confetti. Just picture that. Wouldn’t that be fun? Would you be delighted if that happened? Of course you would. You would giggle with glee.

Now picture this. All that money that fell around you like so much confetti. How much is it? A million? Two million? Three million? Are you making that much money in your business? Have you TOLD anyone that’s how much money you want to make? Have you admitted it to yourself?

If not, it sounds like you’re in the closet. You’d be delighted to have money, but you don’t want anyone to know that you want to make that much money in exchange for whatever your business does. You have a hard time connecting those dots, or building the bridge, between wanting money and having a business that makes that much money.

This is the first type of money closet. Hiding the fact that you want to make money, from others and maybe even from yourself. This comes from the fear of desire that we talked about in Episode 2.

The other type of money closet: Hiding the thing that’s going to make more money

The second type of money closet is far more damaging. It’s hiding (or in other words, not talking about) the very thing that’s going to help you serve your people and make more money. If you’re in this type of closet, there’s something your people need to know that will help them get where they’re going.

But you’re not saying a word about what they need to know. This comes from fear of confrontation. It’s classic. We also discussed this in Episode 2. It’s lurking in the background anytime you’re holding back, and the reason it comes up is because there are powerful experts everywhere who disagree with what you want to say.

You hear all the experts agreeing with each other, and you start gaslighting yourself. You’re wondering, wait a minute. Are they right? Am I crazy? I must be wrong, because everyone else is saying something else, so maybe I’d better just sit down and be quiet. In the online age of “trolls and tribulations,” it’s very easy to hold back and not talk about what we know. It’s really easy to second-guess ourselves, stand back and let others show up as experts, even though what they’re saying is a 180 from what we think and that actually works. And when we do that, guess what happens? They sound confident. They attract the audience. They get the clients, and they make the money. Even if they’re dead wrong, they make the money, because they’re showing up. People want a happy ending so much that in the absence of a real one, they will buy a poor approximation.

So how do we get out of this? How do we escape these closets? Today I want to walk you through an example of my own fear of confrontation, and share with you the tools that I used to dissolve it. This example also does double-duty, because it’s ALSO an example of the ubiquitous advice that keeps us stuck in money closets in the first place.

Why it’s so easy to find yourself stuck in a “money closet”

So what’s the example? What happened? The other day I was listening to an episode of Dave Ramsey’s podcast. This is a podcast I enjoy, in large part because the debt-free scream is one of the best examples of commercial storytelling in the marketplace today. But sometimes I hear advice on that show that gives me pause, and one thing I heard earlier this week on that show was a doozy. I thought to myself, this is the exact kind of advice you’d give if you didn’t want someone to make more money.

What was the advice? Ramsey personalities Ken Coleman and Anthony O’Neal were responding to a listener question sent in by “Rachel from Michigan.” It’s 21 minutes into the episode and I linked it in the show notes if you want to have a listen. In any case, Rachel from Michigan wrote into Dave Ramsey’s website saying that she has a BFA in graphic design. She’s almost $60k in debt. Back in March, her employer was saying “we’ll see” to her getting full-time work. And then they laid her off during the COVID quarantine. She’s now going back to work, but it’s not full time. It’s part-time. And she wants full-time.

(Let’s pause for a sidenote here: if you ever hear yourself saying that you want full-time work, please consider that this is not actually what you want. No one wants full-time work. What they want is MORE MONEY. So I suspect that when Rachel says she wants full-time work, she actually wants more money and is telling herself a story—a false story, by the way–that working more hours is the only way to get it.)

But in any case, she wrote into Dave Ramsey’s website saying that she wanted full-time work but she was only getting part time. She wanted to talk to her employer, and ended her letter by asking, “Is there a good way for me to bring this up?”

The response she got was, and I’m quoting here: “Yes, but very, very, very carefully.” This was from Ken Coleman.

There’s more to his response, but let’s pause and notice something. When he’s telling her to proceed “very, very, very carefully,” he is conveying to this woman, our friend Rachel from Michigan, that asking for more money is a hair-trigger situation. Anything could happen. The entire world could blow up with very little pressure or provocation. That’s what a hair-trigger is. You’re in danger. Tread lightly because this situation is fraught with peril, and it doesn’t take hardly anything to set things off.

So the set-up for the call is this. Rachel is scared, and Ken Coleman is fanning the flames of her fear. Is he intending to do that? I doubt it. But that’s what’s going to happen anytime someone puts three “verys” in front of advice to move carefully.

Now, if Rachel has the skill of high-profit thinking, that doesn’t mean she has to pick up what Ken Coleman is laying down. She can leave this kind of advice in the dust if she wants to, and go out and unabashedly make some money. But I’m guessing she doesn’t have that skill, because she was writing into the show for advice on how to handle this.

So then what happens? After he tells Rachel to proceed “very, very, very carefully,” Ken Coleman goes on to say:

“So you have been laid off with millions of other people because of the pandemic, and so now they’re bringing you back, obviously in a part-time position. And so you want to get full-time. You understand that. They probably understand that and remember that. However, they’re just bringing you back. I don’t want you bringing this up right away. If you need full-time pay, um, I would be looking right now for a potential part-time job to make up the difference of what you need for full-time pay. But within a week or two, I would then say, after you get back in and you’ve got an incredible effort, and they’re seeing, “Wow, it’s like Rachel owns this company, she’s so valuable.” Then you could sit down and say, ‘Hey. Back before March, we talked about me eventually moving full-time. I know EVERYTHING has probably changed, but I would love to be full-time here. I’m wondering what needs to be true for us to make that happen. If you don’t know, totally cool. If you do know, I would love to get on the same page, because I need to be working full-time. The pandemic has hit me hard financially.’  They’re going to understand that. And so the idea here is, the way you handle that is with a lot of humility, but you are clear but you’re not demanding. You’re not expecting. You are asking. And if you get good communication, that should make you feel good. If you get no communication, to the point of, they just keep kicking the can down the road… that’s where my advice on finding another part-time job or another full-time job is the direction to go. But give ‘em a chance, communicate well, and let’s see what happens.”

That’s the sum total of his advice to Rachel in Michigan, and the reason I’m flagging this advice is because it’s a terrific example of how our entire society is structured to keep so many of us stuck in a money closet. So let’s unpack this. How does this response, and so many others like it, keep you in a money closet? Too many ways to count, but here are three.

The  “experts” are going to tell you that asking for money is dangerous.

The first one, we’ve already discussed. It’s the idea that it’s dangerous to expect money, and one must be very, very, very careful to convey that you don’t expect it. This idea is always going to keep you in a closet. That’s just how it is. If you’re afraid and someone tells you, you have very good reasons to be afraid, you’re going to be afraid. And I’m especially concerned that this advice was given to a woman.

Here I want to clarify I don’t think Ken Coleman’s advice was particularly sexist. I’ve heard lots of advice on Dave Ramsey’s show in this vein, and it’s not always directed at women. The men get it, too. But this kind of advice, when lobbed at women, is in my mind more worrisome, because women are already socialized not to ask for money, and to view asking for money as dangerous. And so this kind of advice is, as I said earlier, just fanning the flames.

There’s a great book on this called Women Don’t Ask by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. I hope I’m saying their names correctly. It’s been a while since I read it, but basically the brilliant women who wrote this book are researchers who were working at a university. One day, they noticed, Wait a minute. Why are all the dudes getting all the good arrangements? The best projects? The higher salaries? The plum offices? The perks that we want that aren’t coming our way?

They asked a higher-up in their department about this. They said, “Why is everyone else getting all the great stuff?” And the answer they got back is, “You didn’t ask.”

So Ms. Babcock and Ms. Laschever dove into some original and very powerful research into this question. Why don’t women ask? And they had a whole book’s worth of fascinating stuff to say on the matter. The book is linked in the show notes if you want to have a look, but basically, what they found is that women are disinclined to ask because they perceive that asking for money is a very dangerous thing to do.

When a woman already views something completely innocuous as dangerous, what’s the last thing you do? The last thing, and I mean the VERY last thing, is tell her to proceed “very, very, very carefully.” That’s just fanning the flames of her fear, which is obviously going to keep her in the closet. That’s where your brain thinks the safety is, and anything that encourages you to stay there, we have to notice and deal with.

The “experts” will underestimate you

This brings me to the second way this kind of advice keeps you in a money closet. It assumes, without even considering, that you are less capable than someone else.

Let’s look at Ken Coleman’s advice to Rachel in Michigan to see specifically how this plays out. When he says to her, “Give ‘em a chance… Let’s see what happens,” what exactly is the “chance” that he’s requesting that Rachel give to this employer?

He’s asking her to give the employer the chance to go out and bring in some business, under the unspoken assumption that this is the best way for Rachel to eventually get some work and make some money. To this, all I can say is, if you want to make money, never run with advice from a coach who thinks you’re “less than” someone else. Especially when all evidence points to the contrary.

As between Rachel’s employer and Rachel herself, there’s an insidious, unspoken assumption underpinning this entire conversation between Rachel and Ken Coleman. His entire approach assumes that the employer is better suited to bringing in the business. This is a horrible assumption, because here’s what we know. The employer isn’t getting it done. They told Rachel there’d be work, and there isn’t work. This is evident because Rachel hasn’t been making money for months. So all evidence points to the employer being bad at bringing in enough business to keep everyone busy and everyone paid.

What do we know about Rachel? We know that she’s motivated. She wants to work. She wants to make money. She has a BFA in graphic design. We have no reason to believe she can’t get her own clients.

Yet this is what most humans tend to think, and it’s appears to be what Ken Coleman is thinking about Rachel. But is this true? NO. If Rachel can get an employer to pay her for graphic design work, she can most certainly get a client to pay her for graphic design work. The transaction is exactly the same–it’s doing design work in exchange for money.

Ken Coleman is assuming, that if this is going to get done, this business of bringing in the business, Rachel is not the woman to do it. Someone else—an employer–is going to have to do it, and she should sit tight and be humble while they get it done.

This is paternalism, and it’s another reason we stay in the closet. Paternalism is a “policy or practice on the part of people in positions of authority of restricting the freedom and responsibilities of those subordinate to them, in the subordinates’ supposed best interest.” Another definition is, “the action that limits a person’s or group’s liberty or autonomy and is intended to promote their own good.”

When you hear it, paternalism always sounds good because it comes from a place of concern and it sounds like it’s keeping you safe, and I’m sure that part of Ken Coleman’s motivation was to help Rachel stay safe and not lose her job. Hence, the message of, don’t rock the boat. Don’t upset this employer who’s not paying you. But please notice that this is an irrational response. MONEY is what actually keeps you safe. And not money in the future. Money right now, without delay. What keeps you safe is not handing your future over to someone who’s not getting the job done. What keeps you safe is NOT being humble and pretending it’s cool if you don’t get paid.

Paternalism wants you to do all of these things, and this reveals the problem with paternalism. It keeps you stuck in the closet by exacerbating your own doubt. When we’re already doubting ourselves, it’s so easy to keep doing it when everyone around us is confirming, implicitly if not explicitly, that our doubt is somehow warranted, because someone else can do a better job of attracting clients than we can.

The “experts” are going to tell you that circumstances will prevent you from making money

Here’s another thing that works to keep you in the closet. This is the third thing. The experts are going to tell you that the timing isn’t right. There’s something going on in the world, so just toddle off to a dark corner and wait it out. In the case of this exchange between Rachel and Ken Coleman, the circumstance is COVID. The pandemic is why Ken Coleman is giving the employer a pass. But that “pass” is misplaced. The problem, when we’re not making money, is never the situation itself. The problem is ALWAYS how we’re choosing to respond to the situation.

How do I know this? Too many reasons to count, but one of them is that I have both clients and friends who are graphic designers. During the pandemic, their businesses are exploding. With all forms of networking pretty much dead except online, everyone needs graphic design. Everyone needs exactly what Rachel does. EVERYONE.

So what we have here is a situation of, Rachel’s employer wasn’t out there bringing in the business during the pandemic. Whatever the reason for that, that’s on them. Not her. If they’re not going to do it, she’s going to have to do what every high earner does. You’re in a situation where someone can’t pay you? Don’t delay. Get a new situation. Not in a few weeks. Not when Ken Coleman wants you to. Not when someone else thinks you’ve waited long enough. Do it NOW. Why? Because the time to make more money is ALWAYS now.

That decision to make more money is what gets you out of the money closet. The advice from experts who aren’t really experts at underearning is what keeps you in. The decision to disregard is what gets you OUT.

And you need to get out, because what happens when you do? You make so much more money.

Why coming out of the closet creates cash

Here’s an example from my own life. Back when I was still practicing law, I was perplexed. I was watching all these hedge fund managers register with the government, way too early, so they could theoretically trade for investors other than their friends and family. This was never going to happen, because at the stage of business they were in, the only money they were ever going to get was from friends and family.

So there was no point to register. And every reason not to. At the friends and family stage, registration was just a giant distraction and expense. And it also set a slow-ticking time bomb that was going to blow up their business five or ten years out.

Why was this going to happen? Because institutional investors are like lemmings. They all follow each other, even if it’s off a cliff. This means, once you register as a hedge fund manager—once you’re open for money other than from your high school football coach and your buddy who made a killing in tech stocks–a clock starts ticking. The institutions want to see that from the moment you’re allowed to take arm’s-length money, it starts coming in. If it doesn’t, every institutional investor on the street is going to think something is wrong with you. And when they think this, then what? No one wants to work with you.

Early registration for a hedge fund is the equivalent of opening your restaurant for business about a month before you have food or a chef or a liquor license. Every time someone walks by, they’re going to see the lights on and the door open, but no one’s inside. No one else has joined your party. And when this happens—you’re hosting a party and no one is there–guess what? No one else wants to join you, either. The assume there’s a reason no one is in your dining room, and it’s because the food is bad. They don’t know there’s no food. And when this happens, you repel people. You don’t attract.

No matter what business you’re in, this kind of thing is never going to work. But with hedge fund managers, they don’t see it coming because they don’t have a storefront that people are walking by and being told, “we’re not ready.” Instead, they have a fund and an expectation that in three to five years, they’re going to start talking to institutions and potentially getting money. But when that time rolls around, they go knocking on doors, and the institutions say, “You’ve been registered three to five years? You already should have $500 million or a billion under management.”

By the time the hedge funds have this conversation and see this coming, it’s too late to fix it. And for a long time, I watched this happen from the sidelines. And I was scratching my head, wondering, “What are they doing? Don’t they know that registering too early is the worst possible thing they could do? They are setting in motion a slow-moving train wreck that won’t come to rest until their business is dead, and by then, it’ll be too late.”

And then one day I answered my own question. No, they don’t know. Why don’t they know? Because I wasn’t out there telling them about the downside.

So what happened? What did I do about this? I started a little podcast for a certain type of hedge fund manager that was most afflicted with this problem. And I started telling them what they needed to know to succeed that no other lawyer was saying. I was telling them about the potholes that were going to derail their business five years out, if they didn’t think about this stuff now. it was a targeted message. There are only about 2500 hedge fund managers in the world who were a target for this podcast.

And what happened? Once I started saying what I knew with the desire to make money from it, money started rolling in the door. The world beat a path to my door. I started getting inquiries from people with this problem from all over the world, who turned into clients that I could help avoid this problem from all over the world.

How did I get all these clients? By saying something that was different than what everyone else was saying. All the other lawyers were saying, “Sure! Register now. There’s no downside.” And my people needed to hear something different, and wanted to hear something different, and when I said it, I helped them, and I made money.

Every one of them who called me, and hired me, said, “At last! I’ve been waiting for someone to say this thing about registration. It didn’t make sense to me that I had to register so early. But every lawyer I spoke with was saying, “Register now” so I figured that’s just how it had to be done.”

As soon as I did that, as soon as I offered a new way, I got clients from all over the world. I made money by saying the fresh new thing that they needed and wanted to hear.

From this, what I’d like you to hear is that coming out of the closet and sharing two things—what you know, and that you’d like to make money from that knowledge—is going to help you too. But here’s the thing. Most people don’t do this because it feels scary. So now let’s talk about how to share what you know, so you can make more money, without feeling afraid.

How to come out of your money closet without fear

Coming out of the closet with what you know, and the desire to make money from what you know, is a common time to feel afraid, because this is when you’re going to have to identify the villain that’s thwarting your clients’ happy ending, and get after the serious business of conquering that villain.

For example, one of the villains I help my clients conquer is paternalism. The idea that someone else knows better than you do, and that you should sit back and humbly ask for them to give you something, instead of going after it yourself.

To conquer this villain, I’m going to have to point it out when I see it. Why? Because it’s everywhere. The idea that it’s safer to have a job and make a fraction of the money, and it’s dangerous to get your own clients and make all of the money, is so ubiquitous that it’s not even questioned.

But it’s illogical, and it’s very damaging. The example I sited today from the Dave Ramsey show, was the perfect way to illustrate paternalism at work. But I have to tell you, the decision to talk about this on my own podcast was not effortless. Why? Because, as I said at the top of the episode, when you’re thinking the experts are wrong, and you’re wondering if you’re crazy, it’s so easy to keep quiet. It’s so easy to start gaslighting and second-guessing yourself.

This happens to all of us, and whenever it does, it costs us a fortune, because other people show up as the experts, and other people make money as the experts.

So now let’s talk about a very powerful way you can solve for this. How you do it is you look for the difference in interest. It’s not that you’re wrong, and they’re right. It’s that they have a commercial interest that’s different from your commercial interest. Here’s what I mean by this.

Dave Ramsey is not in the business of solving the problem of underearning. If you’re in debt, he will talk about delivering pizzas to get out of it. He’ll talk about working more hours. In egregious and rare situations, he’ll talk to you about, “Your problem is you’re just not earning enough money.” But mostly, he’s big on budgeting. He’s big on dollar-cost averaging into the stock market over the course of your lifetime. And, not coincidentally, he sells tools that help you budget, and he makes money referring you to folks who help you dollar-cost average into the market over the course of your lifetime.

Is he big on solving the problem of underearning? Is he big on kicking employment to the curb in favor of entrepreneurship, so you can make so much more money? Not so much. Those are the things that I’m big on. And not coincidentally, that’s what I offer—coaching services that help you make a killing in entrepreneurship, and say goodbye to employment forever.

The moment you see that you’re selling something different than what the experts are offering is the moment you can begin dissolving the fear of being wrong.

When I looked at what Ken Coleman was saying to Rachel in Michigan, and how different it was from what I would say to Rachel from Michigan, what I realized is, it’s not that Ken Coleman is wrong. It’s not that I’m wrong. It’s not that either of us are right. It’s that, this is the right message based on the thing that we sell. And realizing that is the thing that helped me get brave enough to talk about my thoughts of this example of paternalism in my podcast. To talk about how damaging I think this kind of advice is. Ken Coleman obviously disagrees. Good for him. He’s not the villain here. He’s trying to help somebody, just like I’m trying to help somebody. But I have a new, fresh message to the Rachels of the world, and the message is this: That advice that you should sit and wait is all based on the idea that you don’t know what you’re doing, and somebody else knows better than you, and it’s just a lie. And I don’t want lies to prevent you from making money.

The exact same thing happened when I was publishing my podcast for hedge fund managers about delaying registration for as long as possible, I asked myself, “Wait a minute. What if I’m wrong about delaying this registration thing? Why is every other lawyer on the street telling them to register immediately?” And I realized it’s because we had a difference in interest. They wanted to sell legal services. That’s it. They’re just lawyers. That’s all they offer. But I wasn’t just practicing law. I’m also a coach who helps clients increase their profitability. So I wasn’t just in the game for legal fees. I wanted to also help my clients be as profitable as possible, and that meant delaying registration for as long as possible. When I saw this, I was able to quit second-guessing myself, quit gaslighting myself, and get out there, say what needed to be said, and make some money.

So now let’s bring this back to you. If you’re not making the money you want to make, I can promise you that you’re in the closet. You want money that you haven’t admitted wanting, perhaps even to yourself, and you’re not saying things that need to be said that will cause others to want to pay you the money. Maybe you’re not even saying these things to yourself. Maybe it’s a total blind spot. So what do you do about that?

This brings me to an epic conversation I had this weekend. It was a call with a listener who wants help making more money. She scheduled a consult with me. The call lasted ninety minutes, and around 45 minutes into the call, I stopped and I told her, “You know, I think this is probably the messiest discovery call that I’ve ever done. There’s something here that’s preventing you from making money, and I’m having a hard time putting my finger on exactly what it is.”

And here’s what I loved about this woman. She was game to keep going. I was like a nurse stabbing around in her arm for a vein to draw blood, and I just couldn’t find it. But she wanted that blood drawn. She wanted us to figure it out. She didn’t want to get off the phone until we resolved it, and we finally got to it. She showed up to the call thinking her business was about one thing,  and when she said that’s what it was about, it didn’t feel authentic to me. It didn’t feel powerful to me. It felt off, and as it turns out, it was off. By the end of our call together, she could see that it was about something else entirely, and specifically it was about the one thing that really mattered to her that she had simply been afraid to call out as the villain in her life and the lives of the clients she wants to serve.

And what happens when you can’t name the villain? You definitely can’t conquer it. Why not? Because if you’re not naming the villain, here’s how the dominoes fall down: You’re not naming the real problem. Then your message is muddled. You’re dancing around something rather than just saying, “Here’s what it is. Here’s what this problem does. Here’s what we do about it.”

And when you’re dancing around the problem, rather than naming it and specifying the solution, what happens? The meaning behind your movement is lost in the mist. And when meaning goes missing, guess what else disappears? Money. No one wants to give you money for something that just doesn’t matter. That doesn’t mean anything. They want to give you money for something that matters a lot. That means everything. And what matters to every human more than we can possibly measure is slaying the villains that are blocking the path to the happy ending.

The villain I help you slay is the low-profit playbook that’s lurking in your head that says, “I don’t know. Someone knows better. They can make the money and get around to paying me when it feels cool for them to do so.” How did this low-profit playbook wind up in your brain? It is deposited there by a cacophony of bad advice about what’s allowed. What’s not allowed. What’s going to get you in trouble, what’s against the rules and is disrespectful. What you have to be “very, very, very careful” about.

If you never hear anything else I ever tell you, it’s never disrespectful to expect to make money, and one of the things I teach you to do inside Gateway to Seven is to call out and conquer the villain without alienating reasonable people who are doing good things in the world. Ken Coleman, if you ever listen to this episode, I think you’re great. I have no issue with you at all. But as far as the advice to Rachel in Michigan who wants to make more money, I know we can do better by her, and others like her, and that’s what we’re doing in this show.

If you are ready to do better by your people, by eradicating fear and boldly saying the thing that everyone else is so afraid to say, so you can serve at the highest level and make money at the highest level, set up an in-depth discovery call with me. It may get a bit messy, as it did with my caller this weekend. But in the end, you are going to hear things you’ve never heard before, that you need to hear to help the folks you want to serve, and make the money you want to make.

The women with whom I had that epic conversation this weekend wrote to me. later that afternoon, she wrote, “I can’t stop thinking about our call. You literally had me crying and sweating at the same time.  Our call was nowhere near what I predicted, but I think it turned out in the best way. You were able to help me see things that I was blind to, and bring up topics I wanted to avoid like the plague. My thought after we hung up was “wow that was intense.” And “I  think she has to be my coach now.“ I realized how I am just trying to play it safe. That’s not what I want.” She ended that message by saying that she wanted to make a lot of money by helping her clients solve the real problem that she’d been afraid to consider, much less name, and she couldn’t do that if she was playing it safe and making herself smaller.

If you’re not making the money you want to make, all of this applies to you, too. You’re trapped in a money closet, and fear and paternalism are the villains that are keeping you stuck.

Ready to get out of the closet? If you’d like to see some things that you’re not seeing right now, book a call with me. kellyhollingsworth.com. It’s free, and infinitely valuable. You are going to hear things you never heard before. That much I can promise you. I can also promise you that mostly, these calls are fun. There’s generally no sweating or crying. We’re just talking about your business and it’s lighthearted in the most powerful way possible. But, if sweating and crying is what it takes so you can stop playing small and start making money, then please know we are going to go there. Because enough already. It’s time to make some money. So thanks for being here. I’ll talk to you next time.