Today I have a special bonus episode to share! Ashley Stahl has been a guest on the podcast and when she was here we talked about how to get unstuck and uncover your career direction. As host of You Turn Podcast (spelled Y O U ), Ashley helps you elevate your confidence, both in work and love. She speaks often on how to get clarity and fulfillment on what path will truly light you up in your career.
I am delighted to share my You Turn Podcast interview where we talked about money, power, and how to maximize your confidence.
You’ll hear:
- How to have a healthy relationship with money
- How your childhood experiences shape your perspective with money and risk-taking
- Some tools to connect with your intuition
If you are new to Ashley and her work, you can listen to her interview on my podcast here and read more about her work below.
Ashley Stahl is a counter-terrorism professional turned career coach and author of the bestselling book You Turn: Get Unstuck, Discover Your Direction, Design Your Dream Career, and she's on a mission to help you step into a career you’re excited about and aligned with.
Through her two viral TEDx speeches, her online courses, her email list of 500,000 and her show, You Turn Podcast, she's been able to support clients in 31 countries in discovering their best career path, upgrading their confidence, and landing more job offers.
She maintains a monthly career column in Forbes, and her work has been also featured in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CBS, SELF, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and more. For her FREE quiz to get clarity on your best career path options, visit AshleyStahl.com.
Resources:
Ashley’s website
You Turn Podcast
Ashley on Instagram
Ashley on Facebook
Ashley on Twitter
Ashley on LinkedIn
Ashley on Pinterest
Right-click to download the .mp3
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Andrea 00:00
You're listening to Make Some Noise Podcast bonus episode number 449.
Welcome to Make Some Noise Podcast your guide for strategies, tools and insight to empower yourself. I'm your host Andrea Owen, global speaker, entrepreneur, life coach since 2007, and author of three books that have been translated into 18 languages and are available in 22 countries. Each week, I'll bring you a guest or a lesson that will help you maximize unshakable confidence, master resilience and make some noise in your life. You ready? Let's go.
Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the show. I hope you're surprised with this bonus episode, you probably don't even realize it's a bonus episode, but it is. And I am highlighting one of my favorite people. One of my favorite guests on this show, Ashley Stahl. Ashley is so smart. Do you guys remember her she was on and she is a former counterterrorism professional turn career expert and best-selling author. I'll tell you a little bit more and about her in a second. But she is the host of the You Turn Podcast. And I wanted to highlight not just Ashley but her podcast and I know a lot of you are career people, or career women. And her show is all about elevating your confidence, both in work and in life and in love. And she speaks on the show about how to get clarity and fulfillment on what path is right for you and what will truly light you up. And I know that that's what you guys want, because you listen to my show. And so I wanted to kind of turn the tables, I thought it would be fun to do this bonus episode and have her interviewing me on her show. So I get to highlight her show and her brilliance. As well as I talk about topics that I know that you'll love. In this particular episode, we talk a lot about self-confidence, as well as some of the highlights and the chapters of my latest book make some noise. So without further ado, here's a bonus episode with Ashley Stahl, interviewing yours truly.
I started making it a point to talk to my close friends about money, how much money we make, how much money we're investing, you know, whether we're presently in charge of the investments or if it's our partner, and also talking about… I'm curious, what I'm curious about women's experience with investing, you know, do you have no experience at all? Why not? Like do you have you know, self-judgment around that what is holding you back from investing. And from there, I would also examine your relationship to debt versus investing. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have this passionate love affair with debt, but no relationship or an on again off again relationship with saving and investing.
Ashley 03:14
Hi You Turn friends, it's Ash here for a another week on the You Turn Podcast in the mindset category, and I'm so excited to bring Andrea Owen on. She's an author, a mentor, a certified life coach, and she helps high achieving women let go of perfectionism control, isolation, and just choose that courage instead and that confidence instead. So, you know, I'm so excited to be having a conversation with her her first book, not her first book, How To Stop Feeling Like Shit was translated into 18 different languages. I just love that title so much. It's so exciting. You know exactly what you're getting. Right?
As you're having this conversation in your ears. I hope you go check out her new book Make Some Noise. We're going to talk today about money and power. These are two topics that I know she has some mastery around. Andrea, thank you so much for making the time to be here.
Andrea 04:13
Oh my pleasure, Ashley. I'm super excited to be here.
Ashley 04:15
I remember last time when I was on your podcast I couldn't stop asking you questions and talking to you and I think we talked about dogs and life and food and death. I feel like you know God bless the fact that I'm trying to stay on track today because you you're full of information.
Andrea 04:32
We could be all over the place yeah, good luck everybody.
Ashley 04:35
Love a good tangent. Okay, so what is it that got you to become a life coach and write books such as How To Stop Feeling Like Shit, Make Some Noise… I mean, I just literally want to say that title because like it's so funny. And by the way, if you guys haven't seen the cover of How To Stop Feeling Like Shit, it looks like a cupcake. It looks like a party.
Andrea 04:53
A good party.
Ashley 04:57
Okay, so tell me like what inspired you to do this work, and what's your intention when people are reading your books or just kind of putting themselves into your work?
Andrea 05:06
Well, it's sort of a funny, not funny story. And I know we have a lot to cover today. So I'll give you the very condensed version. It was in the early 2000s, probably around 2002, where I first heard about life coaching. And I remember sitting at the computer looking at somebody's website, probably one of the very first life coaches, dinosaur days, nd I was saying to my then husband, I think that this would be a great career for me but I feel like somebody would have to have some great life experience before they could be a life coach. I was in my late 20s at the time. A couple years later, he and I were married and talking about conceiving our first child, and he had an affair with our neighbor and got her pregnant, divorced me, I ended up dating entirely too soon, should not have been dating. Because my ex-husband and I, we had been together for 13 years, it was a very long relationship. So I get into this new relationship with a new person. He has terminal cancer. Fast forward about nine months into that relationship, I find out, he never had cancer, he had lied about it to cover up an opioid addiction. And I found myself pregnant with his child, he went away to rehab, met someone at rehab, fell in love with her and broke up with me.
So that all happen within about an 18 month span. I was 31 at the time. I mean, it was like fetal position on the floor, Ashley, like crying to my sister going, like, how did I get here? So we think the universe was like, here's your life experience that you asked for? What you're gonna do with it. And it was horrible. It was my absolute life rock bottom. But I took that as an invitation to completely change my life. And I looked at the common denominator and had to take some responsibility. You know, yes, the men that I had been with had been terrible to me, but I had tolerated it, I had settled in my relationships, I never listened to my gut when it was telling me to get out of both of those relationships. And so that's that was my trajectory that sort of pushed me into a lot of therapy, 12 Step programs, life coaching certifications. And fast forward, you know, I've written my third book.
Ashley 07:04
I am so… Well, first of all, you remind me, I went to an astrologer a while back, and I was like, I was 26 and he's like, life is gonna hit you with a few buses. And I remember being like, I said, what, why? And he was just like, because you need to have a story to tell, you're meant to be telling stories. And I remember being like, what can we like, skip the bus hitting me part? And so I'm listening to you, and like, I had a very similar I mean, not similar, but just kind of like shitshow experience over a couple of years calling off a wedding, somebody dying, like just things like that. And, obviously, you know, when you feel heartbroken, it's easy to either, you know, fall apart or feel like, I don't know, like, you're more fragile, you're more receptive, you're more tender with life. And you know, just more open. It's like your heart. Yeah. And it's open.
So I'm curious, like, how did you start, you know, you did all the life coaching certifications, and you put yourself in the world of learning. I feel like that could be just as much of a growth opportunity as much as it could be a distraction. Do you know what I mean? Like sometimes personal development, like we just become these junkies? How did you find yourself, or what were some things you did, through that experience that you really felt like you came home to yourself?
Andrea 08:24
I want to just underscore what you just said. That is really important, because I think people in helping professions can go down that path of let me help everyone else with their lives and ignore mine. And I honestly didn't realize how much of my own growth would happen in my trainings. And had I known ahead of time, I might not have done it. I wanted to just kind of skate on the surface of my own personal development. But alas, you know, I went and was trained in shame work and it was it was quite a deep dive. But I think one of the major things that happened was in 2011, I took a really good look at my coping skills and realized that I had healed from things like pretty severe codependency, I was also a love addict. I also sort of flirted in and out with an eating disorder in my 20s. And in 2011, I had to look at my drinking, because I had started to heal from all those other things, and quickly replaced it with alcohol. And in 2011, I had two small children a brand new business, and I looked ahead at 10 years down the line at what could be if I tried to get sober and entered recovery, or kept drinking. And I knew what the statistics showed that people who, you know, when we do have a pretty dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, whether you identify as an alcoholic or addict or not, we tend to not get better. We tend to just get worse. And so I got sober and I've been sober for almost 10 years now. That truly opened up so much for me mentally, emotionally and spiritually, probably physically, even though I was not physically addicted to alcohol, like, what does happen to a lot of people. But that was extremely pivotal in in my whole professional and personal life.
Ashley 10:17
Okay, yeah, it's interesting. I remember my spiritual psychology program talking about alcohol, and somebody had asked the leader of the program, like, what are your thoughts on drinking? And they said, you know, we're not really a fan of abdicating your consciousness at any point. And I'd never heard it like, I always think of a king abdicating the throne of deleting your car. Yeah, your consciousness. I remember, she said that and I was like, shit. And because of my Lyme diagnosis, I have not been drinking alcohol and I still miss it but I do feel some inspiration. From what you're sharing like that. You know, there's so much you can give up. And I think that's the case a lot with life, right? Like you can give up things in order to be more free versus adding things on and solving more things or grabbing for more stuff.
So money and power. How did these two topics come up for you, when you were releasing the love addiction, releasing the alcohol working on your codependency. I just love your vulnerability. You're such a breath of fresh air.
Andrea 11:19
I jump in the deep end, yeah.
Ashley 11:22
I know, you probably don't do the small talk thing. I don't either, like not for me. No wonder we started talking about death on our last call. Okay. So what was it about money and power in this entire dynamic you had with yourself and how did you start showing up in empowerment with that?
Andrea 11:39
I personally did not start working on my money stuff until 2015. So one of the pieces of advice that my mother had always given me was never rely on a man for money and to take care of you. So my mom had my older brother and sister in the early 1960s. She was very, very young at the time got married, that relationship fell apart, she was a single mom for a long time. And I was I was the product of her second marriage when she was older. And I understood that advice, and believed her. But I ended up doing the complete opposite. I grew up thinking, you know, is very traditional gender roles, very patriarchal, like, when is my white knight, or my knight gonna write up on his white horse and rescue me and take care of me. That's what I wanted, as much as I didn't want to admit it, that was deep in my subconscious woven into my DNA, probably. And that's what I wanted.
So I found myself in my 30s. And you know, my husband had a decent job and was, you know, my business is starting to pick up and I went to, of course, I went to a personal development workshop, and we were talking about money and I had a huge breakthrough with my own money story. And then from there, sort of ran with it. And how it points to this book is, I knew that I could not talk about women's empowerment without talking about money. Whether we like it or not, money is the currency for just about everything, so… And no one can argue that there are ways in which women have a harder time talking about it. So that's the reason that I had to start talking about it. I didn't intend to talk about power, until I started writing about it and asking women about it, and that topic came up later.
Ashley 13:31
Okay, so I know a lot of women here, it's kind of like weight loss as a woman. I feel like, you know, before I went on my clean eating diet, which is now just my lifestyle choice for my health, I always wanted to lose another five pounds. Now I'm kind of like, I eat so healthy, that like, my body just stays healthy looking, you know? But I feel like it's kind of the same thing with money. Like everybody always wants to just make a little more money. So I'm curious, like, what feedback would you have for the woman who's listening right now and she's kind of like, in her job, and she wants to make more and maybe she's just living paycheck to paycheck like most people are, if they're even lucky, you know, in today's world. So I don't know, what feedback would you have for them to get started in creating more power with money, especially if they've had a history of debt?
Andrea 14:22
I think that it can, first and foremost, I want to say like, it can be complicated. So if someone's listening, and they have never done any sort of deeper emotional work around the topic of money, I want everybody to start there. I don't think that you could have you could read all the books in the world and listen to all the podcasts and have all the strategies for investing, and all those things. And if you're not kind of quote unquote, right, emotionally around money, I do think that it's still going to be a slippery slope. I'm sure you've talked about it here and had other experts on I asked like a million questions in my book of starting that journey with uncovering your money story starts in childhood.
I tell a quick story in the book about how personally growing up, I'm a Gen Xer I grew up in the 80s. And we had these It was sort of like, I guess the first audio book, there were these little records that came with a book, and it was the Disney stories and my favorite one was 101 Dalmatians. And as I was reading this chapter, I realized that the very first and probably only role model of a woman who was self-made was Cruella Deville. And some people might say, like, well, it's just a Disney story, like, does it really matter? My argument is absolutely it does. I had zero, big fat zero role models, both in real life or via the media, books, TV, movies, of a woman who was wealthy, who did it on her own, who was any kind of humanitarian or even not a humanitarian, just a good person, you know, wealthy women were cruel, backstabbing, conniving, or they, if they were nice and sweet, they had, they had inherited the money somehow or married into it. So that's just you know, one example of, of how we grow up and internalize these types of narratives around asking for money, asking for what you want, etc, etc, around money.
And from there, I would also examine your relationship to debt versus investing. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have this passionate love affair with debt, but no relationship or an on again, off again, relationship with saving and investing. And you know, I'm not here to tell people how to save and invest or even get out of debt. But just my point is examine your relationships with these different categories and topics around money and power. I mean, power is a whole other conversation. We can talk about that, too, but…
Ashley 16:55
No, I mean, I think that the internal narrative, sometimes it feels like no matter how much personal development we do around money, that gravitational pole that we can feel back into the way we have always seen money or back into the struggles that have always been our comfort zone seems to rear its ugly head. And it's like, I don't know, I think that's what growth is. It's a little bit messy, right, like you come on done in order to put yourself back together sometimes. And I think with money, you know, as you're sharing, it can be very emotional and scattered. And so I'm curious, what are some specific questions that you would suggest anyone listening should be asking themselves about money to kind of loosen their relationship with it and create more success for themselves?
Andrea 17:43
Yeah, I mean, it starts with as most people can probably assume it's it starts with digging into what is your earliest memory from your parents or parent or their caregiver talking about money. What was being said? What were the feelings or emotions? Did you get a sense that there was something happening? You know, like, even if things weren't being said, and it doesn't matter if you interpreted things correctly, or incorrectly, the whole point is to write down what you remember. Did your parents teach you about money? Do you have an allowance? Were you allowed to do anything you wanted? with it? Did you have to save it? Did your parents fight about money? Or were you raised by a single parent and the other person, the other parent controlled the money? Or did you grow up with you know, there's, there's so many nuances about just your childhood. And then in high school, did you have a job? Why or why not? What kind of work ethic was taught to you and was it connected to money? Did you grow up seeing women in your life handle money? And if you did, did they handle it well? Did you ever see a woman or know a woman who worked in banking, or finance other than a bank teller? Do you know anyone wealthy or rich? How did you know that they were wealthy? What did your parents or other adults say about those people or just wealthy people in general?
So it's, it's all of these things that build this narrative. And sometimes, like you said, you can have conflicting advice or stories from one parent versus the other. Or maybe you had a family friend or an older sister that told you different advice, and it just was confusing. That happens a lot too, because people definitely have their opinions about money and wealthy people about poverty. They're out there, you just have to do some digging, in order to figure out what your money story is.
Ashley 19:42
And let's say somebody starts to get that awareness on it, and they have a pattern of, you know, always struggling, never getting paid enough. And that comes from their upbringing. Maybe they weren't taught that you have to work super hard for money and it's hard to come by and all of those different beliefs, what would Be a step to move in a different direction, once they've kind of done that excavation with themselves in the investigating.
Andrea 20:07
I'm a huge fan of writing, and journaling, and also a huge fan of therapy. So you know, how deep these run is very much a spectrum for people. And I am always going to tell people if you can, if you can afford it, if you have the resources, go to therapy and bring in your pad of paper or your notes app on your phone and talk to your therapist about it. And it's really, again, not that you're asking them for investing tips, it's you're just asking to sort of unpack the emotions around it. And a great therapist or coach is going to just keep asking you questions to dig deeper. Things like, okay, the story that you've carried around with you about money, has that been helpful for you? You know, why do you think that, that they had that story? What is your judgment? What are your feelings around it? Are you angry now that you've realized this at your parents, so there might be some compassion work to do, there might be some, you know, if it's helpful for you to work on forgiving them.
And I'm also a true believer that people do the best they can with the tools that they have. Sometimes that best is really crappy and all we can do is just sort of understand that, well, you know, maybe you need to set boundaries with them around getting advice from them, or whatever it is. But again, this is all just about excavating. So you can get clear on what the narrative is and if you don't like it, work on changing it. And that might be where you just write out what the new narrative is. I mean, that's how I talk about power. First and foremost, I want to know, what do you think about power? When I say that word what comes up for you? Do you automatically envision, you know, men in the government making decisions about you know, women's bodies? Do you automatically think about tyrants? Or, you know, dictators? Or do you think of women in power? Like, that's what I'm always very, very curious about is is… Because also, I mean, no one can argue that the people with the most power, make decisions have the most resources and things like that. And I'm not saying like, let's all hoard the resources and be more like Jeff Bezos. I'm not saying that at all. But it's like, what kind of influence do you want to have? Do you want to be able to donate to causes that matter to you? Do you want to be able to donate to put people in office who support policy change that you want to see.
There's a really great PDF that Brené Brown made, where, and you can just Google Brené Brown Power with PDF, and it should come up. But she talks about the difference between power over versus power with. And when I learned about that, it was hugely eye opening, because I've always wanted more power, but it's from that place like the power with. I want to share the power, I want to help put people who I believe are doing good things in power. I don't want to have power over people. That doesn't resonate with me at all. So I know I just talked a lot about it, because I get up on my soapbox and that's a topic that I'm like mildly obsessed with right now. But again, I just I have not talked to a lot of women, yet, who have really spent some time uncovering their relationship to power. But they don't have one at all.
Ashley 23:24
Yeah, I have so many thoughts just listening to you. I mean, the first thing is just even going back on money, you talk about like looking at the narrative and deciding to change it and even taking that power to write down what is the new narrative you want to have, which is so empowering to say like, well, what do I want to think whether you believe it yet or not. What do you want to think like just choosing who you want to be in your mind is so powerful. I think one thing that's interesting, in self-help is that sometimes it is just as simple as changing it. Do you know what I mean? Like sometimes we can get stuck in the emotionality and the stories and the reflecting and the processing, when really, it's like stop doing that thing. Just stop.
Andrea 24:06
There's a funny Bob Newhart, I don't know if it was an SNL skit or something where he's a therapist, and he's just yelling at his client to just stop doing that, just stop doing that. My answer is yes and no. I think for some people, in some topics, it can be that easy. You know, people have epiphanies, and they've sort of just changed their mind consciously. For me personally, around several things, money included, I have to keep coming back to this, because I very quickly fall on to the, you know, the scarcity mindset, especially when COVID happened. So my husband had just left his job. You know, my husband had worked full time since he was 18 and we had decided in 2019, that it was time for him to leave his job and not come to work in my business because that wouldn't have worked for us, but he was going to be the stay at home parent. So not only was I becoming the sole breadwinner for our family of four, but also our roles were reversing and gender roles are real. So we had to go in eyes wide open and you know, have really tough conversations and examine a lot of the narratives that that we grew up with and still have as people in our 40s. But that is something I have to keep returning to, you know, when I find myself still wanting to micromanage everything, I asked myself, do I need to take care of this or can I surrender and release it and just let him take charge and learn lessons? If he makes a mistake? You know, is it helpful for me to stay in this mindset of scarcity when we actually are going to be okay, we have a plan B if things do fall apart. And as somebody who, who was diagnosed with anxiety disorder in 2003, my brain likes to run away from me very quickly. So I know that's just my process.
Ashley 25:57
Yeah, well, you know, and I do think sometimes the work is if you do just, you know, sit with your pattern. So let's say of his pant pattern of overspending, and financial struggling. It's like what comes up for you, when you don't buy that thing that you really want to buy because you're trying to make a change? Can you sit with all of those feelings that you've been avoiding by buying the thing, and there's transformation in that like, learning how to sit in that discomfort, not getting what you want, or not playing that pattern out.
And, you know, on the note of power, I love that you talked about like, kind of some ideas of what you think of when you think of power. For me, I think a lot about freedom,. Just like being free to be who you are. And it almost seems like, I don't know, if I'm just being a career coachee type to think this, but having worked with so many people on figuring out their skill set, figuring out like, where they're naturally gifted, I kind of feel like everybody has kind of some sort of superpower in their life, you know, especially in their career, it might show up. Like for me, I don't know, like, I'm really good at connecting people. People told me all the time that like business deals, roommates, marriages, like whatever. And so people kind of think of me, I guess, in good graces, because they appreciate some sort of connection I must have made or something. That's the feedback I get. So I also just want to encourage anybody listening, like, what do you think your superpower is? You know, like, what… There's so many different ways to look at power, but obviously, I'm looking at it through a career lens.
Okay, Andrea, you talk a lot also, about starting before you're ready. And I know that this concept has come up in the self-help world and I know that you probably have a very different take on it. What does it mean for you?
Andrea 27:42
I think it's just knowing deep in your bones, that you likely won't ever feel ready. And I think that that is what gets missed when we see these memes floating around Instagram and Pinterest that say, you know, the key to confidence is starting before you're ready. And I like the idea of that, but when it comes right down to it, I think some people can bypass that and say, okay, I get that but let me just get another master's degree, let me just get this other certification, and then I'll start. And it just for me, it's just knowing that you are going to be waiting quite possibly your entire life if you wait until you're ready. And I want to I should have prefaced this by saying, personally, I am someone who starts very quickly, just inherently that's how I am. And I also have a high tolerance for risk. However, and so I say that because I do think it does come more naturally and a little bit easier for people who have my kind of personality.
But I just want people to know, like you say, what are your skills and if that's not one of your skills, all that means is that you just have to be extra conscious around your action taking around your choices. I'm also a big fan of just laying out the choices like what are my options here? Well, I can not start and I'll feel a little bit safer, it won't be as anxiety inducing, and I won't get the thing that I want. I'll never I'll never know. Or I can start before I'm ready and it'll be terrifying and it might not work out. That's another thing I always tell people like I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it's guaranteed gonna work out like that I would make I'd be terrible coach if I said that. But it's just about knowing in your bones that this is for your greater good. And I promise you that's where more self-confidence happens. Yes, self-confidence is brought by more actual competency that we have as women, which by the way I feel like we do not give ourselves has enough credit for how much confidence we actually have. But also, taking the action, whether it works out or not, will eventually bring you more self-confidence. It's about just having like those five seconds of courage in the moment.
Ashley 30:14
Beautiful, okay. And, you know, as I'm listening to you, you know, you're talking about like risk tolerance and, you know, like, starting before you're ready, you know, you mentioned something earlier in our conversation that I thought was like, oh, my gosh, I want to ask you about that, which is, you went through really painful breakups and heartbreak is just so hard. Making a decision to leave something can be so hard. It sounds like the writing might have been on the wall for you. I don't know. But you talked about tuning into your gut. And I think a lot of that is tied to starting before you're ready, or making a choice before you ever feel ready is listening to that intuition. What does intuition mean for you? Like, how can you help everybody listening, get more clarity on what their intuition is and I don't know like, what wisdom do you have around those sorts of moments where your body's telling you, you have to leave something?
Andrea 31:06
Yeah, every time I talk about intuition, I always want to make sure that I say this one caveat. And I've written about intuition in my previous books. And then I went through so when I got remarried, I was married before and then that's when everything fell apart. And then I dated the guy who lied about having cancer to cover up his drug addiction. And then I met my current husband. I married him, and not long after I married him, I was like, what have I done? I have no business being married to this wonderful human being. I'm such a mess still. I'm gonna end up completely wrecking this. No, it was self-sabotaging. And I talked to my therapist, and we were working on it. What I came to realize is that because I had so much trauma, especially relationship trauma, betrayal trauma, that I could not decipher if that was my intuition talking, or if that was actual, just fear, and trauma. And I quoted a licensed psychologist in my book about this, who talks about how trauma can very much interfere with our intuition. And I say that because anyone who's listening who's like, I never know what the difference is. I am so tired of hearing people talking about intuition that can't listen to mine. That might be what's happening. So talk to your therapist. And definitely look into that.
So that being said, when I talk to people about intuition, most people can think of particularly, it's two things, either a relationship that they didn't listen to their gut about, or a career move, that they didn't listen to their gut about. They, you know, they took a position when their intuition was like, probably not the best move. But it was, you know, on their dream list of jobs, or the salary was too good to pass up, or it looked really great on their resume or whatever. And it ended up not working out. This can be so difficult to kind of rewind and not make the decision in the first place. Because a lot of times, we don't know, there's no crystal ball that says, oh, you know, five years later, it was such a good thing that you didn't take that job, or that you broke up with that person, because here's what would have happened? No, we don't we just have to trust, this sort of blind trust, that we made the right choice. And I just, now that I've been on this planet four and a half decades, and I've talked to so many women who are so smart, and so wise, but they don't see it. I know without a doubt, I would put all of Oprah's money on it that, although I don't think she would let me, that women are sixth sense, is uncanny. Like it can, the stories that I've heard of women's intuition, and I do believe we all have it. I also believe that women's just as a little bit more in tune than men's I know that you have some men listening. But that's not to say you can't hone it. And I'm going to say something that probably some people don't want to hear but in order to sort of train yourself to be able to listen to your intuition more and to be able to trust it because that's two totally different things, is to get quiet is to spend time getting quiet, whether that's meditation, being in nature, doing some journaling, dancing, you know, whatever it is that brings you back home to yourself on a fairly regular basis, that will help you hone your intuition.
Ashley 34:49
Love it, okay. I don't know like, do you have any practices that you do on a day to day or weekly basis that you feel like brings you back into more power whether it's with money with your confidence, with your intuition, like anything that's tactical or exercises that people can do.
Andrea 35:05
For sure. I started making it a point to talk to my close friends about money. How much money we make, how much money we're investing, you know, whether we're presently in charge of the investments or if it's our partner. And also talking about, I'm curious, I'm endlessly curious, but I'm curious about women's experience with investing, you know, do you have no experience at all? Why not? Like, do you have self-judgment around that. What is holding you back from investing, especially, I work with a lot of millennials and you know, those even on the younger spectrum, that have not even thought about getting a financial advisor, and they like, oh, I don't make enough money. And I'm like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Find one. Try to find a woman that you trust, get a referral, and just and just start having the conversation, just start having the conversation, start asking a lot of questions. That is literally their job. Literally their job. And, you know, women we tend to get there was a fidelity study in 2016 and I forget what the exact stats are, so I won't quote them. It's in my book, we've just had so many women are afraid to either hire a financial advisor or ask questions even to their HR person about their 401k. And it doesn't surprise me because I was the same way. I was just like, oh, whatever, just have it. rollover. I never even looked at it. I spent a long time not even calling my financial advisor back when he would leave messages because I didn't want to deal with it. Because I was embarrassed that I didn't understand his lingo, I didn't really understand what was going on. I just completely trusted him, scrapped all of that and hired a woman and it's a completely different scenario.
But I digress. I love to, again, talk to my women friends about money, and be really transparent about it. But also, I'm not like making them tell me things like obviously, like with their own comfort level. I also really try to make it a point to go outside and put my bare feet in the grass. So I'm lucky enough to live in rural North Carolina where we have a, you know, beautiful yard with grass and I try to go out there, get some sunshine on my face, even though I work from home and just have that kind of grounding. Yoga. And meditation is something that I like the idea of, I'm not great at it, but you exercise in different ways. I'm also hugely into dance, I dance with around with my dog and my kitchen and in my office. And, and yeah, those are probably my favorite go-tos.
Ashley 37:38
Hmm, I love that, you know, on that note of what you're sharing with connecting with friends. Recently, I just sent a Doodle out to my girlfriends, there's like seven of them. And I said, like what day of the week, every single week would an hour coffee Zoom catch up feel good and you don't have to come if you don't want to. And I have a recurring Zoom invite with seven friends where they can just hop on. And it's like on Fridays, I'm just having coffee by myself, sometimes nobody shows up on the Zoom. And then other times people show up. And it's been so critical for me to have that like recurring sense of community, especially during COVID. But even now, with life coming back into real life events, just having that consistency to connect with people. And money definitely comes up. And there was a moment where somebody was negotiating a book deal and it was really vulnerable for somebody on the line to share exactly how much they made from their book deal and do that to support the other person to get even more. And I just think that that sense of transparency is so necessary. And so I find it really cool that you're bringing that up.
Any final words? Or is there anything I haven't asked you about confidence or money or power that you think is just really key for somebody to know? And tell us a little bit about your book.
Andrea 38:54
Yeah, I think I think we covered so much and bounced around and you're and you're such a good interviewer that I was able to get lots of words in. No, just this book Make Some Noise is my third book. And the reason that I wrote it from the from a feminist foundation is because I felt like I could not write another women's empowerment book without naming essentially the elephant in the room. And that's the culture that raised us. I believe, and I've been doing this work for like 14 years now, that a lot of our struggles, you know, if we're talking about women's empowerment around people pleasing and perfectionism and isolation and things like that, and poor boundary setting, are rooted in how we are raised. And that's what I wanted to name and also, there's some internalized misogyny in there, which I won't you know, that's another conversation for another time. But that's, it's not a feminist theory book, and it's not at all heavy handed. I don't know how to write like that. So there's some humor in there and it's fun. I asked over 250 questions in the book. So be prepared to, you know, to really do some thinking about your own life and I think that's about it. There's tons of bonuses to that go with it for people that buy the book.
Ashley 40:04
Oh, where can they find that?
Andrea 40:06
So that's it AndreaOwen.com/noise. There's a really beautiful workbook that people can download where all those questions will live. And a bunch of other things too that they can grab over there. AndreaOwen.com/noise
Ashley 40:20
Yay. Thank you so much again for coming on.
Andrea 40:23
Thank you, Ashley. Always a pleasure to talk to you.
Ashley 40:26
Yeah, you are so much fun.