96. My problem with money mindset work

What if mindset work isn’t enough? Join me as I unpack its limitations and reveal a deeper, more effective approach.

In this solo episode of Plenty, I dive into why traditional money mindset work often falls short and how a neuroscience-based approach creates lasting financial transformation. I break down how your nervous system shapes your beliefs, behaviors, and financial reality—and why shifting these deep-rooted patterns is the key to true abundance. Instead of trying to “think” your way to wealth, I’ll show you how working with your body can lead to automatic mindset shifts that actually stick.

This episode is for anyone ready to move beyond surface-level solutions and embrace a deeper, more sustainable path to financial peace and prosperity. You’ll learn why survival instincts can keep you stuck in scarcity and how integrating nervous system work can create long-term financial ease. Plus, I’ll share practical ways to start rewiring your money patterns today. Ready to break free from the cycle of money stress? Let’s dive in.

“When we practice neural repatterning, the mindset shifts on its own.” – Kate Northrup

🎤 Let’s Dive into the Good Stuff on Plenty 🎤

(00:00) Introduction to Financial Abundance
(00:44) Overview of the Series
(01:54) Systemic Issues vs. Money Mindset
(02:46) Understanding Conscious and Unconscious Thoughts
(04:36) Neuroscience of Mindset and Behavior
(06:45) The Mind-Body Connection
(08:46) Embodiment in Financial Transformation
(10:03) Nervous System and Healing
(12:44) Nervous System Work for Thriving
(13:21) Automatic Mindset Shifts through Neural Repatterning
(14:38) Deep Change Beyond Conscious Thought
(15:13) Conclusion and Call to Action

✨ The Money Reset: Feel Good with Money—No Matter How Much You Make

Making more money doesn’t guarantee financial ease… but this will. The Money Reset is a free audio experience designed to help you rewire your nervous system for wealth—so managing money feels effortless. 🎧💸

Inside, you’ll learn how to:
💡 Break the ‘money in, money out’ cycle and create lasting stability.
🎯 Relax into a new relationship with money—where structure meets flow.
✨ Use the 5-Minute Calm Cashflow Ritual to bring instant clarity to your finances.

More money won’t solve money stress—a resourced, supple nervous system will. Ready to shift? 👉 Get The Money Reset Now! 👈

Related Episode:

Moving From Financial Hypervigilance and/or Dissociation to Resonance with Sarah Tacy (095)

Episode Transcript

Kate Northrup (00:00):
Our instinctive, unconscious wiring is not always
what we need to thrive. Right?So our default programming is
survival, but we need toactually thriving. Hello. I'm so

(00:22):
excited to be kicking off thisseven part series.
I love the number seven, it is aspiritual number, it is a cosmic
number, and this series isinviting you into your next
level of financial pleasure,peace, and prosperity. So I'm

(00:44):
gonna take you through sevenepisodes, solo episodes,
they're, you know, twentyminutes ish give or take, that
are each a snippet that's goingto give you your next step to
expand your abundance in apleasurable, embodied way. Are
you excited? I'm excited. Sowelcome to this series.

(01:07):
This is episode one of theseries, and I'll see you for the
rest of them as well. Welcome toPlenti. I'm your host, Kate
Northrup, and together, we aregoing on a journey to help you
have an incredible relationshipwith money, time, and energy,
and to have abundance on everypossible level. Every week,

(01:31):
we're gonna dive in with expertsand insights to help you unlock
a life of plenty. Let's go fillour cups.
Lately, I have had to make thesame correction over and over
again with various folks whodon't work daily within our

(01:51):
company, but are, like, adjacentdoing various things. They keep
wanting to talk about moneymindset and that my work is
about money mindset. And quitefrankly, it drives me bananas.
And I'm gonna tell you why todaybecause I think it's important
for all of us who are healingour relationship with money to

(02:14):
get why focusing only on moneymindset is doing us all a
disservice. Number one, I willsay this, when we say, oh, you
just have a money mindsetproblem, like, oh, the reason
you don't have the money youwant is because you have a
mindset issue, that is notfactoring in systemic

(02:35):
oppression, privilege, years andyears of disenfranchisement,
disempowerment, purposefully andunpurposefully of all sorts of
marginalized folks.
So I just wanna say off the bat,like, sometimes someone doesn't
have a money mindset problem.Sometimes it's actually systemic
inequities at play. So when wetalk about money mindset work,

(02:57):
it can kind of, like, gloss overall of that. So that's number
one. Number two, by the time wehave a conscious thought about
anything, there has been anentire cacophony of
physiological things happeningin our body to create that
conscious thought which we areaware we are having with our

(03:18):
prefrontal cortex, with ourcognition, and most of
everything that is happeningunder the surface is completely
unconscious.
So it's not really a matter of,like, oh, I just need to change
my mindset. Like, yes. Sometimesit is as easy as someone giving
you a reframe and you realizing,like, oh, I could just change my

(03:40):
perspective, and then I canchange. Right? Like that Wayne
Dyer quote, if you change theway you look at things, the
things you look at change, whichis true.
Right? Like, that's thefundamental basis of mindset
work. It's true. It's just notenough. Why?
Because if you were to look atour the way we work as humans,

(04:03):
like the way our brains work,the way our behavior is created,
our entire mindset, it's like aniceberg. Right? And the mind,
the part we're actuallyconscious of, is the tip of the
iceberg above that littlesurface, and then below the
surface of the water is this,like, freaking gargantuan

(04:26):
monstrous bottom of the icebergthat is way, way, way bigger
than what's sticking out abovethe surface. So I'm not bashing
Wayne. I loved Wayne.
May he rest in peace. But I amsaying that our current research
has caught us up to theunderstanding that there's a lot

(04:48):
more going on. And when we workwith the piece that's the lot
more going on, we actually getsustainable transformation more
effectively than if we're justtrying to do mindset work. So if
you're listening to this andyou've been doing mindset work
for years, like you've beenexcavating your beliefs and

(05:09):
you've been trying to changeyour thoughts and you've been
trying to change the way youlook at things, but things have
not changed, it is probablybecause you don't understand or
haven't been taught about theway our brain and nervous system
actually work. So I'm gonna giveyou a brief neuroscience lesson.

(05:30):
If you've been around for awhile, this might be review, but
good news, pretty much no one Iknow learned this in school, so
we need to hear it a few timesin order to remember it and in
order for it to become a part ofus. We we can understand things.
That's lovely. We can hearthings, but it doesn't really
matter unless we are actuallyusing them. Right?
Okay. So by the time you get toquote, unquote, mindset work,

(05:52):
which to me is just change athought. Right? By the time
you've actually gotten to, oh,I'm aware I am thinking to this
this thought, what's happened isyou are having your neural
programming work in anunconscious way that has led you
to a particular emotion that hasled you to a particular thought

(06:14):
that, of course, creates beliefsover time or and then also
behaviors. So by the time we getto a thought, there has been a
whole bunch of things happeningin our nervous systems.
Our nervous systems are theelectrical wiring of our brain
and body, and our nervous systemis constantly in communication
with our brain. Our nervoussystem and our brain are really

(06:38):
part of each other. Our brain ispart of the nervous system. So
when I speak about the nervoussystem, it's not only the body.
Right?
It's the brain and body. It'sall one thing, and we need to
use both in order to get themost sustainable changes. So my
problem with mindset work is itis just super surface and it

(07:03):
perpetuates the lie that we arebrains on a stick, right? It
perpetuates the mind body split.It perpetuates and continues the
devaluation of the body, of ourfelt sensational experience.
And I think at the root cause ofmost of our human issues is our

(07:29):
deep, unprocessed feelings andtraumas because of the profound
devaluation of the feltexperience in the body. And so
when I talk about the body, it'sto bring back, it's to
reintegrate the importance ofthe lived experience of a human

(07:51):
being who is living in a bodyand how valuable that is to give
us the directions to our ownpathway to healing. Now
something I hear people say,which really I don't like also,
is that we are just souls hereliving in this meat suit. And
I'm just like, oh, for the loveof God, a, that's gross, and, b,

(08:15):
that perpetuates the devaluationof a body. If I am calling this
beautiful vessel a meat suit, amI not instantly devaluing it?
Am I not continuing the falsehierarchy of the spirit and the
psyche over the physical? I am.Yes. Obviously, these bodies are

(08:38):
gonna expire. We're gonna die.
You know, our hearts will stopbeating. We'll stop breathing,
and then we are, I believe,still a soul, and we'll go on
to, you know, god knows what ournext thing. Right? But in the
meantime, I believe we are herein a body for a reason. I
believe there's a particulartechnology that we were birthed

(08:59):
into in this physicalincarnation because we're meant
to use it, not transcend it.
And I guess at the end of theday, like, that's why the term
mindset work and money mindsetwork really rubs me the wrong
way, because it feels like it isfundamentally devaluing and
leaving out what I have foundhas been the most important

(09:20):
factor or ingredient in myjourney of healing, which is
embodiment. And so it bugs me.So how can we actually have the
transformation with our financesthat we're after when we are
doing money mindset work? Right?Like, it's it's like, okay.
I'm gonna work on my moneymindset. Well, what you're

(09:41):
trying to do there is changeyour financial reality. Right?
Have have more abundance. Havemore money in your bank account.
Get better at saving. Get moreconscious about your spending.
Become a savvy investor, stewardyour wealth better, maybe, give
more to charities, maybe createintergenerational wealth, you
know, heal some lineagepatterns. Right? So those

(10:03):
things, I think, are what we'reafter when it comes to money
mindset, but how can we actuallybring our bodies to the table to
use the incredible technologythat we were born with to heal
in more effective ways?
Well, this may or may not be asurprise to you. I don't know.
Maybe you're new here, but theway that I teach about that is

(10:26):
through a neuroscience basedapproach to using the nervous
system to heal at a root levelbecause mitigating all of our
behavior, mitigating all of ourbeliefs, mitigating all of our
thoughts and our emotions is ournervous system, and our nervous

(10:46):
system is being directed by pastexperiences that were emotional
in nature, and our nervoussystem gets stuck in particular
patterning because there weremoments in our lives that we
didn't have the resources,support, or understanding or

(11:06):
capacity to fully process andmetabolize an emotion, and so it
got stuck in our body. Also, ourbrains and nervous systems are
constantly sifting and sortingfor threat so that we can
survive because we are animals,and our animal nature is to
survive and carry on thespecies. Like, that's really how

(11:28):
we are wired at the end of theday.
And so, yeah, like, we're herereading novels and memoirs and,
like, doing Sudoku and learninghow to knit and eating fancy
dinners and doing whatever it iswe're doing. But, like,
ultimately, what's really goingon here is we are animals trying
to perpetuate the species.That's how we are wired. And so
we're constantly sorting andsifting for threat, and we are

(11:50):
organized around survival. Soevolutionarily speaking, our
nervous systems, again, whichinclude the brain, are always
gathering information for, like,oh, that happened, and then I
felt unsafe, or that happened,and then somebody yelled at me.
That happened, and someonewithdrew their love. That
happened, and then I feltlonely. That happened, and then

(12:13):
I ended up doing x y z. Right?So, like, think about all the
data you have gatheredunconsciously wired into your
body's electrical system, whichis your nervous system and your
brain, and all of that data haswired in your lived experience

(12:35):
so far in terms of what it meansto be human and what it takes to
survive.
So that's great. It's beenworking because how do we know?
Because you're alive. So so far,so good. But the thing is that
our instinctive, unconsciouswiring is not always what we

(13:00):
need to thrive.
Right? So our defaultprogramming is survival, but we
need to actually work with ournervous systems to point
ourselves in the direction ofthriving. And so that's where
nervous system work comes in.That's where neural repatterning

(13:20):
comes in, and what's so coolabout it is that when we nervous
system healing, when we practiceneural repatterning, when it is
based in what we actually knowcreates lasting change, the
mindset shifts on its own. Soit's like you get new thoughts,

(13:42):
new behaviors, new beliefs onyour own, like, by default, by
accident.
You don't even have to doanything about it. It is an
automatic mindset refresh whenyou do your nervous system work
because when you change yourneural patterning, you
automatically change yourthoughts. So that's the way to

(14:05):
change the way you look atthings. The way to change the
way you look at things, thankyou, Wayne, is to repattern your
nervous system, repattern yourbrain, your wiring, so that
you're automatically looking atthings in a new way, and you're
automatically having a, quote,unquote, mindset of abundance,

(14:29):
which actually needs to start inyour brain and in your body, not
just in your prefrontal cortexcognition that you're aware of.
Because, actually, we can'treally create lasting change
from the place of only consciousthought because when we try to
change at the level ofconsciousness in which we

(14:52):
created the problem to beginwith, we just recreate the
problem.
So we need to go deeper, pullthings up by the roots,
repattern way, way, way deepunder the surface of the
iceberg, if you will, and thenthe mindset shifts happens
automatically. So thank you forlistening to my riff on my

(15:15):
problem with mindset work. Ihope this resonated, and, if if
nothing else, it will help youto understand more of what
you're gonna get if you stickaround plenty and our other
spaces. Thank you so much forlistening. Happy repatterning.
I'll see you next time. Thanksfor listening to this episode of

(15:39):
Plenty. If you enjoyed it, makesure you subscribe, leave a
rating, leave a review. That'sone of the best ways that you
can ensure to spread theabundance of plenty with others.
You can even text it to a friendand tell them to listen in.
And if you want even moresupport to expand your
abundance, head over tokatenorthrup.com/breakthroughs

(16:04):
where you can grab my free moneybreakthrough guide that details
the biggest money breakthroughsfrom some of the top earning
women I know, plus a mini lessonaccompanying it with my own
biggest money breakthroughs anda nervous system healing tool
for you to expand yourabundance. Again, that's over at

(16:26):
kate northrup dot com forwardslash breakthroughs. See you
next time.