You know that weird feeling when you get a surprise bill and your first instinct is to either freak out or pretend it doesn't exist? Yeah, that's not laziness or financial irresponsibility, that's your teenage self making executive decisions about your money. And honestly, we should all probably get her in an HR meeting to discuss her management style.
Sarah Walton calls this the "frozen moment," and if there's one concept from her conversation on The Skeptic Metaphysicians that will hit you like a spiritual 2x4 to the forehead, it's this: the beliefs we form during our most vulnerable years don't just fade away when we turn 18. They stick around like that uninvited guest who won't leave your party, making themselves comfortable in your decision-making process and running your financial life from the shadows.
The Three Money Myths That Are Basically Holding You Hostage
Let's get real for a second. Society has been feeding us three absolute lies about money since we were kids, and most of us are still ordering from that rotten menu. Sarah broke these down beautifully, and honestly, the moment you see them clearly, you can't un-see them...kind of like once you notice someone's weird laugh, that's all you hear.
The "There's Not Enough" Myth: This one is insidious because it justifies literally everything. We have enough food to feed the planet, but garbage cans at theme parks are overflowing with waste while people go hungry. We can build technology that drops bombs within inches of targets, but we can't seem to figure out how to feed, water, and medicate people. The scarcity narrative is so embedded in our culture that we don't even question it, we just accept that some people have to do without and move on with our day like that's just how the universe works. Spoiler alert: it's not.
The "More Is Better" Myth: This one will absolutely destroy your peace of mind. Because once you get 10 million, suddenly 10 million and one looks pretty appealing. It's the hedonic treadmill that never stops moving, and most of us are just running on it like hamsters, completely exhausted and wondering why we're not happy. Sarah nails this when she talks about the person who dreams of a big house, gets it, and then immediately realizes they've signed up for gutters, repairs, and cleaning a million square feet of space they'll never even use. Plot twist: the house wasn't the goal. The feeling we thought the house would give us was the goal, and no house can deliver that permanently.
The "That's Just the Way It Is" Myth: This is the one that locks the other two in place like some kind of psychological padlock. It's the shrug, the sigh, the "well, nothing I can do about it" attitude that keeps people stuck in patterns they hate. It's the reason your boss can pay you less than your work is worth and everyone just accepts it as "the market." It's why women didn't have their own credit cards until 1974...literally just 50 years ago...because everyone decided that's just the way it was.
The Reticular Activating System: Your Brain's Weirdly Powerful Pattern-Matcher
Here's where it gets fun: Sarah explains that we all have this thing in our brains called the reticular activating system (RAS), and it's basically like giving your brain a search-and-find mission. You decide what to look for, and suddenly, it's everywhere.
Think about the moment you decide to buy a white Toyota. Suddenly white Toyotas are following you down the street like they're stalking you. You're not losing your mind...it's just that your brain finally got the memo about what matters. The white Toyotas were always there; you just weren't trained to see them.
Now apply that to money. If you're constantly looking for what's missing or what's broken or what you can't afford, your brain will find endless evidence to support that narrative. But if you start asking different questions..."where could this money come from?" instead of "I can never afford this"...your brain starts looking for opportunities instead of obstacles.
Sarah's got this hilarious example about teenagers. You ask your kid to grab the salt from the cupboard, and they come back swearing it's not there. Your first instinct is that they're messing with you, but the truth is way weirder: they literally can't see it because they've already decided it's not there. Their RAS is filtering it out before it even registers. That's how powerful belief is.
The Sunshine Exercise, Toe Wiggling, and Other "Woo Woo" Stuff That Actually Works
Here's the thing about Sarah's practical tools—they sound ridiculous until you actually do them and realize they work like a neurological off-switch for panic mode. She's not asking you to think your way out of financial anxiety by pure willpower. She's asking you to train your attention in very specific ways.
The toe wiggling exercise is essentially a cognitive interrupt. When you're spiraling about money, you literally cannot pay attention to your toes and panic simultaneously. Your brain can't hold both at once. So you wiggle your toes, pull yourself back into your body, and suddenly the Tasmanian devil in your head has to pause. In that pause, you remember you're actually a pretty smart person.
The space-noticing exercise is about flipping perception. Instead of focusing on the finite objects (the chair, the camera, the tree), you start noticing the infinite space around them. It sounds weirdly hippie-dippie until you realize you're literally training your brain to perceive abundance instead of scarcity. The space doesn't begin and end. The possibilities don't have edges.
And the sunlight thing, noticing how many surfaces the sun touches each day, how shadow is necessary, how more isn't always better, is basically meditation wrapped up in a nature observation. You're teaching yourself that life is more nuanced than "I need more, more, more."
The Bridge Between Believing Something and Actually Having It
This is the part where Sarah gets serious, and honestly, it's where the magic happens: between invisible belief and visible results sits one singular thing; action.
Your beliefs create thoughts. Thoughts create actions. Actions create results. There's no skipping steps. You can't think your way from broke to abundant without doing anything different. And you can't get results that contradict your beliefs, it's literally impossible. Your results will always match your operating belief system.
So if your bank account has $500 and you're telling yourself you want a $10,000 emergency fund, there's a belief operating that's preventing that from happening. Maybe it's "it's too hard to make money." Maybe it's "what people see matters more than how I feel" (which would explain the $200 jeans paired with safety pins holding together the underwear). Maybe it's "I have to choose between taking care of myself and taking care of others."
The revolutionary part isn't figuring out the belief, it's doing it without judgment. Not "I'm so stupid for thinking this way" but rather "oh interesting, I've been acting like that's true, and that explains why I'm $9,500 short of my goal." That shift from self-flagellation to curiosity is where the actual transformation starts.
The Soul-Aligned Purpose Thing (And Why You're Not Supposed to Hate Your Job)
Sarah says something that should probably be printed on a t-shirt and handed out at high school graduations: "The universe didn't put you here with these beautiful gifts so you could give them away for free and hate your day job."
But women especially have been programmed to do exactly that. They've been taught that their gifts are just things they do. They're not businesses. They're not things they get paid for. They're just... what they do. Meanwhile, they're trading their lives, literally trading the seconds they get, for paychecks that don't even fund the life they want.
Here's the part that might sting a little: Sarah doesn't believe in magical thinking about money. She's not saying "just believe harder and the money will fall from the sky." But she is saying that when you actually know what your gift is, when you keep showing up and using it consistently, and when you actually understand what you're selling and how much it's worth, the money shows up. Sometimes in ways you didn't predict. Sometimes through channels you weren't looking for.
She keeps her "agreement with the universe" by showing up every single day to do her thing...to teach, to talk, to help women stop living on crumbs. She doesn't control how people find her podcast or how someone gets sent her content by a friend they haven't talked to in five years. That part is "none of her business." But her job, showing up, keeping the agreement, that part she absolutely controls.
One of her clients, Tasha, was a senior executive at a country music station convinced she wanted to organize rich women's closets. After about two minutes of actual investigation, Sarah figured out that what people actually came to Tasha for was advice about her IVF journey. Turns out, Tasha was a former biology teacher with direct personal experience of both primary and secondary infertility. Now there are over 350 babies in the world because Tasha figured out what she was actually here to do and started teaching it.
The gift was always there. The clients were always ready. She just had to stop trying to organize closets and start showing up as herself.
The Both/And Revolution
This might be Sarah's most subversive idea: people who are truly abundant are never either/or. They're always both.
They take care of their families AND themselves. They have spiritual purpose AND make good money. They're ambitious AND at peace. They're generous AND financially secure.
That 16-year-old girl in the grocery store thought she had to choose. One path was self-sacrifice (dance costumes? forget about it...feed the family), and the other was selfish (take care of yourself and ignore the grocery cart). There was no third option in her mind.
But there was. There was always a third option. She just couldn't see it from where she was standing.
The incredible part of Sarah's story is that years later, she got to thank the woman who paid for her dance costumes in front of a whole auditorium. That woman had made enough money to give it away without thinking twice. She got to demonstrate what women do when they have abundance: they change other people's lives. They pass it forward. (You should really listen to the episode to hear the full story here....it will take your breath away!)
Your Brain Is Lying to You (But That's Fixable)
The real takeaway here is that most of us have a teenager, a five-year-old, or a scared kid running parts of our financial life without our conscious permission. They showed up during a vulnerable moment and decided how things work. Then they never left.
But here's the good news: just by recognizing that frozen moment, just by seeing it clearly, you've already done 90% of the work. The belief becomes malleable the second you realize it's a choice and not an absolute truth.
You can retrain your brain. You can ask different questions. You can start looking for opportunities instead of obstacles. You can ask for "both" instead of accepting "either/or." You can decide that abundance isn't something that happens to lucky people, it's something that happens to people who notice differently.
And if none of this works? Well, just wiggle your toes and try again. Your brain's basically a pattern-matching machine, and you've got the remote control.
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