Done with Dieting Episode #29: Brittany Deer

You are listening to the Done with Dieting Podcast Episode number 29.

Hi, I’m Elizabeth Sherman, former corporate high tech executive turn life and weight loss coach. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was searching for that perfect diet, the one that would finally be the golden ticket to lose the weight that I so desired.

Fast forward past tons of failed diet attempts, exercise fads and painful lessons learned, and although I still have not reached the state of Nirvana, body love, my relationship with food exercise in my body is infinitely better than it was not only when I started this journey, but even as recently as three years ago.

The journey that has allowed me to ditch my scale, stop logging my food and exercise, eat food that I didn’t prepare and easily maintain my weight – something that I never thought was possible for me.

I created the Done with Dieting podcast to give you simple, easy to do and sustainable strategies to help you do the same without all of the drama that I went through.

If you’re a woman who’s looking to create a better relationship with food and her body, get off the diet roller coaster and free up a bunch of headspace spent on calories, how you should look what you should eat and beating yourself up for not doing what you think you should be doing. You are in the right place.

Let’s get started.

Elizabeth:

Alright everyone, welcome Brittany to the podcast. Brittany, hi.

Brittany Deer:

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, I’m so excited.

Elizabeth:

This is so great to have you on the call. So first of all, let’s start with who you are, what you do and who you serve.

Brittany Deer:

Yes, I am Brittany Deer, and I am a money mindset coach, and I serve women coaches and I help them change their relationship with money. That can look like a lot of different things because everybody’s relationship with money is very different. Our relationship can come from many different things.

So, it just depends on where the person is at in their journey. And we really work on creating something that they love and that they want to have, instead of maybe something that they have been taught, or that they have been told, or something that they just don’t even like their relationship with it.

They feel a lot of high intense emotions around it and money is neutral, so I help them create whatever it is that they’re looking for in terms of that relationship.

Elizabeth:

Awesome. So, tell me, when you say money is neutral, what do you mean by that?

Brittany Deer:

If money is an external thing, and if it is neutral, then we have a thought about it. And your thought might be very different than my thought, or vice versa. So, it’s a neutral circumstance, and then, everybody has all kinds of thoughts about it, all kinds of beliefs about it. And that’s what I mean by neutral.

Elizabeth:

Okay, great. And so, your story about how you became a money mindset coach is actually really fascinating and intriguing. Tell the listeners about your path and how you got here.

Brittany Deer:

Okay, in a nutshell, we’ll do it in a nutshell.

Elizabeth:

Don’t do it in a nutshell, you can be as long-winded as you want.

Brittany Deer:

I truly feel like I’ve lived two different lives. And when I say that, like my life now is so drastically different, that it doesn’t even feel like it’s been one thing that just changed. It literally feels like two separate.

I’m two separate people, two different lives, especially when it comes to money. But I grew up in a household with a blended family and then my mom was also a single mom on that side of my family. And so, there was just a lot of mixed beliefs and a lot of struggle. I saw my mom work really hard for very little and that’s a little bit of my background of how I was raised.

And as I grew up, I became a little bit over independent. And when I mean by that is I always thought I had to work a lot to have a little. And that just carried into my adulthood and then me and my husband met when we were 19 and we had two totally different money upbringings. Two totally different sets of money beliefs.

And for the first 10 years of our marriage, we really struggled with blending those two relationships. I struggled, I felt stressed, overwhelmed, exhausted most of the time when it came to money. And my husband, in both of our households, they just money wasn’t talked about. Which I know we’re going to get to that.

So, like, it wasn’t talked about, but his parents just lived a little bit differently and I would say just more-more, middle-class not a lot of money. But also, never really was able to see any struggle or anything like that. And grew up in that like work really hard all of the time, work 60, 70, 80 plus hours a week was very normal.

And so, when he and I got married, like I said, for the first 10 years, it was just a strain. All of the time for us, we lived mostly paycheck to paycheck. It felt very hard to make it. It felt like we were never going to get ahead, the relationship. When I refer to a money relationship, I literally look at it that way.

The relationship that I had with money was so difficult. It felt like something out of my reach, it felt something like I was never going to be able to understand money. It felt very hard, it took a toll on our actual marriage, and because we could just never find common ground.

It was the thing that we fought about most of the time. Which there are statistics out there that prove that is one of the top reasons that people get divorced as money. And so, in 2016, we were on the verge of divorce. Like as in very-very close, neither one of us, I would say wanted it, but we could not figure it out how to find this common ground. We were raising young kids and it just felt everything just felt so difficult.

Our house was in foreclosure, and we were about to get divorced. And so, from there, I had been following a childhood friend for quite some time. She was a life coach and I had never heard of a life coach.

And I thought, you know what we have done everything. When I say he and I have done everything, we did financial counseling. We’ve done all of the debt elimination processes that you can literally think of. We have met with financial planners. We had done all of the things that we possibly could at that point in that first decade.

And I was like, why is none of this working? What is happening? Why is none of this working for us? And so, I met this life coach and she introduced me to, that my thoughts create my results. And I never had actually dove into, what I actually thought about money.

Never, it just never crossed my mind to look at all of those thoughts and say ” oh, it’s hard, it’s difficult. I don’t like it; I have to work a lot. I have to sacrifice time with my children to make money. Oh, my husband makes more than me.” That’s a problem, like I just never dove into that.

So, in 2017, when my new money journey started and I drastically changed, but now that’s why I’m so passionate about money mindset. Because my husband and I have done all of the actions, the debt elimination processes, the hired financial counselors, the advisors, all of the actions.

But never looked at what our actual thoughts and beliefs were when it came to money. And that is the foundation of that. All of those processes are not bad or wrong. But they’re not going to work, if you’re thinking that money is hard, money’s awful, I’m never going to make enough, like all of these things, the processes, the debt eliminations, all of those things. They’re just not going to work if you’re having those underlying beliefs.

And so that’s what I noticed was my belief system was not where I wanted it to be. And that’s why nothing was working for us. And so, I started working with this coach and which is funny, she wasn’t a money coach, at the time she worked with network marketers, okay.

So, I wasn’t even a network marketer, which is so funny to me all the time. I just was like, whatever she’s doing something that I clearly don’t know about. And I had no money again, my house was in foreclosure, so I went to work at Starbucks part-time so that I could pay her.

In that 2017 year, my husband and I saved our marriage, we saved our house. I left my full-time job the following year. I started becoming a coach in 2018 and since then I’ve created a six figure business.

Elizabeth:

That is so amazing and inspiring. If you could go back to Brittany of 2017 and tell her something, what would you tell her?

Brittany Deer:

I think in that year, I was so determined to fix all of the things. And when I say fix, I was like, “oh, I got a lot on my plate, like I’m trying to heal my marriage. I don’t want to lose my marriage, I got to save my house, I’ve got two young children. And also, it was, my first thought was like, I could potentially be a single mom here, like I’ve got to figure this out.

So, it kept me going, but I would say to her now because I’m very driven and once I set my mind to something, I’m going to keep going. But I think that’s the biggest thing that I would tell anyone is just to keep going, because that’s the hardest.

2017, was not fun by any means, it was hard. It brought up a lot of things that I just never thought about. Money wounds from my childhood and I had to face a lot. And so, in those moments, I don’t recall telling myself to keep going. I had to have something that would saying, keep going, keep doing this, this will pay off.

And so, I would say it was probably just to keep going, even when dot-dot-dot…, even when it’s hard, even when something comes up and it feels bad. Because that year, I would say felt bad more than it felt amazing. Even though, I was having astronomical results, right? Like I was changing a lot, it didn’t feel comfortable to me.

Elizabeth:

And you brought something up, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the podcast, which is, the things that we think about weight loss are very in line and parallel to the process that we go through when we’re thinking about eliminating debt or all that stuff. They are so in tandem. So, this is perfect.

Brittany Deer:

Yeah, for sure. I work with a lot of like fitness and health coaches and we talk a lot about the parallels and how when we start looking at our money relationship, how many parallels there are into many other areas of our life. I hear it a lot with marriage or just relationships in general because I refer so much to our relationship with money.

If you think of just a relationship in general, you want it to be amazing. You want it to thrive, you want it to feel good, you want to be around that person if it’s a personal relationship. And so, when you look at money as like a person, it allows you to be like, “okay, wait, if I get to decide what this is like, what do I want it to look like?”

And so, for me, I’ve been with my husband now for, gosh, I don’t know, 15, 16 years, long time. And I lost track, two kids and a lot of stories later, I forget. But we’ve been together for a long time and it’s a journey, it’s not a destination, and you know this because you’ve been married for a while as well.

And it’s, Okay, hang on a second, we’re in a season right now. What do I want this relationship to look like? How do I want to feel? How do I want to approach it? Maybe we are in a hard season with money. Maybe we are in a hard season of parenting. Maybe we are in a hard season with our health or whatever that may be, right?

And so, when we do the same thing with money and we look at it as a relationship and not just this thing that we all have to have, right? Or need or whatever, then we can it gives us options.

Elizabeth:

Yeah, I love that because I’ve been talking a lot with a few of my clients recently about their health and there are going to be times when their health habits are going to be easy to maintain that they’re going to be running on all cylinders. And then there are going to be times when things are a little bit crunched that they don’t have as much time to spend on preparing food or exercising or whatever it is that they’re doing.

I had never really thought about that in terms of money before. That your relationship with money changes just like your relationships with business or your partner or your children or your girlfriends would change. That’s fascinating, I love that.

Brittany Deer:

Yeah, and I think that’s the biggest thing that I try to teach my clients is that when we start this work, it’s not a destination. If you stop let’s just say that you’re eating decently healthy and you’re loving it for a year. And then for six months you decide to eat burgers every day.

Your life is going to feel a little bit different, right? Like, you’re going to be different, you’re going to have different results, right? So, it’s the same thing with money, it’s a journey. It’s a lifestyle that you choose. And for me, I’m always looking at how can I keep growing my money beliefs always.

It’s like, what opportunities can I use to help me grow my own money story, my own money journey. Like, I want it to look like this and the everyday things, I am always making sure I’m applying it to, where is my growth in this? How can this help me with my own money relationship?

The other thing that I often get is, do you feel negative around money? Of course, I had a story for a very long time. More than half my life at this point, cause I’ve only been doing this work for four years and so, it’s more than half of my life. I had more of a toxic relationship with money. It wasn’t something that I loved, it wasn’t something that I looked forward to, it stressed me out more than it didn’t.

And so, of course I do. Of course, my brain is going to naturally go there because it’s been trained for so long. Well, this is going to be hard, you’re going to have to work really hard. That was a big one for me. You’re going to have to work really hard to make XYZ or to save XYZ or to invest X Y Z, that’s my story.

And the other thing is something that I really struggled with is, if an expense comes up or something like that, my brain naturally goes to the money, it always has, it always has. And I am just so highly aware of it now that I can manage it. And that’s what I work on with so many people is learning how to manage it. It’s not a problem, we just make it a problem. And then we take action from that place. So usually, we’re feeling like, stressed out overwhelmed and potent.

Like, a lot of people that I speak with, they can’t sleep because money is so stressful to them. And that’s just not healthy at all, like, it’s not healthy. I remember literally waking up at night and wondering why I was so stressed out. And it was because of just all of the thoughts that we’re consistently running through about money. Are we going to have enough? Am I going to be able to afford this? All of the things, right?

So of course, I have them. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have them. It just is learning how to manage the thoughts and the emotions that we have attached to money for so long.

Elizabeth:

And what I hear you saying, which is very true for weight and food and our relationship with those things is that those money stories keep coming up. Even though we’ve identified that I don’t want to have this belief anymore, that we may find it sneak in every once in a while. And what I’ve noticed with my food is that the less I started paying attention to it and making it mean anything, meaning that, okay, I still had this thought, but it was optional about the food that it was scarce, or I needed to eat all of it.

That the more I called BS on my thought process, that the less weight I gave that and the less frequently it came around them.

Brittany Deer:

A hundred percent. I actually have a quick story about this because I think it’s important for me, especially in my industry to share like, actual real life things that happen with me in terms of money about a month or so ago. Back in April I think, we got a new puppy, and my family is animal lovers. And so, we got this new pup, and we add him for about a month and he swallowed masks. Like, he just ate them whole. So, he wasn’t feeling well, and I thought, maybe dogs will just, will come out eventually.

About 24 hours went by and he was not feeling well. He was sick, he was vomiting, all these things. And I thought, you know what, I’m going to take him to the vet, he needs to be seen. So, I take him to the emergency vet and the veterinarian calls me back and going to do the x-ray, and I said, okay. And so, she calls me back after the x-ray and she says, I’m seeing like two metal pieces.

And I said, we think he swallowed a mask, like a medical mask. No one saw him like actually swallow it, but we think he got one in his mouth and does gulped it down. And she goes, that could be the two, like the nose piece. You know what I’m talking about? That she was seeing on the x-ray.

And she goes, let me go, I’m going to do an exploratory surgery. And I was like, okay, what does that cost? And she gave me the amount and I’m like, okay, go ahead and do the x-ray. And then, she said something else about, she could potentially do that before the exploratory surgery.

And so, she did that, we’re up to, I don’t know, thousand dollars at this point, okay, on this dog. And I already have thoughts about dogs spending a lot of money talks, my Hamlet, my family does not, but I do. And so, she calls back and she’s like, alright, we got to do the surgery. I’m like, okay, how much is the surgery? And she’s like, I think it was like $4,500.

My brain literally freaked out in the moment. It was like, ” Oh, no, oh, no!” Like, we’re not spending, I just sat there in the car, watched my brain, literally freak out about the amount of money. Mind you, we have the money, it wasn’t a problem.

That’s not the actual problem and my children are in the back seat and they’re like, is he going to be, okay? And they’re like, take it from our savings, we’ll do whatever it takes to pay for this thing. And the reason that I share this is because my brain still does that, and it does not mean that I don’t care about my dog or that I don’t care about my family or that I want him to be hurting or that I don’t want to do it.

I love animals, I don’t want them to be hurt, but my brain did not even think. Is he going to be okay, do whatever it takes to heal him. My brain was like, that is so much money. No way.

Elizabeth: Yeah, panic.

Brittany Deer:

It was just all of the money. It was focused so on the money and not focused on our new pup.

So, I call my husband and I’m like, “Hey, it’s going to be $4,500 to do the surgery. And my husband’s response was, okay, just do whatever it takes. And see how different it is? Like, literally in the conversation with my husband was over, my husband had zero thoughts. He just said, do whatever it takes.

My brain was literally panicking as this is a problem, don’t do that, that’s wrong, that’s too much. And I have to, like you said, call BS on it, notice it. I have such high awareness now that my brain just tends to directly go towards the money. When it comes to things that I still have beliefs around in terms of like, how I should be spending it, or what I should be spending it on, or how much I should spend on that?

My sister is one of them, she would spend 50,000 on her dog, if it took that to save it. It’s just not a question, but for my brain, it was very much a, like panic, state of a freak out.

Elizabeth: So, what did you do to come around to the other side?

Brittany Deer:

Yeah, I just literally sit there, and I observed that and I’m like, oh my gosh, look at how my brain is just doing it’s manual. When I talk about it’s manual like, what it’s done for so long? I’m just so aware of it and I don’t make it mean anything about me anymore. I don’t make it mean, like I said, that I’m not a compassionate person or that I don’t care about the kid or the dog or whatever it is.

I’m just so highly aware of it and I can call BS on it. I’m like, this is just a thought, this is not factual. This actually has nothing to do with the money, this has everything to do with my thoughts right now.

Elizabeth: Interesting.

Brittany Deer:

And then I don’t let the emotion because the emotion is so sometimes intense. I just allow the emotion. I think that’s probably the biggest, and I will say the most difficult piece to teach people is just to allow yourself to feel that way and be okay. I didn’t die, I wasn’t going to die. And I felt bad because I was so frantic around the cost of it.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Brittany Deer:

When I allow the emotion, I’m talking within 5 to 10 minutes at that point. Now, it would have been hours, I probably wouldn’t have slept that night, two, three years ago. But within minutes, because I just allow the emotions to run through my body now, it just dissipates. It’s, ” oh, that’s a thought, that’s okay, I’m okay.” And of course, my brain is still going to do that.

It did that for years. It panicked and freaked out around money, expenses for many-many-many years.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. So, let’s change tracks just a little bit and let’s talk about money and its role in relationships. So, you had said that at the beginning of your marriage, that you and your husband had very different beliefs and backgrounds in terms of how money worked.

Let’s talk a little bit about that and then maybe offer some ideas about how the listeners can make that work in their relationships.

Brittany Deer:

Yeah. So, this is probably one of my favorite things to talk about because it is close to my heart in terms of its literally what was going to cause me and my husband to get divorced. Because we were so different, because I felt like we needed to see eye to eye; I felt like we needed to be on the same page; I felt like we needed to have the same beliefs; all of the things.

And it’s actually very fascinating that one person can change their thought process and their belief system and change the whole relationship. My husband hasn’t changed, my husband is not into coaching at all. When I say changed, he has changed because we have changed as a couple, but he didn’t actually do the thought work that I did, right?

He just sat back and watched me and still to this very day, we have very different beliefs when it comes to money. And I think the most important piece of that is being okay with it. It’s not wrong, there’s nothing wrong with him thinking certain things and me thinking certain things or me wanting to feel a certain way about money and vice versa.

And the question that we can all ask ourselves in that scenario is, “wait, what do I want to think about this? What do I want to believe about this? What do I want to feel about this expense?” Or whatever it is. And I never figured that out until I started doing it in terms of myself.

I always thought we had to be one, and when I say one, it was like, oh, it’s either this way or no way. And I hear that a lot with married couples is you have to always be on the same page in terms of money and not always, it’s okay. It’s Okay for people to disagree with you and including your spouse.

It’s okay as long as you don’t make it a problem. So, my husband is very thrifty, very conservative, and I am not, and we’re thriving. We have two thriving businesses and we’re doing great in terms of our relationships with money, even though they’re very different.

Elizabeth:

It’s so interesting how we as people can be judged of how other people are spending money. When we look at someone who’s got a new car, like a neighbor or something like that, we’re like, “oh, they just got some money look at how they’re spending their money, or maybe it’s envy, I don’t know.

It’s just interesting. So, when you have that relationship where one person is thrifty and the other person is not as much, of course there might be judgment going on between the two of, I don’t think that you should be spending that, or I think you should live a little kind of, it’s exciting.

Brittany Deer:

Yeah. One time, my husband told me, I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but it’s been a while ago. And he looked at me and he said, you’re really good at spending money. And I would say that in that moment, I had two different things. I was very triggered, this has been a while ago, but I was very triggered, and I was also like, of course I am.

Like, in a way of I want to be, I want to be good at spending money because money is meant to flow in and flow out. I don’t want to be bad at it. I don’t want to hoard it. I don’t want to feel like I can’t. And it was just two different, like things in the moment and I remember him saying that as like, it was almost like it was an insult, thinking that at first.

But when going back to you saying it causes a lot of tension. The only reason that it does is because no one asked themselves. We just aren’t practiced or taught to ask ourselves, what do we want? How do we want to feel? What do we want our relationship to look like with money?

Think about how money is taught to children. Like, most of us learn our money beliefs by how we were raised, that’s a huge one. But like actually in schools, we’re not really taught it like a mental part. We’re taught the actions things, right?

Elizabeth: We’re taught Math. Money is Math.

Brittany Deer:

Yes. And like how to balance a checkbook or whatever. That’s what I was taught, which I don’t even know people have checkbooks. So, it’s like we’re taught the actual things instead of it being more of an emotional, mental thing as well. And the impact from our childhood is pretty strong.

And so, we have to question as we get older, “wait, do I want to do that?” And that’s where, I had the thought that I have to work a lot of hours to make a decent living, which also meant that I have to sacrifice time with my young children.

I had to question that, and I really-really believe that was true. Back in like, just a couple of years ago. And I thought, oh, that is so factual to me. Like, I just have to keep working 50, 60 hours. I’m just going to have to sacrifice part of my children’s lives because I have to work so much.

And that is not okay with me. I just don’t identify with that. And I didn’t realize that it was an option for me to be like, oh, I can actually have more time with my children. And still be successful and also not have all of these thoughts about the money at the same time.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. And so, you actually just brought up a really interesting concept, which I think that a lot of women have trouble separating. Which is the idea that we are taught or told that we should charge our worth. Whether it’s an employer situation or an entrepreneur situation.

And I think how that gets internalized is that many of us have low self-esteem. And so therefore, we don’t think that we, as people are worth a lot. But being able to separate the idea of what my skills and external value is from my self-worth.

Brittany Deer:

Yes, and that takes time. It’s something that you have to develop over time. It’s not something that you can just like easily just say one day it’s very black and white. It just takes time to do that, and this is a whole conversation in terms of women and money. We’re getting there as a society and as a world we got a long way to go.

I know you and I talked about, like, a stay at home moms or the end things like that. It’s not something that’s talked about. And so, if we start talking about women and money more, but the belief systems are going to start to shift. Because women are going to just realize that they have more options and they’re going to be making more money. They’re going to be contributing more, and that just changes the world in itself.

But we have to talk about it first, right? Like you’re saying we have to start and inside and start talking about it and start helping the women differentiate that in order to have the future growth.

That starts with the young generation. So, it’s people like you and I, that have conversations like this, that someone out there will be listening and then they will start thinking different and they will start applying this work. And then they have an eight year old, 10 year old, 15 year old daughter, and then they start teaching them that.

I don’t have daughters, but I have boys and yes, I only work with women, but I still think it’s important whether you have females or male children. But it’s really feeding the children in that younger generation different money stories than what we have just done generation after generation.

Elizabeth:

Yeah, and I grew up in a time, when it was gauche to talk about religion, politics, or money. And yet, what was really interesting was, I grew up in a family where politics were talked about freely.

I think the political spectrum today is a little bit different and I don’t mean to talk about politics, but it was just ” oh, what are your beliefs about politics, or what our leaders should be doing? And how is that different from mine? And what are your needs versus mine?

So, just seeing out of curiosity. I was taught that money wasn’t something that you talked about, you never asked anyone how much money they made. You never offered how much money you made, because then there would be judgment on that.

Yeah, it’s a completely different conversation today than when I grew up.

Brittany Deer:

Yeah. When I think of, a lot of people talk about debt, and they’re the stories that we have about debt. I was taught money wasn’t really talked about. But if it was, it was always a struggle, whatever the conversation was always something negative towards money.

And then debt was literally, it was acting like it was some awful-awful-awful thing. And so, fast forward, I go to college, I’m told that I have to pay for my college myself and this has been 16 years ago at this point. And I don’t even know what college costs now, but then it was very costly for me, and I had to pay for it myself.

So, what do I do? I go get student loans, right? So here I am, I have this belief that I didn’t even decide that debt is horrible, bad, you don’t do it. But yet, I want to go to college, and I incur debt and I am now bad. I’m a bad person because I’m incurring debt.

And then, me and my husband get married and we have so much debt. We had a sick child and I had medical debt for many-many years. And there it is again, it’s bad, you’re not supposed to have it. And that was probably one of the first like set of money beliefs that I had to work on was all of my thoughts about debt.

Because this might blow some people’s minds, but debt is money. And if you don’t want your money relationship to feel awful and toxic, then you have to start with debt because debt is money, that’s all it is. It’s just money that’s given to you, to use for future things. So, if you feel bad about it then you’re actually feeling bad about money. You’re overwhelmed with your stress with about it.

Elizabeth:

It was a few years ago that I was following someone online and she was talking about, whenever she pays her bills, she actually thanks her creditors. Because if you think about it, the debt that you’re incurring is money that you don’t have.

So, they are lending you money in order for you to do something or have something or experienced something that you wouldn’t have without that lending. And so, be thankful for that debt.

Brittany Deer:

Yeah. So now I’m like, oh my gosh, how awesome is that? Like, how cool is that? That is available to me, and it’s so interesting because people differentiate it. When they think of debt, it’s like, oh, it’s okay to have a mortgage because you have to have a roof over your head. It’s like that debt’s good, but this debt is bad.

Elizabeth: Credit card debt.

Brittany Deer:

Yeah, or something else. I’m like, it’s all debt that’s neutral too, because debt is money. So, it’s just a really fascinating conversation to have and then talking about it is so crucial because if we don’t talk about it, then it’s never going to change.

Nothing is ever going to change, if we just continue to say, I’m not going to talk about money in this house, or I’m not going to talk about politics in this house, or I’m not going to talk about what our religion or anything. And when you say, like all of the topics, cause I always say there’s religion, there’s politics, there’s money, and there’s sex.

Those are the things that nobody talks about. And I’m the person that I’m like, can we just talk about all four of them right now? All of them, please. Because I’m so fascinated and curious about all of these taboo topics, that’s a learning thing is.

Yes, it’s sometimes difficult to get to your place yourself to a neutral space when you’re very passionate about something, I get that. But the key is, how could I be curious about this person’s thoughts, about politics, or about religion, or about money? Like, how can I be curious? Because that’s the only way that you can find out things about yourself that you never realized. And I always say that I tell my clients, one of the best ways for them to learn things about themselves in terms of money is to listen to other people talk about money.

Elizabeth: Hmmm, tell me more.

Brittany Deer:

I call it campfire talk. Everybody’s sitting around a campfire, and they’re talking about all the things and let’s bring up some hot topics right now.

They’re talking about all of the money that is being given out in the U S right now, okay. I literally sit there, and I listen and I’m like, what is my brain doing right now? What am I thinking? What is my body feeling? How am I feeling? Am I feeling uncomfortable? And I feeling tense and I feeling like, I’ve got to say something. What am I doing?

I’m curious, I’m not firing back at whatever so-and-so is saying around the campfire. I’m literally investigating internally. It is the most and the easiest way that you can have awareness around your own money story. I understand it takes a little bit of practice because sometimes our brain wants to say, I got to say something right now, or I got to chime in, but if you can learn to sit and watch.

Your brain and your body, you are going to learn so much about yourself and then you’re going to be practicing, not allowing other people’s thoughts about money or religion or politics or anything to trigger you so much.

Elizabeth:

Well, right. And so often, we just feel like we need to change other people’s opinions and that’s never going to happen.

Brittany Deer:

Yeah, oh yeah. I tried that for 10 years. If anybody’s wanting to know, I tried to do that for my husband, and it didn’t work. So, I actually tried to change him. I literally thought, oh yeah, I can change him. I can change the way he thinks about everything, I could just change him as a person.

Unfortunately, that’s not how that works, but I can change myself and I can change what I think about him. And I can change what I think about money, and I can do whatever he says about money, I can always change my thoughts about that. That’s always available to me.

Elizabeth:

Yeah, you brought up stay at home moms a little bit ago, and I want to go back there because one thing that I know that I’ve had this experience before, even though I’m not a stay at home mom and never have been a stay-at-home mom, but there was a period of time when my salary was very unequal to my husband.

And so, I noticed this conversation coming up with a lot of my clients in terms of their money or them not feeling like they have money because they are not quote unquote earning money, whereas their husband is. So, let’s talk about that dynamic a little bit. And what do you think about that?

Brittany Deer:

I’m going to give my unfiltered thoughts here. It fires me up, because we’ve created that as humans. We’ve created a world where it’s a problem, we don’t encourage women to make money first off, and then, we shame them for staying at home with children, which is by far the hardest job in the entire world to be a stay-at-home mom.

And then these women feel inadequate to spend the money because it’s not their money. you could be in a 20 year marriage. I don’t care what it is and there are still women out there that think it’s his money and not mine because I don’t make it. And we have just created that as a society because we just don’t encourage women to have a relationship with money that they love or whether it’s theirs or not.

Especially in a marriage we differentiate it, and that is not a, I decided this for myself, it is a society thing. So, everyone needs to know that is something that society has created, not that, each in the vigil person has decided for their own money beliefs. And we carry that down, we just continue to carry that.

That’s another huge area of where money beliefs come from is external or society. What other people say about money? Oh, that might be, I should probably do that.

But, in order for them to move forward, from thinking it’s his, they need to ask themselves, what is it that I want to think? What is it that I want to feel? And how do I want to approach this relationship? How do I want to start creating a new relationship with money? Because in addition to the money itself, it creates lack of self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, feeling inadequate, feeling like they’re not doing anything, that they’re not contributing.

I see it. I actually was just with someone who is a stay at home mom as well. And she was just talking about this. And I hear words like, my husband is frustrated because I’m not making money. So then, it becomes this thing that comes between the two, right? Because we put so much pressure that it’s a problem because you decided to be a stay at home mom.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Brittany Deer:

There’s so many options in terms of if you want to make money, okay then, let’s figure out what you can do to make money. But it creates that relationship, when you’re a stay-at-home mom with money creates so much internal problems that we don’t see in the moment because we’re busy raising children, literally.

That takes so much time that you’re not even recognizing, and I can relate to this because like I said, for 10 years, I didn’t have the awareness at for a whole decade of what I was doing internally with money. And I was so busy raising children. I was working outside of the home, but if you don’t recognize it, you don’t know because you’re so close to the problem.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. And there seems to be like this power struggle. I know that in my relationship with my husband, that there was a period of time when we were making equal money. And then I left my corporate job to do personal training and that created this huge. Decrease of income and to pick up the slack around the house, because I wasn’t working as much.

I decided that I was going to take on all of the chores and then, we started having this resentment weird thing going on because I wasn’t making enough money. And yet I was resentful for what he wasn’t doing around the house and yeah, it creates this really weird dynamic between the two, where both people then are looking at each other saying you’re not doing enough appreciating what each one is bringing to the table.

Brittany Deer:

Isn’t that fascinating because you don’t really realize that it’s not the money, right? Like, we know now that it’s not the actual money, but isn’t it fascinating how that dynamic starts happening in you’re like, “wait, what’s happening here? Oh, it’s the money!” So then, money gets blamed, right?

So, if money is the problem, then you start having all of that emotion around the money itself. The resentment, the blame, the shame, that all of the things. It’s so fascinating just to think about it because you’re like, “oh, why we’re having this resentment towards each other. Our brain wants to say it’s because of the money.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. That’s so fascinating to think up. So, what can people do to start getting out of this, or start noticing this start changing their relationship with money?

Brittany Deer:

Okay, I want to do this. I want to think about it in the way because I know you’re people talk a lot about food and nutrition and all of that. You’re going to do the exact same thing. You’re going to start having the awareness, right? Of like, ” Okay, what am I eating? What is it that I am consuming right now?

In terms of your money beliefs, what am I consuming? What do I already know? Well, I know that a banana is probably better than a cheeseburger, right? Just collecting data. And so, the first piece is the awareness piece, but you first have to know, what the facts are?

I always say, there’s money, there’s your thoughts, and then there’s the math. The math is, money is very simple, it’s just all of our thoughts that are always so simple. Their first thing is just to start questioning that, to say okay, maybe it’s fun for you to think about, what did my parents teach me? What is it that my parents taught me about money? What is it that I may be learned in my adulthood? What is it that I learned in school? Just start exploring.

Elizabeth:

So, what are some of those phrases that I grew up with? Like, money is the root of all evil and money grow on trees and those kind of phrases that we keep hearing over-and-over-and-over. Okay, good.

Brittany Deer:

Yeah. And then, noticed that the thing for me that helped me the most was, I actually started with how I felt. And because, I didn’t always know what I was thinking when it came to money, but I always knew that when I was overwhelmed, pressured, stressed, sometimes a little anxious that I was probably having some sort of thought about current money situation.

And so, just questioning your emotions, what is it right now? Am I feeling stressed because we’re feeling a little tight on money, or this is actually a real thing, am I making a lot of money right now? And I feel really uncomfortable.

It can go both ways. So, when I talk about money, I’m not talking about people like my story, legit struggled paycheck to paycheck. I work with some people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars and still feel inadequate and still feel very stressed when it comes to money. It’s because of our thoughts and that’s how we know it, right?

Like, I can feel very stressed and have no money. I can also feel very stressed and have a lot of money, and that’s even more factual how we can prove that money is neutral.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. So, it’s the capacity to have, and so, when you have a lot of money and yet you don’t have money, like the same phenomenon for someone who loses weight, but then gains it all back. They don’t have the capacity to be at that lower weight because is that an identity thing?

Brittany Deer:

For sure. They’ve never been a thin person, right? Or I had to teach myself how to be a person with money, took me months.

I’ve never in my entire life, including my childhood. I have never been someone that has had what I would consider had money.

And that took me months to learn how to do that. I actually hit around; I want to say it was like 50 to 75,000. So, in my corporate job, I probably made around 40 to $45,000 a year. And it was probably around 50 to $75,000 in my business. I legit freaked out, I did not know how to comprehend that I produced that. That I knew how to create that, that was me.

And that was just who I was as a person. And I became that person and it took me months and it still is a work because my husband, the end of 2019, I actually always thought he would be an entrepreneur before I would. But in 2019, he finally went out on his own. He’s a contractor. And so, he’s had a very successful business since the end of 2019. And now it’s two things, we have two successful businesses. And it was like, oh my gosh, my dream has happened and holy-crap, right?

Elizabeth: I don’t know what to do with this.

Brittany Deer:

Yes. So, it’s a process. You have to teach yourself how to be that person. I can’t expect myself to know how to do that, if I’ve never done that. If I’ve never been the person with money, I can’t expect myself to know how to operate with lots of money.

That’s goes to, when people win the lottery. And they win millions and then it like banishes, it’s because they’ve never had millions of dollars. They’ve never taught themselves how to appropriately be that person.

And so, it’s a journey, it’s a process of teaching yourself how to do that. The same way with food, teaching yourself how to be a person that feeds yourself what you want, in order to have the results that you want.

Elizabeth: Right.

Brittany Deer:

Or learning how to be the person that is 50 pounds lighter, whatever that is.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love how we came full circle; this is beautiful. Okay so, Brittany tell everyone where they can find you?

Brittany Deer:

Yeah, you can go to my website, which is brittanydeer.com, and I think you’ll put it in the show notes, but it’s BRITTANY and then DEER, just like an animal, dot com and you can also listen to my podcast, which is money mindset coaching for coaches. I am actually getting ready to start it back up. It’s been on a hiatus for about, I don’t know, a month or so. Someone hacked into my podcast.

Elizabeth: Oh, no.

Brittany Deer:

All of the things, it’s been fun. I’ve been able to get caught up on some content and stuff. So, some fun stuff will be coming out, but there’s a couple of dozen episodes for people to start listening to. Which will also help them hit their money goals, or just start thinking differently about money. And what is so fun to me is, the work that you do, and the work that I do, there are so parallel. So, anything that I talk about on my podcast, they can literally just remove the money piece of it and insert nutrition or food or weight.

Elizabeth: Body, yeah.

Brittany Deer:

And utilize it, so it’s just that much more fun to me when you can take it and use it in a totally different area of your life.

Elizabeth:

Yeah, and now, do you only work with folks one-on-one, or do you have any groups or anything like that?

Brittany Deer: I am still one-on-one for the rest of 2021.

Elizabeth: Oh, can’t wait what happens in 2022.

Brittany Deer: I’ll just say that.

Elizabeth:

Awesome. Alright, thank you for being here and imparting so much great information. Thank you so much.

Brittany Deer: You’re so welcome. And thank you this has been fun.

Hey there! Thanks for listening!

If you’re a woman who is done with dieting, but still wants to lose weight, I want to invite you to join me in the Feel Good Sisterhood.

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