Episode 62: Break Free From Your Money Blocks To Unleash Your Income Potential (guest Dr. Amanda Barrientez from NFA Money)

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In this episode, we are exploring the topic of money blocks and how they can limit your income potential. You are probably plagued by them at some level. It takes a concentrated effort to break-free from these blocks, to live an authentically abundant life.

What are your beliefs when it comes to money? How do these beliefs manifest in your business? To discuss this, we are joined by Dr. Amanda Barrientez, who is the host of the Max Potential Money podcast. Amanda works with coaches and online entrepreneurs, through her NFA Money programs, where she helps them align their energy, mindset and systems to make more money doing what they love.

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From the Episode:

Heather: “Dr. Amanda Berrientez welcome to get the balance right podcast.”

Amanda: “Woo hoo! I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.”

Heather: “This is a thrill for me because you found me, but then I discovered you and I've been just consuming your content, like crazy. I think it's really fabulous. for the people in the audience who don't know, you tell a little bit about yourself.”

Amanda: “First of all. Thanks. And I do, I love the way that we just randomly meet people in this business world. And especially in podcasting world, there's so many cool people and I get to amazing conversations. A little bit about me, my company name is NFA Money, which I didn't ask if it's okay to swear."

Heather: “It is okay; and I do want to ask you about that. So she's got the F bomb in the name of her business. Pretty daring, I think for the whole financial world, but I think it's cool. So yeah, you can drop the F bomb if you want okay. Take it away, Amanda.”

Amanda: “Okay. Awesome. Yeah. So my company name is NFA, no f*cking around money. And people ask me all kinds of questions about it. And often they just say, I'm NFA about everything. I do like NFA, joy, NFA fun. And if they flow and the manifesting NFA business, NFA money, and I actually, before it was called NFA coaching.

And so if you didn't know the NFL or what that stood for it, might've been confusing to people. And in the last year, Pulled all of my people that I had in my community. And I said, what's the number one thing that you really want. If you could get one result for me. And they like to make more money in my business.

And so I thought, you know, this perfect time to brand, to NFA money. And so I take it really seriously because I started my journey on food stamps. And I really know what it feels like to struggle and feel scared and feel stuck and think that you're going to be in that space forever. And then realize that oh my God, money-making is just a skill that you can learn.

And then you can grow your wealth and change your whole reality. That's the big overarching parts of my story. And so now I help entrepreneurs make more money more easily.”

Heather: “Wow. And you have quite an extensive educational background. It looks like you were not only. In graduate school, but you are also a teacher as well, looked at your LinkedIn page. Can you go into that a little bit?”

Amanda: “I went to back to grad school as an adult, I actually took my first two years of my bachelor's, out of high school. And then I got pregnant, dropped out of school and had three kids. And then in my later years, our finances were always very unstable. And I was like, I cannot stand this.

My husband ex-husband who's now one of my dear friends was an entrepreneur and just not a super great entrepreneur. And Mostly a stay at home. Mom, always trying to get businesses off the ground. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to go back to school.

So I went back and finished my undergrad in psychology and then went straight into a PhD program thinking, oh, this will be one of the most stable money-making things I can do And in the course of it, so many things happened. I got divorced went on food stamps, had some massive personal fallout, had an affair left my 15 year marriage having an affair, next relationship, not working out, facing homelessness with my three kids and just going oh my God, I got to fix myself. And simultaneously we had all this departmental fallout and I was like, I don't want to go into academia. This is super high stress, people aren't making very much money, you don't get to really teach everything you want to teach. And so I loved teaching. I got to teach over 2,500 students at CU Boulder. Throughout my graduate career. And I realized how much I loved it. And I thought what if I could bring what I know to the world and switch it into a more coaching model instead of the academic model and make unlimited amounts of money and live where I want to live and all those things.

So then I took the leap and in my first year of business, I ended up going six figures.”

Heather: “That's great. And I know that you first started off with generalized coaching, or maybe you can expand on that more. I think it was more business coaching, but then now you're really focused on the money aspect of it. I think from your background being that you were on food stamps, you had some tough times that you can really understand where people are coming from with their story, with their money story, their money past.

I know mentioned in your coaching, money was the thing that people talked about the most that they really wanted help with. Was there something about that in particular that really , struck a nerve for you? Was it your background?”

Amanda: “I would say that why it's impactful to me and why I love to help people with it is because it's such a tangible, outer representation of what's going on inside. when I think of money blocks and when I think of money in general, it's the tangible expression of your subconscious.

I always tell people, your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. So if you don't like what you're getting on the outside, then you got to start working on what's within. And when I started working with people and realizing every single person, I don't care how much money they made, I don't care what their gender or race class, any of it, what type of business they all had money blocks. And it was really easy for me dig into their money story, to understand where their charges were around, blocking their business building, because it'd be things like self worth and imposter syndrome, shiny object syndrome fear of feeling like they're a bad person for charging money for what they're doing sales fears, and they were all related to money.

It was an easy thing to start to shine a light on and have quick shifts. So that was a big part of it. And then of course, yes, because I had my own personal experiences of a lot of money challenges and then realized that it didn't have to be that way. I was like, oh, this is something that everybody needs to learn.”

Heather: “I work as a money coach as well, and from a different aspect because I'm a CPA, so it's a different type of money coaching, but it all starts with, even if we're working on the budget, it always starts with mindset and we have to figure out where their mindset is so that we can change behaviors.

So I'm super excited about this topic today, because we're going to talk about. Three blocks, mental blocks that people have. That's keeping them from making more money in their business. these three blocks, assuming that they're on the broad scheme of things, but can you explain what those three things are?

And then we'll break them down one by one.”

Amanda: “Yep. Awesome. First let's say money blocks. When I define it for people, I came up with the term I saw across the board with everybody. I was working with that they had what I call competing commitments. And what that means is when you're battling your conscious and your unconscious. So 95% of us is run by our unconscious.

Which is awesome if it's set up for success, but really holds you back. If it's not set up for success and most people's subconscious behaviors are not because we get all these belief downloads when we're little. And then we start to look to our surroundings to confirm that what we believe is true. And then we actually create more of that to our reticular activating system arrests, our brain.

Sure what we believe consciously and unconsciously to prove that it's true. And so we keep repeating the same stories over and over and the same cycles and the same outcomes. I kept seeing this where people would say, I want to build a six-figure business, but then they wouldn't take action. And it's okay, there's some discrepancy there.

And so I call that Competing Commitments™, because it's like you're battling against yourself. And the 95% unconscious part is always going to win. So you've got to start working on those underlying belief. So money blocks are really just money. Competing commitments. And you know, you have a money block when you don't feel good about money.

I don't care what amount it is. I don't care what's going on in your money world. It's if you have any stress around money, you have a money block, right? Otherwise you feel abundant. It's flowing. It's growing. You feel great. Then your money block free. The interesting thing is that I've never met a person who doesn't have money blocks and you will cycle through them in new and different ways as you break through to new levels of yourself, because you'll explore and uncover new unconscious parts of yourself.

So an example of this would be, let's say you start your business and he breaks through the imposter syndrome, money blocks, and then you start to be able to promote yourself and make some more money. And then you get to a certain level of money and you self-sabotage. All kinds of different things and you can see oh, I just reached a new ceiling and now I have a new money block to uncover under these top three that I've discovered everyone that I worked with experiences.

I gathered these through having all my entrepreneurs, write money stories, and then seeing the overlaps in the patterns and then starting to talk to people about it. And they're like yes., this the top three and you're exactly right. It's, they're very overarching paradigm beliefs.

And then there's a whole bunch of different thoughts beneath them. The top three are money is bad. Money is scarce and money, pause and stress. Money is bad. Will look like you thinking it's not right to make money doing what I love because it's spiritual. Like healers often have this where they're like, I was given this gift. I shouldn't charge a lot of money. So they feel bad thinking like money is somehow bad. I'm bad. If I charge too much money could be the root of all evil. You could have been taught that, it's not spiritual to be rich, things like that. So that's a pretty common one. Money is scarce would look like there's never enough or there's always just enough. There's not an abundance of money. And this shows up in people, even when they make a lot of money in their business, them feeling really stressed and working a lot to make sure it never goes away. I see this a lot with people who break through, let's say they break through six figures and they're burnt out.

And they can't get to the next level because they keep thinking like, oh my God, I'm going to have to figure out how to keep this up all the time. And it's just overwhelming. And then the money causes stress could look like you're avoiding looking at money because somewhere in your blueprint, you got the belief that money causes a lot of stress. So money's a lot of responsibility. It could be that you saw your parents fighting about money a lot, or they worked a lot or worked really hard for their money. And so you have this coding in your brain like, oh my God, money causes stress. So you want to avoid it, which means, let's say you don't look at your P and L.

If you don't look at your P and L you don't know your highest ROI activities, which means you're going to be working. Extra hard to keep making the money you're making. It could be that you just avoid it altogether. Like you just, you want someone else to completely deal with it. All of these will lead to self-sabotage and they'll cause you to not feel good around money to have a lot of stress around it.

And then, none of us need to add all of those extra layers of challenge to building our businesses. So I like to help people uncover what they're stuck with at the current moment.”

Heather: “Let's unpack this a little bit. Each one of those, as you were describing them, I could see oh yeah, I'm a little of this. I'm a little that I have a little of this. So is it possible to have a blend of these throughout life or do you normally go in cycles of, this is your problem now, and then you move through them?”

Amanda: “You can definitely have all of them operating at once for sure. And some people will have one really predominantly and they'll break through and they'll notice it shifts to the next and then the next, and then sometimes they'll have all three operating. I would notice more people have less of the money is bad.

They think, I think this was an interesting one because they'll often say money's great. I want as much money as possible, but then I'll hear them say something negative about a rich person. And I'm like yeah, like clearly you, somewhere in you, you think it's bad to be rich because you think that people who are Richard greedy jerks. That would be a money as, a bad block or they'll see, I work with a lot of coaches, so they'll see a really high level coach and there'll be like, must be nice to be that rich type of thing. And you're like, oh yeah, there's some blocks going on because , you can't become what you fear or hate because you're going to subconsciously protect yourself from becoming that. You push the money away so that you don't become one of those bad people that you think is, big for their britches or something like that.

Heather: “If you could actually move away from all three of those, would that look like having an abundant mindset? Is that what you would define that as.”

Amanda: “Definitely. I say, when people are aligned in themselves, they're going to have no competing commitments. They're going to have no money blocks. Now, you can live in this state for a period of time until you bump up against the next one. The cool thing about when you do this work and you learn certain strategies, you just move through things a lot faster.

It's not that they don't come. It's just that now you don't have to stay stuck in it for years. Sometimes for people it's years, sometimes months, sometimes weeks. Now I can get stuck with something for an a couple hours and then I'll be like, I feel off what is going on. And then I use my tools and then I can shift really rapidly and go oh, that's what's going on.

It's not that it doesn't come. We're all human and we're all growing. And we all have, quite a bit to work through from our life course.”

Heather: “I've been on your emailing list and every day I've been getting a mantra from you and video with tips, these are all really great. I advise everybody to get on your mailing list. So you get this. And you also talk about in your podcast, the law of attraction, to get out of these three blocks.

Is it a matter of doing mantras law of attraction? Are there some ways that we can bust through these blocks?”

Amanda: “The first thing is to start questioning everything you believe, actually start going, what are my beliefs about money actually first, like most people don't even take the time to go. How did I develop my beliefs about money? They just think They figured it out somewhere and they're just going along very unconsciously yet.

They can't figure out why they don't have any money or the amount of money they want or feel good about it. And then let's say you get partnered or coupled like all of a sudden, then they're amplified because now you've got two people dealing with their money. And so the first thing you want to do is like, where did I get my money beliefs?

What do I believe about money? And just start asking yourself that, and then asking yourself, are these money beliefs supportive or are they helping me get where I want to go? Are they story? Are they truth? And just, play with it a little bit. One of the greatest things you can do. Get conscious and be mindful about why you operate the way you do.

I always tell people, one of my favorite all-time quotes is from Carl Young. And he says, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And when I read that quote, I was like blown away because I thought that this is my whole business right there. We think stuck with these realities and the truth is that you've just bought into certain stories. So first you got to get conscious of them and start to do that work. Read books, about money specifically, often people will come to me and say, I'm really unhappy with money. I'm really stressed about money. I'm like okay, tell me some stuff. You've done a read and they're like nothing. And I go of course you're stuck. That makes sense that you're stuck. Let's start breaking some of that down and just shifting your thinking and because your thoughts create your reality.

Through the law of attraction in ways that are much easier and more complex at the same time than people think. It's not just that you sit on the couch and you think bring me a million dollars. You gotta break down all the reasons why you wouldn't really believe that you're going to get the million dollars.

So if you're sitting on the couch and you're going I wish so much, I had a million dollar. Solve all my problems. What you're probably mostly focusing on is on your fear of not having it and all the debt you have and all the fear around not being able to attract the money. So you think that you're like wishing for the million dollars, but really what you're doing is hyper focusing on all of your fears around not having enough money.

You create more of that through the law of attraction. So I really like to help people shift their brain over time and just remember your brain is a problem solving machine. Whatever you plug into it, that's what it's solving for. If you're plugging in lack, worry, doubt, desperation, fear. It's thinking that's what you live in.

If you're in abundance mindset, there's opportunities everywhere. There are a million ways to make a million dollars mantras that idea of like retraining your brain in a new direction. it's strategic, you know, it's not just yay. We like the airy fairy idea of mantras. It's let's retrain our brain in the direction of our success.”

Heather: “If people wanted to bring this idea of abundance to them and use the law of attraction, I know you had mentioned on one of your podcasts and probably not going to quote you correctly, so please correct me that you put it out there and you don't worry about how it's going to come to you. You just put that idea out into the universe. Can you explain it?”

Amanda: “Yeah. Yeah. I love That you're saying this because it sounds so simple and it's one of the hardest things for people to do, you know? cause we want to hyper control when we're scared. We want to be like, I need a plan because the plan makes us feel safe and comfortable, but the power of manifesting it's in three steps.

You get really clear on what you want. You take action in the direction and then you let the universe take care of all the details of it. Now, most people get stuck at every level, the first level, they don't even know what they want. A lot of times they're limiting what they want by what they've been able to get in the past.

So they're scared to even put out there what they want unconsciously. Usually they'll say of course I know what I want, but when you really dig in and they're like, God, I'm not really allowing myself to even say what I want or believed that it's possible. So that's a place, to do some mindset work around and then taking action.

You don't have to know the answers. You just take the first step. And the rest will start to unfold for you, that was a big one for me because I was a big planner. That's why grad school was easy in a way for me, because it was like, oh, you've got the whole thing mapped out.

Every step is already mapped out for you. And, I can't say grad school was easy, but it was like, the plan was easy to make sure you could get to the end goal. And people in a business are like, oh my God, it's this huge project. I don't even know. And it's because they're thinking about the end game and the end result, instead of going what's my next strategic step, that's it.

That's all you need to know. And you need to take action every day and be dedicated and committed. And I'd Say like, that's your gift to the universe and the universe brings back opportunities for you. So it's like your win-win exchange with the universe. You're like, I want this, I'm taking action.

Now bring me some opportunities. And that's what happened. Now, if you let go of the hows what that means is that. Sure you can have a plan. Just don't be so like attached to it. Oh my God, it has to happen this way. And I tell people all the time, I see this with myself and the people that I get to work with.

You have a plan and you take action, but then something happens that you could have never predicted. You could have never created on your own. People come into your, realm and they're like giving you all these opportunities to like, oh my gosh, you're almost like pinching yourself going, like, how did this happen? This is so cool. And it's just that three-step process. That alone can be lifelong work for people.”

Heather: “Wow. I was like, I want to have a money mindset expert on my show, and then you contacted me and I was like, damn it works.”

Amanda: “I love that. That's awesome.”

Heather: “There's lot of people on clubhouse. Now, these days, talking about money, mindset, are you on there?”

Amanda: “Yeah, no, I've gotten on there a few times. I've had people invite me to speak and I've gotten on there and it's been awesome. I have an account. I have not put any energy into growing it and I haven't gotten on there much. I just have so many other fun things in the works at the moment, but I hear people love it.

Heather: “I think you would probably blow up on there! You work mainly with coaches, how did that come about you choosing that niche?”

Amanda: “I work mainly with coaches because I was a coach. I call myself a consultant now. And the only difference being that I do a lot of coaching. I also do training and teaching and mentoring and guiding. And often I just tell people what to do, don't pull it out of them, which is what a coach does in a lot of ways.

I do more multifaceted things, but to me, coaching is one of them. Powerful brilliant, amazing industries that exist. And most coaches have very generous service oriented hearts, which causes a lot of money blocks can cause money blocks because they go, they have that conflict and that competing commitment I'm doing what I love.

Should I be getting paid for doing what I love? How much do I charge? And they have a lot of just common themes like imposter syndrome. Shiny object syndrome and a lack of a plan and not knowing how to structure a business well, so I like to work with coaches because my business model that I can help people with is pretty straightforward in that industry.”

Heather: “When people start using your techniques to get over these money blocks if they do all the things that we were talking about before, how long does it usually take to retrain your brain? Is it like 20 day type thing? 30 days, six months? How long does it usually take?”

Amanda: “That's a great question. In habits research, there is a really common one known as the 66 day mark. The funny thing is when you dig into that research, it's it wasn't done on very many people. Funny the way that came about, but I will say it depends. It depends on how ingrained that thought is in your mind.

So I like to think about your paths of least resistance in your brain is like sled Hills. So imagine you're going down a sled hill. If you go down it once it doesn't get that tamped down to, into a track. If you go down at a thousand times, it is grooved and you're going to shoot down that thing fast.

I like to tell people that's how you want to think about retraining your brain. All of a sudden, it's going to take time to create new sled Hills. And when you do that you can have a thought and that completely changes everything for you. Then it's practice, right? It's like going, oh, I realized this is what's going on. And then you create the new autopilot behaviors around it and your brain starts going in that direction automatically over time. And for some people it can be very rapid and for other people it might take a year. It might take two. I’m in my third year of business, and I have brakes use all the time still, and I'm just like, wow, I can't believe where I was three years ago and look where I am now. And then I imagine like in three years from now, I'll be blown away by where I was now. And then, I would say it's a lifelong practice.

The cool thing that you'll notice is that all of a sudden you'll have change. That is so lasting. And real in your being and significant entrants, formative that all of a sudden you'll do something so different than you used to do that. You'll be like, oh my God, I've completely changed. So like the new thoughts that I have are now autopilot new thoughts that are much more supportive. I used to beat the crap out of myself internally. Like my inner critic was loud and big. Yeah. Intense. And now it's oh, I can go weeks without inner critic freak out, that's huge.

I would have never thought that'd be possible. And now I'm like, oh, it's a hundred percent possible. And I read a lot. I research a lot. I work with people a lot. This is like my full-time daily life. And so it makes sense that can happen. For everyday people who are like, I just want to get better and better everyday, just practice a little bit every day. And you'll notice changes over time.”

Heather: “That's great. That's really encouraging because I have this inner critic that I'm always battling with myself. So these three money blocks, let's just recap them again. And you have a quiz that will help us uncover which one of these we are. And it generates a report based on the one that you are. Can you explain that a little bit?”

Amanda: “Yeah. Yep. So the three are money is bad. Money is scarce and money causes stress. And it's really quick, it's probably two to three minute quiz. at the end of it, if you get a report and gives you a whole bunch of exercises, it tells you which one you have. And then it also leads you to a webinar that teaches you all three, because you're going to run into all three over your life course.

So it was like, I can't leave you hanging high and dry. , lots of. Information in there. And I'm so excited about this next step. It'll lead helping you do your money story. having a course where people can just go through and do their own money story, because that's the next level of helping you break through your limiting beliefs about money. So super fun.

Heather: “Awesome. That is so cool. All right. You mentioned a few different ways people can work with you, where can they find you on the internet? Maybe they don't want to type in the F word, but they can just type in NFA.”

Amanda: “Yeah.”

Heather: “Yeah, I don't know what might come up.”

Amanda: “True.”

Heather: “So what are the ways that people can work with you find you and where do you hang out on the socials?”

Amanda: “Yeah. Everything handle wise is NFA money. So if they type in NFA money, they'll see all kinds of stuff. That's my website. That'll bring you to my YouTube channel. I am, I'm pretty active on Instagram. I have a big following on LinkedIn. I'm not quite as active there, but they have a lot of people there.

I have a podcast called Max Potential Money. But if they go to my website, everything is there. That'll give them ways to work with me. The money blocks profile, my NFA moneymaker lab, all kinds of things.”

Heather: “The song that is on your podcast, it's kind of jazzy and funky. Where did that come from? That thing is like a worm that gets my head.”

Amanda: “Isn't it. I love it. I love that you say that because when my podcast was named Max Potential Habits, I had a pretty fun one, but then when I rebranded them, like I had this idea in my mind about what I wanted it to be. And it was that it was like, when you hear it, you want to start dancing right away. And it totally does that. So I found it online. Royalty free music site. And the cash register sound is from that. And we combined them together.”

Heather: “Oh, okay. I was going to ask you if you found a song that had that cash register sound in the song, but that's a combo.”

Amanda: “I'm glad you like it. So it's fun feedback. I know when I hear it too, I'm like, I just want to dance. You got to do the money dance when you hear it.”

Heather: “Yeah. And the money high fives where did that come?”

Amanda: “Realistically, I don't know about you, but when I used to create solo videos, I would get stuck on how to end it. all of a sudden I'd be like, oh crap. I didn't think about how to end this. And then it just started, in my emails, I used to always say hugs and NFA fives. It just makes sense. Like NFA, money making, high fives who doesn't want some of that love every day.”

Heather: “Yeah, I love it. That's awesome.

Thank you so much for being on the show. Amanda, this has been really great. you had a lot of information online on your podcast. People should follow, your emails, all of that stuff. And we'll have everything in the show notes.

Amanda, thank you so much for being on the show today.”

Amanda: “Yeah, thanks for having me, Heather. It was awesome.”