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Episode 269: Money Is Avoiding You Because You’re Hiding
How many times today did you think about putting yourself out there, pitching, posting, sending the email, and then didn’t? That gap between thinking about visibility and actually doing it isn’t a discipline problem. It’s your body trying to protect you.
There are two fears running the show underneath “I’m just busy,” and only one of them is loud enough to notice. Here’s what’s actually happening, and why it’s tangled up with money more than you’d think.
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- The Unstoppable Experience – https://aimeecerka.com/unstoppable
- Cashflow Unlocked – https://aimeecerka.com/cashflowunlocked
- FREE Cashflow Calculator – https://aimeecerka.com/cashflow
- Instagram – https://instagram.com/aimeecerka
- Podcast Links – https://aimeecerka.com/podcastlinks
Your Fear of Being Seen Is Tangled Up With Money
How many times today did you think about putting yourself out there, and how many times did you actually do it? If there’s a gap between those two numbers, you’re not undisciplined. You’re protected.
There are two fears usually running the show underneath “I’m too busy to post,” and only one of them gets talked about.
The Fear Everyone Names: Cancel Culture
The loud fear is obvious: say the wrong thing, one wrong move, and you’re done. It’s real, and it makes sense that your nervous system treats it as a threat. Your body doesn’t automatically know the difference between an actual danger and a risk to your reputation. It reacts the same way either way, so it pulls you toward safety, which usually means staying quiet.
The Fear Nobody Names: Can You Handle It Working?
The quieter fear runs underneath: what if you got visible and it actually worked? The client showed up. The demand hit. Could you handle it? This one connects directly to capacity, and it explains why some people avoid visibility even when they say they want more clients. If part of you doesn’t believe you could handle the result, you won’t be a match for it, and you’ll find ways to avoid finding out.
What You Do Instead
When either fear is running the show without you noticing, you find something else to do. Reorganizing a file system. Tweaking an offer that didn’t need tweaking. Another coaching call that feels productive because there’s a dopamine hit attached to “doing the thing,” even when the thing you’re doing isn’t the visible thing you actually need to do.
None of this is a discipline problem. It’s avoidance wearing a productivity costume.
The Tool That Actually Worked
Most tracking systems fail because they ask you to remember something you’re actively avoiding thinking about. The fix that worked: a simple activity tracker paired with a vibration-only phone alarm as a prompt to log what actually happened that day, not what you meant to do. A history view at the end of the week shows the real pattern, not the story you’ve been telling yourself about how busy you’ve been.
Why This Is Actually About Money
Somewhere in entrepreneurship, rejection gets tangled up with worth. Someone saying no to your offer has nothing to do with your value as a person. But the fear of being seen is tangled up in how you feel about money and power, and when you stay invisible, it’s not just your business that stalls. It’s the people who need exactly what you have to say, and don’t get it, because you didn’t show up.
When you avoid visibility, you avoid the thing most directly tied to your revenue. And when you’re avoiding money, money tends to be avoiding you right back.
Hiding Is a Muscle. So Is Showing Up.
This isn’t a one-time fix. Even after years of consistent visibility, it’s possible to slide back into hiding, and that’s not failure. It’s a muscle that gets rebuilt the same way it was built the first time: by noticing, and by doing the thing anyway.
Key Takeaways
- The gap between thinking about visibility and doing it isn’t a discipline problem. It’s your body trying to protect you.
- There are two fears at play: the loud one (rejection, cancel culture) and the quiet one (could you handle it if it worked?).
- Busy work that feels productive is often avoidance in disguise.
- Rejection of your offer has nothing to do with your worth as a person.
- Fear of being seen and your relationship with money are directly connected. Avoiding one usually means avoiding the other.
If You’re Ready to Go Deeper
The Cash Flow Calculator is a free, five-minute assessment that shows you which pattern, visibility or otherwise, is having the biggest impact on your cash flow right now: https://aimeecerka.com/cashflow
For a deeper standalone dive on the avoidance patterns that block momentum, Cashflow Unlocked is available as a workshop: https://aimeecerka.com/cashflowunlocked
And if you’re ready for full support across your money systems, mindset, and momentum, that’s what the Unstoppable Experience is built for: https://aimeecerka.com/unstoppable
Below is the full transcript of the episode, where I walk through this in more depth.
The Gap Between Thinking and Doing
How many times today did you think about putting yourself out there? Pitching yourself for a collaboration, posting a reel, making a post in general, sending the email, recording the thing, shining your light. But how many times did you actually do it?
That gap between thinking about visibility and actually doing it, that’s what we’re getting into today. Because it’s rarely just one fear. Maybe it’s not necessarily a time thing either. There’s usually two things showing up.
The loud one: cancel culture, one wrong move and you’re done for. And then there’s a quieter one underneath, that fear, like, if you actually got visible and it worked, could you handle what comes next?
Both of those are your body trying to keep you safe. Neither of them are a productivity or discipline problem. So instead, we find something else to do. You reorganize your Google Drive or tweak that offer, busy work that feels productive right up until you hit that, “I am so frustrated, I’m not getting the results that I want,” or the results that we say we want.
So if you’ve ever caught yourself doing everything except the one visible thing that you know you need to do, this one’s for you.
This is Money Simplified, the podcast where I help female entrepreneurs go from stress and struggle to unstoppable with money. Money is more than just budgeting and P&Ls, and we’re going to take you through all of it. Here, we blend proven financial strategy with mindset work and energetic alignment, so you can create unstoppable finances, build an unstoppable business, and truly enjoy your unstoppable life.
It’s time to take my wisdom and my expertise to help you simplify money and go beyond the numbers. I’m your host, Aimee Cerka. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
Why We All Say This
Welcome back to another episode. Today, we are talking about visibility, and I know all the business coaches right here probably said, “Hey, if I had a dollar for every time somebody’s like, ‘I just need to be in front of more people, I need to be more visible, I need to have a bigger audience,'” like, they would be able to not work ever again just because of that.
Because we’ve all said it. Like, myself included. It’s like, “I just need to be in front of more people. This isn’t working,” all the things. We want to be visible. You know that you want it. But are you actually doing the things to shine your light so that you can be visible?
Because often what I found is the visibility thing is the thing that keeps sliding to tomorrow. It’s like, “I’ll get it done,” because we stay busy. We’re all busy, but staying busy isn’t the same as doing the thing that would actually move your business forward. So if you’re avoiding visibility while taking action everywhere else, it’s not a time problem, it’s not a discipline problem, it’s your body protecting you.
The Activity Tracker Story
So, seriously, think about it. In the last week, if you had to, we can just ballpark it, how many times do you think you thought about being visible, and how often did you actually do something about it?
I built a pretty cool tracker, and I might share it with my Unstoppable Experience members. Because I’ve gone through different systems, different productivity systems. I’ve had paper trackers, which I technically still have over here, because I liked seeing the progress. I’ve done electronic trackers. I’ve done different apps, all the things, but I was like, “I’m just not recording.”
So I was having a debrief with my CSO at the end of the quarter. I put these things in place, but I couldn’t tell you how many times I posted my story. I could tell you how many sales emails I’ve sent because I could look through my emails. But the different things I was tracking, I didn’t necessarily have those numbers as handy as I would like, and I’d tried different things, and this just wasn’t working. So we worked through a solution.
What we did is we coded an artifact within Claude. It’s pinned in a Google Chrome tab, and it’s got my activity tracker in it. The second part we built in is I have an alarm set on my phone, vibration only, so if I’m doing something it’s not a problem. It’s like, “Anchor in, record what you did for the day.”
Because I would forget in the moment. I’m busy, I’m working. I’ve sent emails, checked in with clients, recorded things, posted things. So I’m not sitting here, and every time I’ve done something, picking up my phone and going, “What did I do again?” But at the end of the day, when I’m looking through, it’s like, “Did I send a sales email today? No, I didn’t, but I had that conversation with that client about upgrading. Did I post to my stories? Oh yeah, I did. Was there a podcast episode that went live?” Those are the things, and I just tap it and it records it for me.
So we needed the easy, simple thing on my phone, not the elaborate apps I kept trying, but I also needed the alarm to go off to remind me to actually do the thing. I’ve set it up so I can snooze it, about five times every 15 minutes, because it goes off at 10:00 and sometimes I’m not done with my day by then.
It’s also got a history tab built in, so I can see what I’ve done for the week and for the month. Real example: prepping for this episode this morning, working with my CMO, I don’t do a script, I do more of an outline with talking points. I had an idea this morning for a reel, and I hadn’t recorded it yet. I put it off. I’ve recorded it now, before I recorded this podcast episode, but I put it off. We all do this, including me. It’s not that you’re not special, it’s that you’re not alone. This is something we all deal with.
The First Fear: Cancel Culture
The first big fear that we brought up was cancel culture. It’s a real thing, and it really kind of goes back to the second fear. At the root, that’s really what we’re afraid of. One wrong move, you’re canceled. You say the wrong thing, and we don’t want to be rejected as people.
I mean, there’s some of us that have a thicker skin, and some of us can handle it. But especially with conditioning that we’ve put on ourselves, hopefully we’re working to decondition and move through that, step back into your power that you’ve always had. But your nervous system registers that as a threat, and I don’t know that it’s necessarily wrong. It’s just becoming aware and handling it, not letting it sabotage you. Because, okay, do I think this is actually a tiger in this moment, or is it actually a cat? Could I handle this if this happens?
The Second Fear: Capacity
Okay, second quieter fear. I think it has to do more with capacity. And this all, I feel like they really all go back to rejection. If you put yourself out there, would you get rejected? Because if you got visible and it actually worked, the client showed up, you would have the demand, could you handle it?
Or are you not set up? Is it going to be too much work? Is it going to create this big mountain of work, and you don’t want that? Or if you can’t handle it, are the clients going to get mad and then want a refund, and then cancel you, and we go back to the whole of that? And this shows up in more than one place. We’re going to go deeper into this when we talk about the receiving capacity pattern.
You’re in a Series
Side note, if you’re new here, we’re going through a series on each of the 16 patterns that I see. And I know 16 sounds like a big number, but they’re small shifts that we need to make. The 16 patterns that I see block or restrict your cash flow. When we tweak these things, you’re set up to unlock your cash flow.
I’ve got a free assessment style tool that I use, that I’ve created for you to go through and uncover which pattern to work on first. It’s called the Cash Flow Calculator. You can grab it, aimeecerka.com/cashflow, or the link will be in the show notes below for you.
Personal Development Isn’t a Checklist
Because if you haven’t gone through the Cash Flow Calculator, that’s going to give you an action plan. This is the pattern that I need to work on first. Because again, we can all fall into some of these patterns to some degree or another at so many different points. It’s something that happens because we’re human. We’re having a human experience.
This, finances, money, energetics, mindset, all of those things, it is not a checklist. It’s not like, “Go register your car. Check.” You’ve got to do it again. Isn’t it Zig Ziglar who talks about personal development being something we have to do daily, just like we shower daily? We’ve got to do personal development. We’ve got to work on our money. We’ve got to work on the energetics. We have to energetically take a bath because we pick up things.
Busy Work in Disguise
So when either fear is running the show and you’re not aware, you find something else to do. Again, we go reorganize something, we tweak it, we find busy work. But you feel like you’re being productive. You’re getting stuff done. There’s something on there.
Another popular one I’ll see happen is we’ll get on, like we’re in coaching containers, Zoom call after Zoom call. Now, I know so many of us are just like, “I am done with Zoom calls. Do not put another call on my calendar. I don’t need it.” But there’s definitely a dopamine hit that comes from, “Hey, I’ve been on the call, I’ve been doing the thing, I’m working on the business.” But are you really? And there is totally value in that, learning and improving yourself and all those things. But again, everything in moderation.
Are we doing this because this is what we want to do, or are you doing this because you’re running away from something else? Because we’ll feel productive right until we have the meltdown about not getting the results we say we want. And I say “we say we want,” because if internally, at a subconscious level, you’re like, “Heck no, if this happens, I’m not going to be able to handle this,” again, you will energetically be the match for that.
Feel It, Don’t Bypass It
But this isn’t about never having the fear. Again, human experience, fears are going to come up. It’s what do you do when you show up? Are you aware of it? Are you catching it? “Hey, oh, I’m avoiding this.” Kind of like I did with the reel. And I had to laugh when I was putting together this outline for this episode. I was like, “I’m doing this right now.” I know it, but I went and did the thing.
Feel the emotion. We’re not bypassing it. Let yourself feel it, and then we can move it. And again, this is a lot of the work we do inside the Unstoppable Experience. This is more of a behind-the-scenes one. We don’t have standalone programs on this part because we need the integration work, the “let’s lock arms and do this inside Money Mastery Academy and the Unstoppable Experience.”
Rejection Has Nothing to Do With Your Worth
But here’s the thing I kind of want to leave you with. Somebody saying no, they don’t want your program, they don’t like what you have to say, has nothing to do with your worth. You’re worthy because you’re worthy. You’re worthy as a human being. It has nothing to do with your worth.
And somewhere along the way, when we dive into entrepreneurship, because we don’t really do this as W-2 employees, we somehow correlate it. The fear of being seen is tangled up in how we feel about money and power and ourselves. So every time you’re staying invisible, it’s not just your business that stalls, it’s the people who do need to hear exactly what you have to say, and they don’t. The people you’re here to help, because you’ve got a mission, you’ve got a purpose. When we stay invisible, when we tie our worth into what people say about us, those people are affected too. It’s not just you.
Hiding Is a Muscle You Can Rebuild
And again, this isn’t something that just goes away. I’ve been doing video now for eight years. And a couple years ago, I slid back into hiding pretty hard. There was a big story I started to tell myself, and I got real comfortable hiding. But it’s a muscle. It gets to be rebuilt. We use the muscles, and you can do it. You can rebuild it again. We can go back to the gym, exercise it out. It’s not failure. It’s just awareness.
So the first thing we need to do is catch ourselves when we’re hiding. Maybe that’s just your note. “Oh, did I hide, didn’t I? Yep, I did. I wanted to do that. I felt called to do that, and I didn’t.”
Cashflow Unlocked Workshop
So what do you have in place, like my nifty little tracker here that we got on the side tangent about, to notice when you’re not doing the things that’ll move the needle? We actually do have a standalone program on this. This is kind of what we talk about in Cashflow Unlocked. I’ll put the link for that in the show notes. It’s a workshop.
Grab the Cash Flow Calculator
But at a minimum, go grab the cash flow calculator. It’s free. It’ll take you about five minutes, and it’s going to show you exactly what area to focus on first. Because if you’re listening to this series going, “Okay, I need to do the bookkeeping, but I don’t have a business budget, I don’t have a personal budget, and yeah, I’m not being visible either,” that’s way too much to put on your to-do list. You’re just going to end up overwhelmed, and again, you’re going to avoid things.
That’s why the Unstoppable Experience is a 12-month experience, to give us the time and space to really shift things. Because what we’ve found is if we avoid our money in one way, we’re avoiding it in other ways. When you’re avoiding money, money is avoiding you. So if we’re going to help you not avoid money, to reclaim your power, to step into your unstoppable power, we’ve got to have the time and space.
So cash flow calculator is my free tool. It shows you what area to focus on first. There’s also a nifty little thing on the results screen. You can send me your results, and we can have a conversation about it, because you don’t have to figure this out alone. That was never the point. You do not have to do this all by yourself. You deserve support. You don’t have to earn it. You can have support now, and you’ve got to believe that.
Remember, you’ve got this, and I’ve got you. We’ll see you next time. Bye for now.
Thank you so much for listening to Money Simplified. My favorite place to hang out is on Instagram. You can find me @AimeeCerka to catch all the behind-the-scenes of my stories. Send me a message to share your biggest takeaway, or just to say hi. I love hearing from podcast listeners.
When you’re ready to take action on your mindset, your money, or the systems behind it all, I’m here for you. Whether you’re snagging a free resource, exploring a mini course, diving into the fundamentals with Money Mastery Academy, getting in-depth support inside the Unstoppable Experience, or scheduling a complimentary bookkeeping consult to finally get hands-on help with your books, your next step is waiting for you.
https://aimeecerka.com/podcastlinks has all the information, and of course, that link is hanging out in the show notes for you. We’ll see you next time.
