Welcome back to part two of our Money Mindset Conversation! Today, I’m sitting down once again with endurance and mindset coach Jennifer Vollmann to dive deep into a topic that so many of us try to avoid: our relationship with debt.

Debt can feel like a heavy, nasty word that gets instantly tangled up with our personal identity and self-worth. In this episode, Jennifer breaks down why numbers on a computer screen feel so personal, how shame can completely freeze our business progress, and how we can systematically rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about what we owe. We also discuss a powerful concept that got Jennifer to the Ironman World Championships: borrowing belief from a coach or mentor until you can build your own evidence.

Numbers are Neutral: A figure like $50,000 is just data on a screen. It doesn't have power until your brain attaches a narrative to it.

The Danger of Shame: Shame is the ultimate stalling emotion. When we internalize debt as a personal failure, we freeze, avoid the numbers, and stop taking action.

The Micro-Action Formula: Overcoming financial overwhelm starts with taking one small action within 24 hours to give your brain immediate feedback and build proof.

Borrowing Belief: When you can’t see a path to financial freedom yourself, it is entirely okay to borrow the unwavering belief of your coach or mentor while you take the initial steps.

Jennifer explains how quickly our brains assign meaning to a number. Seeing a credit card balance or loan statement triggers an immediate thought (e.g., "This is too big"), which creates an emotion (overwhelm), drives a behavior (stalling/avoidance), and reinforces the original negative result.

Are you prone to freezing, over-delivering to overcompensate, or falling into the compare and despair trap? We look at how our internal debt stories sabotage other parts of our businesses—like stopping us from pricing our services at what we are actually worth.

I share a powerful exercise I use with my own coaching clients: writing down every single piece of debt with absolute honesty. No hiding, no lying to yourself. Putting a name and a number to everything on a single piece of paper stops the energy suck of the numbers swirling endlessly in your head.

Jennifer and I discuss how she used borrowed belief from her athletic coach to train for Kona before she ever believed it was possible herself. We talk about how to apply this to your finances—using the proof of a system or a coach's belief in you as a stepping stone to take action.

"Somebody with $50,000 in debt might feel it’s not a problem at all, while somebody with $5,000 in debt is completely crushed by it every single day. The debt is just a neutral circumstance. It is just a monetary figure. You get to decide what the story is."

"If you find yourself in deep shame with debt, the first thing to do is see if you can get to a slightly better thought. Even reminding yourself, 'Good people also have debt,' helps disconnect your intrinsic self-worth from your ability to run a business."

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