Why Broke Feels Safe (And How to Outgrow It)
In December 2023, less than two weeks before my son's wedding, I walked away from a steady corporate paycheck I'd been collecting like clockwork for years.
The timing was, and I'm being generous with myself here, insane. A wedding on the calendar. Another daughter's wedding a year out. And me, standing in the kitchen telling my husband Brett that I wanted to trade two reliable salaries for one, plus a dream and a laptop. Brett, bless him, did the thing he always does. He got very calm and very quiet, which is Brett for "my wife has lost her entire mind and I love her anyway."
Here's why I'm telling you this. If you've ever stayed somewhere that was slowly wrecking you because the alternative felt scarier than the wreckage, this one's for you. By the end you'll know why your brain treats broke like a security blanket and the five-minute daily practice that finally rewires the thing.
The job I loved was trying to kill me
Let me set the scene. I was a project manager at a large corporate consulting firm, leading teams of management and tax consultants all over the country. I loved it. I mean genuinely loved it, the kind of love where you ignore every red flag because the good parts are so good. Six days a week on the road. New city, new team, new problem to crack. I was a small caffeinated tornado in a blazer and heels, and I thought that was the whole personality.
My body, though, had some strong opinions about that schedule.
In 2019, I was working on a long consulting engagement outside Seattle, Washington when I had a massive stroke. A stroke. At work. And do you know what I did about it? I worked from my laptop every one of the five days I sat in that Seattle hospital room. Then I took three weeks off, by which I mean I worked about twenty hours a week from home, before climbing right back onto a full six-day travel schedule, because that's what driven women do, we treat our own bodies like a rental car we can return with the warning lights blinking.
Then in 2021, I was opening a consulting engagement in Deerfield, Michigan, just outside Detroit, when I had a heart attack. Two for two. My cardiovascular system was basically sending me strongly worded letters, and I kept marking them "read later."
And the lifestyle that came with the job I adored? Six days a week of eating like a raccoon with a per diem. Fast food after landing at 11 p.m. because the airport Sbarro was the only thing with a pulse. Hotel breakfast at 5 a.m., where the scrambled eggs have the texture of a yoga mat and you eat them anyway because they're free. My passport was thriving. The rest of me was filing a complaint.
The scariest math I ever did at a kitchen table
So in December 2023, I decided to step away from the travel and maybe, possibly, start something of my own. And the second I said it out loud, the fear showed up like an uninvited cousin at Thanksgiving, loud and certain it knows your finances better than you do.
Brett and I sat down and ran the numbers. Going from two salaries down to one is the kind of math you feel in your stomach long before it ever shows up on a spreadsheet, and that gap had its own gravitational pull that kept tugging at every brave thought I tried to have.
I always say FEAR stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. And on a bad day, let's be honest, it stands for Fuck Everything And Run. But what it should stand for, the version I had to claw my way toward, is Face Everything And Rise.
Because here's what my fear was selling me. Comfort dressed up as survival. The corporate paycheck felt safe the way a too-tight pair of shoes feels safe, you know exactly how much it'll hurt, and there's a strange peace in a familiar ache.
So what does any of this have to do with your business? Everything.
Your brain is doing exactly what it was built to do
Here's what nobody tells you about staying small. When your brain clings to the familiar broke, the familiar grind, the familiar paycheck that's quietly costing you your health, it's performing flawlessly. It's just running software from the Stone Age.
The oldest part of your brain has one job: keep you breathing. It does that by labeling anything familiar as safe and anything new as a threat, because for about two hundred thousand years, the unfamiliar rustle in the bushes was usually something with teeth. That wiring can't tell the difference between a saber-toothed tiger and a sales call. It just knows you survived last year doing what you did last year, so let's run it back. Predictable beats prosperous every time, as far as your lizard brain's concerned.
That's why raising your rates feels like skydiving without the parachute. It's why you "forget" to send the invoice, why you discount before the client even winces, why you white-knuckle a job that's mailing you medical emergencies. Your nervous system reads growth as danger and slams the brakes to save you from a tiger that's been extinct for ten thousand years.
You can't out-hustle a nervous system that's decided your success is a threat. You can read every Profit First book on the shelf and build the prettiest spreadsheet in three counties, and you'll still self-sabotage right on schedule, because your safety setting outranks your strategy every time. And a safety setting answers to one thing only: consistent reps.
The daily practice that rewires the loop
You teach your brain that growth is safe the same way you teach it anything. Small, repeated, on purpose, until the new scary thing becomes the boring familiar thing. I call it the Daily Stretch, and it takes about five minutes.
Here's how it runs.
Name the Fear. Once a day, catch yourself mid-scarcity-reflex and name it out loud. "I'm about to discount this because hearing the word no scares the daylights out of me." "I'm dodging that email because the number feels too big to send." You can't rewire a loop you won't look at. Naming it yanks the decision out of your lizard brain and hands it to the grown-up in the room.
Take one stretch-sized action. Keep it stretch-sized. Send the invoice at full price. Ask for the sale, then zip it and let them answer. Quote the number with no apology stapled to the end. The move has to be small enough that you'll do it scared, because doing it scared is the entire point. That's the consistent rep.
Bank the proof. This is the step everyone skips, and it's the one that does the heavy lifting. After the stretch, write down what happened, because the client said yes and the world kept right on spinning, you made three hundred dollars and the sky stayed exactly where you left it. You're building a case file against your own fear, one entry at a time, and your brain trusts hard evidence far more than it trusts a pep talk. Every entry becomes a receipt, and every one of my scars is a receipt too.
Do that for thirty days and something gives. The flinch gets quieter. The number that terrified you on day one is the number you quote without breaking a sweat on day twenty. You're the same woman you were on day one. You've just shown your nervous system, over and over, that the bushes are empty and the room that pays isn't going to eat you.
The best decision we ever made
I won't pretend the gap closed overnight or that I didn't lie awake doing math in the dark. I did. But I've gotta tell you, leaving was the best decision Brett and I ever made.
My health came roaring back. My mind got sharper than it's been in years. And I've had the wild privilege of building Queen Kong Consulting into something that helps hundreds of business owners every single year. The scary leap didn't cost me my life. The comfortable grind was the thing doing that.
Broke felt safe because you practiced it, so now go practice the brave thing instead.
Come practice the brave thing with us, because rewiring fear sticks a whole lot faster when you've got a room full of people doing the reps right alongside you. Join our free Mindset • Gratitude Challenge community on Skool, where we trade scars, bank the proof, and cheer each other up and out of the recliner. Link: https://www.skool.com/the-30-day-gratitude-challenge-6445
With Grace & Grit, Jo
