Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 0:02
We're going to discuss some hard and challenging truths on the podcast today, and I'm particularly excited, actually. But I'm sure that you already know them. You know these truths in your body, in your bones, because you've lived them. Maybe nobody's ever really pointed them out to you before, I'm going to do that today, because here are some things that I know after working with women for the last 10 plus years. Women are extraordinarily educated. We're ambitious. We're capable. We work really, really hard, and we carry decades of wisdom, experience, intelligence, skill, and insight, and yet so many women are still underpaid and underresourced, financially dependent, or not really fulfilling their full potential. This isn't an accident. You see, women have been trained into a set of survival strategies, cultural strategies that preserve belonging, support families. They protect institutions and they enrich other people while making it extraordinarily difficult for a woman to accumulate power and wealth of our own, you see, women don't actually have a money problem. We have an internal conditioning problem, and today I want to reveal to you five of the lies keeping women broke. But I'm not going to let you live inside the lie. Don't worry, because the good news is, inside of every one of these lies is actually also the way through it. There's not just hope for us. There is a feminine way, a sovereign way, a satisfied way. So listen closely, because you might hear not just these five lies and how you've been living them, but the way through. Welcome to the Satisfied Woman Podcast. I'm your host, Alanna Kaivalia. This podcast is dedicated to helping women lean into their femininity and rediscover the power of their feminine gifts. We take a look at what it means to be a modern woman, and how we can live a satisfied and sovereign life on our own terms. Come visit the hub at thesatisfiedwoman.com, and when you do, I can't wait for you to book a call with me. So on my website, you'll see an opportunity to book your discovery call with me, and you and I will have a chat about exactly what you learned on the podcast today-the five lives that are keeping you broke, and how you and I can find an extraordinary pathway through them to your financial sovereignty and your satisfied life. So head over to thesatisfiedwoman.com, book a call, and I can't wait to talk to you soon. So I want to first define the word broke because I certainly don't want to imply that all women out there are broke. They're not. There are women doing well, but let's define what not having enough or being broke is in terms of this podcast today. Because I don't just mean not having enough money or no money in the bank. I mean being underpaid or undervalued for the work that you do, being under leveraged, overexposed with the ways in which you extend yourself in the world, financially dependent-whether that's on another human like a spouse or a partner, or financially dependent on a job that you hope you get to keep it so you can keep the paycheck-unable to leave-whether that's a relationship, a situation, a career, a job, a community, a family. If you're unable to leave, you do not have the currency to be able to go. Unable to choose to make choices. If you've listened to the last 10 podcasts, and I hope that you have, we're on podcast 60-six today. I can't believe it. There's lots there for you to listen to and catch up on. You'll hear me talking a lot about how money is not just money for a woman. Money equals our choice, our ability to exercise our agency. And if I've learned something in my decades of study of femininity and feminine psychology, the thing that women desire most is the freedom of choice. Another way to define broke for the for today's podcast is also unable to rest. If you can't afford to take time off, if you can't find a way to make time for yourself or self care, broke. Unable to create the life you know you are capable of living. I want that for you. Sister, or if you're carrying enormous value without receiving appropriate financial return that that value should create, you're broke.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 5:11
So women have socially, economically, and psychologically been trained into behaviors, conditions that preserve belonging, maintain families, protect institutions, enrich other people, while simultaneously these behaviors keep us from accumulating our own wealth and power. If we take a look, and we will today, everything that women do that keeps them broke or underleveraged or undervalued or unable to leave or unable to choose is usually propping up someone else or another system or someone else's business or someone else's life or someone else's career or someone else's success, while we are left out of it. So let's get to the lies, right? Lie number one: If I prove myself, they will reward me. I know this lie so well. I lived this lie for years. In fact, I've lived all of these. So I come to you not just as a woman with decades of research, but also decades of having lived through it and now being able to actually guide women through to the other side of it. Okay, so line number one: If I prove myself, they will reward me. Women are taught that the most value that they have is by proving who they are through so much sacrifice that eventually it will be claimed through some kind of compensation. Like one more degree will make me undeniably the expert. One more certification will finally make me legitimate in their eyes. If I just work harder than everyone else, they'll finally notice. If I become indispensable, they have to give me the promotion, right? They have to reward me. If I give them the idea first, they'll pay me later. It's okay. If I show them what I can do, they will eventually recognize what I'm worth, but here's the lie: institutions do not automatically reward women for proving their value. In fact, they're designed to extract that value. Many years ago, when I was living in New York City, I worked for a big, very well-known national gym chain. Okay, we'll leave the name out of it. Doesn't matter who it was, and I pitched to them the idea of creating a yoga teacher training program for them. They didn't have one yet. It was big business. It was booming all over the country. How did this gym not have their own program. I said, I'm here to do it. I'm the person with the expertise. I've done it before. I can do it for you. I had all the intellectual property to do it, and I got into a meeting inside of a boardroom with the CEO of this gym chain, my own boss, and her general manager. These people physically backed me into a corner, and simply presented me a contract for $10,000 They would own what I created for them, and after they gave me that one lump sum, I would just receive an hourly rate for my work afterward, that's it. And the implication from their side was clear: sign this contract now, accept this thing that we've offered you and pre-designed. Otherwise, we'll just find someone else, and you'll lose your job. I was panicked. I was a poor broke yoga teacher at the time. At the time, that money felt like a huge win, and I thought, you know what? If I can just do this and prove myself to them and show them that I can do it, it will grant me more opportunities in the future. Turns out, that company made millions from the intellectual property that I surrendered for a fraction of its value on that day. I walked into that boardroom believing that I was there to prove I deserved the opportunity. They walked into the boardroom knowing that I possessed something that they wanted to own. Those are two completely different negotiating positions. I wasn't stupid. I wasn't incapable. I'd actually done this for other companies before. I was doing exactly what I, as a woman, was trained to do-to give evidence of my value. You to prove to them that I could do it to earn my spot, and eventually I would be rewarded for it. But they didn't need more evidence; they just needed my signature. It's probable that you've lived some version of this already in your life, maybe your employer already understands exactly how valuable you are. Recognition does not guarantee compensation. They might look at you and say, "Wow, you are the best deal that they are getting.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 10:37
In fact, becoming indispensable often creates more responsibility for you, not necessarily more wealth. And unfortunately, hard work doesn't automatically create ownership of your wealth, of your work, of your position. And sacrifice certainly doesn't create more leverage. The reward. for becoming indispensable isn't usually money; it's usually just more work. We are consistently told to produce evidence of our value, whereas on the flip side, men are often taught to establish their price first. So you don't become valuable by proving yourself harder, like we've been taught to do. You actually become wealthier by claiming ownership of the value that you have already created in your life. So here's your way through this lie. Rather than collecting proof, stop. You've got enough proof of how valuable you are. If you are a part of a community, if you are a part of a family, if you are a part of a career, if you are indispensable to any of your systems in your life, you have proven an accumulated value. Start identifying it. Start naming it. Start claiming that value. Understand the result that your work, your labor, invisible, underpaid or not, creates. Price the transformation you offer, not merely the hours you put in. Protect your intellectual property at all costs, and negotiate. negotiate before delivering what you're about to do, because otherwise advantage will be taken. And create ownership wherever possible. This is why I train and work with women to build assets, offers, businesses, systems, and work that continue to pay you 100% of the dollars that you deserve and that you earn, because even today, I've just received new statistics. As of 2024, women make 85 cents to every dollar that a man earns, which means we automatically need to work at least 15% harder just to get to that basic established baseline of what that work is valued at, I want you to have even more. Okay, so that's line number one. Lie number two, I must be useful to be safe. Now this lie goes really deep. This guy, this lie goes way deeper than just wanting appreciation from people, this lie is embedded intrinsically within us, who we are as women, because this lie is about belonging. You see, for most of human history, exclusion from a group was actually physically dangerous. Exclusion from a group, particularly for a woman, could mean death. See, this danger is especially significant for women who are pregnant, giving birth, nursing, raising children, or simply physically vulnerable. So women have learned to survive through connection, protection, cooperation, and most importantly, belonging. This history lives deep inside of us, and this call, this will, this desire to belong is right and good. But it has also been encoded in this entrapment, because in modern life women are still attempting to purchase safety through usefulness, through this belonging. We become the person that solves every crisis, the person who remembers every birthday or occasion, the emotional support system of our entire ecosystem, the reliable employee or family member, we become the fixer, the solver, the helper, the person who stays late, the person who over delivers, the one that everyone calls when something goes wrong. You see, we. Tell ourselves if they need me, they'll keep me. If they depend on me, I will belong, and to our nervous system, it means I will be safe. But the truth is, being needed and being valued are not the same thing. People can desperately need what a woman provides, and they do, while still refusing to pay her at all, or pay her appropriately, promote her, protect her, respect her limits, reciprocate, support her dreams, or recognize the cost of what she gives. Just because we're overgiving, overdoing, because we're the glue that holds everything together, does not mean we will be reciprocated. Women aren't giving themselves away because we're foolish. We're trying to ensure our safety by being useful, by being needed, by becoming indispensable. But indispensable does not make you sovereign. In fact, it creates just the opposite effect. It simply makes everyone else dependent on your unpaid or underpaid labor. You become a slave instead of belonging. You become a cog in the wheel of the entire machine that you, through your own power, are keeping in motion, so you cannot build wealth, right?
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 16:46
And by wealth, I mean all of the opposite things I defined as broke: the ability to choose, the ability to have agency, the ability to leave, the ability to stay. It's not just calm as in the bank, right? The wealth is your sovereignty, so you cannot build your wealth or your sovereignty while continuously giving your most valuable resources away to secure that belonging or safety. So here's the way through that lie: separate generosity from self-abandonment. Self-abandonment happens. You know it's happening when you get that crunch or that tension in your body. When you start to put everyone else last. When you turn into that martyr situation. Oh, them first, but I have to. They need me. Generosity comes from a place of I can. I want to. I desire, not have to, not must for your own safety or infrastructure. And here's another one to get through this lie, and and I want us all listening to this podcast to have almost like a a pact with each other, and all the women listening today, this is that this is our moment that we are going to stop using unpaid labor to earn our place. If it costs us time, emotion, energy, expertise, we are meant to be rewarded for that. So stop using unpaid labor to earn your place. Let people experience the real value and cost of what you provide. Show them, like lift the curtain. Tell them what you've been up to. Allow for support, reciprocity, and compensation. Women still represent an order of magnitude of unpaid labor in the world that makes the world turn. It's time for that to stop. Start to build relationships in which you belong, without being needed to perform to earn your place, and this might cause a real shakeup, and I and I'm all good with that. In fact, in my book, The Way of the Satisfied Woman, I talk about this having to curate our spaces and being able to essentially fire people who don't support us in the way that we need to be supported. Create financial safety for yourself that doesn't depend on your endless giving of yourself away, and become valuable to yourself before making yourself indispensable to everyone else. You can only truly serve or give or be generous or do the thing that you're here to do if you are fully resourced. All right, line number three. If I become powerful, if I really show them who I am, if I own my power, I will be punished. Now this one's real. Okay, women do not imagine this fear we have. Have accumulated so much evidence from an early age and throughout a lot of history. Women have learned: don't be too loud, don't outshine them, do not intimidate them, especially men. Don't ask for too much. Don't brag. Don't take up too much space. Don't make people uncomfortable. Don't appear greedy. Don't be demanding. You don't want to become the woman that people call bossy, difficult, cold, selfish, pushy, or maybe the worst one-a bitch. So we play small. We disempower ourselves so that we won't be punished for being who we are, and we learn to package ourselves almost in the form of apology. When we try to speak up for ourselves, we qualify it, we soften it, we over-explain. We often ask for permission. We lower our price. We hide our ambition. We make ourselves small, and we reassure everyone else that our success is not going to be an inconvenience to them, even though all those fun things on social media tell us just be confident, speak up for yourself, use your voice. But the moment that that confidence and our voice disrupts the hierarchy, access expectations, or entitlement to our labor-it's punished. As soon as our voice threatens someone else's position, it is squashed. As soon as our agency throws off the status quo, it is immediately shut down. That danger is real. But I will say that remaining small also carries a heavy, heavy price, and it's our price. It's the woman's price. So here's the truth underneath that lie: Women are not afraid of power because we don't want it. We do, and in fact, women are powerful. It's like the premise of all the work that I do and the women that I teach and work with. We are here to become empowered.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 22:35
We want the power, but we're afraid of it because we have seen what happens to women who refuse to make their power comfortable for everyone else. They're often persecuted. They're canceled. They're shut down. They're ridiculed. So playing small may protect a woman from criticism, but it will not protect her from financial dependence, resentment, invisibility, or regret. You might be punished for becoming powerful, but you're already punishing yourself for remaining small. So there is no consequence-free option here. Really, the question is which consequence buys you your own life, which buys you your freedom, which buys you your sovereignty, and I guarantee you it's not the version where you continue to stay small and quiet. So let's stop using universal approval as a measure of safety. Safety is challenging for women, no matter what space we occupy. That's the world right now. It is changing. I promise it's getting better, but it's not 100% yet. We are still getting there. We are still working on it. Expect people to misunderstand you, especially right now, look, you and I, in this movement, the Satisfied Women movement, we are at the forefront of women reclaiming their feminine power, saying yes, we have it, yes, we want it, and yes, we own it. There are simply people who are going to misunderstand that, but the people who do understand it, the people who do respect it; those are our people, and those come with us on the journey. Let your visibility begin to reveal those who do support you. The more clearly you can ask, the more clearly you can negotiate, the more clearly you can state your value, the more valued you become in the world you're creating, become willing to disappoint people. I know I talk about feminine guilt. I have a whole podcast on feminine guilt, and it's this anticipatory guilt women have before they fear someone else might be disappointed in them, so they shut themselves down preemptively. Or they turn themselves off, or they apologize for themselves because they're afraid of disappointing someone else. Only women do that. Men don't do that. That's feminine guilt, and it also keeps us small. So I challenge us all listening to this podcast to choose sovereignty over palatability. I want you sovereign more than I want you likable. All right, line number four. My life must support everyone else's success. This is so much bigger than just a woman believing she's got to do everything. Women do not just complete all the tasks given to them; they manage entire ecosystems. We become child-rearing infrastructure, household administrator, emotional regulator of all the spaces we inhabit, the social calendar, the medical coordinator, the aging parent caregiver, the relationship maintenance department, the person who notices what everyone else needs even before they do. The person whose career or life mends when her family requires flexibility. We are the person who creates the conditions that allow everyone else to succeed. This labor, our labor, supports families, businesses, workplaces, communities, and entire economies, and much of it is unpaid, underpaid, unseen, or treated as just you know something that women do. We just do it. We're supposed to. I call BS. BS, by the way, stands for belief system. It's a faulty belief system. Now, this is a moment where I want to take a special little section and talk about motherhood, right? Because women bear children. Women bear children. Pregnancy, childbirth, physical recovery, nursing, sleep deprivation, child care, scheduling, and family responsibility all exert enormous influence over a woman's body, her hormones, her attention, her capacity, her energy, her time, her career, her earning ability, and her financial future. If a woman wants children, there are going to be years when motherhood shapes almost every part of her life. This isn't ideological. This is humanity. This is life. Now, of course, women can have children and build meaningful and financially successful lives, but we cannot honestly discuss a woman's earning power while pretending that pregnancy, birth, recovery, career interruption, child care costs, and disproportionate caregiving have no economic cost. The problem isn't children. The problem is that we currently live inside of a system that relies on women to absorb the cost of raising them. We tell women they can have it all, while literally refusing to acknowledge that someone has to provide the labor to make that all possible. But here's what's really interesting.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 28:25
There's some new studies coming out that women are increasingly seeing that they have a choice here. Women in greater numbers are delaying motherhood, not just by years but by decades, or they're opting out of motherhood entirely, they're leaving traditional careers, which is something I wholeheartedly vote for, and that's what I work with my women that I coach on, to build their own businesses that build flexibility for them and the lives that they inhabit. They want to have a partnership and a family that they can also sustain comfortably and reliably with the rhythms of their own life, because they're refusing to just automatically absorb the cost based on a model of career and success that was not built with a woman in mind and certainly wasn't built with motherhood in mind. This isn't a failure for women. This is women becoming conscious of what's possible now. In fact, I had a really powerful moment in my early 20s when my grandmother, in her kitchen fixing me lunch one day revealed to me that if she had had a choice, she would not have had children. That she would have been a career woman. She had a lovely career. She was the the keeper of the coffee station and break area of her workplace, and she. Ran the Blueprint Xerox machines before there were Xerox machines. My grandmother was an immigrant. She barely spoke English when she started, and this company found a place for her, and she loved it. Now she didn't have a choice. She had children. In the end, she was grateful that she did. I am certainly grateful that she did. But I want to just highlight that this choice is recent. We now live in a time and a place, and a and a and we have the ability to make this choice for ourselves as recently as my own grandmother. That choice wasn't available. So let's be honest, women. Our unpaid labor isn't separate from the economy. It's one of the things holding the economy up. But the modern workplace was not designed for women. It wasn't designed around our bodies, our energy-it wasn't designed around our needs. It certainly was not designed around a person giving birth, recovering, nursing, raising children, and regulating an entire household. The modern workplace was designed for a person whose life was being supported by someone else. So. So women don't need another lecture about working harder. We need ownership of our own gifts, flexibility to work when we want to, leverage to increase our value when we need more money, and work structured around our actual lives, the modern-day workplace was not built for women, which means we need to build something different for ourselves. So I encourage you to stop trying to become better at surviving a structure that was never built for you. Try building your work around the reality of your life instead. Seek ownership of your gifts rather than this endless labor. Create flexibility, leverage, charge for your expertise, and build systems that don't require your constant physical presence. This is why I coach women to build their own online business. It's theirs. It moves with them. They operate when they can at times that work for them. It doesn't matter whether it's midnight, four a.m. or two in the afternoon. We need work that supports our life instead of our life and our labor, to support the work. You see, women need businesses that fit women's lives, not businesses that require us to pretend like we're men and armor up for the battlefield. Times are changing, and we're starting to see it, and it's time to take advantage of it. So let's go to the last lie, shall we? Lie number five. I always come last as a woman. We've been so ingrained with this lie. We need to put ourselves last. They are all the priority, and you'll hear that when you hear a woman say, "Oh, someday, oh, you know, someday I'll do the thing that I want to do. Oh, when the kids leave, I'll do that. I'll finally take a vacation when his time comes for this other thing. Whatever it is, right? We center everyone else, and we put ourselves last, and in doing so, we put off our own life. We put off our sovereignty, our satisfaction, because we're taught that prioritizing ourself is selfish. It's irresponsible.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 33:58
It's disruptive to everyone else is unloving. It's downright unfeminine, and it can be dangerous. So we wait. We wait for when the kids are older, or when they leave home. We wait for our husband to be established, or maybe when work will settle down. We wait for when the parents don't eat us so much, or when the household is stable, but the reality is those times never come. They just change names. Children grow, parents age, the job changes, but all the responsibility remains because we're so indoctrinated to prioritizing everyone else, and we come last. One crisis ends, another takes its place, and all the while we're left behind. Now, as you wait, you're postponing more than a dream. You're postponing your earning power. You're postponing your visibility, the body of work that can actually change the lives of others. You're postponing your independence. Your ability to choose your own freedom. You're postponing your own future. When you hear a woman say "someday, that's what she says when she's been trained to treat everyone else's life as urgent, and her own life as optional. So, sister, seriously, you're not waiting for more time. You're essentially waiting for permission to become a priority in your own life. I'm giving you permission. It's time because deprioritizing yourself has cost you something great. It's cost you your confidence. It's cost the world your gifts. It's cost your sisters and your daughters the benefit of seeing what a sovereign, non-exhausted woman looks like. Confidence doesn't arrive before you decide to make this happen. By the way, the confidence in yourself and your gifts actually is built as you step into the woman who commits to yourself. As you decide, nope, I am the priority, and you start moving toward that. Your confidence arises with it. I see this all the time. I literally watch this happen over the times that I work with women, and I work for them for a period of 90 days. I watch them go from "I don't know if I can" to "Of course I can. Why didn't I do this sooner? Money, your sovereignty, your freedom does not arrive before you build the structure to earn it, you've got to build first, which means you've got to stop putting yourself last. You can't keep placing yourself last and expect your life to somehow magically place you first. You decide that your work matters now. You put your gifts, your priorities on the calendar. You invest in the structure that develops them, that develops your freedom, your sovereignty, your choice, and you make your first sale to yourself. You buy into your own dream. You treat your future as a responsibility you have right now, and you stop requiring certainty before movement. You build certainty. Make your sovereignty part of your family plan. I can't tell you how many women I work with or that I speak to who say to me, Alanna, I can't watch my daughter grow up like this. I can't let her see me going through burning myself out, giving myself away, deprioritizing myself, putting myself last, telling myself to play small, overworking, taking shit from everyone else. I can't have her watch me do this because that's what she's going to learn. If you can't do it for yourself right now, sister, do it for her. This is the moment things change. This moment, and right there, with you. These five lies were never evidence that anything was wrong with you. They were survival strategies. Prove yourself so you'll be rewarded. Make yourself useful so you'll remain safe. Stay small so you won't be punished. Support everyone else's success before your own, and keep waiting for the day when you are finally allowed to become a priority. These strategies have helped women survive inside systems that were never designed for us, but survival is no longer our destination, sister. I want your sovereignty. I want you to have money because money gives a woman choices. I want you to own your gifts because ownership creates power. I want you to build work that supports your life instead of requiring you to sacrifice your life in service of it, and I want you to stop waiting for an institution, a boss, a partner, a family member, or even the culture itself to recognize the value of what you carry. They're probably never going to do it.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 39:41
You have to do it first, and that is where my work with women begins. I speak with women every week who have decades of wisdom, experience, education, and ability. They are sitting on intellectual property. Methods, ideas, solutions, expertise, and bodies of work that are quite literally a goldmine that could create extraordinary value in the world, but they've never built the structure that allows that value to support them. That's what we build together. We take what you know, what you've lived, what you teach, and what you are uniquely equipped to offer, and we turn it into a business that creates money, choice, freedom, and sovereignty. So, if you've recognized yourself in this episode, anywhere in this episode, come book a call with me at thesatisfiedwoman.com. Don't book because you need somebody else to give you permission. Book because you are ready to stop treating your future as optional or as out of your hands. Book because you know that your gifts deserves ownership and structure. Book because you're no longer willing to spend your life enriching systems and other people who receive the best of you while you remain underresourced and undervalued, the first person who must recognize the value of what you carry is you. The first person who must invest in it is you, and the first woman that your work needs to support is you. Come and book your call with me at thesatisfiedwoman.com. Let's build the structure that gives your value back to you. Until next time, do everything you can to remain sovereign and satisfied.
