Transforming Money Systems for Women of Color Entrepreneurs with Diana Yáñez of All The Colors

Josh: Welcome to the Wealth and Yourself Podcast, where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. I’m your host Josh St. Laurent. Today we’re joined by Diana Yanez, who is a Certified Financial Planner, Registered Life Planner, Money Coach at All The Colors and Wealth Manager at Strategy Squad.

Diana helps women of color entrepreneurs create sustainable money systems for themselves, their loved ones, and their communities. Diana, so glad you’re here.

Diana: Thank you, Josh. I’m excited. Thank you for the invitation.

Josh: Definitely. So for anyone listening who isn’t familiar with you, can you tell us about you and your work?

Diana: I focus on helping people develop money systems so that they can just like, move on from their money, not have to worry about their money. A lot of the times people come to me when they’ve either read a book, listened to their uncle, attended a webinar, and they may know what to do, but it’s been three years and they haven’t done it.

You know, so they need that additional accountability, maybe that additional education. And I also focus a lot on coaching on things like, well, tell me why you haven’t worked on your estate plan. Is it because your dad died when you were eight? And it actually brings up these other emotions. So it’s like the coaching aspect of it and that’s one of like the places that I love working the most because again, there’s a lot to do-it-yourself-ers and there’s a lot of things that you can do it yourself, but there’s other places where like having someone there with you on the journey is super helpful.

Josh: Yeah, it’s so true. I talk about that a lot with clients too. Like, you know, doctors aren’t their own doctor. Lawyers aren’t their own lawyers, right? You can only get yourself so far. There was a statement on your website that jumped out actually, I wanted to ask you about, so what is “Heart-Centered Money”? How would you go about defining that?

Diana: As a certified financial planner, I often tell people I’m an expert on money, but I’m not an expert on you or your life. So I can tell you, like if we’re talking about debt pay downs, right? Some of the common ones are, you should pay the one with the highest interest out first, but if it feels more motivational to you to pay with one with the lowest balance, that maybe has a lower interest rate, like that’s actually tapping more into like the non-logical part of decision making. And I like to call it “heart” because I tend to attract a lot of people who make a lot of decisions with their heart. And then you have their own mind, you know, who’s like, why are you deciding that that doesn’t make sense? And it does and makes sense at some level. That’s where I love to work.

Josh: I love that. And that must tie in, I’d imagine with the life planner designation, the RLP that you have and that focus on not just the money, but people’s life you know, from a holistic perspective. Can you talk to that a little bit?

Diana: So the Registered Life Planner training really helped me. Like the biggest thing that I walked away with was their key question of like, “anything else.” I don’t know if you’ve gone through that training, but for anybody who’s familiar with it, That’s really what they teach you how to do is like how to have open conversations where maybe people’s heart can speak a little more openly.

And where you get to the root of any kind of decision making. They go through what’s called the Evoke process, and I’ve altered it a bit to fit my style. The way that I work is often very much like, live with the client, what’s most present for them right now. The RLP focuses on what is your main vision, what are the obstacles that might get in the way of getting there, and like, how do we implement it?

Which is very similar to the CFP. But it gives you more tools on the listening side. It gives you more practice, like staying with clients when they’re in that uncertain point of like, not knowing what they’re gonna do next. What makes sense? Because once you give people permission to not only make decisions with their logic, with their mind, it can be a little bit of a journey getting to, well, what do they wanna do?

If it’s not the numbers leading the decision making, well then what is and what’s most real for them. And it’s also about giving themselves permission for that to be true. So, I shared this before we started recording about the way my life looks today was very impacted by the RLP training itself because you can only take people as far as you’ve gone yourself.

And when they ask me like, what does your ideal life look like? I had to start implementing a lot of those things myself because all of the reasons, what are all the possible objections? And I remember when I was considering being an entrepreneur, one of my objections—I kid you not—was that I did not have an external monitor.

And I was like, really? Is that like a legitimate reason to not do this? I wanted a dual monitor and for some reason I was like, I don’t have one so I can’t do this. And it was like, really? That’s not… but it’s just like all of these random BS reasons that our mind will get like cluttered with, right?

And then they’re just like dead weight. But there were other reasons that were more substantial, but I had to move through it. So when the registered life planner training asked me like, what my ideal life look like, it included a lot of travel. So then like, well, what would it take for me to do all of that travel and like slowly taking steps to get there. You hit other walls, but they’re always more interesting than if I hadn’t started the journey, right?

Josh: Yeah. I love that you went to the fact that “we can only go as far as we’ve gone ourselves.” That’s been my experience with life planning training and the Kinder work and everything as well. And I had a reminder earlier today from a mentor that I’m not living my life plan. I’m working way more than I set out to initially. Right? 

And so coming back to that, I think even as a life planner sometimes can be hard and there’s so much that ties in to our money decisions, that’s not just money. And I think that can be a relief for some people who have a stigma attached to money, don’t want to talk about money, feel really anxious talking about money.

So I love your style that you lead as a life planner and with some of those other aspects. You live your life plan. I think that’s super cool. I was asking you before the recording about the money circles. I don’t know if you wanna talk a little bit about that, but I think that’s fascinating.

Diana: I started my entrepreneurial journey to create group coaching and I’m calling it Bosque Money. And when we’re in groups. There’s something else that we can tap into that is not possible in one-to-one or in self-study. There’s this book Atomic Habits by James Clear. He has a section where he says, the fastest way to change behavior is to join a group of people who are doing the thing that you want to do.

Because as much as we’re all individual snowflakes, we also have very predictable patterns. You know, like you start to change your behavior and then there’s predictable things that come back at you like stopping points or they were unforeseen before you’d started. it’s one thing to go to a financial planner and then have the financial planner tell you like, here’s things to do.

It’s much more. Effective to be in a group of people who, similarly to you, either just dislike talking about money or have been avoiding it like there’s some negative interaction with money. And as you see them gain skills as you see them either have that conversation with their partner or start investing in the stock market more like whatever the outer action is that they’re doing as you see them do it, it actually empowers you. It’s much more effective. 

One of my favorite analogies: It’s like if I go to a personal trainer and they tell me they work out every day. A part of me is like, well, you’re a personal trainer. Like you’re not a real person. You know, like, I don’t care. It’s kinda like, oh, my financial planner is fully invested. Who cares? You know, they’re a financial planner. 

But if there’s a peer who like you, started off kind of frightened, it’s super effective. The other thing that comes out of it is that you’re learning from other people’s experiences. You know, sometimes the only experience we learn from is our own, but in a group it can be helpful to be exposed to others’ experiences.

Josh: That’s so true. I love that you do that. I have been fascinated by that work and it inspires me to do something similar. I would love to set up some group coaching at some point. I wanted to kind of pivot a little bit and ask you about are there commonalities in your work? Do you come across people struggling with the same things, same patterns or habits, is there something that you commonly see maybe for the people listening that you can say, hey, this is something I run into a lot, and here’s kind of how we address that.

Diana: Well, I began to focus on women of color entrepreneurs. I mean, I am a woman of color. I am an entrepreneur, but it was also who was coming to me the most because a lot of the times when you become an entrepreneur, you’re very confronted with your money choices. You’re very confronted with your money stories because now you’re the one withholding for taxes. You’re the one that’s setting up pricing. Everything that has to do with money is on you. A

nd one of the common things that I’ve found that I also have to continue to work on myself: There’s this tendency in anybody who’s not the norm, anybody who’s neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, person of color, that we tend to keep ourselves safe by a little bit by minimizing ourselves.

We tend to ask for less. I mean, there’s this horrible joke. It’s a comic strip and there’s this group of white men sitting around a table and the person at the top of the board is like in order to cut costs, we’re gonna take drastic measures starting tomorrow. We’re going to replace all of you with women, and that’s gonna save 25% in salaries.

You know, and it’s a dark, dark joke, but it’s also true. And once you’re the person, once you’re the woman and the board of directors, once you’re the person of color, you even without meaning to just as a survival strategy, you’re just like, “let me ask for a little bit less.” Let me bring myself a little bit down just to keep me safe, right?

So when I’m working with people, I just call that out. Is this happening inside of you? Is this why you see what your competitors are charging and you’re charging less? And sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. I’ve seen it enough times that I do see it as a recurrent pattern. And when people become aware of it, then they’re able to change it, right?

It also normalizes the experience that this is a survival strategy. It’s worked up until a certain point, and yet— we end up rejecting ourselves around it too. You end up like, I can’t believe you’re doing this. I can’t believe you’re asking for less than you need to. And it could be money, it could be time. For example if you have a speaking opportunity and you don’t publicize it as much as you could because you’re afraid of the pushback, there’s those kinds of things and it happens to everybody. It’s imposter syndrome. Like yet again with my woman of color entrepreneurs, especially when they’re first starting out that’s a really common pattern.

Josh: Wow, that’s incredible. You’re empowering them to ask for their worth when they may have not done that in the first place. And I think that if someone’s tuning in and they say, oh, here’s Diana, you know, financial planner, that might not be the first thing that comes to mind that you’re doing for them.

I think that’s incredible and important. Has there been a major lesson in your journey as a business owner that you feel like you’ve learned and kind of turned the corner during your time as a business owner that you could say, “hey, for other new business owners, learn from my mistake.” I know I have plenty.

Diana: Well the one that I’m learning right now is how to rest. I am really grateful that I’m at a point in my business where like the bills are paid, my expenses are paid, things are comfortable, they’re fine. I’m not saving for retirement the way I would like to, but it’s fine.

The problems that I have are like problems that I can make up in my head. As I mentioned earlier, when I started this entrepreneurial journey, I wanted to travel. Now I want to root, I wanna settle, I wanna stop traveling. In 2022, I was in 23 places at least three nights, which means I must have been like in 40 places.

And then in this year I’ve traveled to like, four or five different countries. So I’m really tired.

Josh: I bet, I bet.

Diana: I’m in this transition point of moving to a new city and building like a community there, building habits, building like a routine there, all of that. And I’m giving myself permission to just be like, okay, work the hours that you have with clients. But for now, if you’re not looking for clients, it’s okay.

I’ve always been very entrepreneurial and even before I knew I wanted to be a financial planner, I knew I wanted to have my own business and this is why, right? And now here I am doing it and everything in me is resisting. It’s like, how could you not be 120% above capacity? How could you pause? Like gating clients, you know, gosh, it’s so hard to walk the talk.

Josh: Yes. I know what you mean. I admire that. You know, you did the travel that you set out to do and now you’re saying, well, hey, it’s a new chapter, let me settle down. I think that’s great. I mean, you’re listening to yourself. I wanted to ask about something that you said a minute ago. So with marginalized communities especially, do you find that there’s an added aspect of past financial trauma to work through and to help them move out of scarcity mindset? Do you run into that?

Diana: That’s a huge question. And it’s a beautiful question too. There’s so much to it. There is a book called The Color of Money by Mehrsa Baradaran. She is surprisingly a law professor, and she wrote this book where she looked at legislation that created the ongoing racial wealth divide. I mean it’s an economic textbook. It’s hard to read. I never thought that an economic textbook would make me cry, but that’s the one that did it. 

Fang Long is another CFP and she talks about how the racial wealth gap makes it sound like there’s a way for people to jump over the gap for people to stretch and somehow make it through.

But when you call it a divide, then you’re really pointing out how systemic it is. So when we’re making changes in these really difficult areas there’s another thinker, Susan Raffo, who actually works a lot with somatic systems, which is like our body’s experience of trauma. And she says, first you have to stop the violence.

So I focus on like stopping the gaslighting that we inflict on ourselves because there’s a little bit of like, well, you can’t complain about what happened generations ago, right? Like this is now, and yet what happened generations ago is still harming us in some ways. So just being aware of the impact of those things in the past stops the gaslighting, stops the violence. From there, what do you do next? How do you move out of the scarcity mindset? And it’s a huge question. I mean, I don’t even know how to, I don’t know that I have speaking points on how we do that, What I can share about is that this work, the financial trauma work for people, for marginalized communities, for people of color, for LGBTQ plus, any, all, all of it, right?

It’s really good to do it in groups because the group is actually resilient and strong enough for people to feel held enough to go deep. You can do it one-on-one. I do it a lot, one-on-one. But again, we come into that wall of, they look at my white skin, they, they look at, they look at the way that I speak about money and it can feel like, well, she doesn’t a hundred percent get it right.

When it’s in a group, the safer the container, the stronger the container, the deeper people can go, a lot of the times it’s acknowledging the harm that was done. That in itself will make it possible for people to then find a different solution. Or to find what they’re gonna do next. Those conversations can make it easier for people to go and ask for their worth.

It can make it easier for people to step away from working with people who aren’t paying them enough. Like when we think about the money portion of it, it can make it easier to recognize why somebody wants to prioritize their child’s education instead of their retirement because they want their child.

Like it can make a lot of the heart-centered decisions that people might wanna do. It can make it easier for their mind to understand them.

Josh: That makes a lot of sense, and I have to imagine being able to share experiences in a safe setting and resonate with other people’s experiences too, and being able to relate to them. I can imagine that would only help. Can you talk a little bit more about the gaslighting and guilt that marginalized communities deal with? And it looks like, like how it looks to be able to heal.

Diana: I am thinking of one of the conversations that we had in one of my earlier groups. Someone was talking about their grandparent and the way that their grandparent had accommodated all kinds of things just to get by. And then this grandparent taught their child that, and now their grandchild has that. And the grandchild is accepting behavior that’s no longer necessary for them to accept.

And there’s also, I mean, there’s so many, there’s some things that are. There’s this author, Ramit Sethi, he talks about, I will teach you to be rich. There’s this other side of being oppressed that’s actually kind of beautiful.

He has a portion in the book where he’s talking about, as a child of immigrants, he grew up with people who, when they were eating all you can eat chicken wings, they would like not eat all day and then they would go and like eat all of the chicken wings they could and like open the bones and suck the marrow out.

You know, like the whole freaking thing. And I was recently with a friend of mine who’s actually Chinese. I’m Mexican, she’s Chinese. Both of us are children of immigrants. Both of us grew up with our parents coming here and working really hard to make sure our material needs were cared for.

And I saw her, we were at a restaurant that was on the pricier side and we both are earning fine money, but I saw her put a napkin in her purse. And I opened my purse. I saw her, I opened my purse and I showed her the napkins that I had in there from a restaurant. And we just started laughing because it’s like, is it scarcity? Or is it like trauma? Is it poverty? Like what is it that compels us to take these clean napkins? And what was even funnier was that the waiter saw us and he brought napkins over, and then at the end we split them between us. It’s like a legacy. The legacy of scarcity can also be really funny.

So how do people deal with it? Sometimes it’s with a sense of humor. Sometimes it’s, I mean, grief is often also what’s needed. And we don’t live in a society where we know what to do with grief, right? We wanna just make the people who did wrong pay. But what if that was like generations ago or what if that’s your own parents?

Like how do you make them pay? Is that really helpful? That’s one. Like, yes, stop the violence. But then below that, what do we do next? You know, and it can be very much like day in, day out, recognizing that you can be a good steward of your resources, that you can speak up when you need something that you won’t take mistreatment, that you can laugh at part at like funny parts of the heritage that you have.

Josh: I love that. That’s a great answer. Can I ask you about your money lesson, maybe your biggest money lesson that you’ve learned over the years? Personally, I.

Diana: I mean, I, I remember the money lesson that inspired my work and that I continue to work with is inequality. And I mean that’s, you can see it all over my work. Like what are the things that make me passionate? I first realized inequality was part of the world. When I was eight years old.

I had gone back to Mexico to visit my cousins. We were at the corner store. He and I were the oldest, like he was the oldest boy. I was the oldest girl of the grandchildren and we were taking care of the younger kids. And we woke up to the corner store and everybody had gotten their chips and soda and cookies, whatever it was.

And he looks at me and he says, you pay. And I was shocked. I was like, why? Why do I pay? I remember being a little bit affronted by it, and I don’t know what I decided to do. I don’t remember that. I just remember that, that question and that command. But I do know that like 10 years later, whenever I would see that cousin, I made sure to spend all of my money before I saw him. So I’m guessing I said yes and I paid for him, for me, for our younger siblings and it was because my parents had immigrated to the us. also as a woman in Latino culture, like me caring for others, like at eight years old, I was already expected to care for others. That’s part of it. But it was mostly about how his dad struggled with addiction and was in and outta work, and I don’t think I was aware of it. I was eight years old. I don’t think he was aware of it. He was maybe nine, you know, just a year older. But that I think is what set the theme for me to like, well, how do we make sure people have enough? How do we make sure that people aren’t being taken advantage of if they have more? I’m still answering that for myself. I think it’s gonna be a lifelong question.

Josh: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And it, and it makes me think about just how early some of those money scripts and money stories can start. I have some of those same conversations with people where it’s like, well, you know, how did this belief come to be? You know, and half an hour later it’s like, well, actually there was this one thing that happened when I was seven or eight.

So that’s always amazing to me, how impactful that can be. And to build on that, I wanted to ask you about your definition of a wealthy life and what does that look like?

Diana: I shared like the beginning of that story, the middle of that story, which was me kind of doing the same, but this time it was me spending it all before I saw him. Eventually I had to learn how to say no. I had to learn how to say yes and how to say no. Yes. At what level was I willing to help the rest of my family in Mexico and no, what, what did I have to do for myself?

It’s become easier with time, you know? And it’s kind of along the lines of like grandparents who say, I will make sure that I pay for your grandchildren’s education. Always. Yes, education is something that I can support. Ferraris and trips, like those are harder for me to support. It’s just kind of like for each of us, what does that make sense?

And for me, a wealthy life there’s this quote by Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams. She’s a Zen Reverend and Sensei, and she says that without interchange there can be no outer change. Right, so me, inside of me, I have to listen to my heart so that I can go and do it out in the world, but also without communal change, without the community changing, no change matters.

It reminds me that individuals can’t take care of collective issues. If we’re struggling for healthcare, we’re struggling for education. If childcare and elder care are not part of the things that everyone has access to, there’s only so much we can do as individuals, So it’s both acknowledging that and then recognizing, there’s this other thinker that I love, Adrian Marie Brown. She wrote emergent strategies, and part of it is thinking that before it used to be like we had an individual who would change consciousness. We had Martin Luther King, or Gandhi or something.

But now she’s calling out for communities to make changes, right? It’s collective issues like we’re, I can’t solve the climate crisis. No matter how many flights, I skip and take buses, like, it’s kind of annoying how much I try and walk my talk.

But again, as an individual, where do my limits end? And how do I stay engaged? How do I keep working, right? How do I keep working, being part of the solution? So a wealthy life for me includes collective care. Without ignoring myself. So how, how do I balance that? And I, and I’ve, what I’m learning right now is that it looks different in different seasons of my life.

Josh: Yeah, I can imagine that to be true. What about this next chapter of your life? What are you most excited about?

Diana: I’m really, I’m really excited about having a routine again. I found the monotony and the adventure of being a digital nomad. It was just like another country, another place to figure out where the grocery store was, like when I was getting to an Airbnb and I was most excited to see how much Tupperware they had. I was like, will I be able to cook here? It’s like, if you wanna cook, go home, you know?

Josh: Yes. Let’s pivot a little bit. So if someone’s listening and they are on their own journey to gaining financial freedom and they’re not quite there yet, what would be one piece of advice that you would give to them?

Diana: It’s really important to have clarity on cash flow even when your income is really high, ‘cause I’ve worked with clients who are making half a million a year and we’re living month to month. If they were to be let go in a couple of months, they’d run outta money.

So it’s not so much about the numbers that you’re moving, but being aware of what it’s setting up for you. Like I ask when people are starting to work on their cash flow, I have them do a values exercise. They go through like this list of like 50 values and they pick the top 10 and they narrow it down to the top five, and we make sure that those values are reflected.

I did something cutesy, but I reframed budget into ‘bougette’ because the word budget comes from an old French word that meant “little bag.” Just a little bag to put your money in and separate out your coins. And it wasn’t like a measure of your self-worth or your ability to be an adult, it was just a tracking system. 

So I have people build a bougette, and it’s similar to the 50, 30, 20 plan. So 50% goes to essentials, like food and shelter kind of thing, 30%, 20% for the future could be being debt free, it could be retirement, whatever it is. And then 30% for now, whatever. And that could be, I always joke and tell people like that 30%, like if you wanted to set it on fire, you could.

It has absolutely no job other than to please you, making sure that the five values you selected are somewhere in there If you really value learning, right, like being mentally stimulated, well then maybe like having education courses for the rest of your life, be it in basket weaving or quantum physics, whatever, like that’s gonna be part of your, of your money.

Because when people are owning their spending decisions, it makes it easier for them to implement them. It’s not me telling them like, here’s what you should do. Or at least for the people I work with, I tend to attract people that like myself to like being told what to do.

So I make a lot of tools for them to tell themselves what they wanna do.

Josh: Yes. And how are they tracking that, cashflow? Is it different per person? Are there some high tech people, low tech people?

Diana: It’s different per person. It’s different per person. I tend to work with a lot of people who are neurodivergent, so I try to keep things as simple, simple, simple, simple as possible. We automate as much of it as we can, and that’s a lot of what the accountability will be like, did you automate this?

Is it working at the automation stand? Some people, it gets to the point where it’s just easier for them to have a debit card and that’s like every week they get their fun money put in there and that’s how much they spend on whatever it is that they’ve selected for that. And they can just look on their phone, what’s their debit balance.

And since it’s like every week and makes it easier for them to track, other people like to track it. Other people are like die hard. You need a budget fence. Like why don’t know how to do that. That feels really complicated to me. But they love it and I’m like, we each have our thing. Whatever makes you happy. 

Josh: Yeah, that’s super cool. Maybe the hardest question of the day that I like to ask, it’s basically if you were starting over and you had a thousand dollars, you know, what do you think you would do with that thousand dollars if you had to start over tomorrow?

Diana: That’s a broad question. If I had to start over with my career with like if I just landed…?

Josh: Financially your business. You’re starting fresh year, you know you had to start over tomorrow with a thousand dollars you know, no business, no savings. What do you think you’d do with a thousand dollars?

Diana: I would spend it on getting clients. I would spend it on creating income that would be the main impetus, the main thing that would push me.

Josh: Use your money to make more money.

Diana: Right? 

Josh: I like that. What have I not asked you that you want to make sure to talk about?

Diana: Well, what I love helping people get to is a place where their money is so automated. It’s so on autopilot that they’re not thinking about it anymore. Again, people come to me when they’re like, maybe they haven’t lost sleep over it, but they’re having some difficult conversations with their family.

Or like, there’s just this constant feeling of stress and unease. And then when people get to that point where money’s on autopilot it’s important for people to celebrate that, right? To learn how to pause and enjoy it before we create another goal. Again, the thing like the thinking that got you to where you are is not the thinking that’s gonna get you to where you wanna go next.

So whatever got you to the point of like, money’s on, money’s good. Well, where is it that you want? And again, I work with people who are more heart-centered. So it’s often not just money that’s motivating them, it’s something else. It could be making a bigger impact.

It could be like whatever it is. I love having people celebrate that in between before they go onto the next goal. What can they do? Like, how can they celebrate it? How can they savor that moment?

Josh: Yes, that’s important. And you mentioned imposter syndrome earlier. Can you talk a little bit about that and the journey to, let’s call it a sense of self-worth around money?

Diana: So imposter syndrome is often when people have had some success, right? They’ve experienced success, or people are seeing them with success and then they’re rejecting it. They’re not sure, like that’s part of them. I help people sit with that. Like actually have them say out loud, what are the things that I’ve done? What are the things that I’ve accomplished? and sometimes again, this is what, this is all coaching, right? So when I’m coaching someone, okay, so you had this positive experience, you got this accolade. What happens with you when that’s happening? I took a training course called Compassionate Inquiry.

And that was primarily, that was mainly for my personal benefit. I enjoy meditation and I wanted to become a meditation teacher, and my meditation teacher suggested that training. And a couple of months into it, I realized it was transforming. The way I coached it was teaching me a whole new set of skill sets.

And those skill sets around more like body awareness and understanding what stories we’re telling ourselves are really helpful with things like imposter syndrome. compassionate and inquiry comes from a doctor who was teaching how to work with, with people going through addiction. And often I think that a lot of the things that we do around money, there’s a little bit of an addiction thing of there of having more and more and more, there’s an addiction to having more or whatever the, problems may be.

And with imposter syndrome, it’s finding out, when did it start? Like what sets it off, what in your money reminds you of it and what need is actually being expressed? Imposter syndrome is often self rejecting. I mean, rejecting the part of me that’s successful. Why are you rejecting that part of you? Again, if you are part of a marginalized community, an underrepresented community, ‘cause you didn’t wanna stand out. 

Going back to what I talked about earlier with The Color of Money. She has a story of the Tulsa, I’m not gonna call it a massacre, but like what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Wall Street where everything was burnt down because it was visible, like the wealth was visible, so it was burnt down and she compared that to Durham, North Carolina, that around a similar time, the black community there also had wealth, but they hid it.

They only had wealth behind closed doors and they made sure to always be very deferential to white people around them. And so there’s a reason why they’re kind of hiding their success, right? Like that’s a broad communal story that you can tell, but as an individual, when an individual is facing imposter syndrome, it’s finding out how does imposter syndrome serve you.

And how do we find other ways to provide that if it’s protecting you from success? If it’s protecting you from asking yourself for more, maybe you’re like, oh, every time I have a success, then the goal gets bigger. You know, I’m tired. Who knows what it could be. Every person has their own answer.

And then the second part of the question, how do you get to a sense of self worth around money? It depends where it’s coming from, right? If somebody’s very restrictive around money, they just wanna save, save, save. They never allow themselves to enjoy it. I would encourage them to start practicing, like, what makes you feel good? And just acknowledging the discomfort and feeling good.

I did these money tree archetypes. When I’m working with people, often numbers kind of turn them off. I created these five different archetypes and one of them is called them. I call it the magnolia. It’s always green, always luscious, ‘cause magnolia trees tend to always be green. Like they don’t really lose their leaves and they’re like very lush green, right? The flowers are beautiful and people with this personality tend to always be very like, flashy and show how big and bright and beautiful life is. And they can sometimes spend more than they have. Right.

There’s that bigness and learning how to tone down on that. It can kind of be a little bit like accepting mortality. Like you actually can’t have everything, like your life will run out. So it’s accepting the discomfort of learning to say no and seeing how that can be like a positive thing.

On the other hand, there’s what I call SDOs, where when it rains, it floods, and when there’s no rain, it’s a drought. So they tend to just save and reserve. Like Sdo Teresa, the SDO itself will literally not branch out for like 70 years. It takes 70 years for it to have like a little baby branch because they’re so preventative. They’re like, just in case it never rains again. So having them learn to enjoy themselves a little bit more, like having them trust that they can, that it will, that they know how to make it right, you know, that they can be good stewards of their opportunities. It’s just kind of like, it depends on the person of what it looks like for them to have self worth.

And really the goal is to be able to tap into many different ways of being with money not being so. Strict that you create a cell for yourself, like a prison for yourself.

Josh: And it seems like so much of that is tied in with what you said before about the story that they’re telling themselves in the way that messaging, that internal messaging. I took a class on therapeutic communication that talks so much about that and. It never occurred to me. You know, it’s like this internal self-talk is so powerful externally but we don’t even realize it.

You know, we get in the car after the meeting and we’re saying all this negative stuff to ourselves and it doesn’t serve us. And so I, I’m glad you pointed that out. I think it’s super helpful. Where can listeners find you online?

Diana: I have a website, all the colors, dot N Nat Network. I am actually taking a tiny bit of a break from social media but I will—if I feel like it— go on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. So it’s only been a couple of weeks. I’ll probably come back in August, but I’m available there and you can find me.

Josh: Excellent. And I’ll put all the links in the show notes so it’s easy to find you. I’m glad we did this. This was fun.

Diana: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation for the wonderful questions.

Josh: Definitely. This has been The Wealth In Yourself Podcast, where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. Our guest today was Diana Yanez, Money Coach at all the Colors and Wealth Manager at Strategy Squad. We’ll see you next week, and thanks for listening. Thanks for being here, Diana.

Diana: Thank you. It was a pleasure.