In 2022, when Elon Musk took over at Twitter, I got laid off along with everybody else. They offered severance. I looked at it, decided it was insulting, and said no. What came after was a long stretch of not knowing where I’d land or what I’d walk away with.
Around that same time, I set up an altar in my house. Protective crystals surrounding money crystals with one intention I said out loud when I made it: protect what’s mine, and what’s owed to me.
Before I had any real information to go on, something very specific about how it would resolve came through to me. It was the kind of thing you could easily get attached to as an outcome. I noticed it. Wrote it in a journal. Then released any attachment to it.
When the situation finally did resolve, it was spot on to what had come through. I can’t get into the specifics for legal reasons, but the pattern held.
That altar has lived in the same spot in my house since November of 2022. It’s staying there until that chapter is fully closed.
Give Money a Place to Land
It’s actually not really about the crystals but the intention I put behind it is important to sift through.
You can’t protect money by squeezing it until your knuckles go white. Instead, build it a place to land and then get out of the friggin’ way of how it arrives.
I do a version of this every time I spend a meaningful amount of money on my own business, especially on investing in myself or learning something new. I say it out loud:
money flows to me easy, may this return to me tenfold
So far, it’s been working!
Here’s the mechanics of why, as best I can explain it.
When you grip money too tightly, when you’re white-knuckled about not losing it, you end up watching for the next drop instead of the next opening.
You can’t scan for danger and scan for opportunity with the same set of eyes.
You have to pick one. I choose not to hunt for abundance. I choose to stay open to it, which is a different posture entirely.
I see the tight-grip version constantly in the founders I work with, usually right before a launch.
Someone builds a new offer, gets close to putting it out into the world, and starts white-knuckling the number.
What will this make.
Will it work.
What if it doesn’t.
The second that happens, they stop talking about the thing they built and start talking about the outcome they need from it.
The energy of the whole launch shifts from “I built something that genuinely helps people” to “please let this work.” People can feel that difference from the outside.
The fix for this is almost embarrassingly simple: before you launch anything, sit down and write out everything you’re obsessed with about what you made.
Every way it’s going to help people. How good it actually is. You’re rebuilding the connection to the mission before you ever look at the number again. It puts you back in service instead of back in scarcity and it changes the entire vibe and energy of the launch.
You can feel the difference in your own body.
Let’s do a little exercise
Think about gripping money,
fistfuls of it,
held too tight,
knuckles white,
hand close to cramping.
Release and take a deep breath.
Now think about being in service,
having something real to offer that helps others,
how they are transformed by your magic,
how incredible the work is that you have created,
the people you have helped with the exact thing they needed.
Can you tell the difference?
For me, it is astounding. It’s the contrast between some mix of dread, fear and anxiety to pure joy and gratitude.
The Takeaway
Build something solid enough to hold the outcome you want, then loosen your grip enough to let it actually move. You don’t protect money by choking it. Let it flow and let it land.
The altar isn’t really about crystals and the phrase isn’t really about luck. Both are mechanisms I use to loosen the grip.
If you’re sitting on a launch, a rate increase, or a decision you keep white-knuckling, that’s a signal you are driving from ego, scarcity or lack (or a combo of the three). You haven’t loosened the grip yet.
I opened up a handful of spots on my founder hotline, an $88, 30-minute reading built specifically around one question: what’s blocking your next money move. If that’s you right now…
More on the woo and weird, later. There’s a whole other post in the way I use candles to boundary my workday and one in the sales language that’s quietly costing founders money without them ever knowing it. Both are coming.
Katie, thank you for the recommendation. Honored to be in your orbit.