255. Until You Choose Yourself, Money Can't Choose You with Tiffany Carter

Content Note: this episode includes candid discussion of childhood abuse, trafficking, and suicide. Please listen with care.

Tiffany built a multi-million dollar business, hosts a top rated podcast, and does not start her workday until noon.

We open with the question I ask everyone: what's your definition of rich? Hers has changed completely. It used to mean safety, if you have cash, nobody can control you, and you don't have to depend on any person, place, job or institution. Now it means something else entirely. Stacked cash with peace. Money that isn't load-bearing for your sense of being okay.

Tiffany speaks openly about surviving severe abuse through her childhood and into her twenties, and about reaching a point at 37 where she had decided she wasn't going to be here anymore. She goes into the full detail in the first five chapters of her book, with her own content warnings in place, and she tells that part of her story here with the same care. What she describes next is what I want you to hear: what it actually took to dismantle a self that was manufactured by someone else, and rebuild a real one.

Including the business decision most people wouldn't make. She took her eighteen-year-old agency down by ninety percent. Kept two clients, just enough to cover the mortgage, the car, the gym. No family, no partner, no backup. Just the bank of Tiffany.

That was eleven years ago.

What we get into:

Why confidence can be manufactured and self-worth can't, and how she had one without the other for decades The mentor who told her she was needy, and the list that followed: you need money to be okay, a man to be okay, a certain size to be okay Being on the offense with your triggers instead of the defense, and why waiting until you're activated is like trying to hydrate once you're already dehydrated Her Abundance Walks, slow mornings, and why she calls herself a Type C entrepreneur My theory on why waking up at 5 am is quietly wrecking a lot of women, and the nervous system reason slow mornings change everything What she asks herself when she sees someone post a $5 million month Why she isn't allowed to be the final say on hiring in either of her companies, and the guardrails she built after friendships that looked like support and weren't Launching from a regulated state versus a messy one, and how she's ruined entire launches by being a bad steward of her own mind The $18,000–$23,000 a month line item she spends on coaches, therapists and mentors, and wh