Befriend Your Bank Account with Keris Fox

Does even the thought of money trigger an instant stress response? In this episode, bestselling author and certified trauma of money coach Keris Fox she shares how to transform your relationship with money by rewriting your money story. She explains why so many women believe they're "bad with money" and offers practical steps to befriend your finances.In this conversation, you'll learn:• Why knowing your exact financial position reduces anxiety• Simple daily self-care practices that help money management feel better• How to recognise and soothe your nervous system around money triggers• The importance of checking in with your body before making financial decisionsWhether you struggle with money trauma, avoid checking your bank account or want to move from scarcity to abundance, this episode offers gentle, trauma-informed and VAST/ADHD-friendly approaches to building a healthier relationship with money.Feel Better Every Day! Learn from the self and Self* care practices the professionals depend on. With a mixture of solo and interview episodes, your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham (author of 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing) shares trauma-informed and VAST / ADHD-friendly self and Self* care ideas to help you:• Feel Better (regulate your nervous system and do the things that help you create a life you don’t need to retreat from)• Be Better (accept yourself completely with love, compassion and kindness – you don’t need to do a thing) and• Do Better (turn what hurts your heart into action to support your family, organisations, communities and the world at large)Thanks for watching or listening. New episodes come out every Tuesday morning (Ireland time) and if you subscribe (via your favourite podcasting app or by joining the Sole to Soul Circle), you’ll be notified about each new episode. 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You can find me almost everywhere – please say ‘Hi’ and share your questions or comments: YouTube @evemenezescunninghamSubstack @evemcBluesky @eveimcTikTok @evemenezescunninghamInsta @evemenezescunninghamFacebook @FeelBetterEveryDay And if you’d like to leave a review and/or rate this and other episodes you’ve enjoyed, your feedback and support helps me help more people (of all genders) with trauma histories and/or ADHD take better care of their whole selves and create lives they don’t need to retreat from. DISCLAIMERThe content I share is not a replacement for one to one trauma therapy (etc). While you can do an enormous amount to support yourself, please always seek appropriate medical advice.Thanks for watching. Please subscribe / follow and share with someone who you think will benefit from this episode.FULL TRANSCRIPTHi, I'm Eve Menezes Cunningham and you're listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. Every Tuesday I share trauma-informed and ADHD/VAST-friendly self-care ideas to help you take better care of yourself (and your Self with that uppercase S for that highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant, miraculous part of yourself).I do this to help you create a life you don't need to retreat from, and you can find out more at thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com. Today's episode, I'm delighted to welcome my friend Keris Fox.She used to be Keris Stainton and she's a best-selling author and she has been running the Ladybird Purse over on Substack for years now, helping women at midlife, myself included, to transform our relationship with money. She is now a certified trauma of money coach and I cannot wait to share our episode.Welcome Keris Fox, formerly Stainton. Thank you so much for joining me.Thank you for having me.Ah, it's such a pleasure. It's so funny because we've only started, like it's in the last few years, we've become, I was going to say real life friends, but we've still never actually met in person. We regularly connect online, but I've known you coming up, what, 15 years online, at more of a distance? Possibly even more than that, I think, yeah.Well, when did you write, I remember you writing your first book. I remember you getting-That's 15 years ago this year. Yeah.But I was on like Journobiz before the book came out, so probably even before that, yeah.Yeah. And now I'm delighted to have you on the Feel Better Every Day Podcast, talking about the trauma of money. Would you like to say a little bit about what you're working on and how people can find you?Yeah, the trauma of money. Talking about the trauma of money. I want to talk about the joy of money as well.I love trauma work because it's all about recovery and it's about the joy, the growth. Yeah, through the trauma to get to the joy.Exactly that, yeah. Well, I'm actually working on, I did Trauma of Money coach training earlier this year, so I am trauma of money certified. Yeah. I'm putting together various programs to do with that, which what I wanted to do when I started trying to put something together, I realised that a lot of the trauma of money stuff is kind of fits in with narrative, with storytelling.Because I'm a novelist as well, I thought the two of them go together quite well. I've been combining the rewriting your money story and your next chapter. I'm putting all of that together and it feels like I've got all of this information now and I'm kind of whittling it down.In the meantime, before I've actually got that put together, I've got my Ladybird Purse money Substack that I've been writing for three and a half years. So every Monday there's an interview with a woman about money and also my own kind of money misadventures. I've started calling it, although I'm not sure that's strictly true anymore.And yeah, I have another Substack, which is my author Substack, which is called Happy Endings. And yes, I have two books out at the minute, one nonfiction, which is the Harry Styles Effect.Yeah, I'm holding up the Harry Styles Effect for people who are listening rather than watching with joy, because this is the book Keris was born to write, basically, and it's just delightful.That's so nice of you. It's like a fandom memoir. So it's not just about Harry Styles, it's about me and fandom and music. And it's also like a celebration of Harry Styles.And then I've just had a novel came out last week, which is under pseudonym, Olivia Harvey. And that's like a new adult sort of sexy rom-com inspired by Below Deck. Stealth, what did somebody call it? Stealth, stealth, stealth sauciness, I think the review said, or stealthily saucy, something like that.Well, congratulations.Thank you.Did I say that's called Rock the Boat, that one? Sorry.No, you didn't. Thank you.People can find out about your books at kerisfox.com. Many, many, many books. So for today's episode, we're talking about how to get through the trauma of money to the joy of money.And I know for me, since I started reading Keris's Ladybird Purse, and I've been interviewed a couple times for it, and it's really made me reassess my own trauma around money.And with my recent ADHD diagnosis, the dyscalculia, and like, it's like I do regular money dates and all. But I often feel like crying, just sorting out bank statements, I've got my UK bank statements, I've got my Irish ones, I've got the business, I've got the personal, it's all, and it's just putting them in date order makes me want to cry. And, and recognising, okay, my brain really does not thrive with numbers.And having the confidence at nearly 50 to say to someone at the bank, or say to someone around, like, I'm really not great with numbers that I got a new accountant who it feels much better with. I've gone on to Xero, but your, your misadventures, as you call them, and your interviews, it's really helped me confront some of my… I'd done money mindset work before I'd done like, kind of my money story, and like, my earliest memory being burgled when we lived in Tottenham, like all of that.But there's something so lovely reading people who love money, and reading people who still struggle with money, but also, I think, with women at midlife. What would you say the biggest problem people have around money?Oh, wow. Well, I think with women, it is thinking that, that we're bad with money. I think that's like, it seems to be the first thing that often when I approach women to...