"I am a financial phobic."

That is how Becky introduced herself when she started our interview. And she said it the way someone speaks when they have finally stopped pretending, self-proclaimed, matter-of-fact, almost relieved, the kind of honesty that only happens when eleven women are sitting in a room in Fort Lauderdale and the culture says you are safe here.

I was in my mastermind’s in-person strategy day, and it was my turn in the love seat. My coach Sara runs them differently than most, she calls them love seats instead of hot seats, which tells you everything about the energy in that room. A few minutes earlier, Becky had suggested that instead of the usual format, we could interview each other. Becky is a former journalist, and the moment she said it, something in me went completely still. Not hesitation. The opposite of hesitation. I knew before I finished the thought that this was what my day was supposed to look like. I was leaving this mastermind in a matter of weeks. This was my last turn. And something about being interviewed rather than coached felt exactly right.

So when it was my turn, I asked for it.

Becky opened by introducing herself, and that is when she said it. "Financial phobic." And something lit up in me so fast I almost laughed. In the space of one breath, two things happened at once. I thought, that is the word. That is the word I have been searching for to describe who I help. And right behind it, just as fast, I am the person who can get her to the other side of this. I knew it the way you know things that do not require explanation. Not as a sales thought. As a recognition. I wanted to reach across the room, give her a big hug, and say, "Don’t worry, I got you."

I have been doing this for years, working with women who were building real companies, earning real revenue, doing genuinely impressive things, and quietly, consistently, not looking at their numbers. I knew exactly who they were. I knew the particular freeze that happens when they even think about looking at a Profit and Loss statement. I knew the email from the bookkeeper or CPA that sits unread for days because something about opening it feels like a judgement.

I just did not have the right language for it.

For a long time I said "afraid to look at their numbers." I thought that statement was accurate enough. But I kept noticing something: women were not raising their hands and stepping forward. They would often just remain quiet. Not because it was wrong, but because it felt like an accusation. After Becky’s interview, one of the other women in the room said something that stopped me cold.

"When you say afraid to look at your numbers, I feel like you are telling me I am incompetent. I would never raise my hand for that."

She paused, and then she said: "But financial phobic? That I would tell you."

And then Becky said something that I have not stopped thinking about since. "It is like women who will not check their breasts because they are afraid they will find a lump," she said. "They are not in denial. They are not careless. They are terrified of what the truth might cost them. And so they do not look. And that is the worst thing they can do for themselves."

I felt that in my whole body. Because that is exactly it. The avoidance is not weakness. It is a protection strategy that has outlived its usefulness. And just like with a breast exam, the looking is almost never as bad as the not looking. What you find when you finally open the Profit and Loss is almost always workable and fixable. What happens to a business when no one is watching the numbers can often be costly.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. A phobia, by definition, is a fear response that is disproportionate to the actual threat. It is a nervous system pattern, not a character flaw. It does not mean something is wrong with you. It means something happened that taught your nervous system that looking was dangerous. And once I had that word, everything I had been watching in my clients for years suddenly had a name that invited them in rather than shutting them out.

The women I work with are not bad at business. They are often extraordinary at it. I have sat with founders who have built multi-six figure and even seven-figure companies without ever once pulling a Profit and Loss report. Not because they did not care. Because somewhere along the way, looking felt like the most dangerous thing they could do.

And it is almost never about the business. It is almost always older than the business. It lives in a childhood where money was scarce and fights were loud, or where money was plentiful but sealed away like something shameful. It lives in someone telling you early on that you are bad at math, or not good with money, and that message taking root before you were old enough to question it. It lives in a first marriage where the power went out and there was twenty dollars left to feed three kids. It lives in a trusted advisor who turned out to be a thief. It lives in the message received early and often that money belongs to someone else, someone with a different kind of brain, someone with a different last name.

By the time a woman has built a substantial business, sometimes even over a decade, with revenue she has never fully seen, she is not avoiding her numbers because she is afraid of spreadsheets. She is avoiding them because looking has always meant one of these things: finding out something is wrong with her, a judgement day of guilt or shame, realizing how much she has been missing and overlooking, or simply confirming the story she has carried her whole life that she was never meant to be good at this. None of those feel safe.

I know this not only because I have watched it in my clients. I know it because I have lived it myself.

Last year I had the worst profitable year of my entire career. I had walked away from my accounting agency to go all in on CFO advisory and coaching only, the work my heart had been in for five years. Dropping the done-for-you accounting work that no longer lit me up, it was time. But instead of adjusting my spending to match my new reality, I kept spending like I still had the same revenue from the business I had left behind. Over $100,000 going out the door for coaching, travel, marketing, and book publishing. I am The Manifesting CFO. And I was not managing my own finances, or even looking at them, the way I teach other women to manage theirs.

There is shame in admitting that. And I am admitting it anyway.

Because somewhere in that season, I realized something I had never expected to feel. Numbers have always come easily to me. They have been my language my entire career. But that year, for the first time, I understood in my own body what my clients had been living with for years. I too thought my numbers were judging me. I too felt the weight of opening a report and bracing for what it would say about me as a person. The universe, in its wisdom, had given me the experience I needed to truly understand the women I serve. Financial phobia does not discriminate. It visits all of us, especially in the seasons when looking feels like it will confirm our worst fears about ourselves.

Financial phobia is the pattern that lives between a woman and her own numbers. It is the low-grade anxiety or uncomfortableness she feels before opening QuickBooks, if she opens it at all, or even looking at her bank account when the balance is a little lower than she would like. It is the way she deflects when someone asks how the business is doing, because the honest answer is she does not entirely know. It is the freeze, the avoidance, the brilliant rationalization that her bookkeeper and her CPA have it handled so she does not have to look.

She is not irresponsible. She is not unintelligent. She has a phobia. And like every phobia, it can be worked with. It can be understood, traced back to its source, and gently, methodically, rewired.

That is the work I do before I put on my CFO hat. I help her feel safe with what we are about to step into. We rewire the old energy and fear, and change it to curiosity and excitement.

Over the next four weeks, I am going to take you inside one woman’s journey through exactly that. She came to me unable to open her Profit and Loss out of fear, anxiety, and what I can only describe as literal panic. By our fourth session together she was in QuickBooks, double-clicking line items, asking questions, and genuinely curious about what she would find. What happened between those two moments is what I most want you to see.

But before the story begins, I want to offer you something very special, created just for you. If any part of what I just described felt familiar, if "financial phobic" landed the way it landed for Becky, if you recognized yourself somewhere in these paragraphs, this is your next step.

It is called The CEO Money Rewire. It is a free five-part private audio series, and it exists because the rewiring does not start with your numbers. It starts with understanding why looking at them has felt like the thing you could not do. It starts with understanding why you are the way you are, then carefully and lovingly moves you in a new direction. You can access it now at www.audreyfaustconsulting.com/moneyrewire.

Stay tuned, because this story starts next week, and it is a good one.

The only CFO-trained strategist who works with financially phobic women business owners at $200K to $2M+, creating the clarity, confidence, and profitability that turns them into financially powerful and profitable CEOs.