"I need to just get my head out of the sand, stop being an ostrich, get in the game and have fun and not look at it as so freaking scary."

She said that to me on our Financial Clarity Session, a free discovery session I offer. And I knew immediately she meant every word of it.

I had known her for a couple of years inside a shared community. I had watched her show up, seen her work, witnessed the kind of woman she was in a room. And I had no idea. No idea what she was carrying. No idea what her relationship with money looked like behind closed doors. That is the thing about financial phobia that most people do not understand. It does not announce itself. It hides inside capable, accomplished, deeply self-aware women who have learned to manage around it so skillfully that even the people closest to them cannot see it.

She was running a multi-six figure business she had built over twelve years, and she was good at it. Really good. Clients trusted her, referred her, renewed with her. Revenue was real and growing. And she had not looked at her numbers in longer than she wanted to admit. In fact, I found out later that in twelve years of running her business, she had never once pulled up a Profit and Loss statement inside her QuickBooks.

When we got on the session she told me right away why she had reached out. "I have a history," she said, "of just shutting down when it comes to finances." She did not say it with shame. She said it with the clarity of someone who has done enough personal work to name a pattern without collapsing into it. And then she told me the story behind it.

Years earlier, someone she loved and trusted completely had been convicted of significant financial fraud. This was not a stranger. This was someone woven into the fabric of her family’s life for nearly two decades. Someone she had trusted with everything and took advantage of her. The legal process that followed was long and brutal, and when it was finally over, something had calcified in her around money. Not just around investing or advisors. Around looking at all of it. If you do not look, you cannot be fooled. If you do not look, you cannot be hurt. The nervous system learns what it needs to learn to keep you safe, and hers had learned that money and betrayal lived in the same neighborhood.

"I really just repel," she said. "It is like, okay, there is the money. No. Do not want to look at debt. Do not want to look at anything."

I have sat with a lot of women who avoid their numbers. I have heard a lot of origin stories. But there was something about the way she said it that landed differently. Not as a complaint. As a reckoning. She was not telling me this to explain herself. She was telling me because she was done with it.

"I need to just get my head out of the sand, stop being an ostrich, get in the game and have fun and not look at it as so freaking scary," she said. And then right behind it, something even more powerful: "I don’t want to have the fear. I want to be bold and confident and proud. This is my company."

She got chills all over her body when she said that. I could see it happen in real time.

That is the moment I want you to notice. Not the fear. The decision that lived right alongside the fear. She was not waiting until she felt ready. She was not waiting until the nervousness went away. She was making the decision to move while the nervousness was still fully present. That is not the absence of financial phobia. That is what it looks like to begin working with it.

I want to tell you what happened when I mentioned looking at her Profit and Loss statement during that session. She did not say no. She did not shut down. But I could read it in her body immediately. She was not there yet. Not even close. The idea of pulling up that report, of seeing the numbers laid out in black and white, of having them mean something about her and her business and all the years she had not been looking, it was all too much. And that was ok, I did not push. Because that is not how this work goes. You do not drag someone to the edge of their fear and tell them to jump. You sit with them where they are and you help them understand why the edge feels so far away.

What I did instead was listen. We talked about her money story, the one that started long before the fraud. She grew up in a blue-collar home where money was protected fiercely because the world felt like it would take it. Cash only. No credit. A very controlled environment. And then the fraud happened, and every instinct her nervous system had ever developed about money being dangerous was confirmed in the most devastating way possible.

She said what I hear in almost every first conversation I have with a woman at this stage: "What do I do today? That is it. I just want to know what to do today."

That sentence tells me everything. It tells me the avoidance has been so complete that the future feels inaccessible. It tells me she is not asking for a five-year plan. She is asking for permission to take one step without the whole weight of everything she has not done coming down on her at once.

Before we got off the session she told me she was ready. She said she could feel it. And I believed her completely, not because she was calm, because she was not, but because of the way she had shown up. She had told me the truth. All of it. The fraud, the fear, the ostrich years, the numbers she had not looked at. She had laid it all out in the first conversation, because something in her knew it was finally time.

She signed up that day.

And then she told me about the oracle card she had pulled that morning before we spoke. And when she read it to me, I understood why she had shown up the way she did.

The card said: Are you ready to face the harsh light of illumination that rips open your old ideas and shows you what else is possible? Allow the truth to burn through your defenses. Then you will be set free.

She read me the last line and I felt it in my whole body.

When the sun goddess comes with her bright light, it is the day of reckoning that will lead only to miracles.

I am tearing up as I write this. I had known this woman for two years inside our shared community. I had watched her show up, admired her work, and sat beside her in rooms. And I had no idea she was carrying any of this. She had never let on. That is how good we get at managing around the thing we cannot bring ourselves to look at.

She read me that card and I got chills too.

If her story is resonating with you, if you recognized something of yourself in the way she described her relationship with money, the next step is not your Profit and Loss. It is something gentler than that. The CEO Money Rewire is a free five-part private audio series designed to help you understand why you are the way you are around money, and to begin moving you carefully and lovingly in a new direction. You can access it now at www.audreyfaustconsulting.com/moneyrewire.

Next week we go inside the first session. And that is where things start to shift.

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.