Embrace Your Fear, Win at Career + Life: Farnoosh Torabi on Building Midlife + Financial Resilience
Show Snapshot:
What if the key to becoming more self-reliant and financially resilient in midlife starts with something as counterintuitive as embracing fear? Journalist and finance pro Farnoosh Torabi invites us to throw our arms around fear to unlock growth and resiliency in midlife. Farnoosh walks us through nine common fears and how they can catapult growth in her latest book, “A Healthy State of Panic: Follow Your Fears to Build Wealth, Crush Your Career, and Win at Life.” We explore biggies like the fear of regret, failure, and loneliness, why we should stop feeling bad for being afraid, and how to make friends with fear without letting it stop you from moving forward. Bonus! We uncover the unsung gifts of fear, including self-reflection, wisdom, self-advocacy, and inner peace. This conversation might just change your life!
Show Links:
Follow Farnoosh:
Podcast: So Money
A Healthy State of Panic: Follow Your Fears to Build Wealth, Crush Your Career, and Win at Life
Quotable:
Fear tells a story. Our fears are universal and personal…it's important to really observe and recognize and explore our personal fears…how we were raised, the influences that we've had, what we want to protect, what we value, our goals. Fear can unlock that for us.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty 0:03
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. Beauties, we're just a few weeks into the start of 2024. A time of year when we're open to possibility and embracing change. Today's show is going to ask you to try something wildly new on for size. What if you spent this year rethinking fear, making friends with it, giving fear a big old, gigantic bear hug. Because when we do, we can turn many of the common fears that hold us back, personally, professionally, and financially, into superpowers for building your best life. So says my guest this week, renowned journalist Farnoosh Torabi, a personal finance expert and host of the mega popular podcast, So Money. Farnoosh is here to talk all things fear, and her newest and most personal book yet "A Healthy State of Panic: Follow Your Fears to Build Wealth, Crush Your Career, and Win at Life." If you want to be smarter about tackling the fears that can hold you back, if you want to learn to pivot, fear into strength, and learn to mine fear for a richer, more meaningful life, stick around. This show is for you. Welcome, Farnoosh.
Farnoosh Torabi 1:14
Thank you so much, Katie.
Katie Fogarty 1:15
I'm excited. Actually, I have a healthy state of panic that I'm not going to get to all the questions that I want to ask you because I have really enjoyed this book, and I found myself-- even though our personal stories are so different--I found myself nodding in recognition. You know, in so many of these chapters, you really focus on the kind of the nine fears that that many people experience. I want to start by asking though, you know, you've written three books on Money and Finance, this book does get to money, but it's really only a sliver of the story. It's very much rooted in personal anecdotes and your personal experience. As a jumping off point can you share a little bit about your background, your upbringing that made you so well acquainted with fear and the role it played in the genesis of this book?
Farnoosh Torabi 2:04
Definitely. Well, I often say when we're talking about money, we're really talking about life. And so to your first point about this book, sort of being a money book, but really being a lot more than just about mastering your finances. That's the reasoning behind it is because you can't, almost it's inevitable that once you're talking about things like spending and saving and investing and earning, you're talking about things like what you're afraid of, and your goals and the way that you are raised the way that I was raised, where I was the daughter of, I am, the daughter of immigrants from Iran, they moved here, my parents, in the late 70s. And I was born in 1980. In Worcester, Massachusetts. Woosta, for those of us who -
Katie Fogarty 2:49
I know Worcester. I went to Holy Cross.
Farnoosh Torabi 2:52
Oh, wonderful. Okay, so you know, did you hang out at the Regal Beagle?
Katie Fogarty 2:58
I hung out lots of places. Yes. So I'm probably not as familiar with the town as you are. Because it was only four years. And I, I spent most of it at the library. Just kidding.
Farnoosh Torabi 3:09
Well, I was young when we were living there, but I remember it as being through my parents' eyes, at least this very scary place. I think, mostly for them. It was scary, because they were new to America and Worcester in the 80s was full of like, sort of, like typical crime that you you know, it would top the five o'clock news of you know, there's the menacing crimes that, I think a lot of, maybe was inflated because of the five o'clock news, but they, my mom, especially, you know, she was really the one, my guardian full time, my father worked at the university. And so she and I were growing up together in the trenches of, Worcester, she was 19, when she had me, and in her own ways, found life scary because of where she was in her life stage. And not speaking the language not having financial independence, being a mom for the first time being a wife for, you know, at a young age. And so all of that got transmitted to me. And so I write in the book about how I've had this very, very early education in what it means to feel fear. And I wasn't an expert in it by any means. But it did set the groundwork for me later as an adult woman navigating another set of terrifying things like, you know, the world of finance and being somebody who wanted to pursue work in media, which is very cutthroat and a lot of other newsrooms were male dominated. How I did all of that as someone too who wanted to be financially ambitious and well off as a young woman. As an older woman, even it's just something that we don't say out loud enough, I think because we're afraid of how it's going to be interpreted and perceived, money is not traditionally a domain that we link women to or, you know, let's just be honest, women, maybe I'm just speaking for myself here, but I feel like I might be speaking for a few more women in the audience. We're not, it's not like we're allowed to want for things as much as men and especially money and wealth and richness and career ambition, these are things that often are more linked to men's ambitions. It's more normalized in, as a man. And so anyway, all this to say that fear and I go way back. And as I became older, I learned how to have a more, more constructive relationship with fear as it's, it's the emotion that doesn't like to go away. The world is abundantly full of just a lot of scary things. And so I think better to have a way to reckon with it and have a relationship with this feeling than to try to fight it. Fighting it has never helped me, trying to be fearless doesn't work for me. And I think that people are ready for this mindset shift. Because I think a lot of people relate to this message of like, How can I just be fearless?
Katie Fogarty 6:11
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This notion of reckoning with the fear. I mean, your book really gives fear a rebrand. And it's just a fascinating read, we're going to explore several of the areas that you touch on. But I want to start with something that you open your book with, and you say, for generations, fear has been a victim of some very unfortunate PR, we're told that fear is a barrier to living our best life, right? And we're encouraged by pop culture to be fearless to sort of embrace this, like the fearless girl, you know. And so it makes it seem like fear is something to be avoided and shunned.You with this book, encourage us to embrace fear. Why?
Farnoosh Torabi 6:52
Because when you face your fears, I believe that what you're really doing is you're facing yourself. And in a world where we are constantly being pushed in millions of directions, there's so much comparison, culture, there's so much distraction, all we want at the end of the day, is to feel as though we're making important decisions in a self-aligned way. And to tap into your fears is not a show of weakness. It's not cowardice, I would argue it's a way for you to get stronger. Because fear tells a story. Our fears are universal and personal. What I'm afraid of, Katie, is different from what you're afraid of, although I'm sure there's overlaps, too. But it's important to really observe and recognize and explore our personal fears. Because again, there's an important narrative there about how we were raised, the influences that we've had, and also what we want to protect, what we value, our goals. These are the sorts of, you know, explorations that we really need to be doing more often and fear can unlock that for us.
Katie Fogarty 7:58
Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, your book. Yeah, there's so many universal themes. And I absolutely adore books where people are sharing very, very specific stories like you do. And I think that's also one of the reasons why I love Laura Belgray's book "Tough Titties," because even though it was uniquely her story, as she was telling it, I was thinking of similar things in my own life, it was like sparking, and sort of excavating all these memories. And I think your your book really did that beautifully for me. You cover nine universal fears, they range from the fear of rejection, of loneliness, FOMO, and certainly failure, I would love to touch on as many as we can, we're definitely gonna get into money fears, because that's a big area of your expertise. But your book is called a "Healthy State of Panic" that, you know, if we are panicking in some ways, if we are sort of, we can turn them into these superpowers. And so before we get into some specifics, I would love to hear a little bit about how you finally embraced the things that made you maybe anxious and fearful when you were younger. And you know, was there one particular moment when you recognize it had this fear in the past had been transformed in some way that made you more powerful?
Farnoosh Torabi 9:10
I think it was in my mid 20s, when I really started to come into my career and step into my career and feel very capable as a journalist, and I was starting to think more entrepreneurially about my work, and the money started to flow in. And what I realized is that, you know, I had been afraid in the past to maybe pursue these entrepreneurial, quote-unquote, risk taking ways of approaching my work. I was like, I just gotta get a nine-to-five. I'm going to earn what they pay me and, you know, quietly, you know, rise through the ranks, I suppose. But it was actually a layoff. I got laid off in 2009 during the Great Recession, which was a terrifying moment but, you know, at the same time, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I really was forced to sit with my fears and figure out," Is it really safer to try to go find another nine-to-five?" Or maybe, to do what I think is the scarier thing over here of entrepreneurship. But let's sit with that idea for a second, let's remember who you are Farnoosh, you know, really facing that fear of going for the juggernaut. It required me to kind of think about, okay, how can I do that in a way that makes me feel safe? How can I do that in a way that feels like, even if I'm going to fail, which I will, I'll still be able to get back on my feet. And so in my, in my decision, ultimately, to not go back and try to find a nine to five in that layoff aftermath, I made a promise to myself that I was going to start this business of mine that I have today, but that I was only going to do it, once I you know, step by step, I was going to create a good savings reserve, I was going to take time for myself to work on myself so that I could show up better in the business, I was going to invest more, and I was going to just try to do the things that I knew were going to help me fall, if I did fall, fall with, you know, onto a cushion, as opposed to you know, going back to live with my parents. And it was, it was invigorating. I mean, it was like I was at this crossroads in my life where, I think that's why I wrote this book, I want this book to be a tool for people who feel as though they're about to make a really big decision and the stakes are high, and it is scary. So whether it's about work or your relationships, or a personal endeavor, money, I think when fear shows up in these moments, these are the opportune times that I write about in the book, when fear can be this, this tool, this guide, to check in with yourself, figure out how you're going to go still do the thing, but do it your way, in a way that protects what you want, that respects your values. And so you might be presenting as fearless. You know, being an entrepreneur, starting a business in a recession, people think oh my gosh, I wish I was you. I wish I could be fearless. And the secret is, is like I'm not being fearless. What I've done actually is decided to have a healthy relationship with my feelings, particularly my fears, take inventory of what I care about, and then go do the thing, feeling safer in my body and in my mind. And I think that's the, that's the trick to fearlessness. You know, I say the way that fearlessness works is that it doesn't. Because it's funny, but really it's like, of course we do things that present is fearless, starting a podcast, going on a stage, starting a business, getting married, getting divorced, having kids. We are doing fearless things all the time.
Katie Fogarty 13:06
Yes, but we don't look at them that way. I yeah, I love that.
Farnoosh Torabi 13:09
From the outside it looks that way. But inside, I think we need to give ourselves more credit for that process of getting to that point of being able to present as this person who seemingly is like up for any risks, but no, what we have done maybe quietly, and it could just be subconsciously, we have assessed for risk, we have thought about consequences. And we have probably created a contingency plan, you know, for ourselves or we've done something in a way that we've provided ourselves with the structure and the support system so that we can go do those things that look like, you know, we're nuts. But we know that we are mitigating for risk, because we've done this, like really healthy practice of learning more about ourselves, and we want to protect through our fears.
Katie Fogarty 13:55
Yeah, I love that. Farnoosh, we're heading into a quick break. But when we come back, I want to pick this up.
We're back from the break. When we headed into it, you talked about how we behave in ways where we are more fearless than people might perceive so that when we look at somebody we'll think oh, well, they can easily be an entrepreneur or they can take a stage because they are fearless. And that is not for me. But what we're not seeing is all the work that went into it, all the steps that were taken that allow that person to get into that position to become successful. And part of those steps might have been grappling with uncertainty or anxiety or trepidation about the process that you know finally puts you on that stage or makes you take the leap and it's very easy to look at somebody else's end result. And think, Oh, that's good for you, but not for me. I couldn't do that. But the reality is we do things that require us to, you know, embrace our fears every single day, as you pointed out, we take the leap on love or we start a new job where we you know embrace parenthood things that are sort of new, and you know untraveled by us, you share something in the book that I wanted to ask you about. It's a great story. It's about one of your co-workers who thought to himself, I, you know, I've been working in the newsroom kind of behind the scenes as a writer or producer, but I'd love to be on camera. But he was fearful of putting himself in that position to try for an on-camera job. And he did something which sounds like you've done at different points in your life he had, he had a very honest conversation with himself, and he came to the conclusion, you know, hey, I'm not ready to be on camera in this big market, I need to move myself to smaller markets to get that experience. Having honest conversations with ourselves sounds so great in practice, you know, like, yes, I'd love to have honest conversations with myself, but it can be hard to do. What are some steps that you would offer listeners who are thinking to themselves, you know, I want to try something, but it feels risky. How do they, you know, evaluate their chances of success or the steps they need to take, if they're, you know, how can you help them have a more honest conversation?
Farnoosh Torabi 16:12
Well, but the case of my friend, and what he was fearing, really, in that moment, was the fear of rejection. So the first thing is when you're fearing anything, is to try to nail it. Like what actually? Is it that you're afraid of? Is it the uncertainty? Is it, is it failure? Is it, with my friend it was rejection. And the honest conversation, it kind of goes like this, like, okay, so I'm fearing rejection - why? Okay, so, I find that the more you ask why of yourself, the more you get to an answer, just like when my little kids, like, always want to know why it's annoying, but do this for yourself. And it's like, Okay, so first step, why am I afraid of rejection? Well, in his case, was because we had this very particular news manager, and rightfully so it was the number one market in the country, New York City, this person or manager or news manager, director was getting hundreds of tapes a week. And so there was some real competition. And so that's, that's why this my friend was afraid of the rejection, because he knew that there was a lot of competition, but really, the next leg of it is that he didn't quite have the chops, to be quite honest. You know, it requires a real, level of honesty with yourself. It's like, Would you hire you, you know, would you hire yourself? Would you throw yourself in the thick of a blazing fire and go live on television in New York City and have to tell viewers, the play-by-play in sound bites and preferably under 60 seconds. That takes, that is a technique, that takes practice.
Katie Fogarty 17:44
It's a skill, that's a real skill.
Farnoosh Torabi 17:45
It's a real skill. And it doesn't mean that you don't have the potential. But now the question for my friend, once he's realizing it's competitive, and he doesn't have the experience, and that the rejection is probable, How bad do you want it? How bad do you want it knowing now what it's going to take? And that's not to say that, you know, are you ambitious enough or not, I don't want to confuse those things. Because you can be very successful as a producer in New York City, you could probably make more than on-cameran camera talent, sometimes, depending on the show and the network. So it wasn't that it was like questioning your, your ambition, but it's like how bad do you want that particular path. And you're smart, you can probably reverse engineer your way to getting there just like everybody else has. But it really takes wanting it. And, and as my journalism professors told us, in grad school, sometimes the best way to New York is to first leave New York, you will get your way back because New York, that market is just, it's number one. So it's very competitive. And a lot of the reporters who land there have come from other markets, Miami, la Chicago, Boston. And so my friend, the, the process for him was to realize I do want this and what I'm willing to do is to give myself a couple of years to go get the experience the live on-camera experience, and the skills to become to come back and be a viable candidate and not just feel like maybe I deserve this because I'm, I know my boss, and my boss picks the people on camera. And my friend went to Florida, worked there, worked his way up and then did eventually land back at the station, and he's still there working on camera. And it's a perfect example of when you fear rejection. Sometimes what it's telling you is that there is a gap in your skills, in your qualifications, and it's not about, it's not personal. It's not like we don't like you. It's that this is just what the requirements are for this acceptance, to be accepted into this program, this job, this school, and in those contexts I think it's important to separate your self-worth from those, from the rejection, it's not really again about you, it's about what the work requires. And then the next question is, are you willing to go do that work? And if not, that's okay. But at least you've had that honest conversation with yourself, you've, you've had that reality check,
Right. And you and your friend had a very specific situation he wanted, as he pointed out to be on the number one media market in the country. And so he had to, you know, figure out how to get himself there. And he smartly went off and, you know, built his skills and came back. So, because he had to get a boss to say yes to him. So what if the person that we need to say yes to us is us? You know, because, yes, we can do the things we need to put in place in order to have a third party, you know, sort of grant us permission, give us the job, you know, do the things. But sometimes we are the people that we need to get to say yes to us, right, we need to get out of our own way. What how do we face the fear that you know, that many of us carry around when we're trying new things or want, you know, looking at goals that we'd like to achieve in 2024?
I would say, go to the dark place, go to the edge of that fear. Imagine you play small, because you let yourself, because you don't think you're worthy enough or capable enough today. Imagine. I mean, the, I think what's waiting for you in the wings is far terrifying, far more terrifying than what you're facing today, which might be a little bit of insecurity or uncertainty. I experienced this in my, in my 20s. Again, going back to Farnoosh wanting to be successful and ambitious and career driven and wanting to be financially independent. I feared what saying that out loud and admitting that to say, people on dates, like what would you know, would they, would they want to a second day and I wasn't getting second dates. And I remember a guy at work told me a mentor, he said, I know your problem. You're too much for these guys, you need to like be a little bit quieter about all these things you've got going on, because then they're not going to know how to take care of you. And I was like, Wow, that sounds terrifying.
Katie Fogarty 22:05
Sounds like very bad advice.
Farnoosh Torabi 22:08
But, you know, I was so impressionable back then, I didn't know anything. And I was like, Okay, and so I played the game for a little bit until I realized, Oh, my God, what, this you know, this is first of all, exhausting, trying to be someone I'm not. But what's more terrifying is that in the act of, of deferring to this fear that I have of rejection, and I'm just rejecting myself in the process. And what's waiting for me down the road is an unactualized life, a life where I never got to fulfill my wildest dreams. And I think for me, that was the true awakening, it was the kick in the pants to like, kind of like, do a little foreshadowing and say, Oh, my gosh, this is what I'm going to end up a shell of a person, not who I am, someone unrecognizable. And then taking that fear with me into the current day, to go and kick ass and do what I want to do, and -
Katie Fogarty 23:06
And but you have, and you've built this incredible career. And by the way, if you'd followed that guy's advice, and like, you know, to the bitter end, you would have wound up married to somebody who didn't know you, because you were presenting yourself, you know, in this sort of artificial light, like, do we really want the friends in our lives that we've only won if they think we're somebody else entirely? That's exhausting and depressing. And I know from reading your book that you have a phenomenal husband, who knows who you are, because you were, you were candid.
Farnoosh Torabi 23:36
Yep, yeah. It's not fair to anybody, when you're not being honest with yourself in a relationship. And so thankfully, I was able to just get so exhausted on the dating field, then I had to have this real honest reckoning with myself. Often when we fear rejection, I write in the book that when we allow it to force us to conform, and we think that we have to conform or play by the rules or, you know, quote-unquote, rules and play nice, nice that what we're really just doing is rejecting ourselves, which is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I mean, that's what we were trying to avoid. We were hoping for acceptance, but it's just you cannot escape the rejection when you allow the fear to take over you, you have to be the one in charge of that fear. And to, as I say, look down the road and see What's scarier for you, you know, today facing a little bit of rejection or in the future, an unactualized life.
Katie Fogarty 24:40
Yep, absolutely. So I'm going to ask you a question that you might not have the answer to, but I'm going to ask you anyway. Do you think that this is a gendered issue? Do you think that more women are, you know, I feel like women are sometimes we have more artifice built into our lives like, you know, I color my hair and wear mascara, you know, but my like, I show up every day with eyelashes that, you know, don't look like they look like when I started in the morning. So do you feel that more women struggle with this than men? Or what's your take on that?
Farnoosh Torabi 25:13
It's interesting. I don't know the exact answer to that question. But I do think it's interesting that when you look at the history of this campaign against fear, that it is very patriarchal. It is, I mean, the first thing I write about in the book is one of the first things is going back to the Great Depression when our former president told everyone inauguration, FDR said that, you know, duration at a time when most Americans were very poor, very hungry, and jobless. He said, Fear nothing but fear itself. And I can't help but think what a privileged way to live. You know, who can afford that? I don't think most people can afford truly being fearless, which I had, I define as not having to worry about consequences, being able to afford any sort of risk, and the consequence of risk. I think that women and minorities are more vulnerable to risk and the ability to not afford things because of just our history, financial history and work history and labor history and civil rights history in our country. And so it's a particularly important message, I think, for women and minorities to realize that when they feel fear, they may have been conditioned to feel weakness, as a result of that feeling, to think that fear is, is fear and courage cannot be, cannot coexist, but they can. And I do feel bad for all the men who are told this, that that they cannot show their fears, because that would mean that they're not real men. And so I just think this message is really toxic. I understand that we want, we don't like the feeling. I mean, listen, no one likes like this, as I describe it, like, you know, this feeling of like this pit at the bottom of your stomach. Fear manifests very differently in all of our bodies, you know, it's like, it's this not comfortable adrenaline in our body sometimes. I don't want us walking around feeling that all day. But it's not to say that when it arrives, there's not something that we can learn and stop and think about, and that we should hide from it. Everyone is scared. If we were just to accept that truth, everyone is scared at some point during the day, every day, right?
Katie Fogarty 27:47
And it makes us feel less inadequate. You know, I, over the years have added public speaking to my skills set, I get hired to do keynotes and to present and at one point, I was terrified of speaking in public, I would not raise my hand at a PTA meeting, because I just, you know, found the whole thing terrible. And I said to one of my good friends who does a lot of presenting, you know, you're just naturally good at this. And she said, Oh, no, no, I'm not I have put a lot of work in. And I've worked with trainers, and I've become good at it. And it was like a ridiculous light bulb moment for me because I had been telling my kids for years to like to try new things. And it takes a long time to be good at things like tennis or ballet or you know, gymnastics or reading and I was not giving myself the same permission to just to be a beginner and to learn and to be afraid. I thought you had to be like fearless to walk out on stage and I still do a lot of public speaking and I will get nervous before I walk out onto a stage still and, but I've learned in midlife that you can be scared and do it anyway. And if we're waiting for that perfect moment of fearlessness to try things, we're probably not doing anything. Because I don't think it exists that moment where you're like, I've got it all going on. I have mastered the universe. You know, it doesn't happen. Farnoosh, I want to switch gears for a minute though, and then talk about money because we've, we've touched on it a little bit. You talked about at the beginning of our conversation how sometimes for women, it's, it's harder to ask for stuff. Our culture does not reward women who are, I mean that you think of all the words like bossy you know, that has been you know, Sheryl Sandberg has tried to to, you know, to ban the word bossy. We see, you know, celebrities and CEOs like Tory Burch, embracing ambition for her foundation. I believe that's what she calls it embrace ambition. So but it's been hard for women to do that because when women are powerful and assertive, and outspoken sometimes that comes at personal and professional costs. You yourself, say in the book that you went through sort of a money fear at one point in your life that, that you thought that becoming a wealthy woman would come at great cost, right that if you were to, to achieve power that it would cost you in your your personal life, what helped you flip this switch and shift?
Farnoosh Torabi 29:18
Yeah, it's the fear of wanting too much success. And I do think that it's it's a really tough terrain. Because while we want to believe that we can just be loud and proud about our ambitions without consequence, there are real consequences for women, I remember growing up, my mom asked for a raise and got fired. And that was in the 90s. And this is still happening today, women are asking for what their value is in the workplace and getting doors shut in their face getting penalized at work. And so with all that, as, as I understand all that, and I don't want to pretend like you know, everything's okay. And you should just do you. Without fear, no, have the fear because rejection and failure is unfortunately part of part of it. But that doesn't mean that we should give up. And what I remember, for myself as a young woman trying to navigate my own financial fears around this is that going back to what I said earlier, the, the moment I realized that I couldn't stop, and I wasn't going to apologize for who I was, was when I realized if I did play smaller and pretend that I would be happy with less, and that I would probably be okay being financially dependent on someone else, because that's how my mother did it. And so many other women do it. I mean, that's just the norm, I would be a very sad person in the future, someone who would look back and be incredibly regretful. And here's the other thing I want to say to anyone who's ever felt doubt or still insecurity around their financial ambitions, career ambitions, yes, there will be rejection. And yes, people will not understand you. Why? Because people fear the unknown. When a woman aspires to be wealthy, and will say it out loud, I want to be rich, whose, this is not something we're doing on mass. And it's not even the average thing, the normalized thing that we're hearing or seeing modeled. And so, for so many people that's foreign, and we tend to fear what we don't understand and what we can't, we haven't seen proven and so to some extent, okay, let's have compassion for these people. But don't let them stop us. And for every person who is rejecting you, there are hundreds, thousands of people who are quietly supporting you and rooting for you, particularly the generation right behind you. I have a young daughter, who's six, and I have a son, who's nine. And I myself was that age at one point with a lot of hopes and dreams and unfiltered hopes and dreams. And whenever I feel like, oh, but you know, will this be, if I'm going to do something, and maybe someone won't feel like, I might make someone uncomfortable because I'm being loud and proud about it my ambitions, it's like, yeah, well, they can deal with that. And I'm going to do it for the others, like my kids and others of that generation, and even myself once upon a time, because that is what it takes. That is the work that we need to do to basically reverse this terrible cycle. You know, where if I was to model something differently for my daughter, which is just continuing the norm, continuing cultural norms and gender expectations, well, of course, she's never going to get to a place where she can believe she can do it. And so the cycle continues. So break the cycle, and you can start with you. And it's going to be tough, and people you think will have your back won't. But that's okay, because that's for them to figure out. It's not your job to try to make someone else unafraid. You deal with your own fears. Someone else has to deal with their own fears. And when someone is projecting that on you. That's, that's their own trepidation at play. And hopefully, you'll read my book and realize there's a better way.
Katie Fogarty 34:24
Absolutely. I mean, your book really does share so many stories of your own youth and you reference throughout it, that many of our fears are rooted in what we were taught or exposed to as children makes so much sense. We learn so many positive things from our parents and our role models and the people that we are emulating to learn how to do anything. So it's just sort of natural that we'd be picking up their fears and anxieties as well. And sometimes we have to ask ourselves like, am I really afraid of this? Or has this been like taught to me to be a fear and can I outgrow it like Can I have a new perspective on something that felt like, you know, the way it had to be? And it doesn't really have to be. You pose a question at the end of your chapter on money that says, Is my financial fear constructive? You know, do, do I, is this serving me? Or do I have to even be thinking this? And I think that's a great question to ask yourself about any type of fear that you have, you know, is this fear serving me in any way that's keeping me safe and healthy? Or is it limiting me? And that goes back to that question that you said, your kids are asking all the time. You know, why? Why do I think this like, do I? Do I have to believe this to be true? And sometimes the answer is no. But we often so often just run on autopilot. You know, I want to this is maybe I'm going to use this as a segue into my last question before we close with our speed round, because we're nearing the end of our time together. But you, I want to ask you about a fear that you sort of alluded to a little bit in your book, but it doesn't get its own, you know, one of the standalone nine chapters, and that is the, the fear of aging. You do have a chapter on the fear of endings, one of those is actually, you know, death, the ultimate end. But there's an enormous gulf between getting to adulthood, you know, sort of firmly being a confident, established adult, and the end of the line, but people are so fearful around aging. And the reason why this question came to mind is because you talked about modeling, sort of a healthy financial and professional ambition, for the generations that come behind us, and in particular, your daughter, I really feel that I am modeling for my own 23 year old daughter just such a healthy way of looking at, you know, the next chapters of her lives, because if we think that relevancy and sexiness, and marketability, and just creativity, all have an expiration date. That's a pretty grim way of looking at life. So I'm just I would love to hear a little bit. Before we conclude about sort of your take on aging. You know, you, you work in television, what is your take on, on midlife and getting older and sort of cultural fear around this, this time of our lives?
Farnoosh Torabi 34:24
Well, it's interesting, I think I'm coming to my own aging process with the great fortune of being exposed to so many more mature woman, women in their 50s and 60s, and seeing them accomplish so many great things. I don't know if it's just my Instagram feed that I've curated, or it's the fact that I actually do seek out wisdom from older, wiser humans. That's something that my mom taught me as I grew up, she loved, like, if there was a grandmother visiting in town, she was like, make a beeline for her at a party and like, would sit with her like by the fireplace the entire night and extract all the wisdom from her. And I didn't understand it at the time. But now I see why she was doing it. And so I for better, I think for better, I've never really had this, I don't have like a huge fear of aging, other than just maybe feeling a little like time is just going too quickly. And, you know, I hope to have my health and my mental capacity for as long as I can. I don't think about death all that often, although I just did my will. I just got more life insurance.
Katie Fogarty 38:45
That's a smart financial move.
Farnoosh Torabi 38:45
Yeah, you know, there's a section in the book about well, like during the pandemic, of course, we were all contemplating the meaning of life and our role in it and there were times when I would fall asleep in bed with my daughter next to me and start to get really scared because the days were long during the pandemic and it felt like we would never get to see the other side of things. And I would just sit there sometimes and on my notes app in my iPhone, like, write down, you know, in the event of my untimely death, like here's what I want my husband to do with our life insurance, like, make sure you know what my wishes are, like, pay off the house, don't uproot the kids, like, you know, whatever we got to do. And he, I texted this to him one night.
Katie Fogarty 39:31
Oh my God, I am dying.
Farnoosh Torabi 39:33
He runs into the room. He's like, do you need to tell me something?
Katie Fogarty 39:36
Did you have a bad diagnosis that you didn't share?
Farnoosh Torabi 39:40
Exactly, is this your way of telling me something awful. And I was like, no, I'm just, but please don't delete this. You know, this is like sometimes where my head goes, but I try to bring it back to like, what's useful? Like, how can I make something useful or good out of this fearful moment? You know, can I because that's what makes me feel better is to feel as soon as I fear anything, taking an action step that supports what I want to protect makes me feel so much better. You know, if I fear, for example, in 2024, oh no, what if I don't make as much money because I don't get as many offers to speak or offers to work with brands? Well, guess what, I'm going to try to get more control of that, I'm going to start working more one on one with clients and reaching directly out to my audience to create more revenue streams that I can control. And so, and sometimes that first step of just like creating a landing page, or coming up with your sales copy, or getting one client, I think this is the sort of stuff that I do all the time. And it's almost become, it's become second nature. But I'm, you know, I joke, half-jokingly, like, I'm terrified all the time. But it's like, you know, how can I not be I'm a mom, I'm an entrepreneur, I live in 2023, everything that's going on in the world, I'm a woman. So you know, fear is like, I eat it for breakfast and lunch and dinner, and sometimes two snacks a day. Like, I gotta get stuff done too.
Katie Fogarty 41:10
Oh my gosh, that's hilarious.
Farnoosh Torabi 41:11
That's how I, you know, got to figure it out.
Katie Fogarty 41:13
Totally. Actually, you know, you know, step by step, right, action step, and momentum builds momentum. So if we are afraid of things, and we sit there paralyzed, we're not going to improve things, whatever it is that we're trying to do, but it's these small little action steps that do comfort us and that, you know, when you do them day after day, after day after day, produces, you know, produces the results and the momentum that you need and can help keep that fear at bay or sort of banished to the corner or, you know, at least let you walk side by side with it and still get some shit done even though you're a little bit fearful. So I love that such a great note to end on. We are moving into our speed round, I always close this way. It's a high energy, one to two word answers, if you can, to just kind of move through some more material before we have to say goodbye. Are you ready?
Farnoosh Torabi 42:05
Yes.
Katie Fogarty 42:06
Okay, this is a fill in the blank. Writing a healthy state of panic was:
Farnoosh Torabi 42:12
Terrifying.
Katie Fogarty 42:13
Hmm. I like it honest. Which fear or which chapter was the hardest to write about?
Farnoosh Torabi 42:19
Fear of exposure.
Katie Fogarty 42:21
You've overcome many the fears that you outline in the book, you share wonderful personal anecdotes. Is there a fear that you are still kind of grappling with?
Farnoosh Torabi 42:32
Fear of, I think losing my freedom.
Katie Fogarty 42:39
Hmm. I know we live in challenging times. I totally. I totally get that especially, the freedoms of women are always under under duress. Okay, you want us to lean into our fears, and you have totally convinced me. But is there a fear you had in your younger days that you have now thoroughly put behind you in midlife?
Farnoosh Torabi 43:00
Hmm. Wow, well, m,aybe its, the fear of cilantro. No. If it's on a taco. It's fine. I won't die.
Katie Fogarty 43:22
That's a good well, we could stick with that. Let's go with cilantro. I like it. What's a smart financial move that you see too many people being afraid to take?
Farnoosh Torabi 43:31
Oh, gosh, the fear of investing.
Katie Fogarty 43:33
Yeah. Okay, I'm with you on that one. I'm a little bit fearful. All right, what is the financial choice that many of us make that we should actually be more afraid of?
Farnoosh Torabi 43:42
The fear of deferring our finances to a partner.
Katie Fogarty 43:46
Hmm, very good. Okay. You have so many wonderful thought-prompts that you close each chapter with. Everyone needs to pick up this book and, you know, read through it or at least turn to the end. I am taking one of these prompts for myself. What are the riches that you possess beyond dollars and cents?
Farnoosh Torabi 44:04
Well, my health, my relationships, and my, my sense of can-do-it-ness my, my belief in myself.
Katie Fogarty 44:18
Love it. You are rich, indeed, those are all phenomenal. Finally, your one word answer to complete the sentence as I age, I feel:
Farnoosh Torabi 44:27
Rewarded.
Katie Fogarty 44:28
Ooh, that is the first time anyone has used that word. It's phenomenal. I love it. I can see why you have built such an amazing career. I so enjoyed this book, A Healthy State of Panic: Follow Your Fears to Build Wealth, Crush Your Career and Win at Life. Farnoosh thank you so much for your time today. How can our listeners keep following you and your work?
Farnoosh Torabi 44:51
Thank you, Katie. Well, I host a podcast three days a week. It's called So Money. So would love for you to join me there wherever you like to listen to podcasts and book of course is available everywhere at HealthyStateofPanic.com if you'd like to learn more about it there, and I'm pretty busy on Instagram, good news, bad news. And, so if you have a question for me or if you want to connect with me there, DM me, I'm usually around.
Katie Fogarty 45:20
Phenomenal. I'm putting all of that in the show notes. This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women who are aging without apology. And before I say goodbye, a quick favor. I would love it if you could take five minutes to write an Apple Podcast review. Did you learn something on the show? Does tuning in every Monday make you feel more seen and supported? If so, please take five minutes to rate or review the show over on Apple Podcasts. Special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly beauties!