I’ve been coaching myself on money and debt for months, and made progress but am now seeing a new crop of fearful thoughts arise. I left my job a year and a half ago to be full time in my business. I had planned it out financially, had 6 months of savings to cushion and incurred a little bit of debt to invest in a mastermind. My thoughts were that this is a worthy investment and I felt good about it.

I struggled to bring in consistent clients, and by the end of 2019 I had utilized all of my savings and wasn’t able to pay off the debt. I did a lot of coaching on that, and decided to double down in 2020 and invest again, increasing my total to $38k. I’ve been increasing this debt over the last few months as my expenses (which are mostly debt payments) are higher than my monthly income.

My recent coaching has been around neutralizing the amount and the circumstance. I can see that I’m not totally there yet.

But now, as COVID-19 is strong in many people’s minds, my thoughts are heavy with “there’s no way I will earn enough money now…” to pay minimums, to feed myself, to ever pay off debt. I feel nauseous thinking about continuing to add to it. I think that I’m burying myself in debt and so of course I feel like I’m suffocating.

I feel really unprepared for a recession and possibility of prolonged income strain. I think that in 2018/19 I did the best I could to prepare initially, and made decisions that I liked even though they were uncomfortable. But that was a different time. Now I feel like I maxed out my options back then and my current and future self can’t handle what’s coming.