Jan. 2, 2026
65. Money, Self-Worth, and Deserving More in Midlife, with Denise Duffield-Thomas
Are you a woman in midlife who knows she wants more ease, freedom, or financial security — but still feels uncomfortable receiving, charging, asking, or even wanting more? You’re not broken, and you’re definitely not alone.
In this episode of Mind Your Midlife, I’m joined by money mentor and bestselling author Denise Duffield-Thomas for an honest, compassionate conversation about money mindset, hidden money blocks, gratitude, the upper limit problem, and why so many women feel unsafe with success, ease, or abundance — even when they’ve worked incredibly hard for it.
We talk about the subconscious beliefs that quietly run the show, how midlife changes our capacity, and why learning to receive is just as important as learning to give.
If money brings up guilt, discomfort, fear, or a sense that “this isn’t for me” — this episode is for you.
What You’ll Learn:
✔ Why gratitude does not mean you can’t want more
✔ What the “upper limit problem” is — and how it shows up in midlife
✔ Why success, comfort, and ease can feel unsafe in your body
✔ Why midlife (and perimenopause) often forces a reevaluation of hustle, capacity, and ambition
✔ Simple ways to begin choosing what you want — without guilt
🎯 OMG Moment:
You don’t just serve — you deserve. Receiving money, care, ease, and comfort doesn’t make you selfish or greedy. It makes you human.
Take Action Today:
- Get curious (not judgmental) about your money stories and family rules around money
- Practice choosing what you want in a low-stakes moment — a meal, clothing, rest, or time off
- Explore Denise’s work, including her books Get Rich, Lucky Bitch and Chill and Prosper, and her podcast Chill and Prosper
- Connect with Denise on Instagram @denisedt
Why This Episode Matters
Midlife is often when we notice how much energy we've spent proving, pleasing, pushing, and holding it all together. It’s also when the old rules about money, worth, and success stop working.
This episode is an invitation to loosen the grip of those rules — to build a life that feels safe, spacious, and aligned now, not
Anniversary Giveaway! See cherylpfischer.com/anniversary for terms and conditions.
**Find bonus episodes by subscribing where you find Mind Your Midlife on Apple podcasts - or go to cherylpfischer.com/bonusepisodes.
🌸 Liked this episode? Share it with fellow Gen X women navigating hormone balance, an empty nest, and/or self-confidence!
🫶 Love this show? Leave a review to help more women over 50 find us.
💡Want menopause support, mindset shifts, or support with midlife transitions?
- Build a mindset for success with the private bonus episodes!
- Book a free Mindset Coaching / Intro Call: cherylpfischer.com/coaching
Let’s talk midlife body positivity, self-talk, and redefining aging for women — without the “midlife crisis” narrative. Every week I'm adding new success strategies for midlife women.
Connect with Cheryl, Midlife Coach: Instagram | LinkedIn | Website
00:00 - Welcome & Why Mindset Matters
03:20 - Introducing Denise & Her Mission
05:32 - Gratitude As An Anchor For Abundance
13:20 - Good Person vs Rich Person Binaries
22:04 - Origin Stories, Consequences, Patterns
31:51 - The Upper Limit Problem Demystified
40:10 - Capacity, Comfort, And Being Liked
48:02 - Hustle Traps, Perimenopause, And Pace
WEBVTT
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There are so many points in our lives where we are maybe making a decision that holds us back, or not taking advantage of something that would have actually been a helpful thing to do, or just not even being comfortable receiving money or care or gifts from someone.
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There's a lot of hidden stuff in our heads that can hold us back.
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And today we're talking about the money stuff.
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So here we go.
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Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time.
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Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body.
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Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and, oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife.
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This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast.
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You may have heard me say before that in the past, this is many years ago now, but in the past I really poo-pooed personal development.
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I thought that all the mindset stuff was silly and that what we really needed to do was just work hard and learn what we needed to know and just do the thing.
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And then I started my own business.
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And when I started my own business, initially I did all the things and it grew quite quickly, but then I got to a point where I was trying to promote it to that next level and I couldn't quite get it.
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And I kind of fell back.
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And then I tried again and I almost got it and I fell back three times.
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I almost got to this next level of business that I was trying to get to, and I kept falling back and not making it.
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And I was realizing how powerful the head trash that we all have hidden in there, or even to put it more simply, just those subconscious beliefs that we have in our heads.
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Some of them may be productive beliefs.
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It's beliefs about how the world works and the how the consequences of our actions will come about.
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And money, it's in there.
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And I started to realize that held the power for me.
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And I was at times doing things that messed me up or held me back.
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And here I am helping others to get through that.
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Now, today I have an exciting guest for you.
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Denise Duffield Thomas is the money mentor for the new wave of online entrepreneurs wanting to make money and wanting to change the world.
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And she helps women get past this head trash about money and about success.
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She has written three books.
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Her latest is called Chill and Prosper, and I will link to those in the show notes to make sure that you can grab them if you want to.
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And her Money Bootcamp has helped over 10,000 students from all around the world.
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You'll also hear us talk about her podcast, Chill and Prosper, and she lives on the east coast of Australia.
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So I am super excited to welcome you today.
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Hi Denise.
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Thank you so much for having me, Cheryl.
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I'm glad we finally hit record because I think I feel like we could have talked in the pre-show for hours.
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Yeah, that was a little dangerous.
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We might have forgotten what we were here for.
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Story of my life.
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Well, that's a good thing.
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It's a good thing.
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We're friendly, we're getting along.
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It's a good thing.
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Okay, so let's dive in.
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I want to start with this trap that we fall into sometimes, I think, as women, where either we don't want to be grateful because that means we shouldn't want more, or when we're grateful we think we shouldn't have more, or I don't know, something weird in there.
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And so tell us how that becomes a money block or a way that we hold ourselves back, and then maybe we can talk about what we could do.
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I would say there's one time that I have a couple of times a week, and because I do ballet, and at the end of the ballet class, it's called the Reverence.
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And it's basically you curtsy and you say thank you to your teacher.
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And I always take that moment to be very present and to say, I'm so grateful.
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I'm so grateful to be here.
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I'm so grateful for dance.
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And I think those moments become little anchors and little pins in our life to say, I am here.
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I am here, I am present, I am experiencing this moment.
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And you know, I've been in this personal development space for quite a long time, and I've heard this idea about gratitude being such a great tool for abundance, and I remember Oprah talking about this too, and she said that for all of the tools she's learned in all of her life, gratitude is the one that she does regularly, and she does it every single night.
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She writes down five things she's grateful for.
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And again, I I rarely think about that way, except for those ballet classes, right?
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And I think the tricky thing is when we uh desire things and we want things and we have this um idea of how our life would be, and sometimes we spend a lot of time thinking about that and creating dream boards and visualizations and thinking about that.
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Gratitude, I think, is the thing that keeps us feeling good in the lag time between where we are and where we want to be.
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And that is so important because if we're constantly living in the future, most of us have this very idealized idea of what that would look like.
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Especially the version of ourselves with more money.
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And we think, well, the the wealthy, you know, the millionaire Cheryl version of me, she would be perfect.
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She would never yell at her kids, she would never be mean to someone, she would never think anything bad about herself or others.
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And it's almost like we've got this this like non-saint-like version of ourselves.
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And the more we idealize that version, the more we're just we're never going to be able to live up to that.
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And so the idea of us having more money always just seems like a pipe dream.
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And I think my um one of my roles, I think, in this world is normalizing talking about money, normalizing also imperfection around success and money.
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Because when we realize that we are we are on our journey, we are going to be the same person with or without money, and largely would be the same person in any time, you know, in history, if we were born in any country, would probably be the same.
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And then you can start to give yourself permission, I think, to be imperfect in the now around every part of your life.
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And then I think the more we can collapse those two time frames together, one having gratitude for what we have, but also um love and compassion for ourselves, then we can actually take the actions towards that idealized self because you realize, oh, I'm not waiting for things to be perfect.
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Um, I'm not waiting for the absence of fear.
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I am that person already.
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And I think, yeah, gratitude just helps us feel better, I think, in that lag time and more present because that's when you know we get that lottery.
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Sorry, that that lottery mentality where we make money and then we don't know how to hold it because it's so foreign to us.
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Well, we're gonna talk about that because I think that's related to the upper limit for sure.
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Yes.
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Before before we go to that, you said something that kind of piqued my interest around this idea of we would become this perfect person when we had the money.
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I think sometimes also we think we're gonna become a bad person if we have a lot of money, or you know, money causes us to be greedy or selfish or something.
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Sometimes I think that's hidden in there too.
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It really is, but it is again this separate self, isn't it?
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And we can't even fathom what it would look like for us on a daily basis.
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And I'm not even necessarily talking about money here, because for some people it's like when I'm thinner or when I'm magically organized.
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I hear that a lot, right?
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It's like I'll do this, I just need to get organized.
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And I go, you're probably never going to, right?
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So why don't we just embrace it now?
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And it is that feeling of like there's something outside of me, and it's very binary sometimes.
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True.
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Uh what I love digging into though is finding out what people's binary rules are, because we there's some universal ones for sure, but I feel like everyone's got their own little thing.
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So it's like I can be, I can be rich or I can be a good mum, but I can't be both.
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I can be rich, I can be a good person, I can be rich or ethical, I can be rich and have love.
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And sometimes those um those binaries come from our experiences from childhood where we, you know, maybe you grew up watching those uh hallmark movies, the Christmas Hallmark movies, where it's like, you know, the successful career woman, she goes to the small town and then she finds love, but she has to give up the career for it.
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And I love that we're coming to that season, right, where all of those movies come out, and it is the same story again and again.
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But that's uh though that could be one little thing.
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Like I grew up watching, um, like I'm 46.
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I grew up in the 80s where there were a lot of reruns of 60s shows like I Dream of Janie and um uh what was the other one?
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Bewitched.
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Yeah, and they were on after school every day.
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And the message from that is you could be this magical, amazing, powerful woman, but you had to hide it.
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You weren't allowed to use your power, and even the husbands were always really annoyed when they used their powers to do housework, like the most mundane thing.
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And it was like you can be magical, but you should do it the hard way because people will judge you, or somehow your big secret will come out that you're this powerful, amazing woman, and so don't use it.
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And they weren't even using to do anything fun, it was like to do the housework.
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No, no, no, you should do that yourself.
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And I as a kid, I really, really wanted this executive life watching uh She Devil.
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I don't know if you watched She Devil, um but it was like oh it was um amazing.
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But it was like Merrill Street was this big fancy writer and this this downtrodded housewife played by um Roseanne Barr wanted to have her life, you know, and she started her own temping agency, and it was like my god, this this idea of this glamorous office life was just like, oh my goodness.
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But um, I think again, it was just the message constantly in those movies was you're a bitch.
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Like if you want leadership and power and money, you have to be a bitch, and then you get criticized for being a bad mum or being a bad friend or whatever, and you have to give up.
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And I think that's what so many of us are afraid of is that I will have to give something up.
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And when we really dig into people's reasons about why they're blocked around money, I often hear people say, But who will I be friends with?
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Oh, interesting, right?
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Because I won't have any friends.
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I won't have any friends, I'll be lonely, people will want something from me, they'll be jealous, and it's it feels like a real burden when you start to really dig into why are you scared of having more money?
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And from the surface, especially in America, it's very much like of course you want money money.
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Oh, yeah, for sure.
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Of course we want to win, yes, and like I'm married to a Brit, I'm Australian, I see the cultural differences a lot, but I think for like there is that feeling of like, am I a bad person for kind of wanting this?
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But in America, sometimes it's what's wrong with me?
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Of course I want money, but it's like, but do you?
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Let's look at why you might be holding yourself back on this and why it's not safe for you to want more money.
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And that's the that's the big one.
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It has to feel safe in our bodies, and for some of us it really doesn't.
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And a lot of that still probably comes from what we're talking about, either messages we've gotten from things we've seen or read, or our situation growing up.
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Maybe we always saw people with money as a certain way, or yeah.
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Um, but that's interesting that you say maybe we don't want money like we think we do.
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Interesting.
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And what I get people to do is uh and with my work, right, is very much about curiosity, curiosity and compassion.
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Um, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a financial advisor, but I am um I'm curious and I teach people how to be curious about their own lives.
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So what we do, we do this process I call OCP, where we look for origin stories.
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What are some things that are um that stand out to you?
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And what what often we do?
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We go we go very general at the start.
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So we just go, what are your money memories?
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What do you remember about money?
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But when a pain point comes up for people, we look for very specific stories.
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So if someone says to me, um, you know, I can't send out invoices, what's going on?
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Right.
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So that's actually the C part of OCP.
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It's the consequence.
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Here's a consequence and a cost that is coming up for you.
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I cannot send invoices, which obviously costs you money, right?
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I've had Yeah, I've had people say I've quit my business because I could not receive the money.
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I had a personal trainer say she would she would just go, I can't, oh, give it to me next week.
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And then of course people would never give her money.
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She had to stop doing her business, right?
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So then we look for what are some specific origin stories around this particular problem?
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And if sometimes people can think of one thing, they go, Oh, yes, you know, someone stole my pocket money when I was a kid, and I've obviously made a decision, it's not safe for me to handle money, something like that could be a very specific thing.
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But sometimes it's a very general thing, and it will be like, what are the unwritten rules of your family?
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And one of them could be it's very impolite to talk about money, which is not an uncommon thing, right, for people to hear.
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And you might have been told that explicitly, you might have been told it implicitly, it could have been very hidden, it could have been very secret, but this idea that talking about money is tacky or it's very rude, and so you can then draw a very clear line, right, to the consequence consequence of this.
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I can't set my prices, I can't say my prices, I can't put my prices anywhere.
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If someone asks to work with me, I cannot say how much it costs, I cannot send an invoice, I cannot chase up an invoice, I cannot um correct someone if they pay something incorrectly, I cannot send out my bank details, whatever it is, you can see there is a massive cost and consequence.
00:16:11.519 --> 00:16:15.919
Wow, of course, of course, of course, right?
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And so then the P is the pattern interrupter.
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And this can come in so many different ways, short-term, long-term, whatever, behavior change stuff.
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But even a pattern interrupter is awareness.
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Absolutely, right.
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That and that moment you're going, of course.
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When you hear other people's stories, and you go, of course, why wouldn't you?
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You can see it directly, right?
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You go, oh, yep, yep, I can connect the dots on that.
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The more people's stories you hear, the more you dig into your own with curiosity and compassion, you just go, anyone would feel that way, right?
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So that's that's such a huge part of it, just the awareness.
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But also, this is why I curate groups around this.
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I have my money boot camp.
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Because when you start to see other people just talk normally and honestly about money, you know, when you educate yourself around this, when you maybe get some coaching or some accountability, or you read a book about it, then you see that there is a different way of being, and also, oh wow, that person didn't die when they talked about money.
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And it's actually okay to talk about money.
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You can do therapy, you can do somatic work, you can do things like emotional freedom technique, EFT.
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Yes, tap all of these things.
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Yeah, tapping, all of these things are great pattern interrupters, but I think so much of it is that awareness of going, I didn't even realize that that was a thing.
00:17:37.680 --> 00:17:39.920
Oh, no wonder I feel that way.
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And that's the fun part of my work, right?
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It's just like, oh, tell me your stories.
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Oh, oh, let's connect to the dots on that.
00:17:47.039 --> 00:17:51.920
And that's one example, and there's so, so, so, so many.
00:17:52.319 --> 00:17:57.920
Yeah, it's uh I'm in my mid-50s now, so we're not that far apart in age, but a little bit.
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And about 10 years ago, I had a very interesting experience with my dad.
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He was moving into his retirement neighborhood, and it's a very nice neighborhood.
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He has a nice home, nothing huge or anything, but very nice.
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And he said to me, I think I live in the rich neighborhood now.
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And he was like scandalized, like, oh no, I live in the rich neighborhood now.
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And I was like, well, first of all, no, but second of all, good for you.
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You know, why is that bad?
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But I really, really thought about that a lot.
00:18:30.079 --> 00:18:31.920
Like, why is he saying that's bad?
00:18:31.920 --> 00:18:34.079
I've probably absorbed something from that.
00:18:34.079 --> 00:18:36.160
Maybe if that was always his attitude.
00:18:36.160 --> 00:18:37.680
It's very interesting.
00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:47.680
Well, I think too, depending on where we grew up and and how we grew up, some some societies are more class divided, right?
00:18:47.680 --> 00:18:50.640
And you know what your class is and you know who you are.
00:18:50.640 --> 00:19:00.160
And I think we we kind of live in this amazing place at the moment, I think, where the boundaries aren't so cut and dried.
00:19:00.319 --> 00:19:00.480
Yeah.
00:19:00.720 --> 00:19:08.960
But I totally, I think we all kind of know what that feels like to be like, oh, this is this is not quite my thing.
00:19:08.960 --> 00:19:20.720
And some of us we are cycle breakers or some of us we're you know, class breakers or whatever, and we know what that we're like, oh, I'm gonna stretch into doing doing that, and we have more awareness of what what things are.
00:19:20.720 --> 00:19:33.200
But I I totally uh resonate with your dad because a couple of years ago, um, like I built this amazing house by the beach, and I was so the closer and closer we got to move-in date, that's exactly how I felt.
00:19:33.200 --> 00:19:38.319
I went, I'm moving to this rich neighborhood, who what are people gonna think of me?
00:19:38.319 --> 00:19:48.640
And I was incredibly uncomfortable with it, and even to the point where we had some really, you know, cool things in this new house.
00:19:48.640 --> 00:19:59.759
One of them was under floor heating in the bathroom, and I didn't use it for six months because I kept I kept on thinking, but what if I get used to this life and I can never tolerate.
00:19:59.759 --> 00:20:02.000
Get cold feet again, you know.
00:20:02.000 --> 00:20:05.119
Like, who am I gonna become?
00:20:05.119 --> 00:20:11.359
And it was, I didn't use my office for a couple of months either because I was just like, Who am I?
00:20:11.359 --> 00:20:19.599
Because it just was shaking the walls of my identity a little bit, yeah, and I didn't know how to handle it.
00:20:19.839 --> 00:20:21.200
Yeah, such a good point.
00:20:21.200 --> 00:20:26.720
I think we probably all do this to ourselves sometimes in little ways, sometimes in big ways for sure.
00:20:26.720 --> 00:20:32.880
And that really is what we're talking about with the upper limit problem concept, right?
00:20:32.880 --> 00:20:39.839
There we we sort of have this thermostat setting and we don't feel comfortable going higher than that.
00:20:39.839 --> 00:20:50.640
And so, what do you hear is a pattern for a lot of women, especially like in the 40s and 50s, where they sort of are hitting their upper limit and struggling with that?
00:21:36.259 --> 00:21:36.820
Yes.
00:21:36.820 --> 00:21:43.780
So um so the person who coined that term is Gay Hendricks with his book Um The Big Leap.
00:21:43.780 --> 00:21:53.380
And I think that's such a great book because it really does talk about this idea of this upper limit problem where we get very blocked or triggered.
00:21:53.380 --> 00:21:59.620
And I it's actually I like to really nut it down into actual categories.
00:21:59.620 --> 00:22:04.259
And this is what I get people to do when they come and join my money boot camp, actually.
00:22:04.259 --> 00:22:13.300
We've got this questionnaire, and I get people to rank things in their life, whether they are economy, premium economy, business class, or first class.
00:22:13.300 --> 00:22:19.140
Because I think breaking it down like that, we kind of have a general sense of what that feels like in our life, right?
00:22:19.140 --> 00:22:24.259
Yeah, and when you're on a plane, there's very particular signifiers that show.
00:22:24.259 --> 00:22:28.980
And I have flown in all of those categories and they are very deliberate things.
00:22:28.980 --> 00:22:34.259
It's like, oh, the toilet paper's a little bit nicer, you know, you get three olives instead of two olives.
00:22:34.259 --> 00:22:38.180
You get, you know, the the silverware gets a bit nicer.
00:22:38.180 --> 00:22:39.380
All of those things.
00:22:39.380 --> 00:22:41.860
And it is very, very, very deliberate.
00:22:41.860 --> 00:22:50.740
In our own life, though, sometimes it's quite difficult to figure out what those categories are because of some of our conditioning.
00:22:50.740 --> 00:22:55.220
You know, it's like, well, what is what is the minimum standard in my family?
00:22:55.220 --> 00:22:57.060
And that can be very different.
00:22:57.060 --> 00:23:01.700
And what I find most of all, it's contrast.
00:23:01.700 --> 00:23:04.740
What do you have compared to what other people have?
00:23:04.740 --> 00:23:08.019
How did you feel about that contrast?
00:23:08.019 --> 00:23:17.300
And that's why I think when I very first started this work, I was like, well, I grew up poor, so of course I've got money blocks.
00:23:17.300 --> 00:23:21.940
But I thought, but if you grew up wealthy, you wouldn't have money blocks.
00:23:22.259 --> 00:23:24.259
Which is not really true in the end, right?
00:23:24.420 --> 00:23:25.700
It's not true at all.
00:23:25.700 --> 00:23:32.660
Because we all have these, like we has when I talk about the contrast, so I'll say to people, how did you grow up?
00:23:32.660 --> 00:23:38.980
And they go, Well, I thought we were middle class, but actually my family were very poor.
00:23:38.980 --> 00:23:44.019
But I didn't realize it because of the way they talked about money.
00:23:44.019 --> 00:23:58.019
You know, my family were very optimistic, we were very grateful, you know, we um we took care of what we had, and you know, I felt like I never wanted for anything, which is really interesting, right?
00:23:58.019 --> 00:24:01.620
And then someone else might say, you know what?
00:24:01.620 --> 00:24:12.420
I actually found out later on that we were very wealthy, but the way my family talked about money was that we always felt like we're one week away from being homeless on the street.
00:24:12.660 --> 00:24:13.380
Oh gosh.
00:24:13.620 --> 00:24:13.860
Yeah.
00:24:13.860 --> 00:24:17.860
Or someone would say, you know what, sometimes we were wealthy, sometimes we weren't.
00:24:17.860 --> 00:24:19.620
We had this very roller coaster life.
00:24:19.620 --> 00:24:28.580
And when I say about the contrast, I've heard people say, you know what, we were middle class, but I I went to this really fancy school, so I was the poor kid.
00:24:28.900 --> 00:24:29.620
Right, right.
00:24:29.860 --> 00:24:40.340
I've heard other people say the opposite to say, actually, we were kind of poor, but my family had slightly more than other people, and so I was the snobby rich kid.
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