The journey to financial wellness after loss isn't just another task on your to-do list—it's part of your healing path. In our heartfelt podcast conversation, I connect with Paula Harris, co-owner of WH Cornerstone Investments, who understands the overwhelming wave of financial decisions that crash down when you're already drowning in grief.
Paula shares from both her heart and expertise how, when the world feels shattered, money matters can feel like the last straw. Yet gently rebuilding your financial foundation becomes an unexpected anchor during these stormy times.
I remember feeling completely lost when facing my own financial decisions after loss. Like many of us, I thought "financial discussions" meant complex spreadsheets and intimidating investment jargon. Paula compassionately reminds us that true financial wellness begins with simple, daily choices that honor both our emotional reality and practical needs.
What You'll Discover in This Episode:
- How the 50-30-20 approach creates breathing room in your budget when you're just trying to breathe through each day
- My personal story with envelope budgeting—how this tactile method can become a surprising source of comfort and control when everything feels chaotic
- Heart-centered ways to include your children in money conversations, honoring their grief while creating family financial resilience
- How aligning spending with your deepest values becomes an unexpected path to healing—when every dollar reflects what truly matters now
Listen to the full podcast here ➡️I'm ready to LevelUp
About Paula Harris
Paula Harris doesn't just understand finances—she understands the human heart in transition. Her guidance weaves together practical wisdom with profound empathy for those navigating the foggy intersection of grief and financial decision-making.
Get Paula's Book
Dear one, remember that financial wellness after loss isn't about getting everything perfect right away. It's about honoring your journey with small, meaningful steps that gradually create a foundation strong enough to hold both your tears and your dreams. I hope this conversation offers a gentle hand to hold as you find your way forward.
Everyone is rushing to beat everyone to the next best thing. In our hyper-connected world, it seems like we're all caught in an endless race—people talking loudly, beating metaphorical drums, and waving attention-grabbing flags. There's this constant clamor as everyone tries to be the loudest, the brightest, the most visible. But when we step back and really think about it, that's not the point of the journey we're on.
The digital world has turned life into a competition. On social media, wins are measured in likes, shares, and followers. We scroll through highlight reels of others’ victories while wrestling with our own unseen struggles. Without even realizing it, we end up comparing ourselves and running a race we never chose to enter.
The Mimicry Trap
A common business strategy taught is to know your competition. Know what they're doing, how they're doing it, and why. Makes total sense when you're selling products, right? But somehow, we've dragged this mindset into our personal lives too. And there's a big difference: instead of learning from others to grow in our own way, we just... copy. We see someone killing it on Instagram with their morning routine videos, and suddenly we're setting our alarms for 5 AM too, even if we're night owls who do our best thinking after 10 PM
This copying doesn't stop at work. It creeps into how we decorate our homes, how we spend our free time, and even how we try to improve ourselves. We jump on the same bandwagons—bullet journals, cold plunges, intermittent fasting—without asking if these things actually make sense for US. And we end up becoming knockoffs instead of the real deal versions of ourselves.
Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times
"The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."
Sometimes the best person doesn't win. Life has its own timing, and chance matters more than we admit. I know this firsthand. My master's degree didn't prevent my life from falling apart. Specialists couldn't save my dad. Prayer didn't keep my husband alive. My stable job didn't protect me from losing my home.
These hard lessons taught me about control. You can do everything "right" and still get knocked down. I'm not suggesting you give up—just free yourself from thinking perfect planning prevents pain. Some things—timing, opportunity, chance—are beyond our control, regardless of how many self-help books we read.
The Freedom of Finding Your Own Path
When you can't hear yourself think anymore because everyone's shouting about their hustle and their success—that's when you need to find your own race. Your own path that fits who YOU are.
What does that actually look like? It means asking yourself the hard questions: What would I do if nobody was watching? What makes me feel good inside? Where do my natural talents, interests, and values overlap? You won't figure it all out in one journaling session, but just asking these questions starts creating space for the real you to show up.
Finding your own race doesn't mean becoming a hermit or never competing again. It means being picky about which conversations you join, which measuring sticks you use, and whose opinions actually matter to you. It's knowing the difference between "this inspires me" and "this makes me feel like garbage about myself."
Redefining Success on Your Terms
There's a race where it's just you SistahGirl, against time and chance. Success isn't counted in followers or comparison—it's measured by whether you stayed true to YOUR path.
Your version of winning might include some promotions or achievements, but it probably also values things you can't post about: staying honest when it would be easier to lie, being kind when you're exhausted, the wisdom you earned through your darkest times, or finding peace when everything's chaos. Maybe it values deep friendships over a huge network, or meaningful experiences over a long list of accomplishments.
Rewriting success for yourself takes guts. You might disappoint people. You might look like you're "falling behind" in the conventional race. People who are still playing by the old rules might not get you. But the alternative—living someone else's idea of a good life—costs way more: it costs you YOU.
A Weekend Practice
It's the weekend... breathe. Step away from the noise. Find your own rhythm. Your own pace. The world will still be there on Monday, with all its rush and clamor. But maybe, just maybe, you'll return to it with a clearer sense of which race is actually yours to run.
Try this simple thing: For the next 48 hours, notice when you feel that pull to compare yourself, compete, or fit in. When you catch that feeling—you know the one—pause. Take a deep breath. Ask yourself: "Is this my race to run? Does this path honor who I really am?" Then choose what to do next.
Over time, these little moments of awareness add up. The noise doesn't go away, but your ability to tell the difference between outside pressure and your inner wisdom gets stronger. You start moving with more confidence and ease, less thrown around by whatever's trending this week.
In a world obsessed with competition, choosing your own path might be the most rebellious—and brave—thing you can do. It's also the only way to make sure that when you cross your finish line, you arrive not just at some random destination, but as the most real, most authentic version of yourself.
#FindYourOwnRace #WeekendWisdom #OneDegreetoVictory #ODTV #BlackWomenHealing
The Stopwatch That Changed My Perspective
School mornings in my home are nothing short of orchestrated chaos. If parenting were an Olympic sport, the morning routine would be my qualifying event. Between shepherding my son to early band practice and ensuring my daughter makes it to the bus stop (preferably with matching shoes), my time management isn't just important—it's survival.
This particular morning presented a scheduling puzzle more complex than usual. Their timelines overlapped in a way that made it impossible for me to be in two places at once—a limitation of physics I'm still trying to overcome. My solution was simple: set an alarm on our spare cell phone to remind my youngest when to head to the bus.
As I fumbled through the unfamiliar device, swiping and tapping through a digital maze of apps, I finally located the clock icon. Success! Or so I thought. When I tapped it, instead of the alarm settings I expected, I found myself staring at a stopwatch—one that had been silently running in the background of our lives.
956 hours, 17 minutes, and 4 seconds.
The numbers continued their steady climb upward as I stood frozen, trying to comprehend what I was seeing. Nearly a thousand hours of continuous measurement, quietly documenting time while we went about our lives, completely unaware.
In that moment of discovery, something shifted in my perspective. I called my son over, pointing at the screen with a mixture of awe and excitement. "Look how long this has been running!" The urgency of our morning schedule suddenly felt less important than this unexpected window into time's passage.
Some parents might have stuck to the schedule. But there are moments when wonder deserves precedence over punctuality. So we paused, both of us watching those seconds tick by, willingly "sacrificing timeliness on the altar of discovery and excitement."
Later, after capturing a screenshot of this moment, setting the actual alarm, and completing our morning duties, I found myself alone in the car, mind spinning with possibilities. 956 hours. What does that translate to in the language of life?
39.833 days, to be exact.
Just shy of 40 days—a number that wasn't lost on me. I'd recently been immersed in Dr. Benjamin Hardy's book "Slipstream," wrestling with his perspectives on time and how we move through it. The concept had felt abstract until that moment when those glowing digits on the phone screen made it tangible.
The Sacred Significance of 40 Days
Throughout Scripture, 40 days appears repeatedly as a period of transformation:
- Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness, stripped of comfort but preparing for purpose.
- Noah witnessed 40 days of cleansing rain, the destruction necessary before new life could emerge.
- Moses remained 40 days on Mount Sinai, receiving divine instruction that would guide generations.
- The spies explored Canaan for 40 days, evaluating the promise that lay before them.
- Elijah journeyed 40 days to Mount Horeb, finding strength renewed in the silence.
What struck me wasn't just the numerical coincidence, but the realization that I had just lived through my own 40-day period of unconscious measurement. What had those days contained? What transformation had occurred while that stopwatch silently counted?
July—my birth month—had just passed. Looking back, I realized I'd approached each weekend with unusual intentionality, as if some part of me sensed the significance of this time period even before the stopwatch revealed it. I had entered what I can only describe as my "personal spiritual slipstream," a state of alignment where resistance falls away and movement forward feels both effortless and purposeful.
The Harvest of Intention
Those 956 hours had carried me through moments of clarity I hadn't fully appreciated until now. Conversations that shifted my thinking. Books that challenged my assumptions. Quiet mornings that restored my perspective. The gradual, almost imperceptible refining of my priorities and values.
I emerged from this period with a clearer vision of the quality of life I want to create and the specific steps needed to build it. Not all growth announces itself with fanfare—sometimes it whispers through the ordinary moments of our days until we have the wisdom to recognize it.
This is the beauty of transformation: gains don't always manifest as visible achievements. Sometimes they're spent in preparation, in the quiet cultivation of soil where future harvests will grow. The most significant changes often happen in the spaces between our conscious awareness, in the 956 hours we aren't watching the clock.
Your 40 Days
I wonder now: What might happen if we approached the next 40 days with deliberate intention? If we set our own timers—not to constrain ourselves but to create a container for transformation?
The invitation is simple but profound: What will your next 956 hours hold? What seeds might you plant? What wilderness might you navigate? What instructions might you receive? What promised land might you explore? What renewal might you find?
Set a timer. Not to race against it, but to honor the sacred potential of time passing. The transformation is already happening—the question is whether we're paying attention.
This morning, on my drive home, I was sitting with a question—which opportunity should I pursue?
Three doors. All of them leading to the same destination, but each with a different cost.
Three doors. All of them leading to the same destination, but each with a different cost.
Two of them feel safe—familiar paths paved with what I know, what I’ve done before, and what I’m confident I can handle. They’re steady, predictable, even financially sound.
But the third? That one feels like a stretch. It’s the road less traveled by—at least by me. It’s the one that doesn’t offer guarantees or comfort, but it does promise growth.
But the third? That one feels like a stretch. It’s the road less traveled by—at least by me. It’s the one that doesn’t offer guarantees or comfort, but it does promise growth.
I’ve been sitting with this truth:
Our comfort zones are where we build our strengths. But it’s the unfamiliar places where we reveal them.
That third opportunity? It doesn’t ignore what I’ve mastered. It demands it. It says, Bring everything you’ve gained in the safe zones—and now let’s go higher.
Our comfort zones are where we build our strengths. But it’s the unfamiliar places where we reveal them.
That third opportunity? It doesn’t ignore what I’ve mastered. It demands it. It says, Bring everything you’ve gained in the safe zones—and now let’s go higher.
So today, I’m claiming this as Fierce, Ferocious, Fearless Friday.
The kind of Friday where we stop asking “what if it doesn’t work?” and start asking “what if it does?”
The kind of Friday where we stop asking “what if it doesn’t work?” and start asking “what if it does?”
Opportunities don’t always look like open doors. Sometimes they look like risk. Like fear. Like discomfort.
But trust—if it calls for your strengths, and you’re willing to move, that opportunity is yours to walk into.
But trust—if it calls for your strengths, and you’re willing to move, that opportunity is yours to walk into.
Do the uncomfortable. Pursue the stretch. Step out knowing that everything you’ve already built has prepared you for this.
Let’s go get it.
This week, so much of what I’ve been reflecting on comes back to one thing: emotional intelligence.
We often talk about emotional intelligence like it’s a personality trait, but in truth, it’s a skill—something we learn, practice, and grow into. It’s not just about managing conflict or getting along with people. It’s about knowing yourself well enough to not let every emotion lead you. It’s the difference between reacting and responding, between spiraling and choosing peace.
There are levels to this.
At the first level, we recognize our emotions only after they’ve erupted—anger, disappointment, fear. We see the wreckage and then ask, “Why did I do that?”
At the next level, we notice the emotions as they rise. We might not stop them yet, but we begin to feel the shift: the tightening of the jaw, the lump in the throat, the pressure behind the eyes. Awareness grows.
Then there’s a higher level—emotional regulation. This is when we begin to pause. We name the feeling, but we don’t let it name us. We respond instead of react. We lead ourselves before trying to lead others. That’s growth.
But the highest level?
Transcendence. The place where your emotions no longer surprise you. You meet them with grace. They pass through you, not overtake you. You are aware, but not ruled.
Getting there isn’t easy. It takes honesty. Reflection. Sometimes a journal. Sometimes prayer. Sometimes a therapist. But always, it takes intention.
So today, ask yourself:
Are my emotions leading me, or am I leading through my emotions?
Because the truth is—when emotions lead, wisdom waits.
But when wisdom leads, transformation follows.
Keep moving.
