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Have you ever noticed that money doesn't just move through your life, it carries an emotion with it. Some exchanges feel light and joyful, while others feel heavy and tense. And in today's episode, we're exploring why and how shifting the energy you bring to money can quietly rewrite your entire relationship with it.
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Let's get started.
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Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast, where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well. Welcome to episode 345 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I am your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com, which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show on this beautiful January day. If you're new to the podcast, thank you for checking it out. I'm glad you're here. Make sure you subscribe to the show. There's a lot of good stuff in my archives. Make sure you go check that out. I always tell people who are just beginning though, who are really green when it comes to marketing, to go listen to my first 10 episodes because I designed them to be an onboarding into the marketing space. You can also get onto my email list by going to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe. And when you do, I'm going to send you an email like every five days or so for several months and I'm going to walk you through the jungle of farm marketing and show you the most important principles you need to know. I'm going to give you some freebies, some resources, some tips.
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It's really good.
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I get a lot of good feedback on it. So get on there by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. Today's episode is sponsored by my favorite e commerce platform for farms, localline. As the season winds down for you, it's the perfect time to get ready for a snow smoother year ahead. And if you've been thinking about switching sales platforms, localline makes it easy. Their team handles the heavy lifting so you can start next season more organized and efficient. Localline is the all in one sales platform built for farms and food hubs with tools for e commerce, inventory automation, subscriptions, barcode scanning, box builder and positive farms. Using localline grow their annual sales by 23% and increase their average order size by 9.5%. Switching is simple. It's stress free. No setup fees, no sales commissions and their onboarding team will migrate your storefront for free so that you can focus on what really matters as a podcast listener. You'll also get one premium feature free for a full year when you use my code MDF2026 so head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline that's all one word to sign up. Use the code MDF2026 to get that free premium feature and start the new year strong and sell smarter with localline. And now back to the show. All right, today's gonna be fun and a little different. I am stepping away from my usual topics all around marketing and strategy and today we're gonna go a little woo woo. I am bringing you behind the scenes of my Farm Marketing School platform and showcasing one of the pieces of content that I shared as a secret podcast with the members of Farm Marketing School. This past month we've been doing something really fun over these winter months. I usually like to take the off season time and put an extra emphasis on a particular topic for the months of December, January, February, sometimes even into March for my Farm Marketing School members so that while they're going through the school and they're taking their individual marketing projects right, they decide what they want to build and then they take the class and they do all the things and they build their marketing asset that's sort of custom DIY but layered on top of that. I like to have this live element going on in the off season where they can also supplement their learning with a particular topic where we go really deep on one particular element. This year I personally have had a lot of energy and interest and curiosity around the topic of money mindset. It's one of the things that I've been working on with my own coach for the last year. And actually at the end of this year I made a very important decision that for the year of 2026, my kind of theme word was going to be enough. I was going to study the word enough and how that shows up in my business. What does it mean to be enough? To have enough to know that I am Enough to. And one of the things that is driving this particular word in my life is the concept of scarcity and abundance and that I have lived in the land of scarcity for a really long time. The way that I look at life, I've always felt like I don't have enough. I've always been trying to grasp at more time, trying to hoard time, trying to gain more financial security. I don't know if you can raise your hand here, but it just feels like I never have enough of either of those resources. And then recently, this past year with my health scare or the last two years, really struggling again with the same, the same concept, just a different resource. This time it was my health. And how can I make sure I have enough health that I don't lose the health that I've already regained back? How can I store it away and keep it safe? Right? Like, I just have these money stories that are hounding me. And I finally decided it was time to really take a deep look at the. The stories that money has created in my life. And I want to try and reframe the way that I look at my resources. Not just my money, but also my time and my health and my relationships from a different space. And that's going to require me practicing a new way of being, a new way of looking at life and doing different disciplines, doing, taking on behaviors and actions that are going to feel weird, like putting on a new pair of clothes that don't quite fit yet. I'm. I'm actually doing things that feel a little uncomfortable to try and practice being in a different way with my money and with my resources. So I am personally very interested in this study of abundance and scarcity and wealth and the pursuit of wealth and is it okay to want more? And all the stories that I have around that.
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Yeah.
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So I'm just. I'm like geeked about it. I'm reading everything I can about it and I want to talk about it with people. I want to facilitate discussions around this and find other people who are interested in this topic. And so this is the reason why I chose to make it the topic of the off season. In farm marketing school. We're doing all kinds of activities around money mindset. And you're just basically, if you're in the school with me, you know this. We're just, we're just working through this material together. As I go through it myself and as I'm uncovering things, I'm bringing that to the table. I'm sharing it with all of you. I'm creating a book study. We have discussion round tables, different activities that are challenging you to do some of the same work I'm doing over here in Ohio in my own little world, and see if it's resonating with some of you, if you'll get some similar results or if you'll find some aha moments and breakthroughs as you go through that work yourself. So that's what I've been working on in farm marketing school. And one of the things that we've been doing is a weekly secret podcast where I'm sharing some of the stuff that I'm doing and I'm challenging them to kind of maybe go through it themselves as well and try some of the similar activities. Anyway, one of those podcasts is particularly insightful, I think, and was challenging. I like how it turned out. And I thought to myself, you know what? Most of these are secret. Most of these are just inside the school and only accessible to the students in there. But I want to share this one with the outside world, partly because I want to sort of tease the incredible value that's inside from marketing school. I want you to see what some of this is and be like, wow, that sounds amazing. I want more of that. But I'm hoping that this will get your mind thinking about the concept of scarcity and abundance and how it's showing up in your life, in your business, in your marriage, or in your partnerships, in your family, in the way you're parenting in, in your possessions, in your bank account, in your retirement account, if you even have one, in your health, in your time. There is so much here to unpack and explore, and I'm just beginning to scratch the surface. And I just thought I would share this first secret podcast. Actually, this is the second secret podcast with you and see if something comes up for you. See if you light up, if it piques your interest. If it does, I want to encourage you to start your own journey into reframing and rewriting your own money stories. We all have them. There's no shame. It's just fun to pause and look at them and observe them and become curious about them and become aware of them before you judge them, just notice them. And we're going to unpack today kind of a different angle on it. You'll. You'll hear it in just a second. But my hope is that this is going to inspire you to really start looking at how do I think about money? How am I being with money? What do I want when it comes to Money, but not just money. Other forms of what I would call energy and flow and resource. And is there anything that I need to be doing? Is there any work I need to do here in my own mind, my own thinking, to begin to break some patterns of behavior, because it's our thoughts that are ultimately driving our feelings and then our behavior. And so it's just really helpful to observe the thoughts and become aware of them and then start to try practicing new ones. And it all starts with just even seeing what else is possible. So I hope that this episode inspires you, makes you think in a different way. And I encourage you to go and read the books that I reference. So the first book is called Happy Money. I'll put the link in the show notes. But there's also another book that we're studying as a book study in Farm Marketing School called the Soul of Money, and it's by Lynn Twist. That's one. That one is also really excellent. I have a whole bunch of other titles in Farm Marketing School that I recommend that I'm going to be going through on my reading list over the next year and sharing, continuing to share in, in the school some of the insights. But I'm so excited because I, I know that because I am fixing my mind on this topic and really ready to do the work on myself, I know that I'm going to have some breakthroughs this year and I'm just going to be documenting it and sharing it along the way. So I hope today's good. I hope you get something out of it. If you decide you want to come into Farm Marketing School for the next couple of months, just to even partake in that, it could be really valuable for you'll know if it's something you want to do. You're going to feel this fire in your belly and this curiosity just licking at you at the end. So enjoy this episode. It's a secret podcast for my Farm Marketing School members only. This one, I decided to pull out of the back and show it and make it public. But it's really good and I hope it makes you think. All right, so here we go. I'm going to switch over to the recording.
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Hey, friends, welcome back to our private Farm Marketing School podcast series on rewriting your money story. I'm so glad you're here with me. This is episode number two. And last week we started by looking back. Hopefully you had a chance to do that homework exercise, exploring some of your earliest memories around money and beginning to notice the stories that you have absorbed before you ever deliberately chose them. And I wonder if you noticed in general, were more of your stories negative or positive stories about money? Either way, I bet that some of them were painful, tender. Maybe some of them were funny. I've had some very formative stories around money, and I hope that you started to see how much of your current relationship with money isn't really your fault. I say that in air quotes. Much of it has been inherited and it can be rewritten. So today we're going to shift into something a little bit new. I decided I wanted to talk more about the energy of money and this idea of flow, because I have been fascinated by this. I've been studying it more intensely and literally praying for the idea of flow. Like, I imagine flows coming towards me as I meditate. And so I also want to talk through how gratitude is kind of the secret to getting there. At least it's one of them.
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So we're going to unpack that a little bit now.
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I want to acknowledge up front that today's topic draws heavily from Ken Honda's book, Happy Money. And his framework will also overlay with what Lynne Twist is teaching in her book the Soul of Money, which is what we're studying as a book study. These two books kind of really come together very harmoniously. One is more about the emotional tone of money, and the other one is more about the spiritual aspect behind it. So I just want to make sure I acknowledged both of those authors because I'm getting a lot from. From those resources today. So I want to start out by telling a story. Have you ever, like, experienced this moment where releasing money, spending money or receiving money created, like, this buzz of energy for you, like, like a little electric boost? I have several of these, and one of them that I thought of was actually last year when Josiah, he used to be on the quiz team at school. And I was going to go watch him perform or compete, I should say. And I had this idea because it was, like, right after school. And I know they're all really hungry. These are a bunch of guys at the time in eighth grade, okay. So they're just ravenous. My son would always come home from school and he would just consume so much food. So I was a lot of compassion for him that he had to go to these meets and he wouldn't get home until really late. And I'm like, oh, he's got to be so hungry. So I was going to bring him a Subway sandwich and deliver it to him before his match or in between his match. And he could kind of scarf it down. And as I was there at Subway, I thought to myself, you know what I actually wanted? Actually, to be honest, I didn't do it there in the moment at Subway. I had this thought before I left because I gave myself enough time to place an order online. I was like, you know what? I'm gonna bless all of the boys on the team. I'm just gonna get a Subway sandwich for all eight of them. And I just thought it would be fun. So I went online and I ordered all these sandwich platters and I went and picked them up. And it was so fun to walk in with these bags of Subway sandwiches and have like this surprise and delight moment with these eighth grade boys. And they were just like, thanks, Ms. Bench. And it just felt so good. There was this uplifting moment of energy in the room and I felt a buzz like I had just made something really cool happen. This actually reminds me of the story. There's a scene in the Harry Potter movie, if those of you ever watched Harry Potter, where Harry Potter wins this jar of vial of what's called liquid luck in his potions class. Because he, he's the one who perfects this certain potion. And that's the prize is this bottle of liquid luck. And he uses it later on in the story when he needs this moment of serendipity to help him accomplish this impossible task. So he drinks the liquid luck in that moment and then just everything just starts to work out for him. And he has this total joy and peace about him as he just says, oh, I just feel lucky. I just feel like this is what I'm supposed to do. And he starts going and doing this ridiculous thing. And the other characters in the story like, what are you doing? And he's like, I don't know. I just know it's gonna work out. And it kind of reminds me of that feeling when I have these moments of just releasing the funds and, and just trusting that something cool is going to come from it. I felt that, like, liquid luck, like nothing could go wrong. And so I want you to think about a time when you have felt this kind of liquid luck. This is what I like to call flow, when we're letting it flow. Ken Honda makes a very simple, I think, profound claim in his book Happy Money. He says it's not the amount of money that matters, it's the energy with which it is given or received. And he calls this happy money versus unhappy money. And I really resonated with this. It's actually kind of become A filter through which I'm working through my current. A lot of my practices as I'm working through my own struggles with how I use money. So happy money is money that's flowing from a place of gratitude or joy or purpose or surprise or delight where you have this sense of alignment with your values. Like, oh, this is what I stand for. In my case, I think that I tend to be a person who inspires, like, a lot of my patterns in my past. If you look at the red thread of my life story, I do a lot of inspiring things. People say, oh, you're just so inspiring, or you're a catalyst for change. And that's not hard for me. It just happens. It comes from my core. And so when my money is flowing with this, it has alignment with this core value I have for being a person of inspiration and a catalyst for change. Like, that's when it feels good, when it feels happy. It's money that feels like partnership with the world, with your purpose in the world, not pressure. It's when it feels good to give and it feels good to receive. I'm gonna talk more about that later. It's usually accompanied by what I talked about. That buzz feeling or that feeling of potential power and influence. And you feel used by God. You feel used by the forces of good. Like, you just brought meaning into the world. Like, you are a conduit for creating good energy in the universe. And it's just awesome.
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Okay.
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Happy money can also be experienced when you allow yourself to receive it. And this is a place that I don't think we spend enough time thinking about. Usually when we're doing trying to rewire our money brain, we're like, oh, I just want to be able to spend it more or, like, release it more and use it more and not feel guilt about it or whatever. But it's also about allowing blessing to come to you so when it does arrive, you don't feel bad taking it. It's funny because I spent many years in a place of like, oh, we don't have enough. We don't have enough really worrying about our finances. And I would pray for God to bless us with money. My God, we just really need it in air quotes. Okay. And then when it would start to come or I would have blessings show up in other ways. Like, people might come and want to bless me with actual. Maybe not cash flow or money, but it was some kind of an item that would meet my need. I had a hard time saying yes to it. I wouldn't allow it I would be like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't need that. Or, I. I can't take that. I don't. I'm not a charity case. And so we would just hold up our hands and block it and be like, no. And I wouldn't allow myself to receive it. So if this is hard for me to. To allow blessing to come to me and actually take the reward, and I have to practice it. Last year, in, I think it was March, my husband and I went to Colorado because I was finally feeling better. I had really turned a corner. I wasn't 100% with my health, but I really felt confident that I had finally figured it out and I was gonna be okay. And I noticed that I wanted to create a moment in time where I.
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Marked that as a milestone.
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And so I said, kurt, I really feel like for the sake of my healing, it would be good for us to travel somewhere. In this case, I'd like to go to Colorado. I'd like to hike up a mountain. I don't know which one, but some kind of peak, or do a significant hike somewhere to somewhere with a beautiful view. And I want to have a moment where I place a rock on the top of this mountain and I declare myself healed. And so I want to create an experience where we celebrate how far we have come in our healing, how far God has taken me and that he has provided. And I just want to honor him, and I just want to say thank you. And I want to make this moment be. I want it to feel luxurious and prosperous, and I want to release. I want to give myself permission to release some of this hoard that I've stashed that I've been afraid to use. I want to say I'm going to use it for good, to celebrate me. And. And so when we actually went on the trip, because I'd given myself permission to do it, it was so fun. It was so fun to be like, yes, we're gonna stay in a really nice Airbnb, not just, like, you know, an $80 hotel room that is, you know, feels like a good budget buy. Like, yes, we're gonna go and we're gonna make luxurious meals, and I'm gonna spend money on. Well, I have to, with the way I eat now, but I'm not gonna feel bad about it, right? And, yes, we're gonna. We're going to fly an airplane direct instead of taking, you know, the two different legs of a journey. And it makes the trip a whole lot longer and exhausting. Like, I'm just going to spend a little bit extra on a big ticket trip on a direct line, right? So doing that was a way of practicing allowing myself to finally release and receive the money that I had been blessed with and to use it for good, to honor myself, to honor God, to say good job and to mark that moment in time. Okay, so that felt like a happy use of money. And it could have very easily been spent in an unhappy way, right? Like I could have come at it from a different angle and I would have turned that energy into negative energy. I would have been second guessing every time I spent money on myself or every time we went and did something and I had to pay an entrance fee to go into to see that rock formation or whatever. And I would have been like, oh, but no, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be like, no, this is all, we're just going to spend the money and we're going to allow it to be a positive experience. It's a very different place now. Unhappy money is the opposite. It's money that flows with resentment, with fear, with guilt, with there's not going to be enough with exhaustion. Sometimes it shows up as obligation. It feels heavy, it feels tight, it feels, I'm struggling here with words. It carries like this, this emotional residue of not enough. And sometimes it shows up for us when we don't allow ourselves to take.
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The reward.
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Or someone tries to give you something or appreciate you and you hold up your hands, you refuse it because you don't want to be like a pity party or you don't want to be seen as, oh, they pity me, right? I'm not a charity trip. Or maybe you've worked so hard all year long, you get to the end of the year, but even then you're unwilling to spend any of that money to celebrate you. And so it just gets all bottled up and turned into resentment. And so here's just what's interesting. At least this is what I think happens. Many of us are swimming in unhappy money and we often don't notice it. Are you catching this at all? Does this feel familiar? Like we'll pay our bills and while we do so, we think, oh, there goes more money, or we raise our prices and we feel so much angst about it, we receive income and secretly we're shrinking and we're thinking, oh, I hope, I hope they don't get upset. I hope nobody finds out that I'm actually making money. We buy things and we instantly feel remorse or fear. My whole story Last week about the Duran Duran cassette. I couldn't even listen to it because I had buyer's remorse immediately. Or we refused to spend money on that massage because it feels selfish. Oh, you know, I need to be taking care of the farm bills first or my kids or some other pressing need.
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Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School I. All right, farmers, it's the off season now and you know what that means. It's time to start working on your business, not just in it. This is the time to step back and sharpen your marketing systems. Evaluate, set yourself up for stronger sales next year. And if you're like a lot of farmers, you know you need to do this, but you're not quite sure how to go about it. And that's why I created Farm Marketing School. It's my monthly membership. It's going to help farmers like you build a simple, repeatable marketing machine that actually works inside you. Get bite sized step by step projects that make marketing easier. So each month you pick what project you want to work on. Like maybe you want to finally write your email nurture sequence or you want to build your social media plan. Well, I walk you through exactly how to do it. You set up the system so that it's a repeatable thing you can do every month. And you're not doing it alone. Because every month we meet live on zoom so that you can get coaching and ask questions and hear what's working for other farmers. It's like having a marketing mentor and a mastermind rolled into one. Now, each project is designed to be completed in under 30 days. Some of them are even faster. So you make steady progress without letting marketing take over your life. And it's so encouraging when you see progress actually being made little by little. And this winter, I'm doing something fun. It's brand new. I'm doing a special focus on money mindset. We're going to be doing a book study and some other guided exercises and discussions to really help us unpack how we're thinking about money, how that's affecting how we run our business so we can start charging what we're worth and sell with confidence and feel empowered as the CEO of our farm business. So if you're ready to stop winging it and finally build a marketing system that brings inconsistent sales, please come join Farm Marketing School today. I would love to have you in my community. Sign up for your first month and join the fun@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS that's mydigitalfarmer.com FMS I'll see you inside.
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Happy money. Money exchanged with gratitude is deeply connected to what Lynne Twist in her book the Soul of Money, which she calls the sufficiency principle. And sufficiency, she says, is the doorway out of scarcity. She talks about it like this. She says, money is like water. It's meant to move, it's meant to circulate, it's meant to nourish. And when water flows, I want you to think about a stream and a brook, right? It's bringing life. It's clear. I used to be a backpack guide, and we would never, ever take water for. For drinking.
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If we could help it from a.
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Stagnant pool, we would always try to.
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Find it from a. A river or a creek or something.
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That was moving because there were fewer microorganisms in it.
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When water flows, it's.
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It's bringing life to us. When it's dammed up or hoarded or held too tightly, it stagnates and it becomes cloudy and sour. And it can't bless anyone and it can't bless you. Money emotionally and energetically behaves the same way. And so when we grip money and hold on tightly to it from fear, our entire system tightens. But when we release it, when you are able to receive it or let.
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It go with gratitude, you'll notice that you just.
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Something opens. Now, you might be listening to this, and you're like, I have never done.
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This, and I know, like, I used.
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To be there too, and I want to offer you some hope. Like, I'm. I'm working on this, and I'm starting to feel it just a little bit, and it's really exciting me. Money is also a lot like energy.
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That's another metaphor that I really love.
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I like to think of it as a current. And just like you can break a current, right? You can close it, and so then the energy can keep running through the current or you can break the circuit, and now it stops and it can't keep moving. Like, as long as you can keep pushing money forward, it will come back around. Like, that's what I'm discovering anyway, when I'm able to release it and trust.
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It and spend it and not hoard.
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Comes back around eventually in other ways, it amplifies whatever emotion you will attach to it. So gratitude will expand it, fear will constrict it. If you release it with purpose, it channels it. If you load it up with obligation and duty, it tends to distort it. I want to share one more Story here today. A couple years ago, back when I launched Accelerator, which was my, like, mastermind small group, but it was the version of farm marketing school before farm marketing school. And I would work with 15 farmers very intensely for three months, and we would work on the different projects together. And when I pitched Accelerator, I was so scared for the first time, I'm like, I don't know if anybody's going to want this. They're going to say no. I'm going to feel like I'm not worthy. I'm not good enough. Right. I had all these fears and all these reasons why don't even put it out there, Corinna, because no one's going to want to spend time with you. And my coach encouraged me. She's like, why don't you get over this fear by personally reaching out to, like, five people that you really want in the group? Like, you know, some of these farmers, I'm like, yeah, I do. Some of them I'd interviewed on the podcast. And so that's what I did. I reached out to them individually. I was like, listen, I'm doing this thing, and I would love it if you were in it. Like, when I pictured doing it, I wanted you in my group, and I just wanted to see if you'd be interested. And I. Everyone that I asked said yes. And that gave me power. Then that was like, oh, I have five people now who, like, want to do this. And that gave me this sense of.
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Confidence to move forward that I could.
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Actually put the offer out there. And so I asked some more people. But I also sent an email, and I remember there were all these people that just signed up for it. It just happened in a day when.
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I had told myself it was going.
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To be so hard.
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And I felt electric. And for the rest of that day.
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I had that liquid luck feeling like nothing could stop me.
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And I was doing things all day.
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Long with just so much confidence. I remember we actually went to an event that night, and I'm kind of an introvert, but at that event, I was just on fire. I was such an extrovert. I was talking to everybody. Yeah, I just felt this energy pouring out of me for days. So I'm going to go back to that quote. It's not the amount of money that matters. It's the energy with which it is given or received. So today's episode is about beginning to notice how money is moving in your life, not just physically but emotionally and. And not just in dollars, not in the amount, but in energy. I want you to imagine yourself standing in a river of rushing water, in the river of abundance, and just notice, like, is your money flow? Does it feel more like this, this rushing river? Is that the energy that you're imbibing it with?
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Or does it feel more like a.
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Clogged pipe or a stagnant pool? So let me give a few more tangible examples, because I know you're farmers and you want this grounded in your reality. Unhappy money moments can look like this. Dreading paying the propane bill and muttering under your breath as you do. Undervaluing your produce because you're afraid customers aren't going to pay what you think it's worth. Feeling resentful when you have to sit.
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All day at the market and all.
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You bring home is what you would consider a meager roi. Saying yes to a collaboration that is draining your energy, but you feel obligated to do it. Okay, those are some examples of unhappy money. Do you feel. Do you sense it? Because there's like a negative energy behind it. There's this negative spirit, a negative mindset. Happy money moments might look like this.
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I wrote a few down.
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Receiving a payment from a customer and pausing to feel gratitude. Paying a vendor with appreciation because they are helping your farm thrive. Getting a surprise gift from one of my farm marketing school members from Hooves and Feathers a few weeks ago. A box of soap and a note inside saying how much farm marketing school had helped him really learn marketing. You guys, that was so beautiful. I felt valued. I felt like he had benefited from.
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My lessons and that what I was.
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Doing was making a difference in the world. That was happy money.
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Buying a new tool.
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Yes, buying a new tool and feeling excitement about it instead of guilt. Giving your staff a bonus and celebrating the joy of being generous. So I just want to pause there, too. Like, you could give your staff a bonus and feel resentful about it. That's unhappy money. Or you could give your staff a bonus and be, like, giddy and giggly about it because. Because you just want to bless them. Do you see the difference? So when money is flowing in alignment with gratitude and with your purpose and your sense, your.
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Your.
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Your values, that's happy money. And we're going to spend some more time talking about values in a future podcast. But, like, because we need to get clear about what is it that you value. Because when you know what your values are and then you can kind of give from that or you allow money to flow through that. Oh, that feels amazing. When it flows through constriction, through fear or Shame. That's unhappy money. Okay, so I want to finish up by talking about sufficiency, because Lynn Twist talks about this in her book.
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And.
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It'S really the heartbeat of our work this month. Scarcity says there's not enough.
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Right?
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She talks about how that's one of the big lies. There's never enough, and that's just the way it is. But sufficiency says what I have right now is enough to take the next step and trusting that God is going to bring in what you require next. Step two will reveal itself. Even if you don't have it right now and you can't see the path right now, it will be revealed. That's. That's part of this trust fall, I think why sufficiency and gratitude and blessing and faith are kind of all tied in together.
A
So the way out of the land of scarcity is seeing that what you have now is sufficient to meet your needs, and that is grounded in gratitude for what is here right now. Gratitude is the antidote to scarcity, a practice of gratitude. It's what breaks the trance. And I am raising my hand here, folks. I just want you to know I am on this journey with you too.
B
This is something I have to practice.
A
Because my modus operandi is to fill my day, my time, which is also another form of energy and currency with activity so that I can plan and prepare for the future. I don't want to feel stressed out in the future. I don't want to feel scarce in the future. And so I will use my present moment to plan and over plan and get everything ready so that I don't have to worry two weeks from now or six months from now, I'll have enough revenue or I'll have enough whatever. And what ends up happening is that I never actually live in the moment. I never actually enjoy the present, because the future is robbing me of the present. My fear of the future is robbing me of the present. I spend all my present time working to make sure I don't feel this way in the future.
B
But then when I.
A
When I have the chance to take the reward in the future because of this work I've done now, instead of taking the reward and being present, I use that time to continue to plan for the future. Do you guys do this too? Are you even following my logic here?
B
Yeah.
A
So I'm right there with you. And the way out of this path of scarcity is to start living more in the land of gratitude, to notice that I am sufficient. Right now, I have What I need right now to take the next step. And maybe I don't know what step.
B
Two or step three is going to be.
A
Maybe I don't actually have what I need to do step three, but when that time comes to take step three, what if you will have what is required? What if it will be sufficient, then too, Right? That's a very different way of thinking. And it really is a mindset shift. I have been practicing gratitude for the last year and a half because of my illness. This was a practice that was recommended to me, and I have seen it work with my health. And health is another form of abundance, another form of energy. And I often think of my health as like a water stream as well, and that there's just a flow of goodness coming and blessing coming. So I've seen it work. I've practiced writing down every day things that I do have, things that I currently choose to still have. Maybe they were blessed to me and given to me a long time ago, but I still have them. Those go down on my list too, of things I'm still grateful for. Right? So gratitude is a practice where you notice all the things that you do.
B
Have, all the ways that you have.
A
Been blessed, the things that are coming onto your radar, new people that you've met, new opportunities and potential, even sometimes challenges in my life, my illness being one of them. I can now look at that as an example of something that has created new life. On the other side of it, things I would never have received had I not gone through that dark period. And that too now is seen as something I'm grateful for because it created movement, it created flow, it created new life. The path out of scarcity is to sit down and start noticing all of.
B
The things that you do have and.
A
To be grateful for them.
B
And to assume they are good, to.
A
Assume they will lead to blessing, to.
B
Assume they are here for us and.
A
They will provide for us. We have enough right now. So I just want you to, like, try to see life that way. Sometimes it's hard.
B
You see it just for a moment.
A
And then it shifts back out of you. But every now and then, that's kind of how it began with me. I could see it and I could lean into it and trust it, start treating money like water, start seeing it as an energy conduit. And when you start to receive and release money with gratitude, then that's when.
B
You can begin to rewrite your money story.
A
So here's your practice for this week, for this episode. I want you to notice this Week when money feels like happy money. All right?
B
This is a moment when money flows.
A
With gratitude, with joy, purpose, when there's alignment with your values. And I want you to write it down.
B
If you.
A
When you spot it or if you don't have something to write it down on, just speak it out loud. The second thing you could do is notice when money feels unhappy, like unhappy money. This is when scarcity or fear is showing up around any thoughts with money. And instead of judging it, again, just notice the emotional tone. I know you want to improve it, but just for right now, just notice that emotional tone that you're bringing to the table. And then number three, this is something I'm having fun with right now. I want you to practice speaking a blessing over any money you release this week. This one actually came from a moment a couple days ago when my husband and I were driving to go pick up our son Josiah from school, and we were stopped at a stoplight. I didn't notice him, but my husband did. There was a homeless man with kind of a cardboard sign asking for. For money. And Kurt turned around at the stoplight. I thought we were just going wherever we go. And all of a sudden, he does this big U turn into a parking lot, parks, gets out of his car, walks up to the guy and hands him some cash from his wallet. And I remember just being like, oh, here we go. I felt this moment of like, oh, like, not wanting to release it for that scenario. But I was also impressed that my husband is just so. So just. Just let's money flow. And he's just so kind. And I paused, and I remembered this practice that I'm about to tell you. And I said, okay, we're going to practice breathing out, like, a word of blessing onto this money as we release it. And so I kind of spoke quietly in the car as I was sitting there. I said, I release this into the flow. May it bring energy, May it bring possibility. May it bless this man's life. And so I just want to encourage you to say something like that every time, to whisper it every time you release money and just say, I'm going to release this bill that I'm writing right now. As I pay this bill, I'm releasing it into the flow, and I'm intentionally trusting that it will bring energy and blessing and possibility down the road. And when you receive money, that you would do the same thing, that you would be willing to receive it as a blessing. Okay, so try it. When you pay the next bill, when you tip someone, when you Decide to buy something for yourself as a reward because you deserve it. Try it when you donate or pay for a service and just see what that feels like. Bless the flow. Start seeing your money as energy, as flow. And what would it look like for you to. Instead of blocking the circuit, to allow the circuit to run and actively release that money with positive energy, intention, see what comes up for you. Okay, friends, you and I are doing brave work. This is hard. This is mind bending.
B
This is feeling a little woo woo.
A
But you're not just learning business tactics. You are writing, rewriting. Really, decades of conditioning.
B
And I'm raising my hand here.
A
Okay? We are learning how to see our money just from a different angle with, I don't know, a more open heart. This reminds me of when I was up on the mountain on Mount Muskoko in Colorado and we went up to look at the view down below of Colorado Springs and I, I sat there for a while and just looked at it and wasn't on. It was gorgeous. And then I got up because I was lingering. This is a beautiful place. And I kind of walked over 10, 20 yards to the right and kind of sat down on a different rock there and I looked down at the city and I saw some different things from that angle that I hadn't seen from the other one. And it was a good metaphor for me, a good reminder, like to. Sometimes we need to. We need to get up and physically move our bodies and see something from a different angle. And we will see a completely different view. It's the same Colorado Springs, but the way I'm visualizing it and experiencing it is different because of where I'm standing. And that's how this work is going to be on us too. When we're looking at our money, we just have to get up and look at the same pot of money in a different way from a different location, and we'll experience it in a different way.
B
That's kind of what we're doing.
A
So I am proud of you for doing this work and sticking with it this week. Your work is to practice the. The energy of the exchange. Practice blessing the flow. Practice seeing the flow and notice how sufficiency begins to rise quietly within you. All right, I'll see you next week for episode three. You're doing beautifully. We'll talk soon. Bye bye. All right, I'm back. I hope you enjoyed that sneak peek of what's going on inside Farm Marketing School right now. Remember, if you want to join the community and participate in that particular study, you can enroll@mydigitalfarmer.com forward/enroll e n r O L L Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 345 if you like today's episode, please leave me a rating or a review, or share this podcast with one of your farmer friends. If you want to get onto my email list, I have some free stuff to send your way. It's going to make your marketing stronger. You're going to feel more confident in what you're doing. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe to get onto that list. It's free. Thank you so much for joining me today. You guys have an amazing week. And remember, I believe in you. Bye.
B
Bye.
Episode 345 — The Energy of Money: FMS Money Mindset Series
Host: Corinna Bench
Date: January 21, 2026
In this episode, Corinna Bench explores the concept of the "energy of money" as part of her Farm Marketing School (FMS) Money Mindset Series. Departing from practical marketing tips, Corinna delves into how emotions, beliefs, and energy affect our financial lives—focusing on the ways abundance and scarcity mindsets shape our experience of money. Drawing inspiration from Ken Honda’s Happy Money and Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money, Corinna shares personal stories and actionable practices to help farmers and entrepreneurs observe, shift, and heal their money mindset.
[02:21–08:13]
“I've always felt like I don't have enough ... trying to grasp at more time ... gain more financial security... trying to hoard time...” (Corinna, 06:28)
[13:36–21:49]
"There was this uplifting moment of energy in the room and I felt a buzz like I had just made something really cool happen." (Corinna, 16:40)
[21:50–26:54]
“Doing that was a way of practicing allowing myself to finally release and receive the money that I had been blessed with and to use it for good, to honor myself, to honor God, to say good job.” (Corinna, 24:18)
[26:54–33:42]
“When water flows, it’s bringing life ... when it’s dammed up or hoarded or held too tightly, it stagnates and becomes cloudy and sour. Money emotionally and energetically behaves the same way.” (Corinna, 32:14)
[36:49–39:16]
“You could give your staff a bonus and feel resentful about it ... or be giddy and giggly about it because you just want to bless them. Do you see the difference?” (Corinna, 39:11)
[39:50–44:31]
“My fear of the future is robbing me of the present. I spend all my present time working to make sure I don’t feel this way in the future.” (Corinna, 42:19)
[45:13–47:49]
“Bless the flow. Start seeing your money as energy, as flow... allow the circuit to run and actively release that money with positive energy, intention...” (Corinna, 47:19)
[48:46–50:14]
On the Buzz of Generosity:
"There was this uplifting moment of energy in the room and I felt a buzz like I had just made something really cool happen."
— Corinna (16:40)
On Receiving with Joy:
“Doing that was a way of practicing allowing myself to finally release and receive the money that I had been blessed with and to use it for good, to honor myself, to honor God ... It could have very easily been spent in an unhappy way.”
— Corinna (24:18)
On the Energy of Money:
"It's not the amount of money that matters, it's the energy with which it is given or received."
— Quoting Ken Honda’s Happy Money (20:56, also reiterated at 35:49)
On Sufficiency & Moving Out of Scarcity:
"The way out of the land of scarcity is seeing that what you have now is sufficient to meet your needs, and that is grounded in gratitude for what is here right now."
— Corinna (40:40)
On Gratitude Breaking Scarcity:
“Gratitude is the antidote to scarcity, a practice of gratitude. It's what breaks the trance.”
— Corinna (41:00)
On Perspective:
“We need to get up and physically move our bodies and see something from a different angle. And we will see a completely different view. It's the same Colorado Springs, but the way I'm visualizing it and experiencing it is different because of where I'm standing. And that's how this work is going to be on us too.”
— Corinna (49:10)
Tone & Language:
Corinna is conversational, candid, sometimes self-deprecating and warmly encouraging. She blends concrete farm business talk with "woo woo" energy ideas, always looping back to how theory meets real farm life.
For Those Who Haven't Listened:
This episode is a reflective, insightful journey into the unseen side of farm business—how your beliefs and energy around money shape your business outcomes. Corinna offers relatable stories, practical exercises, and encouragement for every farmer (or entrepreneur) who wants a healthier, more joyful relationship with money.