001: Welcome to She Handled It^™ with Arwen Becker

Arwen Becker: Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to the She Handled It! podcast. I am your host, Arwen Becker, and I could not be more grateful and thankful that you have spent this time with me today. My purpose and design behind the She Handled It! podcast is really to inspire you by showing you that you can overcome adversity and rise up higher. And the way in which I intend on doing that is to highlight women from all different areas of study, ethnicities, backgrounds, who are going to be able to share how they have prevailed over their past failures, and really some of their darkest hours, mine included. Really the focus is how my guests handled it in their own lives, and really the key takeaways that they learned as they walked through that experience. And really, the intent is to provide you with direction and tools to thrive where you're planted. That's the important part. But honestly, it's also my desire that these conversations really foster greater diversity and equity across all sectors of our lives. Because ultimately, this podcast is to inspire you to believe that you can handle it, just as my guests have handled it.

Through this work, what we're going to do is we're going to help create positive change, put positive change in your life but more importantly, also for the generations to follow through generational change. So, occasionally, I will highlight some men that have powerful women who have impacted their lives and discuss how she handled it, and really how that ricochet and ripple effect affected his own life as well. What this isn't, it's not a superficial conversation. We are going to go deep and we're going to go there fast. I don't have the time or the energy to spend on a lot of superficial fluff. That does not change you. It's about hearing about people and the crap that they've been through, and what it is that they did in order to overcome it. Through these conversations with my guests, it's my intention really to foster open and just meaningful communication because we want to get to the heart of the matter so you can have the opportunity to really take away the wisdom of what they have learned through that challenge and struggle, and truly, hopefully, to avoid some of those mistakes in your own life, right?

But what I do know is no one really cares about my successful retirement planning firm or my lovely home, or my happy family, or my great marriage. No one is really inspired when I talk about, “Oh, I'm a national speaker and I'm a podcast host and I'm an author of multiple books.” Nobody really cares about that. And they don't care whether or not I was a division one athlete or a model or have a degree in zoology, although that's a little bit interesting when we get to the point of where that came from. They don't really care about those things. It's actually quite the opposite. You don't want to hear about how great my life is and all the wonderful things that I have. You need to hear about the struggle in order to get to those triumphs. I have lived so much of my life trying to put onto this persona of a perfect person and doing it because I want to save myself from the potential of being hurt by being vulnerable. And I'm not going to do it anymore. I guess maybe I'm getting to that age where I just don't have the time to stay in that superficial place and pretend that everything is great because, in times, it's not. I am here to open up my life and those brave women around me, who can help you rise higher. That is why I'm here.

What I do know that helps people to move through things and to get further and to believe for more is when they hear about the crap, when they hear about the struggle, when they hear about how things were falling apart, the wheels were coming off, and everything looked hopeless, and how I pulled myself to the other side of those challenges and the same thing with the women that I'm going to talk to. I'm going to talk about what it was like to grow up in a broken home and a major financial instability that I went through and how that filtered through so much in my life. What is like of the effects of growing up in an alcoholic home? What enabling and codependent behaviors were created in myself? What it's like to strive for this validation in negative ways to fill the void of uninvolved fathers? What my deep dislike for anything having to do with God was because of the hypocrisy that I saw around me. I was introduced to pornography at the age of 11, sixth grade, when I should have been protected by the people who were put in my life to protect me, and how devastating that was for me, in my private life, as I grew older.

What it's like to be fired from the only job that I wanted to do my whole life from the time I was five years old, and how I had to come through that and that leading to my divorce really being the catalyst that led to my divorce at 24. And what it was like to have to start to build all new friends because I had put that role in the hands of my ex when we were growing up through high school and college. And all the financial insecurity that I dealt with, in my childhood, in my first marriage, even when I had money, and how I drug those issues, and didn't work through them until recent years into my second marriage. The difficulty of being a stepparent and I always called it a bonus parent. I was always his bonus mom and he was my bonus son, but walking him through the death of his mom, and my eventual adoption of him. Gosh, the helplessness that I felt as a mom when I discovered through multiple testing that my middle son was ADHD and autistic, and what that diagnosis was and the negative effects for years that that poor kid went through and how that for me as a mom gave way to severe debilitating insomnia because I was worrying my way to complete instability because I just couldn't control the situation.

We're going to be talking about what it's like to be an entrepreneur for any of you who are brave enough to go into that space. Oh, my goodness. Any of you working with your spouse, when I ask people at events, most people don't raise their hands, and the few brave people that do usually say, “Oh my gosh, and it was awful,” you know, something like that. I've worked with my spouse for 20 years now and we have been through the struggle. I'm going to talk more about that and how we face near business failure, following the Great Recession, and what that was to lead us into being more than a half a million dollars in debt and the foreclosure on our home, the home that my youngest son by design was born at and what it was like to have to give that up and the shame that I felt because of that, and I actually talked quite a bit about that journey in my new book, She Handled It So Can You, an inspiring and empowering financial guide for women, and I walked through a lot of the struggles that I went through individually with money and how I came out the other side and still was able to keep my marriage together and all of those pieces that go along with financial and security and stability. So, I talked about that.

So, those are just some of the topics that throughout these weeks that we spend together, you'll hear filtered in, I mean, my guests are certainly going to be talking about things that I haven't dealt with. You know, what it's like postpartum depression, what it's like to overcome alcohol, what it's like to deal with abuse, and just the gamut of things that we're going to talk about. Because, again, I don't have time to talk about things that are fleeting and superficial. That doesn't change anybody. I want you to be inspired as I have with so many women around me that I hear these stories and I'm like, “Oh my gosh, I can't believe you overcame that and you're happy and you're still going forward and you've got these great relationships and you've got this great business and you have XYZ, whatever it is that matters to you. And that comes when we realized that we are not alone in this process. So, we are going to dive into a lot of those, again, because nobody cares about the accolades. It's about overcoming adversity and helping you do the same as well.

Pain with a purpose. I do want to say this though, I want you to please keep in mind because I certainly probably like you have listened to many people talk, whether it be speakers or podcasts or radio hosts or whatever that might be, I am speaking through my own lens. You know, I am intentionally bringing women in who don't think and look and sound the way that I do, because that is the only way I see things from a new and fresh perspective. So, I am speaking through the lens that I grew up looking through, and that's why I'm fighting to bring on guests that have these different backgrounds that see things differently. Because what I want to do is I want to talk through my feelings and my feelings come through this feeling of lack as a child, but I also want to be mindful of what I also recognize as my white privilege. You know, I grew up in a community, great community. Comparatively to my peers, I was very financially strapped and struggling, and what it was like to have moved out of our house and go into a rental and have handmade clothes and be that one kid who had the lunch tickets and things of that nature. But I still had tremendous benefits.

You know, I had food on the table, I had a roof over my head, I had a safe school that I was able to attend. So, even though I am a minority as a woman in a very male-dominated financial planning industry, I want to fight to see how I can draw more women of color into that industry to help positively change their communities and people that they reach. So, this communication, I don't have time to put disclosures and disclaimers on every comment that myself or my guests say and the conversation we have. I mean, of course, there's always someone that has it worse off than you, right? But that doesn't negate the feelings of negativity that you went through and the worry that it caused. So, again, we don't have time to package everything up to fit everybody. That's not what we're intending to do. We're intending to talk about one woman's struggle and what it was like and what she learned in that process and to be able to bring context to those feelings and empathy to the hurt and to provide validation to it, that it's okay to feel that way. But then also gratitude from what we've learned. Right? So, that's a part of the process. That's why I am here to help you understand you're not alone in this.

All right. So, now we've got that all out of the way, right ladies? And there's probably some men listening to this too. But I'm here talking to you. I want you to change. I want you to rise higher. I want you to be able to realize you can handle it.