177. Why Comfort Is Keeping You Stuck (and how to get ahead)

Comfort feels safe—but it may be the very thing keeping you stuck.

In this episode, Laura Sexton challenges the belief that comfort equals security and explains why staying financially comfortable often leads to stress, stagnation, and quiet dissatisfaction. If you’ve ever felt like you’re “doing all the right things” but still not moving forward, this conversation will put words to that feeling—and show you a better way.

Laura shares her family’s story of choosing years of intentional financial discomfort to build long-term peace, flexibility, and freedom. You’ll learn why growth doesn’t live in the comfort zone, how unconscious spending keeps you trapped, and why using other people’s money disconnects you from your future.

This episode also includes a simple but powerful 30-day challenge that can immediately shift how you spend, decide, and lead your finances.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why comfort is not the same as contentment or safety
• How financial comfort can quietly cause anxiety and stagnation
• The difference between unconscious spending and intentional ownership
• Why “normal” money habits are keeping most people stressed and stuck
• One financially uncomfortable action that can change everything in 30 days

If you’re ready to stop languishing, start growing, and take ownership of your financial future, this episode is for you.

Learn more about working with Laura Sexton

.        Join the Facebook group Legacy Builders Network.

·        Become a master with your money. Learn more here!

·        Checkout the resource library here!

Want to ask a question Laura can answer on the podcast? Connect with her here!

Want to receive a live money or career audit? Apply Here

Send an email to Laura@AccelerateYourLegacy.com or send a DM on Instagram @accelerateyourlegacy

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Transcript

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Audio Only - All Participants-23 0:05

Hello, accelerators. Ooh, do I have a Hot Take podcast for you today? And I'm so excited that you are here with me for this. Today we're gonna talk about doing the financially uncomfortable. Now listen, I'm going to say the uncomfortable truth out loud because I think sometimes we get so in our head about just wanting to be comfortable. We want just enough. But look comfort. Is not the same thing as safety. Comfort is certainly not the same thing as contentment, but comfort is often stalling. That's right. Today we're starting off. We're starting off by getting uncomfortable, now, this is one of those things we don't normally talk about, and a lot of people would not start off the year going, you know what I want, I wanna be uncomfortable, but. Think about it. How many of you signed up to go to the gym because you knew that a little bit of discomfort going to the gym, going to a place you'd never been before? The clothes that you wear to the gym, usually you're kind of tight and you're showing off some things that you don't necessarily wanna show off things you're not necessarily proud of until you get to a place where you are proud of it and you're excited to be showing it off. One of the key things that I want you to get out of this podcast today is that growth does not live in the comfort zone, and comfort doesn't live in the growth zone. But you know what also doesn't live in the comfort zone. Peace. Just because you are comfortable does not mean that you are where you ultimately need to or want to go if you're not growing. You are not standing still friends, you're suffocating. That's what I don't want for you. So that's why this podcast is here. We are going to help you grow your money, grow your legacy, but you can't do that by standing still. You have to get moving. You have to get uncomfortable so that you can live the life that you want to live. And I'm gonna guarantee you that if you do the uncomfortable now you will get to places that you want to go. I am going to share with you some things today on this podcast that I don't normally talk about. We are gonna talk about what it's like to do the financially uncomfortable and what you get on the other side. Okay? But here's this feeling though a lot of people have that they can't articulate. And I, I wanna hit this point before we move forward with the examples that I have for you. There is a feeling that people have where they're not growing. They're not just staying still because things are starting to contract around them. And when they're not doing the work to grow and they're just, oh, I'm gonna sit over here and I'm just gonna sit where it's comfortable, where it's, there's nothing new here. It's just I know everything here. That feeling is languishing. It's the constant churning of a hamster will. I am doing things that feel like effort, but I'm not going anywhere. That's languishing. If you're not growing, you can run around a hamster wheel all you want. You can run for miles and go nowhere. And what has it gotten you? Comfort is costing us more than we think. And here's my cultural diagnosis about it. We are marketed. Comfort over and over and over again. We are marketed, do this thing and you'll feel good about yourself. But everything that we are being marketed, they claim that it's freedom. They're trying to sell us. Freedom of what they're selling us is golden handcuffs and we get to put them on ourselves. So comfort when they're saying, don't worry about it. Don't do the hard thing and save up money to buy the car. No, go ahead and put it on credit. Get a loan, you'll be okay. It's more comfortable to get a loan than it is to pay cash for that. They're selling you handcuffs, they're selling you slavery, credit cards. It seems like it's a relief. Don't worry about it. You can buy it now and, and pay for it later. So more chains, more bondage. Buy now. Pay later is framed as relief. Don't worry, you can break up the cost of this pizza into four easy payments. Are you kidding me? It's ridiculous because what you're doing is you're killing tomorrow, you. Tomorrow you is going to suffer. Every time you get that bill in the mail and you're like, what in the world did I do to myself? It's painful. It hurts. Tell me you haven't opened up statement after statement after statement and just felt pain, constriction in your chest. I know you have. We have been taught to confuse convenience with freedom. We've been taught that using other people's money. Is the right thing to do, but using other people's money is going to disconnect you from your consequences. The number one most marketed product on the planet right now is debt products. You watch any streaming subscription that has commercials in it, and every single time it goes to break, there will either be a credit card. Or a car with loan options commercial, every single time. I have gotten to the point where I can't count them anymore because it's every single time my kids are watching a show debt product. Why in the world, in the middle of teenage mutant turtles, do we need to pause and show them? A debt product? Because the culture wants you to think that this is completely normal, and sadly, it is normal, but normal is not neutral. Normal in America is broke and stressed and stuck. 67% of Americans have a debt product that they say they are stressed about. 67% now, and that includes people like me that have no debt. 78% of Americans are in debt, in consumer debt of some kind. Not counting a mortgage. You count a mortgage, that number's higher. So if you have 80% of people that carry debt from month to month. 67% of Americans are feeling like it's a crisis that's 70 outta 80. We're getting real close to a hundred percent of people. If you have debt, you feel stressed about it. The people that don't feel stressed about it, I wanna say, either just got into it or feel like there's no hope. So why be stressed? I just started reading the book, the Comfort Crisis to my 9-year-old daughter. Now comfort crisis. It starts out with a gentleman getting ready to walk across the Alaskan Tundra and being terrified that he's gonna die in a fiery plane crash on the way. My daughter was like, why are you reading this to me? And I said, because sometimes you need to do hard things. Sometimes you have to do hard things. That's what life is. Life is a series of hard things that add up to you being stronger. Safer, but do you stay in comfort? You're never gonna be safe. You're never gonna be strong enough to do it. My 6-year-old came out to me the other day and she wanted me to draw a picture for her to color on a card for a friend. Now, we had already done one for her. We had already drawn it out and she colored it in and she liked it, but she left it out and her 2-year-old sister came and drew on it, and it was the smallest little drawing. It was almost nothing. You wouldn't have noticed it. It wouldn't have been a big deal. But my 6-year-old noticed it and she got mad and she tore it up and threw it away, and she said, mom, you need to do another one for me. I said, no, honey, I'm not gonna do that. You need to figure it out. And she just went to pieces and she was falling apart. She's like, you have to help me. No, I don't. She's like, why can't you help me? She's just sobbing big crocodile tears, giant ones. You are supposed to help me. You're my mom. And I said, I was going to teach you to do something, I can't do it for you. You're going to have to learn to do hard things. And she's nibbling. She's like, I don't wanna do hard things. I'm like, I know. But you're gonna have to try. I'm gonna be here with you. Look, if you were at the gym and she's lifting weights, and she's six, so probably not a lot of weight, but she gets underneath the bar and every time she goes to get under the bar, I lift it for her. She's not strengthening anything. And then when she gets out into the real world, she's gonna go to lift the bar and nobody's gonna be there to spot her, and she's not gonna have the strength to do it. I have to be here as a spotter, but I cannot do it for her. Comfort weakens us, but discomfort will wake us up. This is physically, this is emotionally, this is financially. It's all of it. If you have not read The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, I highly recommend it. This is my January book of the month. This is what I'm going to be reading. I'm not only reading it, but I'm reading it to my 9-year-old. We have to learn to do hard things. So here's my credibility in the do hard things financially department, okay? I want you to know that I have been doing a hard thing for nine years in order to set myself up for a really nice payout. So in the beginning of our story, my husband and I had $372,347 of debt to pay off. We changed our entire life. We moved an hour outside the city to this apartment that we are in right now. Now this is a great apartment for us. It was a whole lot better when we only had one kid. Now that we have five, it's really small. There are seven people in two bedrooms with one bathroom. That is what we're living in right now. We made a choice to stay in this apartment. Now, we qualified to buy a home years ago, but we qualified for a number that we could not comfortably afford, and we knew that I would've had to go back to work or we'd have to take our kids out of private education. We made choices and we made sacrifices. We could have very easily moved into a three bedroom apartment or rented a home, but then we wouldn't have had money to save up for a down payment, or we wouldn't have had money to send our kids to a private school. We wouldn't have had money to be putting money constantly into savings and investments. We have been working very hard, and let me tell you what this has done over the years we've been here. When we move out of this apartment, we will have been here for nine years. We have lived with no debt since we made our final debt payment. We are buying a home that is a fraction of our take home pay. In this home, let me tell you, we are going from two bedrooms and one bathroom and about 912 square feet, and we are moving into a 2,800 square foot, two story home, four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and an office, and I'm doing it. With a fraction of my take home pay. Going to buy this home. We are going to end up with massive amounts of peace. And if you've been here for any length of time you'll have heard my story about why, why we wanted to get out of debt, why we choose debt freedom, what it is that we want with our life. We wanna buy a home. Why? So we can spread out so I can miss my kids a little bit. So we can have a little bit of autonomy. Right where the kids can own their own space. Now, only one of them's gonna have their own bedroom, and that's because he's the only boy. So he's gonna have his own bedrooms and then the big girls and the little girls are gonna share a room. But guys, I don't have to worry about whether or not I can pay this because even if I decided not to work anymore, it's less than a quarter of my husband's take home pay. No, you can't come to me and go, well, we're having our second child, so we have to get a bigger house. Nope. Nope. Don't. We're gonna have a third kid. We have to buy a bigger car. No, you don't. You know how I know because I didn't buy a bigger car when I had my third kid, and we got by just fine. Now, is it temporarily uncomfortable? Yes, but it buys permanent flexibility. We did not deprive our kids of anything. They still got to take dance classes. They got to play in sports teams. They're in private education. They get to go to summer camp, they get to do all kinds of things, and we have given them closeness. We have given them creativity. We have given them a sense of stability, and isn't that what we all want for our kids to know that they're going to grow up? Close to each other. They're gonna grow up having to get creative with things. Maybe we don't have all of the pieces to, okay, so I'll tell you this one story that we didn't have all the pieces to one of the Lego sets that my daughter wanted to build. She had this vision in her mind, and she had the instructions from Allego set that we had gotten a while ago. Things didn't get put away. Something got thrown away. I don't know exactly what happened, and she couldn't use the exact instructions to build the exact thing that she wanted to, but she ended up making something that was so much cooler that she could have never done if she was trying to. And that's kind of where we're at right now. Guys, the world is telling you, here are these specific instructions. This is what you have to follow. You have to go into debt, you have to have credit cards, you have to have a car payment. If you wanna ever live a comfortable life, you have to do it this way. And let me tell you that a little bit of discomfort is a good thing. Comfort does not equal contentment. They're just really not the same things. Comfort is avoiding friction, whereas contentment is peace while you still move forward. One of the worst things you can do in a marriage is not have uncomfortable conversations. I'll have couples come to me and they're like, yeah, we don't ever fight about money. We just don't talk about it. Can I tell you that conversation that you're trying not to have is probably the most important one that you could have. Because you're gonna sweep it under the rug and go to the left while he sweeps it under the rug and goes to the right, and you're just never gonna have that conversation. Every time you should have it. You go a little further in opposite directions. You keep going in opposite directions. You're not gonna end up in the same place. Stalling feels safe, I'll give you that, but it also creates anxiety in the background. Because you know you're not addressing the problem, you know you're not tackling the issue. Now, growth requires effort, and it also requires some gratitude to be completely honest, to be grateful that we are no longer where we used to be. Be grateful that we have the ability to keep growing. Your contentment is an active pursuit. It's not passive. Comfort is something that happens. Contentment is active. You have to work to be content. It comes from the activity of your own hands. Doing something, building something, growing something. Contentment doesn't just mean that you stop wanting more. It means you stop chasing more. We can always want more for ourselves. I want my business to grow. I wanna help more people. I wanna build an empire. That doesn't mean that I'm not content with where I'm at. I'm not trying to do these things because of what it can get me. I'm trying to do these things because of the people that I can help. When you're growing on purpose, you don't need constant upgrades to feel like you're okay. Maybe that's where the contentment piece comes in. So many times you look in at somebody else's car and you want a bigger, better one. Because building, getting a car is gonna make you feel like you've upgraded your status. I don't want you to feel like you need to upgrade. You don't have to always get bigger, better, and maybe if we weren't always chasing bigger, better, we'd be okay with being a little bit uncomfortable right now. And maybe after a while you're like me and you don't feel uncomfortable. 92% of the time I'm in this apartment, it's not uncomfortable. It's cozy. Actually. It's quite nice. I've got a very large bed that I get to have all of my little snuggle bugs in whenever they feel like it. Honestly, I'd prefer to sleep alone, but you know, if they all wanna come in there and be with us, they can. I live in a house where there's no shame around what we wear or what our bodies look like. That's amazing 'cause there's no room to hide here and there's no need to hide because we have a home that focuses on loving what we have and not constantly chasing what other people have. I will say that there are times where I get sad, my kids will ask me. Why does so and so have a bigger house? Or why does their house look like that? And ours looks like this. And sometimes it can feel really sad to me. Sometimes I feel really disappointed that I haven't been able to give them more. And my husband has been embarrassed by our place multiple times. He doesn't wanna bring people here because it's very hard to keep it clean because there's so many people running around in here and it's such a blessing. It's so incredibly wonderful to know that I've got these five kids that feel like it's okay to be kids. Yes, it's uncomfortable, but it's okay to be uncomfortable. There's a really easy way for you to start being uncomfortable, to get you to a place of great comfort later, right? When I decided to do this podcast, when I decided to talk about being financially uncomfortable, one of the things I wanted was for you to have an action step that you could take to see what it's like to be a little bit uncomfortable. I don't want you to have to change your whole life. This thing that I'm going to ask you to do, I would like for you to do forever, but for right now, I want you to just try it out and see how it goes. So here it is. Freeze your credit cards. Freeze your credit cards for 30 days. Remove them from your phones. Remove them from your browsers. Remove them from your subscriptions. I'm not asking you to cancel them, I'm just asking you to pause them. Freeze them and then take the actual physical credit card. Go stick it in some ice in a bowl and stick it in your freezer. This is going to force intention on your part. You'll have to unfreeze that credit card in order to use it. This is going to reconnect your spending with your reality. When you're using a credit card, when you're using other people's money, it feels like monopoly play money and there's no emotional trigger that tells you that you've actually spent money, and this is going to interrupt your unconscious behavior, that's the key thing that I want you to take away from this. We're going to interrupt your unconscious behavior so that you can make intentional decisions. Yes, you are going to be a little bit uncomfortable. But I'm going to say this very plainly. You will probably save 15 to 18% of your normal spending. 'cause on average, when you use a credit card, you spend 15 to 18% more than you would have if you used cash or a debit card. So I'm saving you 18% of your monthly spend. You're welcome. But the real change is that you're gonna start deciding instead of defaulting. You're going to have to decide whether or not you want to buy that thing instead of defaulting to what feels easy. We're not just doing easy anymore, guys. You don't wanna live in the same spot that you were at at the end of 2025. When 2026 rolls around, do you wanna be in this exact same spot that you're in right now? If you do turn this podcast out, don't listen anymore, but you don't. You want growth or you wouldn't be here. You want growth, you wanna be somebody different. I know you do. The identity shift into who you want to become comes from when you discover that you've been unconsciously spending. When I say that, you're like, that's not true. I know exactly what I'm spending. Do you know how many of your financial decisions have been outsourced to somebody else making a decision for you? The credit card company tells you what you can and cannot spend your paycheck on because if you don't pay them, they're going to sue you. Your car company that has your loan, they decide what you can and cannot spend your money on, or they're gonna come take your car from you. I don't want them to tell you what you can and cannot do anymore. I want you to be the one in charge. Don't outsource your financial decisions. Be about making the change. You are completely capable as you actually are. I want you to see that. So stop playing around with other people's money. Stop it. Start trusting yourself because you have everything you need to change and become who you wanna be. At the end of 2026, start choosing what you want most. Over what you want right now. Be an adult, be a grownup. Make a plan, and then follow it. Stop doing what just feels good. Children. Do what feels good. You don't wanna be a child, you wanna be a grownup. Look, if freezing your cards. Makes you very uncomfortable. What you need is not willpower. You need more clarity over your numbers, over your goals, over what season of life you're in. You need to figure out where you're starting and where you're going. And I understand that doing the financially uncomfortable is much easier when you don't do it alone. So let's get on a call. Let's have a conversation about what we can do to help you practice intention and have a decision making reset. Now, whether or not this looks like we work together, one time and do a budget deep dive where we get into the nitty gritty of things or we do ongoing coaching, that's fine. Maybe it just looks like a clarity call. Where you'll walk away with one clear next step on what to do to get you to your ultimate goals. You can jump down in the show notes or you can get on my website, accelerate Your legacy.com. Let's chat because I'm tired of people that I know and people that I love staying stuck. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have the ability to become who you want to be. I also know that comfort is easy, but growth is better, and peace the thing that we're all after, right? Peace comes from choosing it on purpose. Just do it on purpose. I am so excited for the person that you are becoming, and I thank you for letting me have a little bit of your time today. Please, if you haven't already, click subscribe. Share this with a friend that you know needs to make a big change. Somebody that wants to change who they're going to be in 2026. I can walk alongside you and help you do it because 2026 is my year of ownership. Not only am I going to have ownership of a brand new house, but I'm taking ownership of my decisions. I'm taking ownership of my business. I'm taking ownership of the way that I do things, the way I act, taking ownership of my emotions. And I'm here to help you take ownership of your finances. If you're ready for a financial future that leaves you growing and not languishing, I'm here for you. All right, accelerators, that's it. Go out and make a difference. I.