A companion post to Episode 2: Understanding Money Beyond Goals
This was recorded January 1st as I was contemplating goals – where I wanted to go, where I’ve been, and what the last few months of stepping back from my business had actually taught me.
Here’s what I didn’t expect: money started showing up in strange, almost unbelievable ways right around the time I stopped chasing it.
The Pause I Didn’t Want to Take
Last October, I made the decision to step back from my tax business. Not because the work itself was too much — but because of the expectation I’d put on myself to perform at a level my body simply couldn’t sustain anymore. I was dealing with health issues and real burnout, and if I’m honest, I probably should have made this decision a couple of years before I actually did.
Stepping back cracked something open. I’d spent over a decade building my sense of worth around being the person who helps — who takes the stressful, overwhelming thing off someone else’s plate. When that role disappeared, so did a huge part of my social life and my identity, and it poked at some old wounds about where my value actually comes from.
When I Stopped Chasing It, Money Showed Up Anyway
This is the part that still amazes me. A couple of weeks after I made the decision to fully step back and put my health first, a $16,000 check landed in my mailbox. I found money on the ground. I received an unexpected $1,500 support payment on Christmas Eve. None of it was something I earned by hustling harder. I was actually doing the opposite of hustling.
What If the Goal Was to Understand Your Money?
During Januar, a lot of us set money goals — pay down this much debt, save this much for a trip, earn this much more. Those goals are great. I’m not knocking them.
But what if, instead, the goal was to understand your money? To understand your spending habits, your financial picture, the actual motivations behind why you spend the way you do, and your relationship to money as a whole?
For a long time, my mind and my body have been at war over this. My mind kept telling me what I should be doing to stay financially secure. My body kept forcing me to stop. And every time it did — through burnout, through health flare-ups — it felt like a failure. Like I was letting myself and everyone counting on me down.
What I’ve come to believe instead is that poverty and hardship taught me things no amount of money ever could. It taught me my value outside of what I produce for other people. That is such a core lesson, and I think so many of us are quietly carrying some version of it — taught to measure our worth by grades, performance, or what other people think of what we’re doing.
Goals Your Soul Actually Wants
I’ve had the big house. The cabin. All the toys. I’ve had the government job with the pension and benefits. I blew it all up, more than once, because none of it was in alignment with what was actually best for me.
The part that didn’t quite make it to the forefront of my actions in relation to work and money is that my soul as goals. My soul’s goal, for the last twenty years, has been to stop working against my own body. I kept setting other goals instead — income targets, business plans, material milestones — and I kept wondering why they never brought the peace I expected them to.
So here’s the exercise I’d offer you: write down what your goals actually are right now. Then ask — what do you think will bring you security? Because chances are, if you look back over your own life, you’ll find a string of goals you already reached that didn’t deliver what you thought they would. That’s not failure. That’s information.
Reaching a goal can teach you plenty — sometimes the most valuable lesson is realizing it wasn’t the thing after all.
🎧 Listen to the full episode:
Dawn Evans is a writer, tax specialist, and advocate for financial and personal empowerment — always a little bit of everything.
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~Dawn
Dawn Evans 
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