The Currency Paradigm: reframing narratives around time, energy, space, and money

The episode explores:

• space as a container currency and the need to prioritize personal space for our well-being. 
• Time is seen as a connector currency that can be fluid and flexible, challenging the structured narratives we have about it. 
• Money as a companion currency that reflects our fears, exposes our wounds, and resources our dreams and the need to reframe our narratives about money and exploring its role as a companion in our lives. 
• energy is recognized as a nuanced currency that often gets overlooked, but has a significant impact on our well-being and decision-making and is one of the first to be depleted when we allow it.

Below is the episode transcript.

Jessica Buchleitner (00:00): Welcome back to Season 2 of Narrative Dive, where are deep diving into the narratives dominating our world. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Hilary Augustine, who is a dream doula, financial guide, and executive coach, and also, importantly, the author of The Currency Paradigm, A New Way to Exist for the Empath, the Executive, and the Edgewalker.

Through her coaching and consulting, she bends limits and challenges norms. I love this. Her unique way of seeing and being mirrored in her writing, her life, and her work. She has completed both a master’s in counseling and a master’s in accounting because who couldn’t use some counseling during their accounting sessions, right? Which represents her love of learning and exploration, but her favorite life degree comes from traveling. She crosses both literal and metaphorical borders.

as her free -spirited, non -conformist self soaks in the medicine of journeying. I love that. That’s a powerful statement, Hillary. Welcome to Narrative Dive. I’m thrilled to have you on. Your book has been a huge inspiration to me in rewiring How I Think About Currency, which we’re gonna talk about. Thank you for having me. Inaugural that you used in the invitation was so fun. I think, okay, here goes. Let’s have an inaugural conversation, jumping into things that are new.

So I have to say, Hillary, I read your book when I was on a train in Spain with a very dear friend of mine and was blown away by how simple the book articulates many very intellectual terms. I believe one of the reviews about your book said that it was a gestalt view of currency, which I thought was a fascinating explanation because that was really the approach that I got. I could see your counseling background, the psychology background there. And just found it to be short explanation, quick explanation, and easily digestible format to help me understand how I’m spending these four currencies of time, energy, space, and money, which we will get into in a moment. But first, I want to address something that I myself was caught in and many people I know are caught in, and that is the monocurrency world. You described this concept of a monocurrency world as part of a grand narrative that we all buy into. So if you could elaborate on that a little bit.

Hillary Augustine (02:27): As I began this morning, asked, I call him my flight companion, but my hubs, my partner, whatever you want to call him. said, why, why do you think I wrote the currency paradigm? And he said, you wanted to heal your story around money. And I thought, it just hit me because it’s true. And it’s so simple terms. And it reminds me of the monocurrency world. So it brought me right into, that’s why I wrote about monocurrency, which is the one world that I was in some ways trained in and indoctrinated in to think around what can I afford, which means everything hinges on the money currency. So there’s four currencies hanging behind me, time, money, energy, space, the images, if someone’s actually looking at the video. Those images remind me that there’s four currencies, not just one. And the healing of my world was first identifying a world outside the monocurrency that I, as an accountant, was trained first, my master’s in accounting, was really focused on that. And there’s goodness in thinking around that. I have to live in a system where there’s a physical world and I’m spending and receiving and guiding and exchanging. I’m not bionarily saying that’s a bad thing.

It’s that there’s more. There’s more to the worlds of currency. And my more was saying to understand the next step, I had to understand where I was coming from, kind of like traveling. What country am I in? In the monocurrency world that has a language, a way of being, an operational system, and an understanding. Okay, Hillary, that’s where you’re beginning. Now you have gifts in that world also. So take those gifts and squeeze out what is the healing for you and then start to add on these other currencies. And that’s what I did in the book was I want to bring money back in relationship to other currencies, not just the monocurrency world. It wants to be playing with other worlds, other currencies. And that’s what we’ll get into later. So you’re giving us a passport into these other worlds apart from the monocurrency world to travel outside of its borders, which I think is great.

Jessica Buchleitner (4:42): And there’s one concept that you mention in the book, which I trace back to some degree of self -deceit, and that’s the hallucinatory capacity in relation to the monocurrency world. Can you explain that?

Hillary Augustine (4:55): Hallucinatory capacity is the idea that Blurton Jones put out where there’s a hallucination that happens around a young child. So a child points at something and the authority figure either doesn’t respond at all or negates that child’s lived experience. And after a while, the child points and points and points, I see this, I see this, I see this, and the authority figure so unconsciously or consciously eliminates the child’s experience that that child then believes they’re living in a hallucination. Like what I see, I must not be able to trust that I see. That really spoke to me because that’s what I was thinking about when I wanted to write this passport out of the monocurrency world is what do I see that feels authentic and true? And what do you see or that I need to rewrite? And then what’s invisible? Where are all these layers? And the invisibility became the other currencies. But I was in the hallucination, the fog that said there’s only one currency and that’s the one you need to care about. And that’s the one that your life hinges on. And I thought, no, no, no, no, there’s more.

And I went back to this study and thought, I’m the child in this study and I’m, my clients are the children in this study that are pointing and pointing and pointing and saying there has to be another way. And I’m like, yes, I wanna be the person in the midst of your story, of my story that says, let’s light up the visibility. Let’s eliminate the fog, bring in the light and see what’s actually there. And it’s all hinges on this study that was a powerful tool for me to come up with that phrase, but then to build on that.

Jessica Buchleitner (6:33): Narrative dive is about really drilling into narratives and examining how they end up with us and how they end up steering our lives. And so one of the examples that I’ll give later is really driving your life based on your bank account balance. For example, I have a guest who’s coming up who created a whole company around financial identity and she’ll talk in depth about that. But oftentimes we kind of beat ourselves up for our bank account balance, right? And we’re ignoring this whole other iceberg.

We’re seeing the tip of the iceberg, but we’re not seeing the base of it, which is a whole massive world in and of itself. And so that’s where you arrived at this new paradigm. It’s a new way of thinking. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Narrative dive is open people’s minds to new ways of thinking and free them from narratives that are holding them aloft. So when we go into the currency paradigm, you probably describe this better than I do. How would you describe it in simple terms to someone who hasn’t read the book yet?

Hillary Augustine (7:32): Yes, so this is always the challenge. think of when I first was thinking about the currencies, I would ask children, what do you think of energy? What is energy? And they’d squirm. know, they’d hear, what is energy? They’d act it out. What is space? They’d point. Point out, right? What is time? Look at their watch, right? Very physical expressions. So I started there. I thought this is the way that children think about the concepts on a concrete level. So first they just start very much spatially and imagination -based and visually. So I would say to anyone listening, like, what is your first experience? I will talk about these, but when I say what is money, what is energy, what is time, what is space? Like, where do you go in that, in those questions?

The currency paradigm is an interwoven system of those four, time, money, energy, and space. So it takes money, which was, as we said, the reason, one of the main reasons I would say of writing this book into existence and the work that I do, which is healing my own money story, or I would say giving it more of an expression, more of a nuanced expression outside of the binary narratives and bringing it into a relationship with these other four currencies. So the currency paradigm is four currencies interwoven, they’re individual, but they’re interwoven currencies that in their, I would say holistic expression, create a whole new way of thinking, being, and relating to the world.

Jessica Buchleitner (9:02): My question to anybody listening to this is how often have you sacrificed space currency for another currency like money? I’ll give you an example. How often, like yours truly, have you maybe had a roommate when you necessarily didn’t need one and probably would have been better off living on your own? Just for the sake of, I can save some money. Travel is a great example. You you have friends, they say you can crash on my couch and you think, I could get a hotel, I could get an Airbnb, I could get a VRBO, but let me just crash on this person’s couch and I’ll save some money for my travels. But then you get there, you’re lukewarm about the experience.

But I’ve been guilty of this one because I never saw space as an actual currency. I saw it as just some third party thing that I could adjust or change as necessary. The only thing that mattered was the amount of money being spent in the end, even though I could afford it and I was fortunate enough for that. The only thing that mattered was the money being spent. wasn’t about my privacy. It wasn’t about my comfort.

And then you realize that when you sacrifice that piece, you’re actually giving away half of your experience. I’m wanting to improve my finances, Hillary, and you have a background in accounting. Can you help me get my finances organized? But really, underneath the surface was that space currency. So you would ask me what would be the first thing you would ask me in that situation?

Hillary Augustine (10:33): The first thing I would ask you…The interesting thing about my work is I’m always in tuning to that moment, right, to be able to really feel what the client is needing and wanting. And so I would first get the person I’m meeting with talking a bit about that particular example. Like give me an example where you have felt impinged, where one of your currencies have felt constrained. And tell me a little bit about that because pain a lot of times is a grand motivator for both booking client sessions, know, a massage therapy. I think of the things that I do. Energy workers like take away the pain or give me a bigger perspective of my pain, right? And so that would be the first part is really trying to highlight a storyline like you just told to say, tell me where you felt constrained. Tell me where you feel impinged. And then let’s put a light on that to see if there’s other options based on currency language. And this would be across time that I would be listening for how the currencies were spoken about. I also want to know what’s been the history of currency constellation or a way of currencies going together or not in your life. So if you’re on an arc to save for some big thing or make a career move and you’re like, got it, I do need to stock away some money currency, then there might be a way that you sacrifice the space currency, but at least you notice it to stay with friends because you are actually also tethering to a future goal.

So it depends, it depends about what to do, which is what I love because yes or your right path in that moment might be somebody else’s not aligned path. And they actually might want it and have their space currency a little bit more constricted, let’s say, less privacy because underneath it all, they’ve got a whole nother track that they have grabbed onto and it’s tethered their heart. And they’re like, this is where I’m going. But you don’t know that about people until you listen. So that’s what I would be listening for. Where are the currency tracks? What are predetermined commitments that might have already been made deep within a person’s story or life? And then are they in alignment with that in the present moment on how they’re using their currencies? And what I heard you say is, no, there was a timeout moment in your life where you don’t have to automatically default to space and money going hand in hand. I go and I coexist in other people’s spaces so that I can save money. That equation, that currency equation, can actually be broken and rerouted. And sometimes you might do that, but other times you might do something else.

Jessica Buchleitner (13:15): That’s fascinating. OK, so we’ve dug into this. I’m a client, right? And we’ve dug into this. And I happen to mention, well, know, I’m saving money. And you’re probably noticing that my whole focus is on money, money, money, money, money, not the other three currencies you would then help me calibrate to get back onto those other currencies.

Hillary Augustine ( 13:37): I would talk about time and energy and we’d start to bring those into visibility outside of the fog to say, hey, where are these currencies operating? How is that working? How are you doing there? And then hear more about the space currency. So we’d tap into each one of those. There’s stories underneath all of that. As you said, there’s the tip of the iceberg and then there’s the whole iceberg underneath each currency about how these currencies are routed or not in someone’s life. And so for your particular example, I would want to go deeper in how you got there. How did you get to sacrificing space so that you could save money? How did you get there? There’s probably multiple stories that were in your life that stacked up. And without considering those, you might not even know there’s another way.

Jessica Buchleitner (14:22): Exactly. No, that’s a good point. The psychological aspects beneath the surface. You do refer to that in the book as a container currency. And it seems so obvious that whatever space you’re in is your container and whatever is present in that container is affecting you. So space can be both physical and metaphorical. What makes the narratives that we tell ourselves about the concepts of space very complex?

Hillary Augustine (14:50): Love that we’re starting with space! We’ll get to a place in this conversation where you will find out more why space, would say, is my North Star currency. Space is complex because there’s so much culturally in where I can dig into what I see around me and say, huh, space isn’t talked about, so that means it’s often undervalued. And from a physical level, it’s often cramped.

So any space that someone has physically, at least in the United States context, is often filled. So I am always aware of the complexity of both the physical nature of space and, as you said, the metaphorical nature, which means if the physical space is often filled with stuff, and I think of my car at times and just being like the word, need to declutter, it really means I need to make space. I need to relook at my space, tend it, guide it, and remake it so that I feel like I can breathe.

But that also means that somewhere in the metaphorical world, my space has gotten cluttered. Like it to me goes hand in hand. So that’s why it’s complex. It has a multi -dimensional layer to it where it’s not just physical, it’s also very much internal. And then when you get into the therapeutic worlds and talk to therapists and energy healers and guidance and all those, a lot of times space will be looked at as a container because they’re creating a container for the client in and access whatever they need to access in their own stories, in their own life. So I look at people that are in the healing world, doctors, nurses, anybody who’s doing a service within that physical world, meeting another human as space containers. They’re holding a space for someone to be able to find more of who they are, what they need, what’s bringing them pain. And that’s a complex reality because there’s a lot that goes on in there, right? But to me, that is the space. That’s how I think about space in multiple dimensions and why it’s important to me to consider. I want to say one other thing. Space is often what is really important for people who are empathically wired or who kind of get overstimulated by a really busy environment. A lot of times that space currency is the container for the possibility to regulate again. And to just go into a physical space that might be their own little world and or breathe deeply. Like all these practices are about expanding space. But I didn’t think about them all until I really said, this is a currency, this runs or it doesn’t. It gets overtaxed, it gets overspent or it gets ignored. This to me is a currency. That’s how I think of space. I love the accounting perspective on that. It gets overtaxed, right?

Jessica Buchleitner (17:32): Very easy to see that. And you are right. There’s the show on A &E Extreme Hoarders. And I thought about you. Yes, I thought about you because I thought about how those people in the show were treating their space currency, which for those of you who aren’t aware, hoarding is a psychological focus that where someone acquires a lot of belongings and there’s usually some unmet psychological needs there or safety needs at the bottom or the basis of the extreme acquisition. But in this practice, everyone’s space is so cluttered when you mention the car and full of things that often they can barely even live in their space. So they’ve outspaced themselves in many ways. But this is just an example where one of them was talking about in the ad how when her home was decluttered or all of those items were removed, she said, I’ve never felt a stronger sense of safety with the items gone, I always thought I needed the items there to feel safe. So the narrative she was telling herself about this space currency was, I have to fill my space to be safe. But then she realized that the narrative was false. So she’d been living with piles and piles and piles of belongings and it was an unsanitary environment. I won’t go into details on that. Yeah, but she was because of this one story in her head, this one narrative, this is where narratives are incredibly powerful. She suffered many years living in a house that was uninhabitable.

Hillary Augustine (19:07): The reason these currencies run in ways that they do is there’s often a safety component or support that has to be looked at. How have I felt support in the world? If I change the way my currencies run, I’m going to feel wobbly at first. It’s like building a new muscle. And then all of a sudden, I might feel a release. And I might, to your example, feel a sense of spaciousness, energy, time and timing, I might elevate a bit more. So I wanted to tap in, that’s a really key component is that moving currencies is about hitting the safety valve and the support valves in our own body and mind to be able to say, can I shift those? Can I actually shift how I feel safe in the world? That moves currency.

Jessica Buchlleitner (19:57): Makes sense. And then we move into our time currency, which you describe as a connector currency. You talk about in your book, shifting career paths helped you see time as very less structured and more fluid because financial professionals, as we know, tend to be very regimented with time and structure. So how do some of our narratives about structured time really limit us?

Hillary Augustine (20:25): When the financial world, it’s very common, and I would say even taught, because I understand the concepts at a level that time and money are linked. So when I made a career shift out of the accounting world, left the CPA world, and into what I thought was gonna be therapy world, like I’m gonna be a therapist, here it goes, I was aware, but didn’t have the language for it, that I was breaking the normative model of the agreement with time. Which was I was on an upward ladder of time. I saw advancement, I saw bonuses with that, there was money attached to those things. I could see where my life trajectory could go. And yet these other currencies that we’ll highlight in a moment, space and energy were feeling impinged upon and constricted. And I thought, my gosh, if I do this the rest of my life, just even sitting, spatially sitting, I thought, I am a mover. This is not going to work. But what I had to do then was break this relationship with money and time and let time become more fluid and trust that what would happen, and it did, but it was scary, was that I would find a new relationship to time. And it would flow differently and I would feel the more expansive nature of time as I went a whole different direction in my mind and heart. I thought I’m taking a left turn and I’m breaking this phenomenon here. And that to me has been so rewarding. But at the time, boy, did I feel the gut level sense of security and support being, hit because I thought this is not what I thought my life was gonna be about. I thought I’d use my time on earth to advance in this accounting world and this is how it’s gonna look. And I thought, no, I have got to release time to a larger model of my own understanding and I have to go to the edge and see if it can become way more fluid and then restructure itself from there, which is what it did. And then that took me to Seattle and beyond. And I learned this through traveling all the time, you know, to not use that word over and over again, but there is a sense of, anyone who travels, you have your best laid plans, but you are in a system of delays and all kinds of hubs and connections. And the best travelers I found are the most fluid. They take that structured time currency, they like Alka -Seltzer, they stick it in water and they let it dissolve and they go with it. And those are the travelers I love to be with. So I thought, I want to be that life traveler too. I want to be able to allow this relationship to time. to restructure itself for me and then see how it works better and how it fits better. And that was part of my career shift.

Jessica Buchleitner (23:14): That’s excellent. Because when you brought up the travel, I came back to the US after four and a half years in Germany. And one time example culturally that I like to give is that we think Americans have less vacation time, know, blocks of time, which were compensated to take on our books. But when you really sort of do an audit it depends on what area of the U.S. you’re in, but in many tech companies, for example, you have about the same amount of time paid time off as you do in Europe, but Americans treat that time, that concept of that time much differently than Europeans do. Europeans will take that time and that is their time and you don’t call them when they’re off on vacation. That just, it’s culturally inappropriate. But in the U.S. we have all this time. We get this idea in our head, I’ve got 30 paid days off a year. but we only take half of them. We don’t respect that currency as much.

Hillary Augustine (24:11): You gotta understand there’s relationships there, right? That need to be broken. you’re gonna take all your time in the United States, you might have to go up against a societal norm that isn’t popular or other things that make that so. Whereas in Europe, if you’re gonna call someone on their vacation, you’re gonna breach their spatial boundary. And is that okay? That’s a space currency and it’s got a moat around it and you’re gonna call and put them back in the work mode? Really? Yeah. So I love that you’re comparing and contrasting because that’s where I say the sky’s the limit on how we use these currencies. definitely.

Jessica Buchleitner (24:48): And so you go from space being the container, time being our connector to my favorite currency because this is the mostly the default monocurrency, right, in everyone’s head. But what you refer to money as, which was an interesting one for me, was the companion currency that reveals our fears and exposes our wounds and our resources, our dreams. So you also say that it acts as a mirror reflecting where we ascribe value, which I thought was fascinating because in that example about the space currency, when people sacrifice their space currency, they’re not valuing their space. They’re valuing only the money currency by looking at the balance at the end of the day. Money, and we are going to do a future episode on this, is full of narratives that we structure around it. People are so bound by their money issues, they sometimes won’t even look at a bank account because it terrifies them.

They have guilt issues around money. We have the Protestant ethic in the U .S. where the amount of money you earn supposedly aligns with your relationship to God, the Christian version of God. And there’s also the narrative that money is the root of all evil, that by acquiring money, people become evil. So we’re really immersed in so many damaging narratives about money. How can we reframe these narratives to the ideas that you’re offering in this book? How can we help reframe our ideas around money?

Hillary Augustine (26:29): Well, I love that we keep coming back to travel and that you’re in Spain on a train and all these places. Because what I was thinking when you asked that question today is if money is a companion, which is what I call it in my book, and it’s sitting next to you on a train, what would you want to talk to it about? And everyone would have a different conversation with money, depending on their history, depending on what they’re going through at the moment, depending on what their life has already been about or what their future dreams are. So the idea that money can be a companion is the start of where I would ask listeners and readers to say, what would that look like to be companioned? And the idea has to be linked to have you been companioned? Like, do you feel a sense that you’re alone in the world and that you don’t have anyone in your court. That is maybe the first start because money takes up and mirrors these realities within our life. And so being able to think first about that companion energy. And then from a specific life example would say, I wanna throw one in here that goes along with the traveling narrative is when I realized money could start companioning things for me. I started to be able to release it and guide it and save it and shape it in very different ways. So years and years and years ago, I was in New York with my partner hubs, a flight, you know, companion, and we call it the big box and the big apple. This is this story. And this story has everything to do with how I would not spend money to get in a cab, even though we had a box we were taking to Spain that was like, six foot by something. It was very big to our friends who needed a stroller. So they had asked us to bring a stroller and we got to New York, which was our connection. We had a few hours to go around the Big Apple, which many people still call New York. You know, it’s an old term, but it’s one of the many terms. And I thought, no way are we getting in a taxi because I don’t know how that, you know, the old meters that would run and I don’t know how much that’s really going to cost. And there was so much fear inside that money currency. And so to Mike’s credit, my flight companion, he dragged that box around and we sweated all the way to the airport, sat on the plane. And in some ways I was kind of rightfully like as much as I was uncomfortable, like, did it. We saved the money, that ethic inside of me. And what I see now is we completely decimated the experience, the energy the time and timing, feeling rushed to get through three different subways and connections. And all of that was because my money currency, I didn’t have a word for it where I could say, hey, hold up, stop. I’m gonna sit here for a second in the midst of this bustling city and center myself. What would the companion currency do? What would I do with that companion currency?

Right now, I would spend it because what that does to the rest of the currencies is aligns them from now until all the way when we hit Spain and we arrive more rested and centered for our friends and deliver this big box and say, here you go, take it. But it was so discombobbled. And that’s one of the things I want people to think about is there some way we can realign these currencies and money many times, either by being spent or sometimes it’s by being saved. Again, if the undergirding story is I wanna hold my money, it always leaks out and goes to other people, I cannot contain this currency as my own resource, then that’s a different story. Another person might have sat by that curb, centered themselves and said, you know what, I really need to haul this box because I’m so short right now on money, but what that gets me is when I get to Spain, I’m going to picture myself really taking a hot shower, getting back in my body and but I’ve done it for me because that’s the highest version of companion. So that’s where my work gets really, really fun is it’s not the binaries, which you did an episode on this. It’s not the dualities. It’s the nuances and the gradation, as you say in that very good episode on binary narratives, that gives the person’s story life. And money can go in all these directions. But that was one of the ways that I did not see money as a companion, and I completely racked the other currencies.

Jessica Buchleitner (31:00): Constantly the story with this particular currency. It seems to be the annihilator in many ways. And you don’t think about it though because you’re like, money gives me everything. All right. But then when you focus on another example is I did read a story about a woman who was assaulted in New York City. And she said this quote that I never forgot many years back. But she said, have I spent $20 on a cab instead of being stubborn and walking, the assault would never have happened. And that’s kind of an extreme example. But when you think about all the things you actually sacrifice and make your life more difficult, have a friend who’s obsessed with finding cheap flights. And so she’ll say, well, I found this really cheap flight going to wherever London, but I have three connections and I have to fly here. It’s gonna take me 22 hours. I’m like pay 500 more dollars and get there direct. You’re just going, why? Just why? But people’s narratives in their head about money are so narrowly defined that it sometimes drives us to make these ridiculous zero logic decisions because we think the money is the religion I worship. If that’s intact, the rest doesn’t matter. And then you go through a couple of those lessons where you’re thinking had I just spent the money, things would have been easier. I would have gotten there faster. I would have been more rested. XYZ would not have happened. And so that’s why this particular currency tends to be, I kind of nicknamed it the annihilator because it it steps in the picture and just goes, hey, energy, hey, time, hey, space, bye. I’m primary here. I’m taking over. And it’s all because we have these narratives around money. I want to bring us to one that you mention in your example of your energy feeling very dissipated when you arrived, that it took you day or two to calibrate when you could have arrived a bit more rested. Energy is one of our most nuanced currencies. You brought up the nuance and I love that you did that because that is one of the things that binary narratives, when we get stuck between it’s this or that and it’s one extreme or another, we don’t see the nuance in between and the nuance is often where the truth or the insights lie. And so the energy is always the most nuanced currency. How many of us were all guilty of this have decided to go along with doing something we really didn’t want to do to please our partner or a friend. And we’re thinking, “you know, I really didn’t want to go to this event. I really didn’t want to do this.” I have a dear friend in Germany who her husband wanted to go to Oktoberfest. She is an introvert. Talk about space currency. That’s her North Star. But she reluctantly went along compromised her energy, ended up getting getting COVID. So when we put our energy currency down, it tends to dissipate us. We do things we don’t want to do because we have this narrative in our head that says, you know, you need to go with him or her to this event, even though you don’t really want to go, but you don’t want to cause a fight. So just go or just please the other person and go. Or we agree to do things we’re lukewarm about because we don’t want to offend the other person. Or we think, “Well, maybe I’ll just try this.” But it’s, we’re not stopping and saying, why do I think I have to go to this event? Why do I think I have to do this thing? What narrative is driving me to do this? What belief do I have that if I don’t do it, what is lightning going to strike me? know, something bad going to happen. So narratives relating to energy. And I think you’ll find this one interesting are often what I call terminating cliches. They’re like brief simplistic phrases that stifle our critical thinking and our ability to debate. You may be reluctant to do something, but then you’ll just say, “well, it is what it is, or this is how it is. I’ll just go along with it.” And that thought -terminating cliche becomes a narrative that drives you to participate in something that totally dissipates your energy in the end, and therefore your other currencies suffer as a result of that. I think what we’re getting at here, Hilary, too, as a sideline is that each currency is connected. So when you dissipate one, the other suffers as well. So we’re so full of these narratives that we don’t realize what they’re doing to our energy in the end. From where you’re sitting and from the analysis you’ve done for your book, how can we correct these narratives to correct our energy currency?

Hillary Augustine (35:33): I like that you’re using different language already. So you use like zero logic for the money currency. And I thought that’s cool because it’s got the zero in there. Right. And so you talked about that. And then, you know, for enter and the annihilator, right? And then for energy, you talked about these cliches, right? And really underneath the examples you gave, it’s obligation. So I think about frequency in terms of obligation is like a radar or a frequency that it attaches to me and then all my currencies go in lockstep. Like, this is what I do. I need to say yes here because I’ve said yes here so many times habitually. So one of the ways that energy especially can come back online in our life and visible is to acknowledge that it goes into a position based on obligation. So the story of your friend in Oktoberfest is there was some obligatory way that that all got set up and then that produced a response that then produced this and we go down the road. But how many times has that happened in your friend’s life or others lives where you could kind of span out and say,this is how energy really often moves in my life unless I interrupt the cycle and unless I say it’s gonna go differently this time. In the book, I talk about how space and energy, because they are not spoken about as much, and we’ll talk about this in a bit, but because they’re more in the experiential realm, they don’t get valued and seen because they aren’t quantifiable. We’re not counting them. We’re often experiencing them.

So that’s the other way to bring energy online is to give it these stories, to legitimize it through language, to bring it back online and say, okay, this matters, how is my energy doing right now? And to be able to see if it’s coupled up with another currency that as you said, once you move your energy, it’s gonna move something else. And I often talk about the currencies like a spine. So like a good chiropractor that’s going in, if you move one vertebrae, you’re moving the others. This is all together. And so this is why the holistic system matters. So if you’re looking at energy, there might be another one or two currencies that are bound up there that really need to be looked at. And then that gets someone to their energy currency to say, my gosh, yes, okay, I see this. I was thinking too about your example about your friend who looks for all the cheap flights. Part of what I wonder about sometimes is, sometimes, yeah, pay the extra 500, depending on what life system you’re in. But you can also get the sense of those wheeler -dealer friends where it just gives them so much juice that they’re like, no, this is like Vegas. Why would I get off the table, man? I’m rolling. And I go, great, there’s an agreement there in your narrative that that’s how you’re gonna roll. And again, I don’t see it as bad, good, or wrong. I see it as a currency constellation that that person has bought into and they’re sitting at their table way different than you’re sitting at your table where you’re like, I would rather give my money to free up my time and get there in one or two stops, right? So my hope is that this currency paradigm allows us to have compassionate narratives with ourselves and others to say, I don’t get that. In fact, I don’t want that life. I will be sitting in a nice restaurant waiting for you while you’re going through your two other international cities. And I will welcome you. Taking up beautiful space and energy while you come in on your third hop.

Jessica Buchleitner (39:04): I want to take everybody into sort of an exercise because in the book you talk about once you’ve aligned with this North Star currency, you’re then able to align other currencies around it to basically construct your unique paradigm. I see our currency paradigms as a fingerprint or DNA almost. It’s very unique to the individual. And it’s almost like we were trained to see ourselves in terms of Myers -Briggs. And when I would approach you, I would say, I’m an INTJ. I’m an ENTP. Okay, now I know that Hillary is a strong leader, is XYZ. And I would have these predetermined traits about you. Why I thought the North Star currency, and we’re going to tell you what that is in a moment, is so important, is whenever I align with a North Star currency and I understand you understand your partner hubs (I love that term) his North Star currency and his currency alignment, when we understand the configuration of another person, it helps us deeper understand that person and therefore create deeper, more meaningful connections. So let’s help our listeners create those connections by first, what is the North Star currency?

Hillary Augustine (40:16): The North Star currency is the currency that when you have it, and you guide it and you shape it, you know it. It makes you feel so good to have more of it around you. I’m not saying accumulation, I’m saying there’s a way that it elevates your lived experience. That is a North Star currency. On a counterpoint, if you don’t have it, if you’ve given it away, you’ve obligated it to its, or extricated it to its corner, you know it because you miss it so much. So you can go with the positive, I have so much, or the other, I would say the extremes of the scale to be able to find this North Star currency that really feels balanced, whole, and good when it is, I would say, centered at some level with the other currencies revolving around it. It is the primary currency in someone’s life.

Jessica Buchleitner (41:10): How would you then help me if I was coming to you find my North Star currency in that situation? If I said, “you know, Hillary, I love this idea, but I feel like money is my North Star currency. What do you think?” There would be an exercise around finding that out, right?

Hillary Augustine (41:27): I would say tell me two or three very pivotal money stories that stick in your mind, that you retell yourself, that you go over and over again, and then we’ll see how the currencies were aligned in those stories. And depending on how you told me those stories, then we would reimagine what could have happened if it’s something you wanted to shift or if you’re telling me the most amazing story ever, it’s like, well, what was center there? And what I will often hear is what you centered. So I noticed that because I knew I was going to be on this podcast. Two weeks ago, I went to a hotel and I was asking myself, these are crazy hotel questions, but I did call and I said, the windows open? Do they, because there is a way that space feels like I can’t breathe sometimes if I know it’s good weather and I can’t open a window and I have to have the air conditioning on the whole time. But I thought because I was getting ready for this podcast, I thought here it is again, Hillary, your North Star currency of space is always speaking to the point that you will take your time, call the hotel and ask them what floors do the windows open on? Because I want to be, possible, on one of those floors. And I thought, that’s a space question, right? That’s how you find your North Star currency. You find it by asking questions, by having others reflect back a story if I was working with you, and or by seeing what gives you joy or huge pain when it’s gone. That’s all the ways to find the North Star currency. And someone has to pay me a lot of money to be in a hotel conference room with no windows in a basement. Like if I’m gonna be there presenting, then we gotta supplement it with something else and we’re gonna take a walk outside as participant, because I’m so attached to nature. So exactly what you’re saying is, I have gotten very clear that there are certain spaces that when I go into them, I either say no right away or I ask myself, is there another currency that can serve my North Star currency to make it tolerable enough? And that’s where sometimes money comes in and it’s like, meh.

That’ll sweeten the pot. Okay, after we’re, yeah. Yeah, you know, so this is the way the currency start to play is once you find your North Star, then you can ancillarily go out to these other currencies and say, is repositioning one or the other currency gonna really help my North Star currency feel supported? That makes a lot of sense.

Jessica Buchleitner (43:54): Yes. And I love in the book, I’m bringing it back to Myers -Briggs for a moment, where you talk about knowing your partner’s currencies and Northstar, did touch on that before we gave this example. This way of thinking about currencies can help us in our friendships and our relationships and our business relationships as well. Because when we understand,…and I’ll give a good example of this, a couple of years back we were presenting at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women annual session with a big panel of women from various countries and backgrounds and one of the things you learn is that not everybody’s time currency is exactly aligned. We had a, we, one of the women is known for being late everywhere, but she, her culture is not centered around the type of time American or European culture is centered around. Her culture is more centered around energy currency or personal connection. And she said in Senegal, we go to someone’s house and we stay as long as we need to stay. We have a good time. We eat a good meal. There’s not this sense of, “it’s five o ‘clock. I’ve got to go.” We don’t have this regimented way of living. It’s much more loose. She said, if I need to be on time on your time, then just tell me an incorrect time and then I’ll calibrate it to my standards. So that’s, that’s just what we would do when she would speak on panels with us. We would tell her two hours before the panel would start. Cause we know she’d get there two hours late.

And it was a simple shift, but it worked out fine in the end. And so that’s a good example of when you’re working with another person with a whole different paradigm around these currencies, when you understand why they have these directional beliefs with them, you can calibrate better how you work with them. And for cross -cultural work, that’s extremely important. Let’s say mentoring a new relationship with somebody. I like the relationship example because that’s the person you’re going to end up living with, right? How do you calibrate those currencies? How do you go through a discovery process to understand the other persons?

Hillary Augustine (45:55): Well, I love what you did with the woman from Senegal because it starts with orientation. That you realized that the conference was oriented around a certain way of existing. And she was reorienting to be something different, to get there. So there’s a sense that it’s really important to understand where someone’s coming from. and I like that you sought understanding. That’s the reality. In a relationship or a committed partnership, I believe it really is observing. You observe something within this woman. Like she wasn’t showing up quote unquote on time, on someone’s timeline. But in her mind, she probably was. It was just a different time level, right? So that’s the first reality is observe and be curious and notice what someone does off the gate.

So I think about one of my main friends who’s an energy person and she will text and say, I haven’t heard from her for months or whatever, “hey, how you doing?” I now know when she texts, she’s in flight. I’m a space person and I’m thinking, I wanna answer that really well. So she’s coming in, you know, in flight and what I’ve heard, I hear now is, I’m thinking about you, Hillary. That’s what I, I’m thinking about you. But I wanna sit down and almost write a tome to say, how am I doing? What’s happening? And I know the medium is not text to do that for me anyway. So I have learned to go thumbs up. I do a thumbs up emoji. That is not me. That is me adapting to loving that she’s thinking about me. But eventually I’ll ring, I’ll go back and say, gonna connect with you by phone. I’d love to have some time with you when we’re in the same city. Like, this is not me. Because energy’s not my North Star currency. I can feel energy, but I don’t operate with that being the first thing. So anybody in a relationship or a committed friend or partnership can probably start to really think about, my gosh, yes, this happens in emails or texts or this person operates this way, I operate this way. And it just, if we’re really not meeting in the universe around currency and how we take our first dance step. Like it is very different. So that is how I’ve seen these currencies really come out in the everydayness of even texting. And what I’ve done, which is remain curious and really understand the other person to the go, okay, she’s connecting with me. She’s just saying, I’m thinking about you. Love you, Larry. Let’s carve out a space. Let’s carve out a container of connection, right? And that can, this can be translated to relationships, partnerships.

Jessica Buchleitner (48:38): Exactly. I love the sense of calibration with the currencies. I do so much cross -cultural work with people from all over the world. I’ve worked with people from every continent except Antarctica. At this point, I worked in Germany for four and half years. Germans are very, they love their box. They’re very particular with time and plans and structure, which is kind of how I calibrate personally. Going outside of that is a bit outside my comfort zone, but for some people I’ve worked with, I’ve had to do that in the past because I realize this just isn’t their thing. And if I calibrate a little to them and they calibrate a little to me, we actually have a much better balance of how we’re working together if one person expects everyone to calibrate to this one way of doing things being more, again, the binary narrative, settling on one way is more comforting for the mind because it gives us such a degree of certainty. However, it’s not the right calibration for every person in the situation, sorry to say everybody, but nuance is important. One of my final questions for you in this conversation here, which I could go on for hours, is I noticed that two of your currencies are the subtle hints. Two of your currencies are quantitative and two are qualitative. Why is it important to have that 50 -50 balance? Because when I looked at the whole paradigm, that was one thing that jumped out to me was I know Hillary has an accounting background. Interesting that she did two that are quantitative, two that are qualitative, but it’s almost like a yin and yang that creates the whole picture.

Hillary Augustine (50:12): There’s probably somewhere unconscious within me that did something that felt really solid because I can be so fluid, like my language can be fluid in my life. But I also love, as you said, that accounting side of me that gives some sort of sense of structure to my world. I noticed that the currencies were quantitative and qualitative after I started talking about them. So I taught and trained around these currencies before I wrote the book. And so new dimensions were coming out. And I thought, huh, as I write, are counted, time and money often, and two are experienced, energy and space. That’s fascinating. So what I was thinking about is the dimensional reality of how people can scale up and down their understandings of currencies and let it expand for them is once they identify their North Star currency, what if they take another currency that’s exactly opposite and pair it with that? In the book, I call it a golden equation. So I’m working with money as my North Star currency, but I really want to see the influences of energy with that. In the world of, in another world, the language would be dialectics, the truth in seemingly opposing opposites. So take dialectical space or non -binary space, put two things together, and then see how they influence each other. So that’s where the two that are quantitative and two that are qualitative can start to play together in this currency language is being able to take one of each. And I find it fascinating, too, coming from the United States, that the ones that are counted, of course, get more airtime than the ones that aren’t. That, again, is what we’ve been talking about, like what’s visible and what’s invisible. And if you can make some things that have been invisible a little bit more visible, it can really change your look at life. Like once you see that space is a currency. Huh, wow, okay, if I don’t ignore that as a currency, now what’s possible? So that’s where bringing that quantifiable and qualifiable reality together and finding all different ways to play and find new possibilities really came out of then what the writing was in the book and the larger currency paradigm that goes beyond four currencies. Then it’s about how do we play with this? How do we make this work for our lives? How do we ground this in my rooted reality while imagining new imagination here?

Jessica Buchleitner (52:33): You brought up what was counted in the US. And I remember having a disagreement with a very dear friend. She’ll be fine if I talk about this because we’re like sisters. But we got in this disagreement when I was living in Germany, because we went to one of the beautiful Alpine lakes below Munich. And we ended up getting upset because I walked away and wanted to just go on my own hike. And I’m very independent like that. Space currency is big for me. Which, you know, I want the space to do my hike. I don’t want to sit by the water and talk. I just want to go off into nature and just, you know, breathe the fresh air. And we had a tag up about this disagreement. she said, you know, didn’t have a sense of community for me. And I realized the light came on. My friend, my very dear friend is from Serbia. Her family’s Serbian. Serbian culture is very much open. know, everyone in the community knows each other. It’s very, very fluid in that sense. And what hit me was my own American ideas of independence. I was raised with rugged individualism, which means don’t ask for help. Don’t show weakness. Do it on your own. you don’t feel good. You’re depressed. You’re lonely. Suck it up. Get the job done. You know, that’s that idea that culturally I have to not depend on another person. Okay, she doesn’t want to hike with me. Well, cool. I respect your space. I respect my space. I’ll just do it on my own. But that disagreement raised that currency idea in me where I thought, wow, that’s a huge cultural difference right there around that space currency. Those come out, and I love giving those cross -cultural examples because they show the contrast of how people see things. She’s coming from a society where she slept in bed with her five cousins. It was a very strong -rooted community values type of culture.

Whereas I came from a culture of everybody went into their suburban home, shut the door, their problems were kept in the house. You have to solve everything on your own. Don’t ask for help. Just get it done. And I realized how that was limiting me from the resources around me with my idea about how my space should be in that sense. So another cross -cultural example for you there.

Hillary Augustine (54:54): There’s really nuanced positioning that I found in this currency language and understanding that you’re picking up here in the larger sense, you’re amplifying it by a cross -cultural relationship. And I would say you can take that all the way down to the nucleus of two different people trying to connect even within the same culture because they don’t see these currencies the same all the stories are, it’s a hologram, know, or constellation I use a lot. So I really appreciate you highlighting that story because I hope people also bring it down into their lived experience and say, wow, from a micro level, every single human I see today is going to think differently about their currencies. And I think about this every single time I go to the grocery store, the people that go through the fast lane versus the ones that are standing, the ones that are looking at their phone. Like we’re all doing these currency arrangements at every level, right? But they’re so subtle and so quick. But if you slow down the reel and watch today, even after listening to the podcast, how are currencies being used? There are so many dimensions to the agreements that we have with currencies.

Jessica Buchleitner (56:01) This is a question for every guest. I’m introducing this in season two, so you are the first guest to be getting this. Now that I’ve crossed the proverbial bridge over from our MVP season one to season two where we’ve invited guests, we did a lot of test learning and iterating in the season one, but I’m glad we did it that way. I’m an innovator, so I like to kind of fail forward and figure things out. This question is an important one and I want every guest to be able to answer this, but: What narrative have you challenged recently and how has this changed your thinking?

Hillary Augustine (56:34) I have lived probably the last, it might have been five to six years when I moved from Seattle to where I call base camp, come and go from Richmond, Virginia. It doesn’t feel like home city, but it feels like base camp. holds me. I’ve lived very contemplatively much, the book came out, like the ending of the book and the way that you have to do all the details to get it out came out during this time. So I have been very used to there’s a contemplative nature of reality that I love. I love the poets and the, you know, spacious trees and all that. And that’s still very much a part of my life. But most recently, I started getting real curiosity toward New York City, which is a 50 minute plane ride away. And I’m like, New York? Like, really? I want to go to what looks to be completely dense to me, right? The idea that there’s more people. I lived on an island outside Seattle for a while, the size of Manhattan, 10 ,000 people, that was that island. This is way more than that, right? But I could feel the energy pulsing inside of me toward the curiosity of getting to know this city, which I’ve always wanted to know because I’ve had multiple friends live in and out of the city. And they always have a little twinkle in their eye, even if it’s been hard there’s a way that it calls them back. So I went to New York a few weeks ago, this is where I was asking about if the windows would open in the hotel room, and loved it. So my sense of spaciousness was actually still really alive. I didn’t feel impinged at all. I had the most fun watching people on the subway rocking back and forth as we’re crammed in together, and I thought, I’m really enjoying this. I do not feel that I’m not spacious. So something inside of me has been created over time in this contemplative writer, Hillary, that actually loves to go back into seemingly condensed spaces and pull in energies and vision and have awarenesses that pop because of all the multiple cultures and languages.

So that is something that is on the new cutting edge for me is going into places that look seemingly spatially constricted like in New York City, but realizing I’m accessing something in myself and I need to go there because I’m intrigued by it. And that’s going to take me further. I think in my writing, in my creativity, in my innovation, in my connections, and that’s my edge right now is to not make what has been the last five, six years of contemplative practice and really going deep and expanding and all that, a fixed narrative in my life about how these currencies work. Hillary’s a contemplative, but she also loves accounting and she’s a consultant. You know, all these things I could say about myself. I love New York City and I want to get to know it more and I want to be in a subway rocking back and forth with people to see what comes alive in me. That’s what my narratives are doing right now. They’re rewriting themselves at this point in my life and I’m really working every day to wake up with my hands open instead of closed to say, what is life trying to invite me towards that will reshift my currencies so that I can walk my path, which I know has more books in it and has more creation energy. And right now that city is calling me. So I’m like, when can I get back there? You know, so that’s what’s happening in my narratives is my spatial currency is saying, “You’re good. You’re going to feel spacious in some of the most constricted spaces. Go there and see what’s possible. Like, all right, here goes. “

Jessica Buchleitner ( 1:00:10) Absolutely. Well, Hillary, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on Narrative Dive. I do hope that everyone will check out your book and also get the aha moments that I did around these currency paradigms.