Mind Over Stress

Today, our guest is Dawn Goldberg. Dawn is the author of The Smarter Accountant. She’s had a varied career in public accounting and we’re going to let her do a little background information and give us her journey in the profession and how she got to the point where now she’s actually got the book out there and doing professional coaching and everything else. So Dawn, welcome to The Unique CPA. 

Thank you so much, Randy. Yeah, I have been a CPA in public accounting now for over 30 years. I like to say, yes, I’m still standing. I have worked for Deloitte Touche, I’ve worked for Ernst & Young. I’ve done all the things. And like most accountants in public accounting, I had normalized a lot of the issues that we deal with as accountants, and I have been specifically in the tax department my entire career. So I’ve had 30 plus years of tax seasons. And so, I’ve always been into professional and personal development and I had done some studying, and had learned a few things. And I was applying the things that I was learning to my life outside of work and was applying it to my relationships and to all different areas of my life, and I was seeing vast improvements. 

And then one day I realized, oh, I could actually apply this to my work during tax season. And so I was working with a coach and I was telling her that You know, tax season is so hard. And she said, well, you do know, that’s not a fact. That’s actually a thought. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like every accountant on the planet would agree that tax season is hard. 

Right.

And she’s like, no, that is actually an optional thought. So she started talking about how your brain works. And from that point on, I started to apply what I was learning. I started to take it even further, and I saw just a vast change in how I approached tax season. And I now have stress free tax seasons. I was working with some clients on this, some coaching clients, and they were like, why aren’t we taught this? Why aren’t—we’re taught so many things as accountants. We have so much knowledge. Why aren’t we taught how our brain works and how to manage it? And I said, that’s exactly why I want to write this book. I want accountants to learn what I have learned, so that they don’t continue to have the struggles that we’ve all had all these years. 

Yeah, which is, to anybody listening to the show knows that that’s an important thing that I like to talk about, because I think there’s so many things that we do, I won’t use the word wrong, that we can correct, obviously, if we were, the wrongness was, thinking tax season has to be bad when it doesn’t. And so the book then is all based on this knowledge you gained and, and how we be better? And so why don’t you dig into the book for us and give us this. 

Yeah. So the book talks about the tool that I learned, which is called the model. It’s a formula for how to manage your brain. And every single chapter, there’s part one describing the formula, and then part two is going over the twelve typical pain points that accountants deal with. So, each chapter is, if I’m so smart, why dot, dot, dot. You know, why do I feel so stressed and overwhelmed? Why do I work so hard? Why is my life unbalanced? Why am I not as productive as I’d like to be, right? So there’s twelve typical pain points, and I dive into each one, and I tell the story about an accountant who dealt with that issue, and then I teach how you can overcome that issue with understanding this formula. 

And so the simplest way that I can teach the way that our brain works is that we have two operating systems going on that you need to understand. And so there’s system one that is the lower primitive brain. I like to call it the toddler. It’s the part of our brain that has been with us since humans lived in caves. It is motivated by three things, that’s called the motivational triad. And that is, it’s motivated to seek pleasure, to avoid pain, and to conserve energy. Okay, so that’s the part of our brain that is running our lives 80 to 90 percent of the time that we’re not aware of, okay? 

But then we also have the higher brain, the prefrontal cortex. I like to call that the supervising parent. And the superpower of this part of our brain, and we’re the only species that has this. We have evolved as humans to have this prefrontal cortex. And the ability of this part of the brain is to think about what we think about. It has the ability to make decisions ahead of time, to plan, and it has the ability to override the toddler. So when the toddler is freaking out, like a toddler throws temper tantrums, toddlers are all about immediate gratification. Doesn’t matter what the negative net effect is. The toddlers are all about immediate gratification. The higher brain, system two, can override that. 

But what happens is we have 60,000 thoughts a day and 80 to 90 percent of them are coming from that lower primitive brain. They are default. They’re like the default programming. And as soon as we enter the profession of accounting, we’re taught how to think. And we want to be validated, we want to feel like we’re part of the community. So we start to borrow each other’s thoughts and we start to think and believe the same exact way. And so we’re all in this dysfunctional, we’re all in this together, type of team. We don’t think to question these repetitive thoughts, these beliefs, and it wasn’t until I learned the formula for how to manage my mind that I was like, hey, I could actually question the things that I have been believing is a fact all of this time, and this coach saying this to me, tax season is hard as a thought, it’s not a fact. 

Well, what are the facts? The facts are the dates on the calendar, the amount of work that has to get done. The fact is that April 15th is, you know, is a deadline. Those are all facts, right? We could prove them in a court of law, but our brain, our lower brain, is making interpretations, right? Those facts mean nothing until our brain makes them mean something. In our brain, we have been allowing the lower primitive toddler brain to make those decisions about what we’re making things mean. We don’t know that we actually can think differently, more intentionally. 

And so once I understood that and I said, okay, Now, I understand the difference. Now, I understand what’s going on. Now, I know why I feel so stressed and overwhelmed. It’s never because of a fact. It’s never because of a circumstance. I do not feel stressed because the date on the calendar is April 13th. I feel stressed because of what my brain, my lower toddler brain, is making that mean. So that is what I learned, what I was able to apply, what I was able to prove. Was incredibly powerful and that is what I discuss in the book is literally how to apply the formula, the model, to each situation that accountants deal with. 

So how do we manage that stress by changing the way our brain is thinking? Because, you know, April 13th, if I still have taxes to do, I’m getting stressed. So what is the, give us some ideas of how we start doing this. 

The first thing is to understand that stress and overwhelm, well, here’s how I like to look at it: Your feelings fuel your actions. So the feelings like stress and overwhelm, I like to equate it to like putting fuel in a car. They are the dirtiest fuel you could possibly use to take action. And it’s no wonder that accountants are burning out. Imagine putting sludge in, you know, a very expensive luxury car. Will it, you know, seize up immediately? No, but over time it’s, you’re going to have problems. So we use stress and overwhelm and frustration, we use all these emotions to take action. We hustle through, we push through, we’re so busy, instead of learning how to manage our brains so that we can use better feelings to drive our actions. And so I say that stress and overwhelm are just the biggest time wasters. 

The first thing you have to do is you have to have the awareness of what is the story my brain is telling? So there’s a difference between there’s the fact, and then there’s the story your brain is telling about the fact—you have to delineate between the two. You have to get clear because a lot, a lot of what we believe, as accountants, we believe our facts are actually our stories, and our stories are optional. So you have to pull that apart. And when I work with accountants through my program, it’s a six week program called the Smarter Accountant Program. And inevitably the first few weeks, they’re like shocked at how many thoughts they thought were facts. So we pull apart that. And then we understand and we run it through the model and we see, okay, here’s the fact, here’s my thoughts about the fact. That’s why I feel stressed. That’s why I feel overwhelmed. And then what happens when I feel stressed and overwhelmed? Well, I spin in confusion about what to do, I complain, I don’t create a plan, I don’t think intentionally, I am just hustling. Right? We’re not getting the result that we, we might get a result, right? We might be done with our deadline by April 15th, but at what cost? Where if you learn how to manage your brain, you’re actually using better fuel to take action. 

And here’s the beauty of it: I now get more done in less time. That is the beauty of understanding how to manage your brain for accountants, is that you can be more intentional and it’s much more, your productivity just skyrockets. 

Right. Is part of that knowing at all, the times of day that you had, just your brain’s working better or is it scheduling or is it just reprogramming that thought process, or is there a combination in there? 

Yeah, it’s really a combination. What I teach in my time management program, is you first need to learn how to manage your brain before you learn how to better manage your time. Yes, there are processes. Yes, there’s a way to manage your time that I teach that’s much more effective. But what I tell accountants is to do lists are the most ineffective way to manage your time. Why? Because they are extremely overwhelming to your brain. 

Right. 

Your brain looks at a to do list and freaks out the way our brains did when we lived in caves and a saber toothed tiger was ready to kill us. Same exact reaction, panic. So, first, when I teach time management, again, I do a six week program. The first few weeks, the main focus is learning how to manage your brain. And then a better process for managing your time. Because if you do not understand brain management, you do not know how to better manage your time. We’re always, we’re taught like these different actions to take. Well, you know, time block, or figure out what time of day you’re more productive. Those are great. Those are actions to take. But if you don’t know the feeling that’s fueling those actions, you’re taking ineffective action. You’re actually wasting your time. 

Yep. And how about just finding ways, another issue we all have, and our brain is in charge of it, I assume, is just, you know, being on 24/7 and constantly, you know, worrying about, you know, waking up at three in the morning and worrying about, oh, what client am I working on? What am I supposed to do? I owe that project. Is there something like that you go into, is learning how to just shut down the brain too? 

Yeah, so what I teach is called container calendaring. It’s different than time blocking in the sense of it’s deciding what needs to get done with your higher brain, not your reactionary toddler brain. You’re using your higher brain to decide what needs to get done. You’re deciding when, what day, you’re deciding how long it’s going to take. It doesn’t take a certain amount of time. You decide on purpose how long you’re going to take. There’s a thing called Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to the amount of time that we give it. So if we give ourselves a month to get something done, it’ll take a month. If we give ourselves a week, it’ll take a week. So you need to understand that. You need to understand then what time of day. There’s factors that go into that. I’m an early morning person, so I will schedule things, more mental taxing things in the morning. 

But then, the most important thing that’s missing from everybody’s time blocking process, like any accountant can write words on a calendar in a block of time. It’s your ability to follow through: what happens when you get to that time block and your brain is freaking out? What happens when it’s like oh my god what about this thing and what about that thing? And you need to decide in advance how you need to feel in order to take that action. That’s what’s missing. If you feel resistance, you’re going to take ineffective action. If you decide in advance, I need to feel focused or determined or motivated or whatever feeling will fuel that action, that’s how you guarantee your follow through. 

And once you start to be more intentional with your time, your brain is less likely to wake you up in the middle of the night. The process that I teach, my clients are like shocked. They’re like, I slept through the night. I’m like, yes, because now you’re more intentional and you have more control. And it definitely comes down to planning with your higher brain. But it’s not just putting words on a calendar. It’s being able to make sure that you follow through, the guarantee that you follow through. And that comes from understanding, again, how to manage your brain in conjunction with time management. 

Alright. So I’m actually looking currently at Amazon, and I see the book out there, which is great. And the subtitle I see, it’s How to Eliminate Stress and Overwhelm, Create More Time, and Gain a Competitive Advantage and More. So let’s expand on what the more, what is the overall theme or other aspects of The Smarter Accountant? 

Yeah, there’s um, like I talk about in the book, there’s like typical 12 pain points. For example, imposter syndrome. That’s something that a lot of accountants deal with, and self confidence, right? So, we think that if we get those three little letters after our name CPA, that boom, we’re going to feel confident or we’re not going to doubt our abilities, but that’s not the case. You can go for your masters, you can get that promotion. You can be, you know, you can get that brass ring. But if you’re not understanding your brain better, you’re not going to feel automatically confident. Confidence does not come from your accomplishments, right? You could have all the letters and all the accreditation, you could take all the CPE courses. But it’s what your brain is thinking about those things. That’s what causes you to feel the way you feel. So a lack of self confidence is coming from your brain, not from there’s something wrong with you. 

And so when I work with accountants and they’re dealing with imposter syndrome, we get to the root cause of it. We understand, we kind of like peel it apart and look at what is their brain doing that’s making them feel less confident? And then we take the higher brain and we learn how to put that into play, right? That supervising parent, that toddler has been in control for way too long. What I tell accountants is you do not want a toddler running your accounting career. Toddlers do not do very well doing accounting. 

No, probably not. 

No, you want that supervising parent to be more in control. You want it to be more intentional. So that’s just one example of some of the issues that people, you know, accountants will come to me—

Confidence. Let me expand on that for a second.

Yeah. 

’Cause confidence is a huge, huge thing. I’m part of a group right now that is trying to find, uh, why CPAs or tax preparers, EAs, whoever in general are not getting into the advisory aspect of tax as much as they should, the planning aspect. It’s more of the reporting aspect. And a lot of it comes down to what we’re seeing is it’s confidence. It’s like, okay, well, the tax code is a mile long and I only know 100 yards of it intently myself or deeply myself. So how can I be an advisor or a planner when I don’t know everything? And you don’t have to, but the confidence is they feel that they need to. And that’s it. So this would be huge for just getting past that I would think is that just realize you don’t have to be an expert at everything—you’re an expert at something, use that and go with it.

Yeah. So here’s the sneaky thing that your brain does that most accountants don’t, most people don’t realize. Go back to that motivational triad, right? It’s your lower brain is motivated to seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. Change is not conserving energy. Any time that we want to make a change, our lower brain is like, that’s probably not a good idea, you’ll probably die. It’s very melodramatic. It catastrophizes everything. So it would rather you not switch and take on advisory services and do something out, you know, then you’d have to learn, or maybe you’d have to expand your knowledge and it would take more effort. Your lower brain is not on board with you taking more effort than you already do. So that’s why you have to understand. It’s just your lower brain, the toddler doing what it does and it means well, but it’s not the part of your brain that you want to be, again, running your life as an accountant. You want to understand that there’s a higher brain that you can use, that you can learn how to use more intentionally, to then get past. 

Like I’ve worked with employees that wanted to be entrepreneurs. And what I’ll say to them is the most important asset that you’re bringing into that business is your brain. So you have to understand how to manage it because it’s going to want to do what’s familiar. It’s going to want you to go back to being an employee, because that’s what’s familiar. Plus, we have been educated, our entire educational process teaches us to be very good employees. You want to become an entrepreneur, unless you’ve had examples of it in your own life, and unless you’ve been taught, then your brain is initially not on board with it. You have to learn how to override that, and to be in control of it. Otherwise, it’s going to want you to stay in familiar territory. 

Alright. This is making so much sense to a lot of things that I go out and talk about, ’cause the other thing is that, you know, that there’s so much automation out there that you can install into your practice, but people just aren’t doing it to the level I think they should. When in reality they know, I’m sure their one portion of their brain knows that in the long run, this is going to be so helpful to me. 

Yes. 

But in the short term, it’s going to be so painful. I’m going to not do this because I don’t want that short term pain. 

Exactly. So, you described the brain exactly. The short term resistance is that toddler brain. It’s all about immediate gratification. It wants the M&Ms. You ever see the M&M challenge where they put a bowl of M&M’s in front of you? Don’t touch it. I’m going to leave the room. The lower brain is, that toddler brain, is all about immediate gratification. If it’s painful, if it’s not fun, if it’s going to take effort, it’s not on board with it. But if you can use the higher brain to create a vision of what you want, that’s when I work with entrepreneurs, I’m like, where is it that you want to be a year from now? It might be challenging right now, but you have to be willing to feel the discomfort of it. Like the worst thing that can happen is an emotion. You can do an emotion. 

Yeah. 

You can feel uncomfortable. You can feel a lack of self confidence. You can feel confused. And so what? So you can keep that, hold that, that long term vision. That’s what the higher brain is capable of doing, but we’re not using it in the way that we should.

I think that’s so meaningful and insightful, that people really need to take advantage of. Let’s talk about then what the, or start to implement, obviously, they’ll need you to help on the education on that. But let’s talk about, like the results, what has this done? I mean, you personally started doing this and you said you saw huge results. Now you’re helping others with it. What have the results been? 

Yeah. So I’ve taken employees to becoming successful entrepreneurs, getting through really challenging time and growing their businesses, and then, you know, they get into a groove and then there’s the next expansion of their business, and they want to take on more clients or they want to even, you know, niche down. They want to grow their business in a different way. Every single time they’re bringing their brain with them. And so I’ve worked with employees on that. I’ve worked with partners in accounting firms that are really trying to have some work-life balance. I was working with a partner in a firm and we were doing time management, and I said, well, what is what is your goal with your time management? And she kind of cringed. And I was like, why are you cringing? And she’s like, oh, I don’t really like setting goals like that, because I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint myself. I’m like, alright, it’s just you and me. Nobody needs to know, let’s just play around with this. So I said, how many hours a week do you work during tax season? She said 80. I said, okay, what would you like to do? She said 60. I said, okay. I walked her through a process that I teach. And by the time we were done, it was only a one hour session, by the time we were done, she looked at me and she said, this is the first time I’m actually looking forward to tax season.

Yeah. 

And I’m like, yes! The way your brain has been thinking about things. Here’s what I tell my clients: Is it useful? And is it helpful? We have very strongly held beliefs. I say that accountants tend to argue for our limitations. Accountants will want to argue with me, well, you know, reducing stress and overwhelm might’ve been easy for you, but it’s not going to be for me. And I’m like, well, you might want to try it. Because how is it working for you, holding on to the belief that you need to be stressed and overwhelmed as an accountant? I’m telling you, I get more done in less time than anybody else. 

Right. And that’s so important. That’s huge. Let’s pivot for one minute, ’cause I want to touch on this in addition, obviously you’re coaching, you’re doing this, but you are a certified, what is it? You’re a certified life coach?

Professional coach, yeah.

Which that just means you’re out educating on this topic or what, is that it? 

Yeah. So I’m still a CPA doing the things that CPAs do, and I’m a professional certified coach for accountants. And so I was just working with a client, a time management client. And she said to me, you know, you really should be calling yourself the get s*** done coach for accountants. And I started to laugh. Like, what do you mean? She goes, you get more s*** done than anybody I’ve ever known and not burn out in the process. So that’s been my new, my new name, the get s*** done coach for accountants. 

Nice!

But yeah, so you know, I have two programs. Two six week programs. The first one is the Smarter Accountant program, and what clients will do is they’ll take the Smarter Accountant quiz, and they’ll see if and how they’re under-utilizing their brain. goes through the 12 pain points that are in the book. And then we work on three out of the 12 in a six week period. And then I also have the Smarter Accountant Time Management Program. And that’s where I teach accountants again, that combination. What I like to say, I’ve recently started saying that I teach time mastery. Because it’s really a combination of brain management and time management that creates time mastery. That’s the thing that’s missing. We’re all taught different actions to take to manage our time, but we’re not taught the thing that makes it possible to take effective action, which is how do we feel? What are we thinking that’s causing those feelings? The brain management. Because otherwise we’re using that toddler brain and the toddler brain when it comes to doing accounting work is not on board with a lot that we have to do.

Oh, yeah. We have a lot to deal with. So, okay. I can see that. Alright. Well, that, I think that’s great information. Before we wrap up, I’ve got a couple of final questions I want to ask. The first one is you, obviously we know what you do. We know what’s important, work-wise and business-wise and being less stressed and all that. How about when you’re not at work, when you’ve now gained more time because of your training your brain, what is your outside of work passions? What do you enjoy doing, that’s not work related?

So, I love—it sounds so funny, but I love learning and it’s not just the continuing education classes, you know, with accounting. I just love reading and listening to other podcasts. I started a podcast called The Smarter Accountant Podcast that kind of gets the word out about the book and about what I teach. And so I just love taking complicated things and distilling them down simply in order to help accountants. And yeah, I just, I love reading, I love learning, and I have a husband, I’ve got two kids, I’ve got three dogs, so they take up my time. I am a classic introvert, so the more time that I can spend by myself, the better—the better it is for everybody. And so, yeah, just, you know, going around the neighborhood and I live on Long Island and so I live on a beach. So yeah, just enjoying. And, you know, I live 20 minutes away from New York City, so.

There’s a lot to do there for sure. Alright. And then if anybody wants more information about you, about the book, about the programs, uh, how would they get ahold of you? 

It’s simple. Just go to thesmarteraccountant.com and you’ll see the book is on there. You’ll see the podcast, you’ll see The Smarter Accountant quiz, and I’m going to be launching, I just created a productivity quiz, which is going to be super fun. That would be thesmarteraccountant.com/productivity-quiz, just to see how you measure up with your productivity. And I have lots of, I’m going to be doing a whole productivity series to my email subscribers. So I definitely want to get on board with that.

Nice. Well, this is great information, Dawn. I appreciate you getting on the show. I learned and enjoyed. So thanks again for being here. 

Thank you.