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Tax season’s behind you. Q2 is half gone. Kids are wrapping up school. Tariffs in the headlines. War in the headlines. Graduations, business cycles, household pressure, all of it stacking on top of each other at the same damn time. And somewhere in there, you’re supposed to be the version of yourself that makes sharp decisions about your money, your business, your family, your future.
Most weeks, you’re not that version. You’re the version that wakes up already behind. Checks the phone before saying good morning to anyone in the house. Pours coffee while running the mental tally of what’s overdue, what’s promised, and what’s about to crack. By 10am, you’ve made more decisions than a lot of people make in a week. By 8pm, you have nothing left for the people you came home to.
That’s where this conversation with Dr. Preston Cherry starts. Dr. Cherry is back in the booth, and we went somewhere most financial conversations refuse to go. Because the issue most business owners are wrestling with right now isn’t a knowledge problem. It isn’t a strategy problem. It’s something else. And until you name it, no amount of additional income is going to change how you feel on a Tuesday night.
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Financial wellness and mental wellness are the same conversation
Dr. Cherry calls financial wellness a continuum. Four elements live on that line: mind, heart, money, meaning. He talks about cash flow, house flow, and heart flow as parts of one system, not three separate buckets you handle one at a time.
That reframe hit different when he laid it out on the show.
Most people in our world have been trained to think about money as a math problem. Spreadsheets, cash flow forecasts, tax strategy. The mental side gets shoved into a different category, something you’ll “deal with later” once the business is stable enough to relax. But it never gets to that point. Because the mental side is not separate from the financial side. They are the same operating system running in two windows.
The keyword Dr. Cherry kept coming back to was confidence. Financial wellness, in his definition, is the confidence you have in managing your money in a way that helps you secure the life you actually want. Not the life your parents wanted for you. Not the life Instagram tells you to want. Not the life your industry says you should be performing. The one you’d build on a blank page if no one was watching.
If you can’t answer what that life looks like, no amount of cash flow improvement is going to feel like progress.
32% of Americans think 2026 gets worse, and that’s not noise
We ran our “noise vs truth” segment in this episode. I throw statements at Dr. Cherry and ask if they hold up.
One of them came from Bankrate: 32% of Americans think their finances will worsen in 2026. Highest pessimism Bankrate has measured since 2018. Across every income bracket. Not just the bottom.
Dr. Cherry’s response was straightforward. That’s not noise. That’s the operating environment.
He laid out what people are actually feeling. Housing supply is low and prices are high. Insurance is up across home and auto. Child care in some cities is matching rents and mortgages. School costs are climbing. Even high earners are making, in his words, “switcheroos.” Steak to chicken. Delta One to Comfort Plus. Two vacations a year instead of four.
This matters because if you’re stressed about money right now, the dominant cultural script is to blame yourself. “You must be bad at this. If you were smarter with money, you wouldn’t feel this way.” That’s the lie. Stress about money does not equal mismanagement of money. It can also be a perfectly rational response to a real environment.
The trap a lot of business owners fall into is treating the stress as a character flaw, which turns into shame, which turns into avoidance, which turns into actually bad financial decisions. The decisions weren’t the original problem. The story you told yourself about the stress was.
Look, I’ll be straight with you. Most of what’s pinning you right now isn’t a knowledge gap. You know the moves. You don’t have the capacity to make them on your own, and you don’t have anyone honest to think through them with.
That’s what the Black Mammoth Power Hour is. One hour. We dig into your actual numbers, your actual stress, your actual life. You walk out with clarity instead of another to-do list.
The honest self-audit has three steps you can’t skip
This is where Dr. Cherry’s framework lives. He doesn’t sit clients down and say “step one, two, three.” But the journey is consistent.
- Admit where you are.
- Acknowledge how you feel about it.
- Then act.
Admitting where you are takes courage most people underestimate. It means looking at the actual numbers. The actual hours you’re working. The actual state of your marriage, your sleep, your patience with your kids. Not the version of yourself you post on LinkedIn. The version you are at 11pm when no one is watching.
Acknowledging how you feel about it is the step almost everyone skips. Guilt, shame, anger, frustration, regret, those are different emotions and they show up differently. Dr. Cherry made a point I keep thinking about. A good cry is underrated. It rinses the soul. Cleans the palate. If you’ve been carrying something for a year and you’ve never let yourself feel anything about it, that energy is going somewhere. Usually into your business decisions, your relationships, or your body.
Only after those two steps can you actually act. Most “action plans” are just shame productivity. You feel bad, so you do something to feel less bad. That’s not strategy. That’s a tantrum with a planner.
More money does not fix what’s broken inside. It magnifies it.
Wealth funds wellbeing, not the other way around
This was the line that stopped me in my chair.
The cultural narrative is that money causes stress, so more money equals less stress. So you grind harder. Skip therapy. Skip the marriage check-in. Skip the doctor’s appointment. Because once you cross the magic income threshold, all that other stuff will sort itself out.
Dr. Cherry blew that up.
Money does not fix internal problems. It magnifies them. If you’re a stressed person at $80,000, you’ll be a stressed person at $800,000, just with more responsibilities and more people relying on the version of you that isn’t getting any better.
But, and this is the part most people miss, money also funds the solutions if you’ve already done the audit. He said it like this: life and money alignment gives you money assignments. Translation: once you know what you actually value, you have somewhere to deploy your dollars. Therapy. A coach. A team member who buys back your time. A trip with your kids that you’ve been deferring for three years. A boundary that costs you a client but saves your sanity.
The audit is the unlock. Without it, more money is just a louder version of the same problem.
35,000 decisions a day is wrecking your judgment
The average adult makes around 35,000 decisions a day. Business owners make more. And the research, much of it surfaced by Tessa Santarpia inside the NoBS Collective, confirms what every burnt-out founder already feels. Mentally exhausted people make riskier, more impulsive choices. Or they avoid decisions entirely.
Your capacity is currency. And it’s the currency most business owners are spending fastest without realizing it.
Dr. Cherry shared his own burnout story. Until recently he was running a wealth management firm, a speaking platform, a university financial planning program, a full teaching load, plus mentorship, media, and writing. All at the same time. He’s 47. He’s the first to point out that 47 is not 37. The energy bank that covered all that ten years ago isn’t there anymore.
So he made a choice. Wealth management and speaking. Everything else paused, ended, or got handed off.
You probably need to make a version of the same choice. Not because you’re soft. Because you’re a human with a limited amount of cognitive bandwidth, and right now you’re spreading that bandwidth across too many domains for any of them to get your best.
Drill deep, not wide
That’s the move. Drill deep, not wide.
Pick the one thing that actually matters right now. The one role. The one priority. The one decision that, if you got it right, would make every other decision easier or irrelevant.
Put your capacity there.
Most of us are trying to optimize 14 things at once. The business. The kids. The marriage. The body. The retirement plan. The side project. The hobby we feel guilty about not making time for. The mastermind, the cohort, the podcast we said we’d start. None of them get our best, so none of them grow, so we feel worse, so we pile on more, so the capacity drops further. That’s the loop.
Drilling deep is the only way out.
For one week, pick one thing. Sleep is a decent place to start, because almost every other capacity problem improves when sleep does. Or pick the one business decision you’ve been avoiding for 90 days because thinking about it is exhausting. Make it. Live with the consequences. You’ll find your capacity grows back faster than you expected.
The thing you don’t want to face is usually the thing keeping you stuck. (For more on that thread, Ashley Quamme broke down how your brain blocks money decisions in her recent episode.)
The gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it is mental.
It’s not information. It’s not strategy. It’s not access. It’s you.
And while you’re stuck in that gap, your kids are watching how you handle pressure. Your spouse is carrying weight you’re not even seeing. Your business is running on autopilot decisions because you don’t have the capacity to make them on purpose anymore. None of that is permanent. But none of it changes until you sit down with the person in the mirror and tell the truth.
That’s the work. That’s the audit. That’s the unlock.
What’s the one thing you’ve been splitting your capacity across that you already know you need to drop?