What if the income ceiling you keep hitting isn’t actually about your skills, your work ethic, or how hard you’re trying?
In this episode, I’m joined by Pam Covarrubias, host of the Café con Pam Podcast, to talk about how first-gen high achievers can break through the invisible ceilings that keep us from earning, charging, building, and living at our next level.
Pam shares how she went from being a corporate executive to quitting her job without savings or a plan, taking a job at a coffee shop to pay her bills while she built her business, and eventually going all-in on coaching. Along the way, she had to work through her own money wounds, recognize her expertise, and learn to charge enough to actually make a living from her work.
We talk about:
- How to recognize when you’ve created an invisible ceiling around how much you can earn
- Why making more money can feel unfamiliar, even when you consciously KNOW you’re capable of more
- How Pam quit corporate America and built her own business
- Why first-gen entrepreneurs may struggle to charge more for their expertise
- How loyalty to your family and lineage can quietly influence your money decisions
- Why visibility and success can feel unsafe
- How to stop waiting for other people’s validation before going after what you want
- Using somatic work and subconscious reprogramming to change the patterns that strategy alone hasn’t fixed
- Why investing in coaching and support can help you keep growing instead of trying to figure everything out alone
Pam also shares one of my favorite examples from the episode: a client who kept hitting the same money threshold. When they dug deeper, Pam discovered that the women in her family had never earned beyond that level. Breaking the income ceiling meant addressing her loyalty to her lineage, not simply finding another business strategy.
You need to figure out what's making your next level feel impossible, unsafe, or like something people like you aren't supposed to have.
Pam Covarrubias is a leadership coach, media founder, and somatic practitioner helping first-gen high-achievers break up with performance culture and lead from their Certainty. She is the creator of Calladita Culture®, a framework for women ready to stop silencing themselves, betraying their bodies, and burning out to belong.
Through coaching and consulting, she partners with organizations to build leaders rooted in wholeness, not hustle. She is also the host of the globally acclaimed Café con Pam, where she amplifies first-gen voices and challenges the narratives that keep us playing small.
Pam's work draws on somatic and trauma-informed practices, including clinical EFT, and her broader body of work focuses on helping first-gen leaders move beyond the ceilings that strategy alone can't necessarily solve.
Find Pam at Café con Pam and Pam Covarrubias, or follow @cafeconpampodcast.
🦄 Want to work with Charly? To book 1:1 money coaching, join my free webinar, subscribe to my Dom Your Dinero emails, listen to the podcast, and find everything else I'm up to, head here: https://linktr.ee/travelercharly
