Fundraising Anxiety: What Your Body Is Trying to Tell You

A somatic look at stress, pressure, and the internal signals fundraisers ignore.

Fundraising anxiety isn’t a mindset problem — it’s a nervous system response. In this episode, Erin breaks down why fundraisers experience tight chests, clenched stomachs, throat pressure, and racing thoughts when preparing to make an ask… and why none of this means you’re bad at your job.

Drawing on somatic practice, trauma-informed coaching, and fifteen years of fundraising experience, this episode helps you understand how your ancient wiring interprets budget shortfalls like a threat, how donors pick up on your internal state through co-regulation, and how anxiety quietly shapes (and sometimes sabotages) your relationships with donors.

You’ll also hear two contrasting “versions” of the fundraiser:
 • the anxious fundraiser whose nervous system is in fight-or-flight
 • the regulated fundraiser whose calm presence draws donors in

Understanding the difference is the key to asking with confidence, receiving with ease, and building long-term donor trust.

This episode is foundational for any fundraiser who has ever wondered:
 “Why do I feel this way?”
“How do donors seem to sense my stress?”
“Is there a healthier way to do this work?”

Spoiler: Yes. And it starts in your body.

💡 Key Takeaways

1. Anxiety is not a flaw — it's biology.

Your nervous system reacts to budget shortfalls the same way your ancestors reacted to predators. Nothing is wrong with you. Your body is doing its job.

2. Donors feel what you feel.

Nervous system co-regulation means your internal state is always communicating, even if your words sound confident.

3. Anxiety narrows your vision and creativity.

Fundraising from fight-or-flight constricts your thinking, your options, and your relational presence.

4. A regulated fundraiser is a magnetic fundraiser.

When your breath slows, your energy settles, and you stop tying your worth to the donor’s “yes,” everything shifts.

5. Anxiety is a messenger, not a master.

It’s pointing to a place inside that wants safety, attention, or care — and you can learn to give yourself that.

📝 Reflection Question for Your Journal

Where in your body does anxiety show up — and what might it be trying to protect?
This question alone can unlock profound awareness for fundraisers.

🎧 Companion Resource

Be sure to listen to the guided meditation designed specifically for this episode:
 “Meditation: Making the Ask”
Use it before donor meetings or anytime your system feels activated.

👥 Join the Communit

Book your 1:1 Brave and Balanced Breakthrough Coaching Session here: https://calendly.com/vitalistcoaching/brave-balanced-breakthrough

✨ Stay Connected & Continue Your Fundraising Growth

Listen to all episodes + subscribe:
https://thebraveandbalancedfundraiser.buzzsprout.com

Join the community:
The Brave & Balanced Fundraiser Facebook Group
👉 https://www.facebook.com/groups/braveandbalancedfundraiser

Book a Brave & Balanced Breakthrough Call:
A personalized 1:1 session to support your inner clarity and fundraising wellbeing.
👉 https://calendly.com/vitalistcoaching/brave-balanced-breakthrough

Learn more about Erin’s coaching & nervous-system based support:
VitalistCoaching.com

Connect on Instagram:
@erinmcquadewright

Transcript

Erin McQuade-Wright: 1:33

Welcome to the Brave and Balanced Fundraiser, the podcast I wish I'd had during my 15 years as a professional fundraiser. I'm your host, Erin McQuade Wright. This is your space to breathe, realign, and reconnect with a part of you that chose this work for a reason. Together we'll explore tools and practices that help you show up less stressed and spread thin and more grounded, brave, and on purpose. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. All right, friends, today we're talking about something almost every fundraiser feels, but very few actually understand. We're talking about fundraising anxiety, not the mindset version, not the try to think positive thoughts version, which is actually spiritual bypassing something. I unfortunately also have. Become an expert in until I learned what it was, and stop doing that. So we're not talking about the mindset version, but the body based anxiety that lives in your nervous system and quietly shapes how you show up with donors. And believe me, they notice. Once you understand this felt experience, how your body responds under pressure, how your nervous system communicates with other people, and how anxiety shapes your fundraising, you unlock a completely new level of confidence, presence, and ease. This was the key that helped me heal what I now call my fundraising trauma, and it changed the entire trajectory of my career. Today we're diving into the felt experience of fundraising anxiety, not as a flaw, but as a body-based response that makes perfect sense. And once you know this, how your body response. With anxiety, when anxiety is present, I'm telling you, it's a game changer and you can uplevel your fundraising, uplevel, how you're showing up in your life, uplevel, how you show up in all your relationships. This really was the key for me in unpacking what was what I call fundraising trauma. And helping me heal. Use that information to, uh, upgrade and get to my next level in awareness. So what we're talking about is fundraising anxiety, and that might show up as a clenched stomach. That was a big one for me. A tight chest, pressure in the throat, maybe headaches or feelings of being on edge. And this is your ancient wiring. This got passed across generations through your DNA for really good reason. It's important for humans to know when there is a situation happening that might require fleeing. Might require fighting to preserve our life. Our nervous system interprets a budget shortfall the same way it once interpreted a predator on the horizon. The physiological response in your body is doing its job, but it's not built for long-term fundraising cycles. I think about the old me and the new me each taking a donor out for coffee. And before I started unpacking all this for myself, I had a story that I was cool, calm, and collected on the outside, but on the inside I was super nervous and like you see a duck on a lake, it is gliding so passively across that lake, but underneath the surface of the water, the little feet are going like so fast to get them across the lake. I thought I was being the duck, but knowing what I know now about a nervous system and how it communicates with somebody else's nervous system, I probably was really telegraphing that I was anxious. So the old me might take a donor to coffee thinking a thought like, I really need a donation. This is very important. I just need to do it. I need to just make it happen. And when I had that thought, my chest would tighten up, my vision would narrow. I would lose some creativity because I was just so focused on the task in front of me. And what was the, the root of that focus? Well, I wanted to really do a good job. It was very important to me that I do a good job. And I thought that meant having a singular focus and just really bringing a lot of intensity. And of course, the donor could sense that tension because our nervous systems talk, they do something called co-regulation. So just like you can feel it when somebody who is super angry walks into a room, they don't even have to say anything. You feel that energetically, that ripple of, whoa, what's going on with that person? Our nervous systems co-regulate. They communicate and they pick up on each other. And like in any situation where one person leans in energetically a lot harder than the other person leans in, the person who's not leaning in is actually gonna lean out. You can think of it like a dating scenario where one person is just leaning in way too hard. That's pretty much a guarantee that the other person is going to say, not for me. No thank you. I don't think I'm gonna go for a second date with you. Too much intensity can kill the ask. And here's the part that was really tricky for me. The donor, for whatever reason, says no or says yes, but then ghosts me. And I would make that mean something about myself. Right? Now I know I can't control what the donor does. I can only control the meaning I make of that. I can control how I feel about that. But back then I didn't know that. So I got the idea that making the ask was painful. I connected making the ask to feeling pain. And like any good procrastinator, I found a million other things to do except make the ask. There was an opportunity there when I felt the sting of rejection. There was an opportunity there for me to tend to myself, to tend to those, that sore spot within me that wanted to connect this to a bigger meaning about me. Maybe I thought I was just bad at fundraising, or I thought I was bad at people. You know that, that people just don't get me or that I am. Somehow not connection worthy as a person, right? These were all meanings that I would make of that rejection. And the donor wasn't rejecting me. They were rejecting the request, but I conflated those two as well. Really painful. And you may have experienced this in your career. You may not have either way that is what fundraising looks like when it's driven by anxiety for me. And if I was to have that same scenario, coffee with a donor now, or let's put sub in any fundraiser who has done her work regulating her own nervous system. And doesn't have to be a woman, but there are a preponderance of women in the field of fundraising, so pretty good guess that it might be a woman. This fundraiser knows how to hold her own space. She is sitting up straight in the chair rather than leaning into the donor's space, she is noticing what's happening on the inside, and she is managing that. She's using her breath to calm her heart rate if it's elevated. She's taking a moment without needing to speak or dominate the conversation to just check in on an internal level while she's being present on an external level. That donor can feel that regulation of her nervous system. The donor's nervous system is co-regulating with that, and she might hear something like, wow, you're so easy to talk to, or I just feel really calm when I'm with you. Just by being in charge of her own inner climate, that fundraiser has an advantage. Do you see this? That fundraiser has the advantage of knowing that her worthiness is not tied to whether the donor says yes or no to her request. She's got her own back. She knows she's okay. And because she knows she's okay, she's able to telegraph and feel in her body a real level of calm that the donor responds to and the donor leans in. And that's a beautiful place to be because the donor wants to help and the fundraiser's not getting in her own way by having this whole internal push pull dialogue about, oh, what are they thinking about me? They probably, do I have something hanging out of my nose or between my teeth and, oh, did I say that right or did I just offend them? Right? All of that is the inner dialogue of anxiety being present and it's not a judgment. Again, I've been both of these people. But it's something that's coming up in the body that actually we can heal, we can tend to that anxiety. And I'm gonna put in this show, I'm gonna record a separate episode that will be a meditation that you can listen to before you meet with a donor or before you write the fundraising letter. Before you craft your ask so that you can come back to it as a resource and be able to say, okay, what does it feel like in my body when I'm feeling anxiety? Okay, got it. What does it feel like in my body when I am regulated and calm, and I'm telling you, if you ask from that place. Of calm regulation, you're going to get more yeses. The donor's own nervous system is going to be more calm in your presence. It's gonna be easier for that donor to build a relationship with you, for you to build a relationship with that donor. And I hope that by explaining these two different scenarios, you can see it clearly for yourself. You can try it on as an idea and see what this would look like if you were carrying out these scenarios because anxiety is a messenger, it's not a master. It's a feeling, it's not a fact, it's just information. So for now, if you've got a donor interaction today, I just want you to do this one grounded step before you have that conversation. And I don't care if it's on the phone, if it's over zoom, if it's in person. Whatever it is. I want you to take three slow, full breaths, and I want you to focus on making the out breath a little longer than the in breath, and this tells the nervous system that it's okay that you're not gearing up to run from a lion, that you're okay. When the exhale is just a little bit longer than the inhale, you're giving that signal to your body that it's okay to calm down, and it resets the nervous system faster than positive thinking. You know, there's a lot of mindset hacks out there, but I think what they miss is the fact that we're not just a mind. We're also a body, and it's possible for you to be thinking one thing in your mind and your body to be like, uh, no. That's not what we're doing here. You might have had this experience before where you're thinking, I am calm. I am calm, and inside you are raging, raging. That's because the mind and the body speak two different languages, and it's really okay to, to try that. I mean, it's not, I, there's no judgment here. We have to see what works for us. But when you do a somatic practice, and of course somatic means in the body, when you do a somatic practice, like focusing on your breath. It resets the nervous system and it gets you there. It shortcuts the learning curve, rather than trying positive thinking or affirmations. So don't think of your anxiety as a barrier to fundraising. It really is a signal pointing toward a need for safety internally. And you can give yourself that. And I'm gonna show you how. In the meditation that I'll do. So the question for you to take to your journal or to just think about as you drive in your car, or take your walk wherever you are, where in your body does anxiety show up and what might it be trying to protect? Where in your body does anxiety show up and what might it be trying to protect? You knowing this information about your own unique body, your own unique experience is gold for you, and it's a fundamental step for you to be able to live in a more regulated state of ease and freedom. As we close today, I wanna highlight a few key insights that you can carry with you into your next donor meeting or honestly into your life. Number one, anxiety is not a flaw. It's a physiological response. Your nervous system reacts to a budget shortfall the same way your ancestors reacted to a predator. Nothing is wrong with you. Your body is just doing its job. Number two, your internal state is always communicating. Even if you think you're calm, donors can feel your anxiety through nervous system co-regulation. Your body speaks louder than your words, and it might have something to do with why you're not getting the results that you wanna get in your fundraising. Number three, anxiety driven fundraising narrows your vision. And your creativity. It puts you into survival mode, which is the opposite of the grounded relational presence that successful fundraising requires. Number four, a regulated fundraiser is a magnetic fundraiser. When you stay connected to your body, your breath, your worthiness, donors lean in, they relax, they trust you. The entire interaction shifts, and it happens all on an energetic level. Number five, anxiety is a messenger, not a master. It's pointing you towards something inside you that wants safety, attention, or care. When you meet it with compassion instead of resistance, everything changes. Here's your reflection question for your journal. Where in your body does anxiety show up and what might it be trying to protect? This one question can open so much awareness for you. And if you'd like support practicing this, check out the companion meditation I recorded specifically for this episode. It's designed to help you regulate your nervous system before donor meetings or before writing an ask. As always, come share what came up for you in our Facebook community, the brave and balanced fundraiser. You don't have to navigate this alone. I'll see you in the next episode.