How First-Gens Can Break Their Income Ceiling: Cafe Con Pam
How First-Gens Can Break Their Income Ceiling
Have you ever wondered why you keep hitting the same income ceiling—even though you’re smart, ambitious, and doing all the fucking things?
You might think you need another certification, a better job, more clients, a new business strategy, or simply need to work harder.
But what if the thing keeping you at your current income level isn’t your ability?
What if you’ve inherited an idea of how much money someone like you is allowed to have?
I recently sat down with Pam Covarrubias, host of Café con Pam and creator of Calladita Culture®, to talk about how first-gen high achievers can break their income ceilings, stop playing small, and build careers, businesses, and lives bigger than what we’ve seen modeled for us.
And this conversation reminded me that optimizing your money isn’t only about choosing the right savings account or investments.
Sometimes you have to optimize the beliefs determining how much you’re willing to earn in the first place.
Your Income Ceiling Might Be Invisible
Pam describes Calladita Culture® as a larger system that can keep first-gen people quiet, overworked, underpaid, and overgiving.
Through hundreds of conversations with first-gen leaders, she began noticing the same patterns repeatedly. She identified five wounds around silence, identity, worth, power, and commitment—and the protective patterns that can keep us repeating what’s familiar even when we consciously want something different.
And this can absolutely show up in your money.
You might consciously think:
Of course I deserve to make more money.
But underneath that thought might be:
Who am I to charge that much?
People like me don’t make that kind of money.
What if people think I’ve changed?
What if my family judges me?
What if I become successful and lose people because of it?
You don’t necessarily solve those questions by working harder.
Sometimes you have to figure out why your current level of success feels safer than the next one.
You Can Know You Deserve More—and Still Not Believe It
One of Pam’s protective reversals is what she calls possibility.
Your brain knows how to handle what’s familiar—even when familiar isn’t what you actually want.
Pam gives the example of believing a promotion or higher pay simply isn’t possible for you. Being underpaid may suck, but your brain already knows what that experience feels like.
Making significantly more money?
That’s unknown territory.
And THIS is why I think mindset work belongs in conversations about building wealth.
You can have the perfect spreadsheet.
You can understand investing.
You can know exactly what salary you should negotiate.
But none of that automatically means you’ll ask for the raise, charge the price, start the business, invest the money, or leave the job.
Knowledge and action aren’t the same thing.
Pam Quit Her Corporate Job Without a Perfect Plan
Pam knows something about choosing the unknown.
Before becoming a coach, she was a corporate executive working directly under a CEO.
Eventually, she decided she was done.
She put in her two weeks’ notice without a plan and without savings.
And no, the next chapter wasn’t immediately glamorous.
Pam realized she needed money coming in while she figured out what she was building.
So she called a friend managing a restaurant and asked for a job.
She deliberately didn’t want another office job because she knew she’d bring the work home with her. Instead, she wanted something that would pay her bills while leaving enough mental space to build her business.
She eventually ended up working at a coffee shop.
She asked for the morning shift so she could finish around noon and spend the rest of her day building her business.
I LOVE this.
Because entrepreneurship gets romanticized as:
QUIT YOUR JOB! FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS! GO ALL IN!
Sometimes going all in looks like making lattes in the morning so Future You has the afternoon to build something.
That’s not failure.
That’s optimization.
Pam was optimizing her time, energy, and income around the life she was trying to create.
Breaking Your Income Ceiling Can Mean Charging More
Eventually, Pam went all-in on coaching.
And then she encountered another problem:
What the fuck do I charge?
She’d been given an hourly rate to start with, did the math, and realized there was no way she could make the living she wanted charging that amount.
So raising her prices wasn’t only a business-strategy problem.
Pam says she had to work on her own money wounds and recognize her credibility and experience before she could charge more.
This is another place I see people get stuck.
You can optimize your spending down to the penny, but there comes a point where you also have to ask:
Am I allowing myself to receive more?
Could I negotiate?
Could I raise my rates?
Could I apply for the bigger job?
Could I build another income stream?
Could I use the expertise I already have differently?
Could I stop automatically assuming that the number I’m currently making is my number forever?
Are You Loyal to Your Family’s Income Ceiling?
This was probably my favorite money story from our entire conversation.
Pam worked with a client who kept hitting a specific money threshold.
She’d try charging more and couldn’t seem to break through it.
Eventually, Pam discovered something much deeper:
The women in this client’s family had never made more than that.
Her income ceiling mirrored her lineage’s income ceiling.
Pam describes this as loyalty to the lineage—an inherited pattern that can make surpassing the people we came from feel deeply uncomfortable.
THAT is some first-gen shit.
Because consciously, you might want your parents to be proud of you.
You might want to build generational wealth.
You might want to have opportunities they never had.
But another part of you might be wondering:
Who am I to have more than they did?
And sometimes breaking your first-gen income ceiling means redefining what loyalty looks like.
Maybe honoring your family’s sacrifices doesn’t require repeating their financial reality.
Maybe the whole fucking point was for you to get farther.
Success Can Feel Unsafe Too
Making more money isn’t the only thing that can activate these patterns.
Being seen succeeding can too.
Pam shared that her mother had a successful business when Pam was growing up. Pam watched that success eventually attract jealousy from within the family.
Now, as an adult building a visible business herself, Pam has had to work through the association her body learned:
More visibility = more exposure = more danger.
This matters because sometimes we think we’re procrastinating.
Or we’re inconsistent.
Or suddenly we don’t feel like marketing.
Or we get right up to the next level and mysteriously start fucking around.
It might be worth getting curious about what success represents to you.
What happened to successful people in your family?
What did you learn about rich people?
What happened when someone stood out?
What happened when somebody wanted more?
Your answers might tell you something.
Your Friends and Family Might Not Come With You
Pam and I also talked about one of the weirder parts of building something different:
The people you expect to support you might not.
When Pam started her business and could no longer financially participate in her social circle the way she had with her corporate salary, some friends stopped inviting her places.
Meanwhile, people outside her immediate network became clients and supporters.
That’s a hard lesson.
But it’s also freeing.
You don’t need everyone from your old life to understand your new one.
And you definitely don’t need their permission to keep going.
Breaking Your Income Ceiling Is About More Than Money
The goal isn’t just:
MAKE MORE MAKE MORE MAKE MORE.
Money is a tool.
I want more LGBTQ+, BIPOC, first-gen, and historically excluded people to understand how to make it, optimize it, invest it, and use it to create lives that actually feel fucking good.
Because the point of building wealth isn’t staring lovingly at a bigger number in your bank account.
It’s what that number lets you do.
Quit.
Rest.
Travel.
Start the business.
Take the sabbatical.
Help your family.
Work less.
Say no.
Build another income stream.
Become work optional.
And sometimes the next step isn’t another financial strategy.
It’s realizing that the ceiling you’ve been treating as reality might just be the highest number you’ve given yourself permission to imagine.
You can change that.
About Pam Covarrubias
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.
Pam 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.
Listen to the Unicorn Millionaire Episode 151: How First-Gens Can Break Their Income Ceiling
In my latest Unicorn Millionaire Podcast episode, I go deeper into how first-gens can break their income cieling.
“How to Break Your Income Ceiling as a First-Gen with Café con Pam” 🦄
🎧Listen to Episode 151 of the Unicorn Millionaire Podcast on Spotify
🎧Listen to Episode 151 of the Unicorn Millionaire Podcast on Apple Podcasts
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