What’s your relationship to money?
Ladies - today on International Women’s Day I invite you to explore your relationship to money. It is no secret that the gender wage gap persists. Women earn an average of 82 cents for every dollar a man earns, and the impact on Black and Hispanic women is drastically more pronounced.
Our relationship to money has an effect on how we show up in the world as conscious leaders, parents, friends, daughters, and other labels we identify ourselves as. While there is still an incredible amount of work to be done to close the gender wage gap, each of us has an opportunity to start with what we can control.
First, explore your relationship to money.
Notice, when you bring the thought of money to mind, what happens? What sensations do you feel in your body? What emotions arise? What thoughts? What is your relationship to debt and saving? When was the last time you really audited your finances? Do you have a financial plan? How do you feel while reading these words?! Take a few moments to write down everything that comes to mind.
As a conscious executive and leadership coach, finances are usually not the first thing my clients bring to our discussions, but its presence in each person's life colors their overall experience. It’s like my husband’s persistent knee pain that he keeps trying to ignore in the hopes that it will go away, but the reality is that he isn’t getting any younger and the pain miraculously disappearing is more akin to a pipe dream than a plan. It is subtle, always in the background coloring his experience, occasionally becoming more pronounced and demanding his attention before fading to a somewhat tolerable annoyance yet again.
In addition to bringing our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and reality of our financial situation to light, we can also take control of our financial education.
While there is a wealth of information out there, many of us did not receive a robust financial education growing up. It is more likely that you took a class on woodshop than how to create a financial plan. We need to take control of and responsibility for our financial education.
One opportunity to do that, for free, is to attend Fidelity’s Women Talk Money’s “Invest like a woman: Money moves for today’s world” series. This free online series, which kicks off today at 1 pm ET, has an amazing lineup of financial experts and influencers including: Tori Dunlap of Her First $100K, Erin Lowry of Broke Millennial, Cate Luzio of Liminary, Farnoosh Torabi of So Money and Claire Wasserman of Ladies Get Paid, and a number of female financial experts from Fidelity. These women will share their financial expertise and experiences to arm us with what we didn’t learn in woodshop: how to take control of our finances and plan for our financial future.
Bringing to light our current relationship to money and taking control of our financial education are two key steps to financial growth and freedom.
With financial awareness and education we have more room to explore the level of importance we are giving money in our lives. We have space to assess how much of our energy we are giving to beliefs that we do not or will never have enough and are living from scarcity instead of abundance. Before we lift the cloud of denial and/or ignorance around the topic of money in our lives, it may be difficult to see the light of how it can support us to live a life of abundance by our design.
