A new perspective about the relationship of women and money

What do you feel when you read facts like these,

• Less than 6% of Fortune 500 companies have female CEO’s. [1]
• American women are 80% more likely to be in poverty after retirement than men. [2]
• 61% of women said they would rather talk about death than money. [3]
• Only 24% of federal politicians worldwide are women. [4]

Angry? Helpless?

These feelings lead you very quickly to anger and blame: the system, men, your mother, your father, the patriarchy!

That’s easy.

To place responsibility on someone or something outside of us is liberating. We get the victimhood hat. We are of the hook, all continues and even gets worse.

This is useless and even dangerous. When we do that, we lose all our power. And much worse we make the gender war even more incendiary.

We need to be courageous and look at our own role in this drama.

This past summer I held the space for 138 women (mostly business owners) who dared to look at their own role in this drama. I asked them, which was their number one challenge when it came to money. The number one answer was visibility.

Interesting! What does visibility have to do with making money as a woman?

Half of them experienced great fear expressing themselves in public. They don’t write the blog post, publish the video or participate in the meeting. They hide in silence their ideas and their entire self. They hide like if their life depended on in.

The others do somehow the opposite. They take massive action. They are present. They post their blog post and their video. They speak during meetings. Yet they do so with an underlying sense of fear that sounds like: “they’ll find me out”. They show up wearing an armour of reasonable business like words and ideas.

These courageous ladies articulated very well how we keep money away from our experience: we hide.

Yes, but why do we hide?

Could there be a common underlying cause?

Yes, there’s one common factor among most women: the “I’ll survive” mindset. This is the set of non-supportive beliefs that keep us, women invisible and financially weak. It stems from the long history of celebrating all things masculine in the past 10,000 years.

Beliefs are nothing else than chronic thoughts. We have repeated them so often for so long that we think they are true. Even more we think they are our identity. A couple of examples of this kind of self-sabotaging beliefs are,

• I cannot earn more than my husband or father
• If I make more money, I’ll be lonely
• If I make more money, they’ll take it away from me
• If I make money, they think I’m a bad person

Some women even realize that these thoughts are not rational. Yet they are not able to eradicate them.

Are we doomed or can we change these pervasive programming?

Yes, there’s hope!

Sure, now we have all the research on neuroscience, brain and heart coherence research, quantum physics, epigenetics and more.

But why do we still have financial gender gaps everywhere? We have women empowerment coaches, institutions, retreats, courses….. and reality is not very different.

The number one reason why we are still stuck is blame. We must let go of it and take the driver seat of our own destiny. We women must do our inner work to transform these fears into fire to change ourselves and reality.

You don’t need to do this alone. On the contrary, the best is to do this in community, in sisterhood.

1. https://inequality.org/gender-inequality/#gender-income-gaps
2. https://www.nirsonline.org/2016/03/women-80-more-likely-to-be-impoverished-in-retirement/
3. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/women-regret-this-financial-mistake-the-most-2018-04-19
4. http://agewave.com/what-we-do/landmark-research-and-consulting/research-studies/women-and-financial-wellness/