What Feeling Comes to Mind When You Think About Money?

I've done this exercise many times, and the responses I hear vary from the positive to the not-so-positive sides of the emotional spectrum (guilt, doubt, stability, fear, hope, shame, confidence, pride). No matter your response, the point of the exercise is to reflect on what the feeling(s) is, and how you got there.

Last week, Susan and I went to a financial planning conference, and on our last day, we experienced a different kind of keynote talk. It was a theatrical representation of money reflections.

I've become familiar with the human money experience, and how much it shapes our adult money patterns. You may have even heard about concepts like "money stories," "money beliefs," "money archetypes," or "money scripts." I've spent a lot of time exploring my money stories, as well as researching what shapes these stories in all of us, and how to heal from and change them. One thing I hadn't come across was a theatrical representation of our money stories. I gotta say, it was powerful.

It's been a minute since I've attended a live theater performance, so to be sitting at a conference with a waning cup of coffee and expecting to focus on talking points in a powerpoint presentation, when suddenly the speaker erupts into singing and acting, I was pleasantly surprised. The actors portrayed a woman and the various factors of her life for which she feels responsible. They acted out the ways in which she takes on tasks surrounding her, ensuring she's pleasing the people in her life while also having control over how things are done.

For her, the feeling that came up when she thought about money was Responsibility.

I thought that was a surprising response. It's not one I ever remember hearing when doing the exercise of uncovering what kind of baggage our money stories have dumped on us. Usually, I hear about the feelings that have caused our money patterns later in life. For example, I can relate to the feeling of responsibility, but that's not the first feeling that comes up for me. Instead, it's fear, shame, or uncertainty. My early money story explains why I have these feelings, and responsibility is a reaction to those feelings. How did I try to mitigate the fear, shame, and uncertainty that money was causing in my childhood? I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility.

I love a good group discussion, and I was thrilled when the speaker, mid-performance, prompted all of the attendees to break into discussion among the folks at our table. In a weird coincidence (considering the conference was mostly male), the people sitting at our table were all women except for one man. We went around the table and shared our experience growing up: could we relate to this feeling of responsibility, and taking on the worry of money on behalf of family or community members? It was almost unanimously yes, but the one man in attendance at our table couldn't relate. He said he became interested in finance later in life but couldn't recall an experience from childhood that made him feel a sense of responsibility to keep things together. I truly do love that for him, and I wish that was true for everyone.

​Research​ tells us that women take on a disproportionate amount of financial worry and responsibility. It's not great for our mental health, and it doesn't actually help our financial confidence. It also doesn't help that the part of our population that feels more financial burden is the same part that suffers from wage inequities and wealth disparities.

The protagonist of the theatrical performance suffered a breaking point that finally drove her to address why she felt this crushing responsibility, and how to stop it. Their interpretation of this solution was that we need to "let go" of our responsibility, mostly by way of surrendering to god. Respectfully, I think we owe it to ourselves to have another (and/or) solution: action and agency.

As children, we're more likely to have a sense of spiraling responsibility when we're unable to exercise control over a situation. But as adults, there's a lot we can control. We have steps we can take to perform action and gain more agency in our finances. That might mean tracking daily expenses, categorizing monthly spending, identifying our average savings rate, getting familiar with our "FI number", understanding ways we can save for retirement, or deciding to meet with a financial planner to have help with these steps. These are all examples of actions we can take, and in doing so, we're exercising the agency we have.

It doesn't help to fret over financial situations we can't control, or even to fret over our own. When we take action, we're changing our money patterns and rewriting our money stories. That gives us control to change the feeling that comes to mind when we think about money.