Do you remember those little variety packs of mini boxes of cereal from Kellogg’s? Every week when we went for the shopping I used to ask for one. Sometimes (I suspect when they were on special offer) my mum would get them for me. Other times she told me ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees you know’.

It felt like money was something that was hard to come by, was not plentiful and was not to be spent on novel items.

Combined with my perfectionist tendencies it was also a constant source of guilt in feeling like I’d never done enough to ‘deserve’ the money I was being paid. The thought of asking for a raise or putting effort into researching whether what I was being paid was in line with my peers never really crossed my mind.

I justified it by saying that I wasn’t motivated by money anyway and so it didn’t really matter.

But I was missing two critical pieces of understanding:

• money is actually a force of good and can be used in a hugely positive way.

• my worthiness was not determined by the amount of money I was earning

Talking about money mindset is something that instinctively feels uncomfortable for me. But more strongly than this I believe that it’s an important conversation to open up amongst females in order to make things like asking for a pay rise feel like an option.

Tune into this episode of the PODCAST if you’d like to hear more about:

• what money mindset is

• why it is relevant to balance

• where it comes from

• how we start to investigate our own money mindset