Every one of us has a money story.

Most of us have never called it that. We might call it our attitude towards money, or our relationship with it, or we might not have named it at all. But from the moment we were old enough to observe the adults around us, we were absorbing something: the way money was talked about, fought over, stretched carefully, or never mentioned at all. The feelings that arrived when there wasn't enough, or when someone else seemed to have more.

All of that became part of a belief system. And belief systems, especially ones formed in childhood, have a habit of staying in place long after the circumstances that created them have changed.

That is what this post is about: finding your money story, questioning the parts of it that may be holding you back, and beginning to understand what it would take to write a different one.

How your money story was formed

Your money story has three main threads.

The first is what you absorbed from your parents or caregivers. Not necessarily what they said explicitly, but what you observed. Did they agree about money, or did one tend to be careful while the other spent more freely? Was money talked about openly, or was it something that lived in anxious silences and arguments behind closed doors? Were you told, directly or indirectly, that certain things were simply not for people like you or your family?

The second thread is the wider influence of teachers, extended family, and peers. Sometimes this creates friction with what you learned at home. Growing up in one set of financial circumstances while surrounded by friends with a very different relationship to money leaves its own kind of mark.

The third is your own experience as an adult, which sometimes confirms the beliefs you inherited and sometimes challenges them.

None of these threads makes a story that is good or bad, right or wrong. The point of exploring them is simply to become aware of what is actually running in the background when you make decisions about money, because very often we are not acting from our present-day values and knowledge. We are acting from an old script that we never consciously chose.

A useful exercise is to sit with three questions: 

• What messages did I receive about money growing up? 

• How were my teachers, extended family, and friends influencing my beliefs? 

• And what has my own experience since then actually taught me?

You don't need to write an essay. A few words or phrases are enough to start seeing the shape of the story you have been telling yourself.

Five myths worth examining

Once you can see your money story more clearly, it becomes easier to spot the places where it may be resting on something that isn't quite true. Here are five beliefs that come up repeatedly, and that deserve to be questioned.

Money is scarce. In your immediate household growing up, money may well have been limited. But scarcity in one context becomes a generalised belief about the world if we are not careful. Money, as an energy, is abundant. The question is not whether it exists, but how we access and create it. What often keeps money at a distance is not its scarcity, but a mindset that has stopped looking for ways it might arrive.

Money is the root of all evil. This one is seductive, especially when the news consistently shows wealth being used badly. But money is a tool. A knife in the hands of a skilled chef creates something nourishing. The same knife, used differently, causes harm. The knife is not at fault. Money is not the problem. The intention and values of the person using it are what matter. Wanting to earn well, to charge fairly for your work, to create profit: none of these things make you a lesser person.

The only way to make money is to work hard for it. There is something true in this, but only up to a point. If effort alone were the key to financial security, the hardest-working people in any society would be the most financially comfortable. We know that is not the case. Effort matters, but so does strategy, leverage, learning to make money work on your behalf, and being willing to receive in exchange for the value you create.

Money is a measure of your worth. This one quietly ruins a great deal of joy. It ties identity to income, and self-esteem to status. People make significant life decisions based on not wanting to lose a job title, even when keeping the job is costing them more than they are getting back. Your value as a human being is not a financial figure. Holding these two things separate is not easy, but it is worth working towards.

Making money is a zero-sum game. The idea that if you win, someone else must lose. That charging for your work takes something from the person paying. But you are not just taking money. You are offering something in return that is worth something to them. Value is created in that exchange, not extracted. Living with an abundance mindset means understanding that the sea is large enough for everyone to swim in.

How you relate to money

One way to understand your current relationship with money is to think about it through the lens of attachment, the same framework used to understand how we relate to other people.

Someone with an avoidant attachment to money has learned that dependence is dangerous. They work hard, they are self-sufficient, they avoid asking for help or advice, and they keep their financial situation close to their chest. There is often a lot of control here, which can look like discipline from the outside but can also be a way of keeping discomfort at a manageable distance.

Someone with an anxious attachment to money lives with a persistent low hum of worry. The fear of not having enough, and the daily struggle of making ends meet. Even when things are going reasonably well, the fear of something going wrong, of money disappearing, of running out when it matters most, is always present. Interestingly, this kind of anxiety can also be felt acutely by people who have a great deal of money, because the fear of losing it, and the identity and security it represents, can be particularly acute.

Then there is a disorganised pattern: not really knowing whether there will be enough money coming in each month, not tracking where the money goes, avoiding looking too closely, making decisions from one moment to the next without much of a framework. This is not laziness. It is usually avoidance of something that has never felt safe to look at directly.

And then there is secure: a way of relating to money that is grounded, intentional, and neither clenched with anxiety nor in denial. This is not the exclusive province of people with a great deal of money. It is more about clarity and trust, knowing what is coming in and going out, having a foundation in place, and being able to hold the uncertainty of what cannot be controlled without being paralysed by it.

The frequency we are operating from

There is a broader principle worth naming here, which is that our emotional state shapes what we attract into our lives, including money.

When we are operating from a place of shame, guilt, or chronic fear, our energy is contracted. We focus on what we lack. We make decisions from a defensive position. We are so focused on what could go wrong that we sometimes fail to see what is going right, or what opportunities are available to us.

Shifting out of that does not require pretending everything is fine, or bypassing genuine difficulty. It requires a conscious movement towards a slightly higher register: from fear towards courage and curiosity, from shame towards understanding and forgiveness, from resignation towards desire and action. From wanting things to change to actually believing they can.

One practical expression of this is getting very clear on what you actually want. Not just what you need, not just what seems reasonable given your circumstances, but what you genuinely want. Most of us spend our adult lives prioritising everyone else's needs and treating our own as optional extras. That pattern has a cost.

Write the list. Give yourself permission to want what you want, and then start asking: what would it take to move towards this?

Giving, receiving, and the flow of money

Two principles that come up again and again in this work, and they are not always as instinctive as they sound.

The first is giving generously, and not just in the sense of donating to charity. Giving your time, your attention, your expertise, your care. When you go into the world looking for ways to create value for other people, something tends to come back. Not always immediately, not always in the form or the source you expect. But the relationship between generosity and abundance is real, and it is not magic. People who are treated with genuine care tend to reciprocate. Relationships formed on that basis have depth and longevity. That is how abundance is created and sustained.

The second is receiving with gratitude. This sounds simple. In practice, it can be surprisingly hard. Many people who find it easy to give struggle to receive: to accept a compliment, a gesture, a payment, without deflecting it or feeling that they do not quite deserve it. At the other extreme, when you receive something with a sense of entitlement, or without acknowledgement or thanks, you are not in a state that attracts more. When you receive it with genuine appreciation, you create space for more to arrive.

This applies to something as ordinary as your salary arriving in your account. Receive it with grace and gratitude. Treat it like a welcome visitor. Trust that more will come when this one leaves.

A question to hold

Your money story, like your life story, is an evolving one. The beliefs at its heart were formed by people and circumstances that had no idea they were shaping your future relationship with money. Some of those beliefs have served you. Others may have outlived their usefulness.

The work is not to dismantle everything and start again. It is simply to look clearly at what is there, to question the parts that are not quite true, and to begin, gently and with some curiosity, to believe that a different direction is possible.

Ask yourself: What does an abundant life look like for me? What needs to change in my current life to make this vision a reality?

This rewriting and reframing of your money story can be done more easily by working backwards. Start with the end in mind and then assess which aspects of your money story and how you live can be changed. 

Money does not, unlike the humans in our relationships, carry the emotional baggage of how we treated it in the past. It is always there, waiting for the right ecosystem to flow freely to and from. Our job is to create such an ecosystem. 

It begins with awareness, acknowledgment and acceptance of our current relationship with money, and where we are consciously and unconsciously creating resistances and blockages.

If you would like to explore this further

As a deep transformation coach, I help my clients become much more intentional in how they think about their time, energy, and money, and how they put those resources to work in a way that is right for them.

If this has resonated and you'd like to find out more, you are welcome to book a free exploratory conversation.

If you've noticed that some of the heavier emotions around money feel deeply stuck, I am also a certified Emotion Code practitioner. This work can help identify and release trapped emotions that may be operating below your conscious awareness. You can book a release session here.

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