Let´s talk about money, shall we?

Money - and so much is attached to this short word. I know for me it is, as I wrote earlier in my articles about money beliefs and how these run or ruin our careers. It makes us stay when it no longer fits and underprice ourselves. Some of us are motivated by it and great at earning it, some of us are not so much. Some of us are also good at spending it, and some are pretty bad at it.

And a lot of that, I have come to believe, has to do with something that goes a lot deeper than the numbers. It has to do with the relationship we have with money itself - and that relationship, very much like others in our lives, has a pattern.

Our relationship with money has an attachment style

People are more familiar with attachment theory when it comes to intimate relationships: the anxious, the avoidant, and the securely attached. I have come to realize that we could also define our relationship to money in similar terms.

The anxious type: always feels there is not enough, and when there is enough, the fear that it could all disappear is constantly in the background.

The avoidant type: avoids the topic as much as possible, avoids thinking or talking about money, and usually also does not have big plans for savings or investments.

The secure type: know that there is always enough, and if something were to happen and it were all to disappear tomorrow - whether through job loss or financial crisis - they know they can always find another well-paid job or project. They tend to see many opportunities for earning.

If the attachment theory for money existed, I believe it would look something like the above. Reading it, you probably placed yourself in one of those categories, or at least are leaning towards one of them more than towards the others.

I certainly know which one I lean towards. Or rather, which ones, because for me it has never been straightforward. My own relationship with money has always fluctuated between anxious and avoidant. For a long time, it was avoidant - simply avoiding the existence of it in a way, as well as its management. Then, after becoming a mother, as most parents know, a whole layer of responsibility and fears comes up, it became rather anxious. What coincided was the fact that I became independent and started building my portfolio career after my first child was born. And as most people who gave up the certainty will know, it is quite an experience - a lot of things that seemed to be well below the surface come up. The things we did not think about, the fears we chose previously not to feel, and the beliefs we did not need to acknowledge. So it was, in a way, a perfect storm that made me face all I mostly did not want to face until that point.

That is also when I realized to what extent money was shaping and influencing my career - even though I had already gone on the entrepreneurship journey before and given up a salary after five initial career years. But somehow that felt different than going independent and putting a price on my own work. The latter felt more personal, hit a deeper note, and made me question things a lot more. Because pricing your own work, it turns out, really forces you to value (evaluate) yourself.

Money is emotional, not factual

For a long time, I thought money had a lot to do with facts. The entire industry called finance is centered around it: managing, deploying, and investing it. Yet, in my own work around my money beliefs that have determined much of my career, I have come to realize that so much about money has nothing to do with facts. That it has to do with emotions and our learned patterns about money - how money should work for us (if at all), how we earn it (and how much we believe we deserve to earn), what our upper earning limit is (in our head and not in our actual potential), and the ways we spend it.

In different cultures, talking about money is seen differently. In some, it is even considered rude; in most, it is probably not the first topic to bring up at a dinner table with friends. There is this interesting mix of emotions attached to money: pride, shame, sometimes even guilt. It is one of those things where there is no prescribed right or wrong. It is so individual and yet so universal in a very human way.

As for me, this is an ongoing topic and process. Currently, I am reading The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money (highly recommended read!), which inspired me to write on this topic.

And where does all of this come from? For most of us, it starts a lot earlier than we think.

Where it all starts

I grew up in Serbia in the 90s. Hyperinflation, embargo, wars - and parents who did not know from one day to the next what their salary would actually buy. Two parents with very different attitudes about money and spending created contradictory beliefs that I carried with me for years without fully understanding them.

And then, at 17, I left and was catapulted into a new world. Boarding school, then universities in the UK, then finance in London. The contrast could not have been more stark. It took me quite a few years to understand and place it all, but today I see the value of those contrasts and how they shaped me into who I am.

Over to Brazil, specifically São Paulo, where I lived for four years. The societal differences are palpable from the first moment one arrives in the city, and as one gets to know it all, it becomes only more profound. There is a lot of money, and it shows - via every possible way to show it. I was at the time far from starting a family, but I still remember an example about a school where children are taken by helicopter. Of course, there are safety issues that one does not have to deal with in some other parts of the world, but it is also a status signal. I vividly remember that at that moment I said: I will go back to continental Europe, and my children will go to public schools, to get exposed to a range of people and not only to one specific extreme, and to avoid bubbles.

Those contrasting worlds - hyperinflation in Serbia, extreme wealth in São Paulo, the finance bubble of London - shaped my own relationship with money in ways I am still unpacking today. And perhaps that is also why I recognize these patterns clearly when they show up.

How money shapes our careers

A part of my work is supporting accomplished women who have worked in demanding, and usually quite well-paid industries for quite some years, who want to redesign their careers - and the money topic is one of the key parts of our work. Namely, when faced with a choice and a decision to leave the stable, well-paid career and that salary at the end of each month, every possible fear related to money that they had no idea they had surfaces. And this is regardless of the amount they have saved and invested, and how big the financial cushion is - and sometimes it is that big that they almost do not have to work anymore! But as I have come to learn through this work, it never is about the actual bank account itself. It is about the way we feel and relate to money.

Let's be realistic - money dictates our careers to the largest extent. And here I am not talking about paying the bills and covering necessary costs. I am talking about doing jobs we do not necessarily like anymore (or never have), in places we wish we could leave, working long hours and sacrificing the most scarce thing we have: our own time.

I was given excellent advice many years ago when I just started working in finance in London and was thinking of going to Brazil. A colleague told me: "Just go, leave now before it is too late, before you get trapped in a rat race and golden cage - a high fixed cost base built around a certain lifestyle, that gives you no other option but to stay." Today, I repeatedly hear the argument "but where else can I be paid this much" - to which my answer tends to be: it is not about how much you earn, but how much you keep.

When enough is never enough

Another thing I have noticed is that a complaint about lifestyle cost is often a cover-up to show off "how far I have come." What I have come to realize is that people have this need to belong to a specific social group - and to show it. It ends up never being enough. Even with high salaries and growing bonuses. As a client of mine once said: "It doesn't matter how much you earn in London, you always feel like middle class at best."

As Morgan writes: "It is pretty much impossible to win the game of status. Because what is unique and enviable at a certain point becomes banal and uninteresting at the next one." And it is linked to one of our evolutionary traits to compare yourself within the herd, to see who's alpha and who's omega.

And this brings me to FOMO - the fear of missing out. I will end with another quote from Morgan: "Removing FOMO from the equation, what is left? You start to only care about your own financial goals. You start to only care about the opinions of the people you love. You think long-term and avoid being sucked into fads and bubbles."

I am working on moving towards secure attachment with money. But it is a process, and one that is taking longer than I expected. Which often is the case with the things that matter most.

What I do know is that the starting point is always awareness. Understanding which pattern is running - anxious, avoidant, or somewhere in between - and then asking ourselves honestly: is this pattern serving me? Is it keeping me in a career that no longer fits? Is it making me underprice my own work? Is it making me spend in ways that are not actually mine - not my values, not my priorities, not my life?

Because the relationship we have with money is not fixed. It can change. It requires, like most things worth changing, that we first decide to look at it honestly.

Questions to ask yourself

In case you would like to go deeper on this topic, here are a few questions that are a good starting point:

• What is your relationship with money - anxious, avoidant, or secure? And where do you think that pattern comes from?

• What career decision have you made, or avoided making, primarily because of money? And was it truly about the money, or about what the money represented?

• What would "enough" actually look like for you, in concrete terms? Have you ever defined it? And if you were to reach it, how would you recognize it?

• What would you do differently in your career if money were not a factor? And what does this answer tell you?