Our current way of making money relies on one question: 

“How much money can I make IF I?” 

These conversations can look like: “I can get promoted and make more money IF I… am responsive 24/7, work while sick, rarely see my loved ones, etc.” “My boss needs me to get this certification, I can only do that IF I…”

When we grow wealth from a place of “IF I” and ignore parts of ourselves to make money, we allow others to control it.

We allow others to dictate the timing, the amount, and the how. Growing wealth from a place of “IF I” means that this wealth is one crisis away from disappearing. You can get a deeper feel for and an understanding of this at Sustainable Wealth in Action.

To create more security, we have to ask ourselves instead: “What can I sustain?”

This looks like: “What is required of me to get promoted in this company? What need am I fulfilling by seeking this promotion (purely money, increase in responsibilities, new assignments, prestige)? Are there other ways of satisfying those needs and honoring all of me?”

When we get curious about what we can sustain, it forces a conversation about what is actually achievable without denying parts of ourselves. These conversations and the answers or solutions that arise out of them create actual security…

Because the only thing we have control over is ourselves.

Why Ask a Different Question?

The strategies and techniques all of us were taught on how to be successful – “do well in school, get a job, work, retire” were never designed for women. They were designed to make men who had support at home successful. Men enter schools, doctors’ offices, workplaces, and are governed by laws that promote this accepted model of success. The needs of men and the systems that support them are aligned.

Growing wealth in today’s world feels like a constant battle for women because we attend schools, work, receive healthcare and are governed by laws that were never designed with our needs in mind. The systems that are supposed to support us DO NOT.

Times are changing. Technology is evolving at light speed. Over the past few decades in particular, technology has fundamentally changed the ways in which all of us care for our health, work, process information, and relate to one another.

Technology has connected the global community so that all of us are no longer competing against just our neighbor for opportunities, we are competing against highly-educated and highly-skilled people from around the world. People who can take lower pay because they live in countries whose Government provides affordable healthcare and education.

Despite all of these changes, women and men still use this same outdated approach to create our wealth. It’s not working and honestly, it never has for women (Women Lag in Investment Savings and Net Worth, 2021).

For decades women have consistently lagged behind men in their ability to grow wealth. And women who are also caregivers (care for children, parents, pets, friends, the environment, and/or their communities) are impacted even more adversely (Wage Gap Wider for Working Mothers, 2019, The Trickle-Down Effect of Caregiving on Women, 2018).

In order to compete globally and create security for generations to come, we need wealthy women.