November 4, 2019
Grab Your Money by the Mindset, and Other Lessons for Women Seeking Financial Liberation from Author Barbara Huson
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Last spring, a teacher of mine told me about Barbara Huson’s writing and teaching which focuses on empowering women to overcome under-earning and achieve high-earning and more financial power. I am a feminist, a woman business owner with a lot of clients who are also women leaders, a mother of two daughters, and a social and political activist for women’s and girls’ rights. And I am also a woman who has fit the “under-earner” label at many points along my 25-year career path so far. Since becoming a business owner five years ago, I have developed a voracious appetite for learning about the forces that shut off women’s access to financial power and building my knowledge about what women can do to counteract those forces and achieve economic empowerment and financial dignity. I was very interested in learning from Huson on the topic of women’s financial power through the lens of earnings, so I put Huson’s book Secrets of Six-Figure Women: Surprising Strategies to Up Your Earnings and Change Your Life on my summer reading list and listened to it on a summer road trip. Here are my takeaways from the book and reflections on the topic.
Barbara Huson (formerly Stanny) has published a total of six books on women and finance. I was particularly interested in Huson’s use of the concept of underearning as an entry point for educating women about money and power. This book shares the results of Huson’s years of research with six-figure women, specifically her discovery of eight secrets to becoming a high earner. The result is a unique and valuable framework for women to learn new skills that stop under-earning and support high-earning.
I want to end under-earning for any women reading this now, so let’s get right down to those secrets first so you can start practicing them. They are:
Up front I’ll say one thing about this book which challenged me is that $100,000 minimum is the amount that makes someone the aspirational “six-figure woman.” Huson wrote this book in 2002; in 2019, earning $100,000 doesn’t feel like the big win it may have over a decade and a half ago. I want way more for my sisters today and my daughters in the future than $100K, which just does not feel like the threshold of financial liberation to me. I know Barbara Huson agrees, and that more women are making six figures today than in 2002. However, in 2019, the lower segment of the six-figure scale is unlikely an adequate earning level for women living in this land of ever-growing economic inequities in the U.S. combined with the outrageous and persistent financial inequities for women specifically. We pay more for everyday products and services thanks to the “Pink Tax,” we’re marketed to incessantly and in objectifying ways, we have higher educational achievements yet earn less than men starting with our first jobs after college graduation, we are less likely than men to grow our wealth through investing even though we’re smarter investors, we’re hard to find in financial advisor and related roles, and over our lifetimes we accumulate the compounding deficit of the gender pay gap, which systematically slashes our earnings before they hit our paychecks and follows us job to job. And then there’s the career and financial costs of motherhood in America to factor in (btw, dads get a raise!). These realities left me quite certain that “six-figure” isn’t the definition in 2019 of what Huson calls “abundance.” Furthermore, that these realities are largely out of the control zone of the average woman — and all the more so if she is a Black, Latina, or Native woman — is very important to put on the table before we start talking about what we women can do to boost our earning power. I know that Huson agrees with all of this, and The Secrets of Six-Figure Women and the books she has published since address much of this and make it clear that the goal is an abundant financial reality based on our worth in society, our value professionally, and policies that guarantee women’s rights to financial equity regardless of our gender.
Teaching children and adults the honest, enraging, and dehumanizing truth about girls and women vs boys and men when it comes to money is a prerequisite for getting us to the Promiseland of financial gender equity. We need to be told about the ways that societal systems snatch women’s financial power and wellbeing at every life stage; we need to see the enemy to fight it and win. Once educated, we can advocate for equity in federal and state policy, demand it in our workplaces, teach it in our schools, and model it in our homes. But that is only one part of how change will come.
The other pathway to change is directly through women as individuals — through me, through you, through each of us. We don’t have time to wait, and time is money and we know we have less of that. Every woman who wants to escape under-earning must become the activator of her own financial liberation, with one woman at a time to conduct an individual, personal, and deep assessment of her relationship with finance and money.
The Secrets of Six-Figure Women is a treasure because it pivots readers away from a full-blown accounting of the big, systemic factors that currently curtail women’s financial power and zooms right in on teaching women the factors that are in our control and how to flip the scripts on them starting right away. For me, this focus made this book a supportive and practical container for an honest examination of my personal opportunities for development and growth when it comes to my relationship with money and earnings that felt empowering rather than enraging and deflating. I enjoyed the break from outrage and overwhelm, and the opportunity to reflect on my individual experiences while hearing about women who have attained high-earning status.
Money is among the most charged topics in our society; for women it’s a very complicated one loaded with the dynamics of sexism and often other intersecting discriminations such as racism.
The book structure introduces each secret of high-earning women, then shares stories from women Huson interviewed, and then gives a lesson on how to start practicing the particular secret. Mostly I found this repeated flow of illumination, storytelling, and demystification enjoyable. At times, Huson’s teachings sounded repetitive because repeated themes emerge as the book goes on through the secrets. Yet even this taught me something: through the repetition, I came to see how doing any of the practices would shift my mindset and positively affect my earnings, and doing them mattered more than doing them perfectly or all at once.
The Secrets of Six-Figure Women gives clarifying insights and practical tools for women seeking to do what we can to jump the track from under-earning to high-earning. Women are so rarely told straight-up how to empower ourselves out of the land of financial crumbs, yet we know we are the only ones who can actualize our own financial empowerment. As far I can tell today, the patriarchal power structure isn’t going to do it for us or even with us.
My big takeaway is this: before women set off trying to undo under-earning and achieving financial freedom using Huson’s 8 practices, women need to become willing to take a big mindset leap that catapults us from a mindset based on assumed scarcity to earned abundance. I for one am ready.
I am also struck once again that this book is another example of two themes that have animated every endeavor in my life in which I have sought empowerment and positive change: willingness and mindset. If you’re not in love with where you are in your life, you gotta make moves to get to a new place. You have to be able to identify what’s blocking your path so you can move that stuff out of the way and get on with the life you want and deserve. In order to get that life, you need to leave the comfort of your smaller thinking and venture into the uncharted territory of new, bigger, unfamiliar ways of thinking. You’re gonna start the journey with little more than the pilot-light of faith that where you’re going has got to be better than where you’ve been.
Two of Huson’s eight practices for achieving high-earning were particularly useful to me at this time in my life and the life of my business:
#3: Focus on fulfilling your values rather than achieving financial goals: This practice gave me a way to think about the nonnegotiable code I live and work by as my sustenance in the journey towards financial power, as a source of strength and guidance at every point along the way. I know firsthand and teach clients about the myriad ways that having a value-based business or approach to leadership adds value to a business or career. Huson’s discovery of focusing on fulfilling your values rather than your financial goals was a common thread among high-earning women gave me a new way to think about the value of my values and how this can power higher earnings.
#5 Feel the fear. Have the doubts. Go for it anyway: Huson doesn’t pretend facing down fears and insecurities is an easy thing to do, but she doesn’t mince words either: If you want to earn more, get brave and then get going. Huson and the high-earners she interviews make it clear you don’t need a full plan to start and demonstrate that fear is a normal part of the process and a pitfall towards paralysis that women need to avoid over and over. This is a theme that repeats in my personal development pursuits: Don’t overthink. Don’t overplan. Do start. Somewhere. Now. Progress not perfection. This is still a hard one for me, but I’m getting better all the time.
We need to confront the fact that women today still don’t make $1’s pay for $1’s work in the United States, and that my Black, Latina, and indigenous sisters earn only a paltry portion of my 76 cents.
I came away from this book thinking about how in so many ways, under-earning is a mindset problem that leads to a financial problem, not the other way around. Fortunately, it’s also a problem any woman can correct if we develop a burning desire to change that jolts us into action. Money is among the most charged topics in our society; for women it’s a very complicated one loaded with the dynamics of sexism and and often other intersecting discriminations such as racism. We may not have been able to control what beliefs were put in our minds about money from childhood until now, or what we weren’t taught because we were girls, or that we live in a patriarchy that depends on our lack of power to survive, but we still own and control our mindset. That is indisputable, and liberating. It’s a nice bonus that overhauling our mindset can up our earnings, which kicks the patriarchy where it counts.
It takes moxie to be a woman in the world who sets off to unlearn and reclaim your story as a financial being. We need to step into uncomfortable zones if we are going to stop mindlessly participating in the perpetuation of the wage gap. We need to confront all the messages that we and our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers ingested regarding our relationship to money and money’s relationship to us, and arrest our inherited disconnection to it. We need to contend with the financial messages the men in our families learned and passed on, too. We need to stand in the path of the forces that want the cumulative suppression of women’s earnings to proceed, and that want my daughters to expect less, ask for less, then learn to live on less. We need to confront the fact that women today still don’t make $1’s pay for $1’s work in the United States, and that my Black, Latina, and indigenous sisters earn only a paltry portion of my 76 cents. We need to call out the relative absence of women in leadership positions in the financial industry. And we need to reckon with the mental and emotional underpinnings of under-earning if we are to overcome it.
And finally, we need reinforcements. We need to band together with our sisters who are also sick and tired of under-earning. We need women who have recovered from under-earning and achieved high-earning. We need to learn and practice this new mindset in safe spaces with people who understand how complicated and hard it is. And we need allies — I’m looking at you, men! — who are committed to activating their privilege to clear away some of the obstacles we confront. Need some tips, guys? Here you go.
Simply put, remapping your financial mindset is hard work. And it’s also really, really important work for women that benefits all of us. Fortunately, Barbara Huson’s book shows that it is also doable because it features the stories of women who have done it. This makes The Secrets of Six-Figure Women a source of practical encouragement and necessary inspiration that deserves a spot in the toolbox of any woman ready to get on the path towards financial abundance and bring her sisters along with her.
Check out Barbara Huson’s website for more information on her books, coaching, and seminars.
Originally published November 4, 2019 on Medium.
Nancy is a Baltimore native who came to communications and marketing through her work in public health. In 2014 she took an entrepreneurial leap of faith to start Asana Consulting and she found her wings.
