The Heroine's journey to Financial Independence
Isn’t that what happens when we start taking charge of our finances? We’ve been thinking one way (“I feel so stupid”); now we have to think another (“I am capable and responsible”). We are called upon to shed our dependency and ignorance, our antiquated beliefs and societal taboos, anything that’s kept us imprisoned in the past. It is “a process of throwing off the old and coming into the new,” says Campbell. Particularly interesting is his observation that, so often, the journey begins with defiance. The hero does something she is not supposed to do.
“Life really begins with the act of disobedience,” Campbell once explained. Take the biblical story of Eve who ate the apple. “Now God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit,” he explains. “But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life.”
In our case, the forbidden fruit is money. To become the initiators of our own lives, we must disobey the cultural prohibitions against our achieving financial independence. Such bravado requires courage — courage to venture beyond the boundaries of what is safe and known, to challenge the taboos, to feel the foreboding, and to keep on going. The opposite of courage is not the absence of fear. It is automatic conformity.
The women who share their stories…are heroines in the true sense of the word. From them, I finally grasped how people who become smart with money are able to muster up the courage to do so. Actually, I sensed what they did long before I fully understood it. And I began following in their footsteps long before I could articulate exactly what I was doing.
It wasn’t until I was asked to speak at a forum on women and money for a local college that I figured out what the process of becoming smart with money was all about. In preparing for my speech, I reread my interviews with smart women and pondered what I had learned. Though their experiences were diverse, these women shared surprising similarities. As I studied the transcripts and thought about my own experience, I became aware of seven themes that ran through their stories like seven common threads woven through a collection of complicated tapestries. These themes, I began to see, were actually a series of recognitions or insights every woman had. These insights, sometimes on the order of epiphanies, ran counter to the myths and beliefs most of us have about money. I call these insights realizations. Every woman I spoke to had come to each of these seven realizations one way or another.
I found these realizations incredibly powerful, remarkably illuminating like mysteries revealed, truths unveiled. I saw that incorporating them into my thinking was what had enabled me finally to start taking financial responsibility for myself. What’s more, I recognized that these seven realizations, when combined form a process. In other words, they become the stepping-stones that mark our way in the heroine’s journey, each taking us one step closer to getting smart about money.
