Your Money Story Shapes Your Leadership Story

Every leader has a story. For Black women, one of the most powerful — yet often unexamined — is our money story.

Our money story is the set of beliefs we’ve internalized about money, worth, and possibility. And whether we realize it or not, it shows up in how we lead.

Where Your Money Story Begins

Your money story didn’t start with your first paycheck. It began in the lessons you absorbed growing up.

• Maybe you heard “money doesn’t grow on trees” every time you asked for something.

• Maybe you watched your mother or grandmother stretch a dollar to cover everyone else’s needs, while putting her own last.

• Maybe you learned that money slips away quickly, so holding on tight was the only way to feel secure.

These early experiences sink deep. They don’t just shape how you handle money — they shape what you believe about yourself. About what you deserve. About what’s possible for you. And unless we pause to examine them, we carry those beliefs into leadership.

How Money Stories Show Up in Leadership

For Black women in leadership, those inherited money stories often manifest as:

• Overworking to prove your worth. Believing your value is measured by how much you produce.

• Struggling to negotiate. Accepting less than you deserve because asking feels risky or “too much.”

• Carrying others’ weight. Equating leadership with financial and emotional responsibility for everyone else.

• Confusing worth with sacrifice. Believing boundaries mean you’re selfish.

Sound familiar? These patterns don’t come out of nowhere. They’re the echoes of a money story you didn’t write — but have been living out.

What It Means to Rewrite Your Story

Here’s the good news: your money story is not fixed. You can rewrite it.

And rewriting it doesn’t just mean earning more, saving differently, or hitting new financial milestones. It means redefining your relationship with worth.

• It’s choosing to believe you are valuable apart from performance or sacrifice.

• It’s giving yourself permission to rest, to ask, to receive — without guilt.

• It’s shifting from leadership as survival to leadership as sovereignty.

• It’s modeling for others what freedom and abundance look like in real time.

When you rewrite your money story, you release the cycle of scarcity and step into leadership that is lighter, freer, and rooted in authenticity.

Why This Lands Differently for Black Women

It’s important to say this: talking about money stories hits differently for Black women.

Because our stories are layered with more than personal belief — they’re shaped by generational labor, cultural expectation, and systemic inequity.

We’ve been taught to “make a way out of no way.”

We’ve been praised for resilience, but rarely resourced for rest.

We’ve been told to be grateful, even when underpaid.

We’ve been expected to carry families, communities, and institutions on our backs — often at the expense of ourselves.

So when a Black woman rewrites her money story, she is not just choosing abundance for herself. She is breaking cycles. She is reclaiming her worth. She is leading from a place of wholeness that creates ripple effects far beyond her own life.

The Deeper Truth

Sis, your worth has never been tied to your bank account, your productivity, or how much you sacrifice for others.

Your worth is inherent. Your leadership is enough. And you have the right — and the power — to write a money story that reflects that truth.

Reflection

What part of your money story are you still carrying that no longer serves your leadership? And what story would you write instead?

be well, sis