What My Mother Left Me
Four years ago, my mother passed away and left my siblings and me an inheritance. When the money arrived in my bank account, I felt paralysed. For way too long, I left the money in the account because I had no idea what to do with it.
My mom, being of her generation, stayed with the same employer for most of her working life. She put a little aside every month. She was given access to a financial adviser who advised her for decades, and I’m happy to say his advice was good.
When I started my own company, I did what felt like the responsible thing: I hired an accountant, a very expensive one. Looking back, I wasn’t paying for her expertise; I was paying her to hold a fear I didn’t want to look at myself. I was paying to avoid anxiety and overwhelm.
My business gave me real things; it gave me a confidence in myself I didn’t have before, which carried into other parts of my life. I assumed the financial stability would follow the confidence. It didn’t. They turned out to be two completely different things.
Neither my mom nor I was financially literate. Neither of us was ever handed the thing underneath both of those: the actual skill of understanding money ourselves. We were both given fish. Neither of us was taught to fish.
I don’t think we are the only ones. Most of us were never taught how money actually works, how to protect what we have, how to manage the risk, or how to grow it. Not in school or at home. Definitely not from our mothers. So I’m taking a step towards changing that. I’m opening up a conversation about it at the Lighthouse Lab.
In June, I co-hosted a Lighthouse Lab with Jole Berlage-Buccellati about money beliefs. We looked at how much of what blocks us around money doesn’t live in the mind; it lives in the body, passed down from our ancestors, who survived things we have no memory of ourselves.
So for our next one, on Tuesday the 8th of September, we are looking into a more practical aspect of money:
Financial Confidence, From Fog To Focus with Daniel Alberts from Coherent Wealth.
Daniel set up Coherent Wealth after more than 25 years working across business and international development in the US, the Netherlands, Colombia, Mozambique and Kenya, where he now lives. He’s not a financial adviser; he won’t tell you what to buy or sell. His work is about helping people step back from the noise - accounts, pensions, property, plans - and see the whole picture clearly enough to make their own decisions. He will share what he learned from his personal experience and take us through a simple visual exercise, the personal wealth canvas, to help us move from financial jargon to real life.
The session runs 90 minutes. There’s a natural break at 60 minutes if you need to go. The final 30 minutes are open questions. It’s recorded, but the recording won’t be shared without everyone’s permission.
€10 to join, free if you’re a Her Circle Club member.
I’m planning to come back to the money topic from different angles. So I want to hear your questions and what else you would like to explore in future Lighthouse Labs.
👉 Reserve your seat: https://bookwhen.com/thinkvisual/e/ev-sbaq2-20260908110000
👉 Daniel wrote a piece about building an annual ritual for stepping back from the day-to-day money noise and asking the bigger questions together. Worth a read before Tuesday: Tired of living in the land of Maybe & Perhaps?
Hope to see you there.
Naomi
