How would you define your money personality?

I'm Maura Ironsmili, and this is the anxious achiever, the show that looks at the intersection of mental health, leadership, and work, and asks, how can we do it all better?

Today's guest says that our relationship with money is often fully formed at a young age before we can even be conscious of it.

But our relationship with and our hang-ups around money can have negative impacts on our work, our families, our self-concept, and more as we grow into adulthood.

We've talked on the show before about how money is often

more about emotions than it is about dollar and cents. Shana Game is a personal finance expert,

and she specializes in thinking about money trauma. She looks at the irrational fears that surround

the way we all interact with money and what we can do about them.

And she helps us figure out how to play detective around the things that trigger us about money.

It's a super helpful and I think really realistic approach that I just love.

She's also a podcast host and author of the book Unraveling Your Relationship with Money.

Here's our conversation.

The first part of your book is called, Why Is Your Relationship with Money So Messed Up? Which is a rhetorical question, I assume, but I'm going to ask it to you, like,

it's a real question. Why is our relationship with money usually so messed up? There is so much

that goes into how we interact with money that we're just not thinking about, right? I talk about

in the book that by age seven, our money personality, our money

habits, our money beliefs are pretty much set in stone, right? It's what we learned or didn't

learn as kids around money. And so that just kind of operates on this like unconscious basis.

So every time we spend money or we interact with money, that story is

playing out, right? Whether we're conscious of it or not. For example, I was just working with a client

and he was like, you know, I like I can't figure out how to make the numbers work and I really

want to hit the school. But like every time I go to spend money, I just do, I just, I'm so irrational,

...