Finola Howard (00:03.394)
I have sat across from women who win awards for their work and still can't pay themselves properly at the end of the month. Not once, over and over again. And I've watched something else just as often. The conversation is flowing, the work, the clients, the ideas, all of it lit up. And then it turns to money. And her voice drops. She gets almost embarrassed.
As if the money part of the business is something a bit unseemly, something she shouldn't really be caught talking about. And here's what sits underneath that a fear of looking. Because if she opens the numbers and looks straight at them, it might be worse than she let herself believe. So she doesn't look. She keeps her head down and hopes it sorts itself out. I do an exercise with clients where we look properly together.
And I'll tell you what happens every single time. It frees them. The looking is the thing they were most afraid of. And the looking is exactly what sets them free. Because you cannot grow what you refuse to look at. And the not looking was costing her far more than the truth ever could. I've watched this in too many women now to think it's personal. It isn't a you problem, it's a lie.
That a whole generation of brilliant women were handed. And I want to take it apart properly today, because once you see how it was built, you can't unsee it, and you stop obeying it. Ask her why she doesn't look, and eventually you'll hear a version of the same sentence. Just not a numbers person. Not wired for the money side. Women feel their way through business, intuitive, creative, caring. Men do the figures. That's just how it is.
It's so common we don't even hear it anymore. It sounds like a plain fact about how she's made. And that's the thing we end today. Because it isn't a fact. And when you find out where it actually came from, you're going to be angry. I was. So let me take you back because it matters. It's the nineteen sixties. Two scientists at the California Institute of Technology, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga, were studying patients with severe epilepsy.
Finola Howard (02:27.182)
To stop the seizure spreading, surgeons had cut the corpus callusum, the thick bridge of around 200 million nerve fibers that joins the two halves of the brain. Sperry and Gazanica studied what happened when the two sides could no longer talk to each other, and they found that the hemispheres do specialize. Language sits mostly on the left, spatial awareness mostly on the right. This was real, careful Nobel Prize winning science.
Sperry won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for it in 1981. And I want to be fair to it because the science for that was sound. And then the culture got hold of it. And then the culture did what culture does. It took the left hemisphere handles, the structure of language, and turned it into the left brain is cold, logical, spreadsheet loving accountant. It took the right hemispheric handles, spatial information.
And turned it into the right brain is a free-spirited artistic dreamer. A careful finding about where certain processing happens became a personality horoscope. And by 1979 there was a best-selling book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, promising that you could unlock hidden genius by switching sides. Schools started sorting children, corporate away days started sorting adults, and you, a left brain or right brain thinker,
You've probably done the quest the quiz. But none of that was true. Sorry. And then the culture got hold of it. And the culture did what culture does. It took the left hemisphere, handles the structure of language, and turned it into the left brain is a cold, logical, spreadsheet-loving accountant. Then it took the right hemisphere handles spatial information and turned it into.
The right brain is free spirited artistic dreamer. A careful finding about where certain processing happens actually became a personality horoscope. So by 1979, there was actually a best selling book drawing on the right side of the brain, promising that you could unlock hidden genius by switching sides. Schools started sorting children. Corporate away days started sorting adults. Are you a left brain or a right brain thinking?
Finola Howard (04:56.408)
You've probably done that quiz. I think I've done it loads of times. But none of it's true. And here's how we know for certain. In twenty thirteen, neuroscientists at the University of Utah did this study that should have ended this forever. They took brain scans of more than a thousand people, one thousand and eleven to be exact, and they went looking for it. For the left-brained person, for the right-brained person, for anyone at all.
Who had a genuinely stronger network on one side. They broke each brain into more than seven thousand regions and measured. It was published in a peer reviewed scientific journal plus one, and you can read it for yourself. They found no one. Not one dominant scient brain in over a thousand people. Yes, particular tasks lean to particular regions, but nobody is running their life off one half.
Both sides work together, connection by connection, joined by that bridge constantly for almost everything you do. When you do the hard sum, both halves are working. When you write the beautiful thing, both halves are working. So the entire foundation of I'm not worried for numbers, the idea that there's a logic department in the brain and yours came switched off, that foundation is made of nothing. It was never there.
You were sold a brain that does not exist. So here's the part that made me angry, okay? Take that invented split, logic on one side, feeling on the other, and lay it over men and women. And you get the exact inheritance every woman listening was handed. Logic and money filed on the men's side. Feeling and care filed on the women's side. And there's a name for this. The academic
Cordelia Fine calls it neurosexism, using dodgy, oversimplified brain science to justify the old stereotypes that make them sound like biology. And here's the tell that the whole thing is invented. The right brain, the side everyone calls the soft, intuitive female side, is the side that actually runs spatial reasoning and map reading. The very things men have always told us they were better at. The story contradicts its own science.
Finola Howard (07:21.592)
Just doesn't hold together because there's nothing underneath it to hold. And when the scientists went looking properly, they found something even bigger. A neuroscientist called Daphna Joel at Tel Aviv University analysed brain after brain and published it in one of the most respected scientific journals in the world. Her finding there is no such thing as a male brain or a female brain. Every human brain is a mosaic.
A one off mix of features, some more common in women, some more common in men. Most shared by both. There is far more variation between one woman and another than there is between women and men as groups. Two neat categories, male brain and female brain, just do not exist. They never did. So let me say the true thing as plainly as I can. It was never that you couldn't do money.
Money got filed on the wrong side of a line that isn't actually real, and the line itself was drawn to keep you out. You didn't fail at something you were built for, you were talked out of something that was always yours. So watch now how neatly it played out in money. Women were handed the small money, the household cash, the grocery budget, the coupons, stretching the euro till it squeaked.
Defense, scarcity, making do. And men were handed the big money, investing, growth, building wealth, offense. So a whole generation of women grew up believing a very specific, very quiet version of themselves. I'm good at budgeting, I'm bad with money. Good at defending the little you have, not built for growing it. Then the finance industry finished the job.
It spoke in a hard, aggressive, jargon heavy voice beat the market, pick the winners, a voice built by men for men, and a woman who'd already been told she wasn't wired for it, heard that voice and did the sensible thing, she stepped back. She handed the big decisions to someone else, or she just didn't look. And when she was careful, when she didn't gamble, didn't chase, didn't bet the house, she was called timid.
Finola Howard (09:49.834)
Emotionally risk-averse, when in fact her caution was completely rational. She was more likely to have been paid less, more likely to have taken career breaks to care for people, more likely to live longer and need the money to last. She had less room for error than the man beside her, and she was called nervous for respecting that. None of this is a grievance against men, it's a lie, none of us wrote and all of us inherited.
But I want you to feel the size of what it took, because it took the money conversation right out of the hands of the people who were, it turns out, quietly better at it. Because here's what happens. When you stop listening to the story and look at the evidence, Fidelity, one of the biggest investment firms in the world, they hold a retirement and investment accounts of tens of millions of people, studied more than five million of their own accounts over 10 years.
Women didn't just hold their own against men, they outperformed them. And not because they were better at the maths, because they traded less, chased less, and stayed the course when everyone else panicked. Two finance professors at the University of California, Brad Barber and Terence Odien, studied 35,000 households and found the other half of the same picture. Men traded 45% more than women.
Single men sixty-seven percent more and all that extra tig activity, all that extra overconfidence cost them returns. It wasn't skill, it was noise. And Warwick Business School in England studied nearly 3,000 investors and found women outperformed men by close to 2% a year. Read that back. The group told for a hundred years that they weren't wired for money, turnout when they engage with it.
To be better at it for reasons of nerve and discipline, not arithmetic. The ability was never missing. It was never the ability. It was the permission to look that got taken. So if the split in both sides of the brain is a myth, and the ability was never the problem, what is money really? It's not a cold calculation you were locked out of. Money is an act of creation.
Finola Howard (12:17.366)
And creating is the one thing you have never once doubted you could do. You created the business, you created the offer, you built the reputation that wins the award. Money is made the same way. It is built on purpose by someone who decides to build it. And the only reason you couldn't see that the that is the oldest reason there is, you have been standing too close to your own money to see the shape of it. From inside.
From inside, it looks like a foreign country you were never given the language for. Step back and it's not foreign at all. It's another thing you build. The same creative faculty you trust completely, just pointed at the part of the business you were told to keep the lid on. So we're here's what all of this is building to, and it's bigger than money. For weeks I've been telling you that the parts of your business were never meant to run in separate boxes.
You're marketing over here, you're selling over there, your content somewhere else. The growth you're missing is hiding in the connections, not the pieces. But integration was never really about the business. The business is just where you can finally see it. The thing being integrated is you. Because you were taught to cut yourself into parts. The creative part, that one's allowed. That's the acceptable, acceptable kind of woman in business. And the money part, that one's not yours.
Hand it over, don't look. Don't want it too openly. Money is the last box, and it's the one you are most encouraged to keep shut, because keeping it shut kept you small and kept you safe and kept you exactly where the story wanted to keep you. Integration means bringing that disowned part home. All of you and all of your business running as one whole. And here's what that actually gives you.
The thing I most want you to hear. It gives you space. Space to be your most genius self because you are no longer spending half your energy holding a part of yourself at arm's length, braced every time the subject turns to money. When it's all integrated, there is nothing to brace against. There's just the work and you whole together. And when you're whole, you get to follow your joy.
Finola Howard (14:44.462)
And this is the part they never tell you. The part, the whole lie was designed to stop you finding out. When you follow your joy and you do it your way and you bring the money inside instead of leaving it out in the cold, the money follows. Not as a reward for being good, as proof. Proof that the money becomes the evidence that trusting your joy and your genius and your own way of doing this.
Was right all along. The money proves you right. That's what it's for. And I don't want you to leave with a feeling. I want you to leave with the place where it becomes real. It's your selling calendar. When you build your year around what you're selling and when, and when the whole thing is designed from the money outward, instead of the money being whatever's left at the end of the year of noise.
Money stops being the thing that happens to you. It becomes something you design on purpose, out loud. That is the last part of yourself brought home into the whole. So that is exactly what we build in your business integrated. Over eight weeks, live together, we build the whole engine. Your voice, your customer, your offers, and the content that runs off your selling calendar. The money designed into the business from the start.
Not bolted on the side and dreaded. And we finish before the year ends. So you walk into next year already set up instead of building it mid-flight in January. One of the women I've done this work with, Kerry, said the shift better than I can. She said it went from my work is something that happens to me to I have control over my business and my own business development. That's it. That's what looking gives you. Control where there used to be dread.
Doors close on the sixth of October, the same day we begin. The link is in the show notes. And I want to be honest about why this matters beyond your business. Every single time a woman stops believing she isn't wired for money, every time she looks at it straight and builds it on purpose, a lie that is held for a hundred years loses a little of its grip. This is not just your revenue, it's the thing itself coming apart one woman at a time. So this is the invitation.
Finola Howard (17:10.86)
And it's the revolution. And they're the same sentence. Stop handing over this part of your business, this part of yourself. You're told was never yours. Bring it home. You were never bad with money. You were sold a brain that doesn't exist. So come and build the one you actually have.
Before you go, one thing. If this landed, if you felt the flinch when the conversation turned into money and then felt it start to loosen, then this episode was never only for you. You know a woman who is brilliant at what she does and quietly certain she's just not built for the money side. Please send it to her. That is how a lile this old actually comes apart. One woman handing the truth to the next until none of us believe it anymore. That is the whole idea of this show. A truth told.
Clearly enough that you carry it on. So share this with someone you know needs it. And if you want the rest of this conversation, how you build a business that's unmistakably yours with the money built right into it, subscribe and the next episode will find you. I'm Finola Howard. This is your truth shared. Go and build the one you actually have.
