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Grab your money by the mindset, and other lessons for women seeking financial liberation from author Barbara Huson
Where I live in the U.S., summer is in the rearview mirror and winter is on the horizon yet there’s no change in sight for this open-season on women. It feels like my sisters and I are banging our collective heads against walls everywhere we turn in this society where women’s rights to mind, body, respect, dignity, and a dollar for a dollar’s work is still a radical notion.
Last spring, a teacher of mine told me about Barbara Huson’s writing and teaching which focuses on empowering women to overcome under-earning and achieve high-earning and more financial power. I am a feminist, a woman business owner with a lot of clients who are also women leaders, a mother of two daughters, and a social and political activist for women’s and girls’ rights. And I am also a woman who has fit the “underearner” label at many points along my 25-year career path so far. Since becoming a business owner five years ago, I have developed a voracious appetite for learning about the forces that shut off women’s access to financial power and building my knowledge about what women can do to counteract those forces and achieve economic empowerment and financial dignity. I was very interested in learning from Huson on the topic of women’s financial power through the lens of earnings, so I put Huson’s book Secrets of Six-Figure Women: Surprising Strategies to Up Your Earnings and Change Your Life on my summer reading list and listened to it on a summer road trip. Here are my takeaways from the book and reflections on the topic.
Barbara Huson (formerly Stanny) has published a total of six books on women and finance. I was particularly interested in Huson’s use of the concept of underearning as an entrypoint for educating women about money and power. This book shares the results of Huson’s years of research with six-figure women, specifically her discovery of eight secrets to becoming a high earner. The result is a unique and valuable framework for women to learn new skills that stop under-earning and support high-earning.
I want to end underearning for any women reading this now, so let’s get right down to those secrets first so you can start practicing them. They are:
