- Stacey Tisdale previously held roles as a financial journalist at The Wall Street Journal and CNN.
- She found herself constantly stressed out and making bad financial decisions.
- Tisdale uncovered her “money script” to understand her behavior and change her relationship with money.
Stacey Tisdale was working her dream job as a financial journalist with some of the biggest media organizations in the business: the Wall Street Journal, CBS and CNN, just to name a few, but despite her success, she was unfulfilled. She was highly stressed and she wasn’t making the best decisions with her money.
“I was playing it safe and it was getting me nowhere,” Tisdale tells Insider. “I was stressed out and wondering what my next step was going to be. I knew that I wanted to continue working in financial journalism and helping people manage their money better, but I had to do it in a different way.”
Tisdale finally realized that she was scared. She had always done what was expected of her.
“I had been conditioned that where I was and what I had was enough and that trying to break away from that would have been crazy,” says Tisdale.
She went to work on changing her life. One day while doing a report for CNN, she asked herself, what is it about money that makes it so difficult for us to get it right? Not only get it right in terms of everyday money management, but also setting ourselves up for financial success.
These questions, and her own desire to get right with money and break down traditional barriers, led her on a 6-year study into financial behavior on what keeps us from breaking away from traditional models, investing in our passions, and finding financial independence.
Tisdale’s journey culminated in a study on financial behavior or “money scripts.” A money scripts is a term used in behavioral finance coined by Rick Kahler, author of “Conscious Finance: Uncover Your Hidden Money Beliefs and Transform the Role of Money in Your Life,” to describe beliefs that we have acquired about money and how it works and are the result of conditioning that begin from the moment we are born.
According to Tisdale there are 3 main money scripts:
Childhood Scripts: Our first education about money comes from our primary caregivers and how we observed them handle money and their ideas and attitudes around money. This is often where our first impressions about …….