How is your relationship with money?

Our decisions are heavily influenced by our emotional relationship with money — yet we spend almost no time examining it. Discover which of five money types you are.

Most senior leaders I know are financially sophisticated. They read the P&L, understand capital allocation, and speak fluently about return on investment. What surprises them — when we actually go there — is how little of their real money decisions are driven by any of that.

Key takeaways

Our relationship with money forms early. It is shaped by what we saw at home, what we were told about wealth and scarcity, and the emotional experiences we had around financial gain or loss. By the time we reach senior leadership, those patterns are deeply embedded. And they almost never come up in boardrooms — which is precisely why they do so much damage there.

The myth of the rational decision-maker

We like to believe we are homo economicus — the rational actor who weighs evidence, calculates risk, and makes optimal choices. The behavioural economics research of the past thirty years has demolished this idea. When it comes to money, we are not rational. We are emotional, historical, and often completely unaware of what is driving us.

We spend money we do not have to signal status we do not feel. We burn ourselves out because we are terrified of not having enough — even when we have more than we will ever need. We underprice our work because somewhere we absorbed the belief that wanting money is a character flaw. These are not personal finance problems. They are leadership problems. They show up in investment decisions, hiring choices, pricing strategy, and risk appetite.

Alain de Botton describes this dynamic brilliantly in Status Anxiety — the relentless comparison to others, the substitution of external accumulation for internal security. It is not a fringe phenomenon. It is the default condition of most high-achieving people who have never had reason to question it.

What kind of money type are you?

Olivia Mellan, a psychotherapist who has spent decades working on money psychology, identified five dominant money types. In my work with leadership teams, I find these patterns everywhere — not just in personal wealth decisions, but in how leaders run their organisations.

The infographic below maps all five types: what drives each one, what each person secretly believes, and — most usefully — how each pattern shows up in organisational decision-making.

The exercise that actually moves something

Knowing which type you are is the beginning, not the conclusion. What does more is this: share your result with three people who know you well — your partner, a long-standing colleague, a trusted friend — and ask them which type they most recognise in your daily behaviour. Not the type you aspire to. The one they actually see.

The gap between how we see ourselves and how we appear to others is where the real work lives. Almost everyone I know who has done this exercise has been surprised by at least one of the answers.

The leaders who have the most impact on their organisations — financially and otherwise — are not the ones with the best financial models. They are the ones who understand what is running in the background of their own decision-making. That awareness does not guarantee better choices. But its absence almost always guarantees worse ones.

Financial intelligence without self-knowledge is just sophisticated rationalization. You'll always find a good reason to do what your emotions already decided.

Over to you.