What Happens When 8 Women Read the Same Book

I asked a simple question on our Zoom earlier this week. How would you describe your relationship with money?

Nobody said healthy.

Not one person. We had women on that call who have built real businesses, left stable corporate careers, figured out genuinely hard things. And when I asked them to describe their relationship with money the words that came back were toxic. Fragile. Difficult. Complicated.

The most optimistic answer on our Zoom, was neutral.

It's not a personal failure. That is a pattern. And it is one of the reasons I run this book club the way I do.

We were reading The Psychology of Money and I will be honest, I picked it because I knew it would crack something open. Morgan Housel does not write about spreadsheets and index funds. He writes about how we actually think about money, which is messy and emotional and shaped by everything that happened to us before we ever earned a dollar of our own.

Most of us did not grow up in households where money was talked about openly. We absorbed whatever was modeled for us, good or bad, and then we went out and built businesses on top of that foundation without ever really examining it.

About forty minutes into the discussion one woman admitted she felt behind. That investing still felt like a language she was supposed to already speak. That money decisions made her more anxious than she let on to pretty much anyone in her life. And then the next woman said it too. And then the next.

And then everyone was just... nodding.

That did not come from the book. That came from finally being in a room where it was safe to say it out loud.

I started She Reads She Leads because I believe what we read shapes what we build. That is still true. But what I have learned running this community is that reading alone only gets you so far. The retention rate for reading alone is roughly 10 percent. Discussing it brings that to 50. Implementing it gets you to 75. Teaching others takes it even further.

We are not here to talk about books. We use books to have the conversations we should have been having all along.

The money conversation is the most important one we have. Not because anyone on our calls needs a lecture. But because so many of us grew up without financial literacy and have been quietly paying for that gap ever since. I include myself in that. Loudly.

When a room full of women entrepreneurs finally admits their relationship with money is toxic or fragile or just... hard, something shifts. The shame loses its grip. The isolation breaks. And suddenly we are not talking about a book anymore. We are talking about real life. Real businesses. Real decisions that real women are navigating right now without nearly enough support.

That is what I want every woman who joins this club to feel. Not informed. Not inspired in a vague way that fades by Thursday. Actually less alone in the specific, complicated, sometimes embarrassing reality of building something from scratch without a roadmap.

We read together every month. We show up on Zoom. We bring our honest reactions and our unfinished thoughts and the parts that made us squirm a little. That is where the good stuff lives. Always in the uncomfortable parts.

If you have been thinking about joining, this is what you are actually joining. Not a book list. A room where someone finally says the thing you have been thinking and you realize you were never as behind as you thought.

Next Zoom is May 19th. We are reading 10x Is Easier Than 2x. The title alone is going to give us a lot to argue about.

Come be in the room.

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