The Scraps I Mistook for Enough

James and I are back working with our business coach, making plans for seriously growing the business. At the same time, I'm deep in my VITA love, sex and relationship coaching training where a massive chunk of the learning is done by practising coaching with each other.

This week's practice sat inside a module on helping clients get what they want. Which sounds simple. It is not simple. Because the module isn't really about the wanting. It's about how much you believe you're allowed to have the thing you want, if you think you’re worthy of it, and whether, underneath that belief, you think you actually deserve it.

I want to stop on those words for a second, because they are huge. Worthy and deserve are not the same weight. Worthy feels almost gentle by comparison - something you can talk yourself into on a good day, with the right playlist and enough affirmations. Deserve is heavier. Deserve has judgement built into it. Deserve asks: have you earned this, specifically, or are you just hoping nobody checks?

So when it came to my turn in the practice, and the question was how much I believe I deserve the income goal I've set for my business this year, I didn't answer with a number. I'm not going to tell you the number here either, and I noticed myself flinch even writing that sentence - which is its own small data point. What I answered with was grief. Not a polite trickle of it. A flood.

Grief for every scrap I have spent my life accepting and calling enough. Scraps of love. Scraps of belonging. Scraps of kindness. Scraps of tolerance - being tolerated, rather than wanted, and somehow filing that under fine. Scraps of money, taken and made to stretch, while telling myself I was being sensible rather than small. Scraps of scraps, if that makes sense. The scrap of the scrap. That's how deep the habit goes.

I help women change their lives for a living. I have a stack of testimonials from clients who will tell you, unprompted, that working with me moved something fundamental for them - that they left jobs, left relationships, found their voice, stopped shrinking, got what they wanted. I know this is true. I have watched it happen, over and over, for a decade. And still, sitting in that practice session, some old and very quiet part of me asked: yes, but am I worth getting paid properly for it? I'll happily walk a client through six months of belief work and then go home and negotiate against myself in an invoice email.

That question and I have history. It has been ten years (pretty much to the day) since I left, or maybe was sacked from, my last proper corporate job. Ten years of "doing the money work." Every single time I think I've finally cracked it, finally cleared the belief, a new one turns up wanting its turn. This week it introduced itself as grief. Last time it was something else. It will probably be something else again. That used to frustrate me. Now I mostly just recognise the knock at the door.

Because even after working on this for a literal decade, I know there's something here about women and money. Women and money are not friends. We were never introduced properly. We were told we were not 'good' at it. We were taught to be careful with it, grateful for it, and never, ever seen chasing it too openly. Wanting money as a woman gets coded as something slightly off - grasping, hard, unfeminine, a "bit much". A woman with a healthy appetite for money (or anything really!) is still, somehow, a character note. Suspicious. In need of an explanation. So we learn to want it quietly, apologetically, with a joke ready in case anyone asks why we charge what we charge. Mine used to be "well, I have to eat too, ha ha". And then we wonder why the money conversation in our own heads is such a flipping mess. It isn't really about spreadsheets or income targets. It's about who gets to want money (or anything really!!) out loud, and who's supposed to sit quietly and be thankful for what lands in their lap.

The last time I felt this particular type of grief was when I got my ADHD diagnosis, which came so late in my life: what would things have looked like if I'd had that information sooner? Not just the practical scaffolding, though there's a lot of that too, but the permission. If I'd known earlier that my brain worked differently, would I have spent quite so long believing that struggling quietly was just the price of admission? Would I have built my sense of worth on scraps quite so readily, if someone had told me sooner that I wasn't broken, just wired differently?

I don't know. Nobody can answer a what-if like that with any certainty. But I think the not-knowing is part of why the grief this week hit as hard as it did. It wasn't only about this year's revenue goal. It was about every year before it, where I quietly agreed to want less because wanting the full amount felt greedy, or difficult, or like I was asking to be told no in a particularly humiliating way.

Grief, in this context, isn't a sign that something's gone wrong. It's your system finally being honest about a script that's been running, unpaid, for a very long time. The work isn't to bypass it or distract yourself (which I am so prone to do). The work is to let it move fully, to feel the feelings and then ask what you're actually going to do differently now that you can see it clearly. The only way is through.

So, a few questions, for you as much as for me, because I said I'd ask them and I meant it:

• Where in your life have you mistaken scraps for enough, and quietly called it gratitude?

• Is there a difference, for you, between feeling worthy of something and feeling like you deserve it? Which one do you struggle with more?

• If you fully believed you deserved the thing you're asking for this year, the salary, the relationship, the client roster, the rest, whatever it is, what would you do differently this week, starting now?

• And who, if you trace it back, first taught you that wanting more made you too much?

Don't rush to resolve any of that. The resolving isn't really the point. The noticing is.

If any of this landed somewhere, Rise Above Cohort 2 opens 9 September, and this is precisely the ground we work on together: not tactics, not strategy, but the belief underneath it. The deprogramming that has to happen before you can even let yourself want more than scraps (of whatever it is for you), let alone ask for it. https://www.michelleminnikin.com/rise-above-the-group-experience

Mx