For most of my twenties, I believed wealth was a problem to be solved through strategy.

So I did what intelligent, ambitious women are taught to do.
I increased my marketable skills. I increased my income. I studied leverage. I learned how money moves– how it compounds, how it accelerates when placed correctly, how to make capital work instead of laboring endlessly for it. I understood the mechanics.

I was disciplined. I was methodical. I was very good at it… and “it worked.”

I became a millionaire by thirty.

I remember waiting– quietly, optimistically– for the internal shift I assumed would follow. The moment when my body would finally exhale. When something in my chest would loosen. When the vigilance would dissolve into relief.

It didn’t.

Nothing softened.

If anything, my nervous system tightened. Not dramatically – just enough to stay perpetually braced. The kind of vigilance that passes for ambition. The kind that feels “responsible.” Protective.

Because now “there was something to lose.”

What had once been “build the wealth” subtly became “keep building — and don’t fuck it up.”

At the time, I didn’t question it. I hadn’t yet found coaching or somatic work or language for nervous systems. I told myself this was normal. This was what success felt like. This was the price of having more.

Ease, I assumed, would come later.

Later turned out to be remarkably evasive.

The irony is that I didn’t come to coaching because I was spiritually curious. I came to it because I was a bored, resentful 9-5 employee who had become very good with money — good enough to build off an offramp out of a job I hated.

I briefly considered becoming a financial planner.
(Then remembered I despise spreadsheets.)

When I talked through alternatives, someone asked, casually, “What about being a money coach?”

I remember thinking: What is a coach?

So I started listening to podcasts. At first, just to answer that question. But episode by episode, something more uncomfortable began to surface.

People were talking about nervous systems. About low-grade fight-or-flight. About scarcity masquerading as motivation. About achievement and high performance as a trauma response.

I recognized myself immediately.

It felt less like learning something new and more like finally naming and identifying the water I’d been swimming in so deeply I’d been too blind to really see it.

Slowly – inconveniently – the architecture of my relationship to myself, as well as money and wealth, began to unravel.

And that’s when I realized the mistake I’d been making is the same one our culture makes constantly:

Wealth and abundance are not the same thing.

And we treat them as if they are.

The Great Conflation in our Understanding of Wealth

We speak about wealth as though it were singular — a number, a balance sheet, a net worth.

But in lived experience, wealth has at least two distinct axes that are constantly collapsed into one — with devastating consequences on both ends.

Wealth, in the conventional sense, is financial.
It is net worth. Income. Assets. Investments. The compounding effect of money making more money over time.

It is governed largely by cognition: strategy, education, exposure, risk tolerance, and long-range thinking.

Abundance, on the other hand, is energetic.
It is a lived nervous-system state. A felt sense of not just sufficiency, but OVERFLOW and the ease it creates in the body. Abundance is the body’s capacity to experience safety, ease, and presence now, rather than perpetually bracing for what might be lost.

It is governed not by spreadsheets, but by nervous system capacity and regulation.

These two things are often discussed as if they automatically arrive together.

They don’t.

In fact, they are frequently anti-correlated.

You can accumulate extraordinary financial wealth while your nervous system remains stuck in low-grade fight-or-flight – vigilant, guarded, unable to rest without guilt, scanning constantly for threats to what you’ve built, and feeling the need to constantly be “on” for fear of it all disappearing the moment you stop moving.

You can also cultivate deep gratitude, emotional richness, and inner peace while remaining financially constrained — unable or unwilling to translate that internal abundance into material external wealth.

Our culture is not introspective enough to even identify let alone understand this distinction, so it pretends it doesn’t exist.

High-achieving, high-income people are told that if they just make more, they’ll finally feel safe.

And then you have the other end, where manifestation gurus assure people that if they just regulate their energy and become high vibe, the sky will part and millions will flow, and then women don’t understand why feeling good didn’t automatically mint them as multimillionaires.

Both groups are trying to solve a two-axis problem with a one-axis solution.

And both end up confused when it doesn’t work.

The truth — the one we rarely articulate — is this:

Wealth and abundance are completely different things.

 They develop on different learning curves.
They require different skills and capacities.
And they do not automatically mature together.

Only at higher levels of self actualization and higher consciousness – what the Greeks would have called aretē, excellence of being – does a woman have the capacity to integrate both.

Until then, most people overdevelop one axis and neglect the other.

And that neglect has a cost.

The problem isn’t that women are doing wealth “wrong.”

It’s that we’re being handed half a manual and then feel confused by the results.

Over time — watching myself, my clients, and an alarming number of brilliant women — I realized the same patterns kept repeating. Not because anyone lacked intelligence or effort.

Because everyone was solving the wrong problem, and that’s when I saw what was really happening— once you really see this, it becomes difficult to unsee.

If you’ve ever wondered why someone with more than enough still can’t relax — or why someone with big dreams and a deep well of gratitude never seems to translate that energy into material expansion — this is the missing link.

The problem was never motivation or intelligence.
It was solving a two-axis problem with a one-axis solution.

This Arete of Wealth finally names what we’ve all been sensing but couldn’t quite articulate until now:

These are the four common configurations — not personalities, not moral judgments, but developmental states within external financials and internal abundance.

Because most of my work is with high-performing, high-income women, I’ll spend the most time where their friction actually lives: plentiful money without internal ease, and the path to integrating both.

1. Prisoners of Plenty

High Money · Low Abundance

This is where a massive percentage of high earners live, so I will dive most deeply into this quadrant.

There is plentiful money in this quadrant.
They learned the strategies and have built to extraordinary levels of income.

And internally, they are still waiting.

Waiting for the day it finally feels like enough.
Waiting for the moment they can relax without consequences.
Waiting for an imaginary finish line that keeps quietly receding.

In its shadow, this archetype looks like Ebenezer Scrooge.
But far more often, Prisoners of Plenty are not unethical or cruel.

They are conscientious women running unresolved survival inside a luxury container.

Core nervous system orientation:

Their nervous system never fully stands down.

Not in obvious panic – but in a constant, low-grade vigilance.

A subtle bracing that lives beneath competence and polish.
A background hum of monitoring, scanning, being “on alert.”
A felt sense that something important could slip if attention lapses.

Relaxation doesn’t register as nourishing.
It registers as risky, and is only allowed after overfunctioning/overworking.

The belief structure underneath:
What I have is fragile.
I’m only safe because I’m paying attention.
If I stop optimizing, I’ll slide backward.
Enough is always one move away.

Often braided through these beliefs is a moral charge:
Hard work equals virtue.
Ease feels suspicious.
Rest must be earned — and tightly managed.

Observable patterns:
The goalpost is always moving.
Money is enjoyed mentally, but there is no relief or relaxation in the body.
Calendars are optimized, but never spacious.
Rest exists only as recovery for future output.
Pleasure requires justification.

From the outside, it looks impressive.
From the inside, it feels tight and neverending.

The hidden cost:
Money increases pressure instead of freedom.
Wealth amplifies responsibility but never peace.
Life often narrows as resources expand.

Many women here quietly wonder:
If this isn’t the moment it finally feels good… when is?

The developmental edge:
This is not solved by making more money, though there is room for investing and wealth development.
The work here is multifaceted, both unknotting outdated belief systems from the mind and expanding the nervous system’s capacity to live within a parasympathetic state (fancy words for feeling restful and relaxed as an energetic baseline instead of feeling constantly “on” and “on edge.”)

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2. The Prosperous Sovereign

High Wealth · High Abundance

A Prosperous Sovereign is a woman whose financial intelligence and internal energetic and emotional capacity have both reached full flourishing.

This is the rarest quadrant and where women within the House of Arete reside.

High financial resources combined with a deep felt sense of ease and power.

Core orientation

• She understands how money actually works – cash flow, opportunity cost, risk bands, liquidity, time horizons. Because of this, uncertainty does not read as danger and she wields her capital from a place of power.
  
• Her nervous system stays online during financial decision-making. She does not outsource authority to fear, urgency, or social proof.
  
• Big money can circulate through her without tightening or collapsing her nervous system.
  

What this looks like in practice

• She allocates capital intentionally: some for growth, some for preservation, some for optionality. She knows why each dollar sits where it does.
  
• She can tolerate short-term volatility without narrating it as personal failure or impending collapse.
  
• She invests without chasing. She spends with joy, lightness and pleasure. She holds reserves without hoarding.
  
• She does not need to constantly “check” her accounts to feel safe – she is well regulated, and allows the ease that her financials provide to be a felt, lived state in her body.
  

This is not luck.
It is what happens when financial mastery and somatic and energetic capacity converge.

She knows how to grow, allocate, and steward capital – how risk actually works, how cycles move, how wealth compounds when it’s treated as a system rather than an arbitrary scoreboard.

And in tandem she has trained her body to not only tolerate but fully allow ease, to remain regulated under external pressure, and to experience safety without needing her external resources to create it for her.

This is the Arete of Wealth realized.

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3. Stuck in Survival

Low Wealth · Low Abundance

Here, scarcity is both external and internal.

Resources are constrained. Time feels urgent. Safety feels conditional.
The nervous system is organized around immediacy and threat.

Expansion is difficult because the body is focused on getting through the week.

This is not simply a mindset or tangible money skills failure.
It is a capacity issue.

No amount of mindset work and strategy alone can override a system trained for survival.

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4. Rich in Spirit

Low Wealth · High Abundance

People here possess a deep feeling of internal contentment and emotional richness.

They are present. Grateful. Emotionally rich.
Their nervous systems feel resourced even when finances do not.

Sometimes this is wisdom.
Sometimes it is contentment.
Sometimes it is resignation or spiritual bypassing.

Without financial skill-building and a felt sense of desire for more externally, abundance remains internalized rather than expressed in the material world.

This quadrant can be a genuine resting place – or a glass ceiling.

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Why Money Doesn’t Calm Us — And Never Has

We have built an entire culture around the idea that money will create or change how we feel.

When it doesn’t, we assume the solution is more money.

When people feel calm without it, we assume they lack ambition.

Both assumptions are intellectually lazy.
Neither is true.

External financial skill and internal energetic abundance are learned on different timelines, rewarded by different systems, and rarely cultivated together.

Which is why so many people live half-realized lives – financially resourced but restless, or grateful and regulated but financially constrained.

Wealth without internal capacity becomes extraordinary stress and burnout, while energetic abundance without financial skill stalls out very quickly.

The synthesis is rare not because it is hard or complicated, but because most people mistake proficiency in one domain for the whole solution, which it will never provide.

Most people spend their lives mastering one and wondering why the other never arrives.

The Prosperous Sovereign is what emerges when a woman can desire at scale — when her financial skill and internal capacity expand together, and wealth finally feels the way she always thought it would: spacious, pleasurable, and radiantly, deeply, wildly alive.