There is an assumption that financial expertise is transferable and that what you know professionally follows you home. Tara Saxon built an entire career on proving otherwise.
In this episode of the Women Leading the Way interview series, the Drofa Comms team sat down with Tara Saxon, Founder and Certified Money Coach at The Intentional Wealth Co. We spoke about the distance between knowing what to do with money and actually doing it, and why financial literacy alone isn’t a panacea.
Tara’s CV reads like a finance highlight reel: Arthur Andersen, NAB, American Express, BankWest, HSBC. Yet, none of it stopped her from ending up financially vulnerable after stepping away from income when she became a mother. That moment, broken, humiliated, sitting on the living room floor with every credential the industry could give her, became the entry point for a completely different kind of work.
What she found when she went looking for answers was in behavioural conditioning, intergenerational patterns, and unprocessed financial trauma. They are sitting underneath the advice people couldn’t seem to act on. As she puts it: “You might not remember a single word about money in your household growing up, but I’d bet you remember the feeling in the air when the bills arrived.”
In the interview, Tara explains why high-achieving women in finance can still freeze during salary negotiations despite brilliant track records. She talks about why waking up at 3 am running worst-case scenarios has very little to do with your portfolio.
A great deal, though, has to do with a nervous system that never received the message that you’re safe now. And she says that the women who look most put-together are often carrying the heaviest private pressure.
Her practical advice starts with one distinction. She says: “Separate your professional expertise from your personal relationship with money, because they are not the same.” From there, she encourages getting curious about which fears are genuinely yours and which were inherited. The goal, ultimately, is to build enough capacity to regulate stress. In that case, bold decisions become possible without old patterns pulling you back.
👉 Read the full interview with Tara here: https://womenlead.co.uk/ideas/tara-saxon
