Who Do You Think You Are?

In the opener of the wealth conversation, Dr. Rana Sabra starts with her own story and the saying her father handed her, the voice that made charging well feel like a character flaw, then goes underneath pricing to the real question hiding beneath it: who you believe you are allowed to be. She walks through the research on inherited money scripts and the impostor pattern that hits accomplished women hardest, shows how the same root drives both undercharging and the endless chase for one more qualification, and ends on why she is breaking the belief now, so it never reaches her daughters. Along the way she offers the reframe that changes it and a simple three-step way to bring an unconscious belief to the surface and rewrite it.

What you will take away

· Why your pricing is set by a belief you absorbed in childhood, often without knowing it.

· How the money avoidance script equates wanting more with being a bad person.

· Why achievements never settle the feeling of not having earned it, and what does.

· Why undercharging and endlessly collecting qualifications come from the same root: who you believe you are allowed to be.

· Why a money script does not stop with you, and how to keep from passing it on.

· A three-step way to name, trace, and rewrite the money story you inherited.

One thing to do this week

Finish the sentence, out loud or on paper: the belief about money I inherited is. Then ask whether you ever actually agreed to it.

Welcome to enRICH, the show for women building a business as rich on the inside as it looks from the outside. Each week, Dr. Rana Sabra, global marketing strategist and behavioral scientist, breaks down the psychology behind how people decide, trust, and buy.

This is for women entrepreneurs scaling their business, who are done with generic advice and ready for the next precise thing. 

New episodes every week. Find everything at ranasabra.com.

Let's stay in touch. DM with questions, ideas, or just say hi @ranassabra. Take the free Marketing Clarity Audit at ranasabra.com/quiz. Ten questions, and you'll know exactly where to focus next. Everything lives at ranasabra.com.

Transcript

Why Raising Prices Felt Wrong

SPEAKER_00 0:09

I want to start with something I have never been comfortable admitting. For most of my career raising my prices felt like doing something wrong. Like I was taking more than I had earned and should be a little ashamed of it. I know exactly where that came from. My father, whom I love deeply, used to say in Arabic, Majumia Malun Illa mincha. Oh. It means, more or less, that no fortune is ever gathered except through stinginess or through what is unlawful. He believed it, and given the life he lived, he had his own reasons. And without ever choosing to, I carried that belief into every price I ever set. So each time I went to charge what my work was actually worth, a voice that was not even mine would show up and call it greedy. If you know that voice, in whatever language you first heard it, this episode is for you. I'm Dr. Rena Sabra, and this is Enrich. Welcome back. This is the first episode of what I'm calling the wealth conversation. And I wanted to start with my own story because honestly, I cannot teach things I have not lived myself. That voice I just described, the one that made charging well feel like a character flaw, I have watched it sit inside some of the most talented women I have ever worked with. You can hear it in the way the price comes out quieter than the rest of the sentence. And the discount offered before anyone even asks. So before we get anywhere near pricing tactics or revenue targets, we have to deal with things sitting underneath all of it. What do you actually believe about money? And whether you were ever given permission to want more of it. So for this episode, I ask you to be so honest with yourself and find a quite few moments as you listen. Let me start with the research because honestly, it explains that voice better than I ever could on my own. There is a body of work in financial psychology led by

Money Scripts And Childhood Conditioning

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Dr. Brand Klantz on something called money scripts. A money script is simply a belief about money, and the research found four things about these beliefs that I want you to sit with. They are usually formed, guess when? In childhood. They are passed down through families and cultures, parent to child, generation to generation. They run almost entirely unconscious, so you act on them without ever noticing you're holding them. And they are at best partially true. So all of that conditioning is happening at childhood before you became an entrepreneur. Here's the part that should get your attention. In a study of more than 400 people, Klonz and his colleagues found that these money beliefs were not just talk. Three of the four belief patterns they identified were significantly tied to people's actual income and net worth. The story you absorbed about money as a child decades later shows up in your bank account. I was mind blown with this, honestly. And there is one cluster of these scripts that runs especially deep in accomplished, generous women. Researchers call it money avoidance. It sounds like this. And then you wonder why raising your price feels like a moral failure instead of a business decision. So I will say it plainly. For so many women, undercharging starts with an inherited belief that runs in the background and makes the decision before you ever open the spreadsheet. It was never really a strategy problem. And it was never really about confidence in the way we usually describe confidence. If you want to see where this is showing up in your business right now, in the actual pricing and positioning, the free marketing clarity audit is a fast way to find it. It's 10 questions, takes two minutes, and it shows you where you are leaving money and clients on the table and what to fix first. It's free at renasabra.com backslash quiz. There is a second force that stacks right on top of the inherited script, and it hits high-achieving women hardest. Back in

Imposter Syndrome Keeps You Overworking

SPEAKER_00 5:22

1978, two psychologists, Pauline Klans and Susan Eimes, named something they kept seeing in extremely accomplished women. They called it the imposter syndrome. These were women with real achievements, degrees, awards, and results on the board, and they could not internalize any of it. Underneath, they were convinced they were not actually that capable, and that sooner or later they would be found out. Here's the cruel part, the research documented. Achievements do not fix it. You would think more proof, more results, more recognition would finally settle the feeling. It does not. The accomplishments pile up and the belief stays exactly where it was. So we keep working and overworking to say ahead of being exposed. We keep explaining our success away as luck, good timing, and the one that gets me the most, being where someone is being generous to us. But that's not the truth. We have earned that success. Let me show you how this looked in my own life because I lived on the other side of it. I have a doctorate in business and in marketing.

When More Credentials Still Feel Useless

SPEAKER_00 6:44

And after that, I got a postgrad qualification from an Ivy League in digital business transformation. And with all of it behind me, over 13 years of studying business and over back then it was also over 10 years of working in business and in marketing. I kept signing up for course after course, certificate after certificate. I believe in learning for the rest of my life. That's not gonna change, but I kept telling myself that was all it was. But that's not what kept me signing up. What kept me signing up was quiet feeling that I was not yet good enough and that one more qualification would finally make it true. And it never did. I know I'm being so honest and so vulnerable on this podcast because I truly want you to change and transform your life and your business. And the day it broke for me was the day I sat in a course and realized that the material was not just thin, it was fundamentally wrong. I mean, I have been around the best researchers and mentors in marketing. And I have done my own published research in marketing so I could easily tell if something is right or wrong. This course, the material in this course was wrong at the level of the core idea, not just the surface. And it stopped me cold because I was able to catch it instantly. I already knew more than the person I had paid thousands of dollars to learn from. I had been the expert for years. I had already become the very thing I kept trying to qualify to be. The chasing had only ever been about who I believed I was allowed to be, and no certificate and no course and no mentor was ever going to answer that. So let's connect it all. You have an inherited money script telling you that wanting more is greedy. You have an imposter pattern telling you that you are not as

The Identity Ceiling Behind Undercharging

SPEAKER_00 9:04

good as your results say, and underneath both of them sits the real question. The one this whole episode is actually about. Who do you think you are? And I don't mean on paper. I mean who do you believe deep down you are allowed to be? That one belief sets a ceiling and everything else arranges itself beneath it. Believe you're not yet there in or you're not good enough yet, and you will undercharge to stay safely below the line, and you will chase more qualifications to try to climb to it. Neither one ever works because you cannot answer a question about identity with a price or a certificate. You were always excellent enough. What kept your prices low and kept you signing up for more courses, for more mentors, for more certificates was a story about who you were allowed to be. Change that story, and both the price and the chasing finally start to move. So let me give you the reframe that changed this for me. Because seeing the programming is only half of the work, you also need something true to put it in place. Wealth is not taken from anyone. The belief that you having more means someone else has less is one of the oldest and most damaging manuscripts there is, and it does not hold up. The woman who undercharges and overgives until she has nothing left does not help more people. She runs out of the very resource that would have her help others. Strength is the prerequisite for generosity. You cannot fund anyone's rise from a place of scarcity, and you cannot give

Wealth Supports Generosity Without Scarcity

SPEAKER_00 11:04

away what you were too afraid to build. This is the part the old script never tells you. You can be generous and well paid at the same time. You can care deeply about people and still charge exactly what your work is worth. In fact, charging what is what it is worth is what gives you the means to be as generous as you actually want to be. So the most useful thing you can do for the people you want to lift is to become someone with the capacity to lift them. So how do you change a script you cannot even see? You make it visible, and then you decide, as an adult, whether you still agree with it. Because that

Name Trace And Rewrite The Script

SPEAKER_00 11:49

script was imprinted in you in your childhood, and now you are the adult, and now you get to choose. So, first of all, name it. Finish the sentence out loud. The belief about money I grew up around was do not overthink it. The first thing that surfaces is usually the tr the truest. So let's do this again. Money is dot dot dot. Rich people are dot dot dot. Wanting more means dot dot dot. Whatever comes up, that is the script talking. Write them down and then decide what you want. So the second step is trace it. Whose voice is that in? When I did that exercise, it was my dad's voice. It was so clear. So for you, who is that person? Is it a parent, a grandparent, a culture, a hard season your family lived through? For me, it was my father and the same he believed all of his life. Manuscripts almost always made sense for the person who first handed them to you. The real question is where is whether or not they still make sense for the life you are building right now. So after you do those steps, now it's the turn the your time to be an adult and decide. You are allowed to keep the parts that serve you and retire the parts that do not. The belief maybe that taught you to be careful with money, maybe it can stay. The belief that taught you to feel ashamed of wanting more should go. You get to choose because a script is not a fact. It can be rewritten, and you are the one holding the pen because now you are the adult. If there is one thing to do this week, do the first step right now, before you forget. Say it out loud or write it down. The belief about money I inherited is. It could be one sentence, it could be a paragraph, or you could journal pages. Then look at it and ask the only question that matters. Did I ever actually agree to this? Or did I just absorb it from someone else? You don't have to solve it today. Seeing it in your own handwriting, naming the programming out loud is what loosens its grip. You cannot rewrite a script you have never read, but you need to state it first. I will tell you why I finally did this work. And I'm even more vulnerable now, because after carrying that belief for most of my life, I now have two daughters.

What We Pass Down And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 14:44

And a manuscript does not stop with you, it passes down quietly to the next person who loves and trusts you. The same way my father's words were passed to me, he did not mean to hand me a ceiling. He was handing me what he had been handed. But I got to choose what I pass on. And I'm not going to hand my girls a belief that teaches them to make themselves small and call it goodness. The chain stops with me. If you are carrying a script like that, you are not rewriting it for yourself. You are rewriting it for everyone who learns how to live by watching you. That is where the wealth conversation actually starts. It starts with the story you have been carrying about whether you are even allowed to want this. Long before pricing formula enters the picture. Name the script. Decide if you still agree with it, and let yourself want more. Because the more you build, the more you can do for the people you care about. If this was useful, subscribe to the next one so it can find you and send it to a woman you know who is widely good at what she does and still charges like she's apologizing for it. She will know exactly what you mean. And when you want to see where this is quietly costing you in your own business, take the free marketing clarity audit at renasabra.com backslash quiz. It will show you where to start, you know what to do. I will see you in the next one.