My ex-husband's feedback has been rattling around in my head

He told me that when I'm stressed or anxious I have a tendency to treat all of life a bit like a CEO trying to keep all of the trains on the tracks. I laughed at the time, because I know it is completely true. He's known me for nearly 30 years, so it's no surprise really.

Without making this article a therapy blog, when I was growing up there was a never-ending source of chaos in my life that means I am completely phenomenal in a crisis- you'd never realise the anguish going on inside my body. I was told that I was a 'good girl' for not reacting to the chaos, and miraculously carrying on, regardless, as the dependable and stable one.

In fact I have a very clear memory of saying, at around 13 years old, to my Mum and Dad something along the lines of

If you don't sort this out you'll end up with a very f*cked up mental case of a daughter.

It took until I was 29 for that volcano of stored internal anguish to erupt in to a mental breakdown and a heap of therapy. Nevertheless the pattern still exists.

In a world of uncertainty, or competing emotions and needs, my natural response is to take responsibility for ALL of it. I'll create a plan, a spreadsheet, three scenarios and, if we're really lucky, a governance framework. There's a map of all of that in my head, with nodes connecting seemingly unrelated data points with the main objective being to support the world to not explode, end, or otherwise decombust.

I'm an expert 'smoother', the ballast in a ship, or the sunken tip of an iceberg, depending on your perspective. It is at times something I'm incredibly proud of and glad to be. But it doesn't always serve me well.

What's your point, Sasha

It turns out this is both a useful founder trait and occasionally completely exhausting and Money Sweetspot has had a bit of that energy over the last few years too.

When you're building something from scratch, there are always multiple scenarios, pathways, opportunities, partners. Add on top of that the advances in technology and the pace is too much for even my pattern recogition extraordinarie of a brain to keep up!

The to do list is never done. There is always another thing you could fix if everybody simply had an additional eight hours in the day.

And because I can usually see how the pieces connect, my instinct is often to try to keep all of them moving. At some point though, “keeping all the train on the tracks” can become the job, rather than stopping occasionally to ask whether you're still on the right track (or indeed if you want to be on tracks at all).

That is probably the best way I can describe where we're at with Money Sweetspot this year.

The opportunity around us has got bigger

Our Financial Reset remains core. Helping people get out of expensive debt and create more room to move forward is still deeply important to us.

But we've also learnt that the things sitting around the loan; how you understand someone's position, how you help them progress, the technology, the decision-making, the human judgement, might be useful well beyond the loans Money Sweetspot can make itself.

That's opened doors we hadn't expected with employers thinking more seriously about financial wellbeing and mortgage advisers are meeting people who want to buy homes but can't get there yet because debt is sitting in the way.

The one that I'm most hopeful about, in terms of the impact Money Sweetspot can have in achieving the mission I set out in 2019 are the conversations we are having with Iwi and other organisations. By existing, with our own financial rseet, other organisations are thinking about how financial products could be designed differently for the people they serve. And that's how we get impact without becoming just another massive finance company.

We're looking at an opportunity that is much bigger than the company we originally built.

It is exciting, and also exactly the point where I can become an enthusiastic Labrador and chase every ball thrown in roughly the same direction.

The year of strong foundations

To counteract the Labrador, this year we have been talking a lot about strong foundations.

That sounds incredibly sensible and slightly boring, but it really isn't.

Strong foundations mean making sure our core lending works properly, our technology is fit for where we're going, the economics stack up, our funding is sustainable and our team isn't held together by optimism and Teams messages.

It also means being willing to stop doing things and that is much harder than it sounds because behind the 'stopping' are usually a group of people that are impacted, especially in our space.

I've always been pretty comfortable with doing unusual things. Dropping out of university. Moving overseas in six weeks. Starting a finance company whose goal is essentially to have its best customers stop needing it.

I'm much less naturally comfortable with accepting that we can't pursue every interesting idea at once.

Not every thought needs a board meeting

To help get myself out of my own brain, and switch back to my intuition a little more, I've been reminding myself that not every thought needs a board meeting.

Sometimes you notice something, sit with it, learn a bit more and let the answer emerge rather than immediately turning it into a project.  It's OK to sit in the space between the noticing and the action.

You don't need to fix everything or assume responsibility for all of the ideas, problems and solutions, no matter how enticing that might be for alleviating your own anxiety (or distracting you from the mundane or crucial work).

I think there is something in that for Money Sweetspot too.

We don't need to prove our ambition by doing everything, we need to build the right things properly. We can be bold and honest about what we're learning along the way, including the things that have gone wrong, because some things have.

We've had technology that hasn't behaved the way we expected. We've built things that turned out not to be as important to customers as we thought. We've had ideas that were brilliant in theory and slightly rubbish once introduced to actual humans.

I'm not embarrassed though. My conscience is clear, as I know that absoutely everything we have done has been with our mission in mind- and we've done our very best.

After this period of reflection, and feedback, I've realised that I should be much more worried if we had built something new and never changed our minds, because where's the learning and innovation in that?

Back to connecting the dots

Unsurprisingly, my pattern recognition has kicked back in and I'm interested in is what happens when you combine all of those lessons.

Finance that understands people.

Technology that supports the humans rather than trying to remove them.

Products that help people make genuine progress.

And a business model sustainable enough that empathy isn't something we can only afford when everything is going well.

We're still small and there are lots of things we can't change, but I think we can keep nudging, one baby step at a time. I believe that if enough of us nudge the financial system in a more human, empathetic and sustainable direction, eventually it starts to move.

If you want to nudge the financial system in a similar way, I'd love to hear from you.

Sasha

P.S. And thank you to my ex-husband, Mark, for pointing out the pattern of my lifetime, it was enough to give me my very own 'nudge'.

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