Laura Gates-Lupton

I grew up with the belief that you could either care about money or care about people, but you couldn’t care about both.

I’ve always been highly intuitive and deeply sensitive to others’ feelings, needs and wishes. Even as a child, people would tell me things they wouldn’t tell others. As a teen, I was the friend others turned to when they needed someone to listen without judgment. It seemed natural that I should turn those skills into my life’s work when I embarked upon a master’s degree in Clinical Social Work at the age of 22.

If you had asked me at the time, I would have said I didn’t care about money. So much so, that I applied to one of the most rigorous and expensive MSW programs in the country without a thought of how I would pay for it. I didn’t care that new psychotherapists made very little money, I just wanted to be the best therapist I could be, and to deeply serve my clients.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and you’d have found a wearier version of me.

I did love the work and especially my clients, but not the decades of paying student loans, nor the low salary I was earning despite being a seasoned and respected clinician. I felt trapped, due to my financial situation. How could I make a change when my family and I were barely keeping our heads above water as it was? Also, I had come to see that caring about money didn't mean you couldn’t also care about people. But I did wonder if it was too late for me to get my money act together.

What I learned is now what I teach. I have been a certified professional coach for 11 years, and offer transformative one-on-one coaching for talented, caring, service providers who feel like no matter how hard they work, or how many hours they put in, there is a cap on their income that they can't seem to surpass. I love helping my clients smash their personal glass ceilings while transforming their relationship to work and money.

Topics I love to talk about:

1. Why financial feminism matters and why money is important to badass feminists.
2. What is financial identity and why is it so crucial to letting go of overworking?
3. What to do when someone asks to "pick your brain" and other tricky money boundary issues.
4. The consequences of pretending that our clients aren't paying to be in a relationship with us.
5. Why we get stuck with personal glass ceilings and what to do about it.