Tara Saxon - Certified Money Coach

Tara Saxon - Certified Money Coach Single ladies - design a FEARLESS relationship with money | Take control | Trust yourself | Live confidently

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Nobody comes to work and announces they are worried about money.What they do instead is become short with people. Or go ...
07/09/2026

Nobody comes to work and announces they are worried about money.

What they do instead is become short with people. Or go quiet in meetings they used to run. Or turn down the conference, the secondment, the thing that would have stretched them, and give a reason that sounds like preference.

They get careful. Careful looks like caution, and caution looks like a personality.

This is the part organisations consistently get wrong. Financial pressure almost never presents as financial pressure. It presents as attitude. As disengagement. As someone who used to be reliable and is not quite, lately.

And because it arrives wearing that costume, it gets managed as that. A performance conversation. A note about tone. A quiet decision that she is not quite leadership material after all.

The person knows exactly what is going on. They are simply never going to say it, because saying it at work costs more than carrying it.

I am not suggesting money is behind every difficult person you manage. But I would ask how you would know if it were.

What have you seen mistaken for attitude?

The most useful finding in this research is not that financial stress harms performance. We knew that.It is who it happe...
06/09/2026

The most useful finding in this research is not that financial stress harms performance. We knew that.

It is who it happens ๐˜ต๐˜ฐ.

Loughborough University tracked employees over time rather than surveying them once, which lets you see the same person move rather than compare different people. Professor Eva Selenko's team found that when someone's financial situation worsens, exhaustion follows, along with disengagement and a sharper interest in better-paid work elsewhere.

Here is the part that should change how organisations think about it. The effect showed up regardless of whether the person was well-off or already struggling. It was not how much they earned. It was which way it was moving.

A small worsening does it. In anyone.

Which means the mental model most organisations run on - that financial pressure is something happening to people at the bottom of the pay scale - is wrong. It is happening to your senior people too. The ones on good money, with a mortgage sized to that good money, who have just had a rate change or a school fee increase or a partner's hours cut.

They will not tell you. They have more to lose by saying it than the graduate does.

And the researchers were direct about the implication. Financially stressed workers are not only more exhausted, they are more likely to disengage or start looking. That is a retention problem wearing a wellbeing costume.

If you have lost good people this year and could not fully explain why - are you sure you know what they were carrying?

An industry told me it cannot find workers. Then a man who spent forty years in that world told me ๐˜ธ๐˜ฉ๐˜บ.I was in a room o...
05/09/2026

An industry told me it cannot find workers. Then a man who spent forty years in that world told me ๐˜ธ๐˜ฉ๐˜บ.

I was in a room of removals and logistics operators last week. The conversation that kept surfacing was not pricing or fuel or compliance. It was people. They cannot find enough of them.

Several said plainly that their businesses would not run without workers here on holiday visas. Not as a supplement. As the thing keeping the doors open.

Afterwards I was talking about it with a friend, and her husband was listening in. He spent his entire working life in construction and retired only recently, a bit earlier than planned because of an injury. He had a theory.

In his day, he said, they were prepared to do the hard yards. The physical slog, the dirty work, the heavy lifting. But they did it knowing what it bought. Work hard, earn decent money. Earn decent money, buy a house. Own a house, and you had somewhere to raise a family and be safe.

That was the deal. And the deal held.

He is not a man given to theories. He has just watched it happen from the inside for forty years.

His point was not that young people have gone soft. That explanation gets reached for a lot and it has always struck me as too easy a cop-out. It was that they have done the arithmetic. If the work will not buy the house no matter how hard you go at it, the bargain that made the work worth it is not on the table any more.

I have been thinking about it all week.

We tend to file workforce shortages under recruitment. Employer brand, pay bands, pipeline. But the men in that room are not describing a recruitment problem. They are describing what happens to an entire labour market when the financial logic underneath it stops working.

That is not a policy argument and I am not qualified to make one. It is an observation about pressure, which is what I do look at. Private financial reality does not stay private. It shows up in who applies, who stays, and who quietly decides the whole thing is not worth it.

If you are struggling to fill roles right now - are you certain you are solving the problem you think you are solving?

I am opening my 2027 diary.A note on what has shifted, because it has been noticeable this year.Twelve months ago most e...
04/09/2026

I am opening my 2027 diary.

A note on what has shifted, because it has been noticeable this year.

Twelve months ago most enquiries came from someone planning an event who needed a speaker on money. Increasingly they come from someone who has been sitting with a risk register, or a set of engagement results they cannot explain, and has started to suspect there is a pressure in their workforce that nothing they currently measure is picking up.

That is a harder brief and a better one.

What I do in a room: I make a private pressure sayable. People leave able to name something they have been carrying alone, and leaders leave understanding why their steadiest performer has gone quiet.

I have written this week about what that is and is not. It is not a control. It is the thing every control depends on, which is someone telling you the truth early enough that you can still do something about it.

Conferences, leadership programs, International Women's Day, WHS and safety forums, and closing keynotes where you want the room to leave thinking rather than clapping.

If 2027 dates are being locked in now, I would love to be part of the conversation.

On 2 October, the tool that around 5,000 Australian organisations used to assess psychosocial risk switches off.The Peop...
03/09/2026

On 2 October, the tool that around 5,000 Australian organisations used to assess psychosocial risk switches off.

The People at Work survey. Free, government-backed, built by Safe Work Australia with the state and territory regulators. More than 160,000 workers have completed it since 2020. Registrations closed in June, final surveys launched in July, and after 2 October the platform goes and the data with it.

Two practical things.

If your organisation has PAW history, export the reports before 2 October. Raw data was never downloadable and the generated reports go too. That is your assessment trail.

And when you choose a replacement, read the hazard list properly rather than assuming it covers what you need. That is where the thinking happens, not in the procurement.

Now the part that interests me.

The most widely used measurement instrument in the country disappears in the same quarter the evidence bar went up. Which is an awkward moment, but also a genuinely useful one, because it forces a question most organisations have not had to ask: what were we actually measuring, and what was never in the frame at all?

Workload is on the list. Job control is on the list. Job insecurity is on the list.

Private financial pressure is not. It has never been on any version of the list. And it walks through the door every morning regardless.

If you are choosing a replacement right now - what are you making sure it captures that the old one missed?

I went to Japan first at thirteen. Properly at fourteen, for school.Which is the age where you are busy working out who ...
02/09/2026

I went to Japan first at thirteen. Properly at fourteen, for school.

Which is the age where you are busy working out who you are, so wherever you happen to be doing it gets built into you and stays there.

I was going through photos this week and had to stop.

The trains, absurdly efficient, running past temples that were old before anyone thought of trains. Convenience stores with a dazzling spread of simple food that somehow still sells out by evening, in a city with a ramen bar on every corner. Crowds moving with a restraint that means you never once feel unsafe in them, at any hour.

I have not lived there in decades. My Japanese has gone rusty, and these days nobody particularly needs it - everyone answers in English before I have finished the sentence.

The place has changed. So have I. Things go and we do not get a vote.

And here is the part I cannot resolve. I am homesick for somewhere I will always be a gai-jin. An outsider. Fourteen years old and permanently, politely, on the outside of it - and still some part of my heart has never left.

I do not think that gets fixed. I think you just carry it.

Is there a place that has a piece of you that you have no real claim to?

These alarms live in my phone permanently now.4.20. 5.25. 6.25. 6.30. Not set for tomorrow, just always there, waiting. ...
01/09/2026

These alarms live in my phone permanently now.

4.20. 5.25. 6.25. 6.30. Not set for tomorrow, just always there, waiting. One of them is labelled "Don't miss that plane." Another one is labelled "Back up," because apparently I do not entirely trust the first one.

I did not build this stack on purpose. It accumulated. A regional airport here, a 6am flight there, and at some point the alarms stopped being for a particular morning and started being a permanent fixture of who I am now.

That is how most of the structures in our lives get built. Not decided. Accrued. One reasonable adjustment at a time until you look at your phone one day and there is a small monument to everything you are afraid of missing.

I like this work enormously. I am not complaining. But I did stop and look at that screen for a second longer than usual.

What has quietly accumulated in your life that you never actually chose?

There is a line in a legal update this week that most people will skim straight past.Where excessive workload is identif...
31/08/2026

There is a line in a legal update this week that most people will skim straight past.

Where excessive workload is identified as a psychosocial hazard, the Code directs organisations toward workload allocation, staffing levels, deadlines and supervision. Rather than, in the authors' words, administrative controls such as resilience training.

Read it again, because it has teeth.

Since 1 July, under section 26A of the NSW Work Health and Safety Act, a business must either comply with an applicable approved code or demonstrate that its alternative achieves an equivalent or higher standard. The Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code is now the benchmark against which that gets measured. And the Code is explicitly systems-based. It asks whether the design and management of the work is producing the harm.

Which means the era of treating a training session as a control is closing.

I will say the uncomfortable version, because it applies to me.

Awareness is not evidence. A keynote, a lunchtime money session, an app, an EAP poster in the tearoom - these are administrative controls at best, and they sit near the bottom of the hierarchy for a reason. They do not demonstrate that a hazard was identified, assessed, controlled and reviewed. Anyone selling you awareness as compliance is selling you exposure.

What they do is different, and worth being precise about. They make a pressure sayable. Every control higher up the hierarchy depends on someone being willing to tell you the truth early enough to act on it. That is not compliance. It is the condition compliance runs on.

The Holding Redlich piece sets out six questions boards should be asking management. Michael Selinger and Jessica Alamyar wrote it and it is worth ten minutes. Link in the comments.

If you sit on a board or an exec team - what evidence could you actually produce tomorrow?

The most useful minute of any keynote happens before anybody arrives.Chairs straight. AV tested. Water on the lectern. N...
30/08/2026

The most useful minute of any keynote happens before anybody arrives.

Chairs straight. AV tested. Water on the lectern. Nobody in it.

I walk an empty room before I speak because it is the last moment it tells the truth. Once it fills, it performs. People arrange their faces. They sit where they think they are supposed to sit. The room becomes a version of itself.

Empty, I can see what I am actually dealing with. Where the back row will drift. Which corner the light dies in. Where someone will sit if they want to be able to leave.

And then I stand in the middle of it and think about who is about to walk through that door carrying something they have not told a single person at work about.

Because that is the real room. Not the one on the run sheet.

What do you do in the last quiet minute before it starts?

I was eight, and my grandmother had a noise.Not a sigh. Not a word.BLA-AAAAH-TEchoes of a buzzer. The game show sound wh...
29/08/2026

I was eight, and my grandmother had a noise.

Not a sigh. Not a word.

BLA-AAAAH-T

Echoes of a buzzer. The game show sound when the contestant runs out of time. Every wrong note on the violin, from her chair in the corner - that flat electric BLA-AAAH-T - the sound that means you are finished. Sit down.

It felt like sitting in the sideshow dunk tank, like the hapless clown. Bracing for the "๐˜ต๐˜ฉ๐˜ถ๐˜ฏ๐˜ฌ" when the ball hits the target, the platform gives way and down you go.

That was the sound of a B flat played slightly under.

She was not meaning to be cruel. She was correcting a child's intonation the way she had been taught to correct it, and she would be genuinely bewildered to know I am writing about it all these decades later.

But I learned something in that room I did not know I was learning. I learned to play slightly inside myself. To hold a margin back, so that when the buzzer came it was not quite all of me it landed upon.

I read Christian O'Connell's Unscript last month. His argument is that most of us are running invisible scripts - handed down by family, by culture, by fear - about how we are allowed to show up. He is very funny and personable about it, which is the only reason it gets under your guard. Somewhere in it I put the book down, because I realised I have been doing it on stage.

Twenty years in front of rooms. And some part of me is still eight, still holding a margin back, still braced for the buzzer.

That is the thing about this work. I can sit with a client and find the money story she absorbed at eight and never questioned. I am good at it. And I had a blind spot in the exact shape of my own.

I have not fixed it. I have named it, which turns out to be most of the distance.

So this is a wholehearted recommendation, and not a casual one. I do not say that about many books. It has genuinely changed how I work.

What noise are you still bracing for?

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