Welcome to this week’s episode of the phenomenal career podcast. This week, I have a good friend who I’m excited to introduce to you all. Welcome Natalie.
Hey Jaz, thanks for having me.
Some of you might know that some of you might not but this is my second go at recording with Natalie, as we originally recorded maybe two to three, even years ago? So this is not the first time we’ve had a conversation about Natalie’s journey but let’s start off today with what you do and what is your career?
I am a money mindset and savings Coach from London. I work predominantly with millennials and Gen Z’s to help them with their money mindset. So how they feel about money, how they think about it, and how they engage with it.
A lot of them have a scarcity mindset, so my job is to empower them through a series of courses, workshops, and consultations to get them out, banish those limiting beliefs, and for them to walk into pure abundance with money so that they can have a better relationship with it.
As you know, money makes the world go around, and if we’re scared of money, we’re putting ourselves at a disservice to receiving and attracting more. So, my job is to really change that, the trajectory of it.
I love that. How did you even start this work?
We have to go all the way back to my childhood because anytime I talk about money, I always talk about how it’s interlinked with childhood and the upbringing you had surrounding money. Growing up, money was always available because my dad was a great saver, but he was a hoarder as well.
So, in hindsight, that turned me into a great saver. I’m very good with money, I’m great at saving, but it also turned me into a hoarder because I didn’t give my money a purpose I didn’t give my money a why. I was just saving for the sake of saving and not enjoying it.
When I got into adulthood, I got my first job and started to see how other people were spending their money and it made me realise I was just hoarding money.
I work in the fashion industry and seeing how people spent their money every month – not buying stocks or shares, but by buying clothes made me realise that a lot people are buying clothes with money they don’t have because they’re using buy now pay later schemes. They’re using their overdraft, and they’re using credit cards. This made me question why are we not managing our money?
And from that, I started an Instagram page called Natalie Scott Empowers where I talked about money. The page originally started off as an empowerment page, hence the title Natalie’s Scott Empowers but when I started discussing money, I noticed that my engagement went up and my follower count went up as well. It made me realise that people liked me talking about money, so I just continued and it turned into a business from there.
I decided to run a money mindset course and invest in myself and get a coach who could help me structure the course. At the time, I would go to schools, colleges and universities to talk about money, talk about finance and talk about fashion because it’s all interlinked. But with the growing interest surrounding money mindset, I stopped talking about fashion, and was just talking about finance. I was fearful initially, but you need to be frightened to be challenged.
It’s about putting that first step forward.
I actually like a challenge. If you’re in a place where you’re comfortable, you’re never going to grow. I’m in a privileged position where I’m still doing fashion because I love it, but finances is my calling. I don’t know what God has in store for me, but whatever it is, I’m there.
What is a key lesson you would share with your followers?
Value your time. A lot of the time, you’ll get emails that will stay “Oh, we only need you for 20 minutes, or we only need you for 25 minutes, 30 minutes, but can you stay behind and listen to all the other panellists and take part in the Q&A?.” With situations like that, you need to make sure you’re charging for the whole thing and not just the initial 30 minutes.
Obviously, they’ve got to protect their business, and they’ve got to look at their own budget, so I would recommend when you do get an email like that, respond asking about budget and rates. You don’t want to end up doing things for free all the time because then you’re not really growing.
You will find that you will have clients that will charge a lot of money to sit down with you for an hour of your time, one on one consultations, and then you’ve got some people that would love for you to do it for free. Most community work I’m happy to do for free, but I don’t always shout about it.
Some people that are in the same industry as me ask how did I get that gig with so and so and I say, “You know what? I did this one for free,” because the impact on the community is far greater than what I could charge.
I’m a firm believer of karma and doing good and it coming back to you. I know, by doing something for a community as a reduced cost would have a greater impact to me as it means more. But then next time around, I may charge, so it’s all about picking what you want to charge from what you don’t want to charge for. And that’s down to you.
It’s a question of value. So, what’s your career teaching you right now?
It’s teaching me a lot. I’ve been thinking about this question, actually. I think what work is really teaching me is that I need to take more of a chance on myself, because I really hate leaving my opportunities, my progression in other people’s hands. I like to take control of my own destiny, as corny as that sounds, I really do.
Work is teaching and reminding me of my purpose of why I’m doing what I’m doing in regards to the business.
It is teaching me that Natalie – you could actually do this. It’s teaching me that I don’t have to rely on somebody else who doesn’t see my vision.
I want people to know that you cannot rely on anyone else to get where you want to be, whether it’s pay rise, promotion opportunities, you have to really go for that. I’m a confident person, don’t get it twisted, I’m very confident. But I can be very shy when it comes to people skills.
But I’m taking myself out of my comfort zone and putting myself in situations at work where I’m interviewing people, which makes me nervous but it’s important to be uncomfortable. It’s about taking initiative and I feel like we don’t do that enough.
I’d love to invite you to share with the listeners – How can they connect with you, stay tuned to your journey and find out about working with you.
I’m always on Instagram, that’s my favourite social platform to connect with or Natalie Scott Empowers. Catch me there and drop me a DM.
I’ve got a website, which is Natalie Scott Empowers.com which is full of resources. I’ve got a little e-shop where you can level up your credit score, level up your child savings, and all that great stuff. I’ve also published a little mini savers guide on Amazon. So check that out, it helps you discover differences between ISAs.
I offer one to one consultations just to help you level up in areas of saving strategies and investment. I also have a course called Money Mindset, if you feel like you’re struggling with your money mindset, you haven’t really dealt with the childhood trauma in regards to money, then this course is for you.
If you sign up to the money mindset newsletter that I send out every week, you will receive a few news bits every Friday morning about money mindset and saving. So yeah, that is me.
