2035: The Psychology of Self Worth, Money and Success

Farnoosh Torabi (0:00)

Hey friends, if you've been sitting on a book idea and wondering could this actually become something, this is your moment. Join me in New York City on October 9th for Book to Brand. This is my intimate full-day immersive designed to help you turn your idea into a clear, compelling, pitch-ready book concept. You will meet the insiders, agents, publishers and recent authors who can help bring your book to life. Spots are limited and early bird tickets are on sale now. Head to booktobrand.co to reserve your spot. So Money Episode 2035, The Psychology of Self-Worth, Money and Success, with Dr. Marisa Franco.

Marisa G. Franco (1:05)

There's a really interesting study that found that if people had low self-worth, even if they had family advantages, even if they had wealth, even if they attained higher education, they didn't do any better than people without those advantages. However, if they had high self-worth, they could what the researchers call capitalize on advantage, which means, and they had higher education, then they would have higher income and adulthood. If they had high self-worth and they grew up more wealthy, then they would have higher income. If they had high self-worth, they had high GPAs or high SAT scores, then they would have high income and adulthood. But none of these things seem to matter if people had low self-worth.

Farnoosh Torabi (1:42)

Welcome back to So Money, everybody. What if the thing that's standing between you and more success, more money, even better relationships isn't a lack of opportunity? What if it's your ability to actually believe that you're worthy of what comes your way? My guest today is Dr. Marisa G. Franco, a psychologist, TED speaker, professor at the University of Maryland, and New York Times best-selling author who has an incredible gift for taking complicated psychological research and making it feel deeply personal and useful. You may know her from her best-selling book, Platonic, How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends. Her newest book, Worth, goes even deeper, exploring how our sense of self-worth gets formed, how it shapes our relationship and choices, and how we can begin to change it. We talk about how the way we learn to connect with people as children can follow us into adulthood, showing up not only in our friendships and romantic relationships, but in how we earn, spend, invest, and take risks with money. We get into why some people actually feel worse when good things happen to them. And some fascinating research suggesting that education, wealth, and other advantages can only take us so far if we don't have the self-worth to capitalize on them.

Here's Dr. Marisa Franco.

Dr. Marisa Franco, welcome to So Money.

Marisa G. Franco (3:07)

Thank you so much for having me, Farnoosh.

Farnoosh Torabi (3:09)

We love to dive into the psychology of our lives and our money on this show whenever we can. And we're so grateful to have you because you're such an expert. You've spent years studying specifically attachment, belonging, friendship. We're going to get into all of it. Maybe we could start with just learning a little bit more about your journey to really becoming so fascinated by attachment theory and why you believe it's one of the most important and misunderstood frameworks for understanding ourselves.

Marisa G. Franco (3:42)

Yeah, yeah. So I sort of started my writing books for general audiences when I was going through a breakup in my 20s and I felt really bad. And I started this wellness group with my friends where we met up and meditated, did yoga, cooked. And it was so powerful for me, the impact of seeing friends regularly that I was like, why doesn't this form of love matter? And why am I treating this form of love as secondary? And so I wrote my first book Platonic to try to level the hierarchy we place on love. And part of the ways that we do that is we understand how we show up in relationships based off of our own attachment history, our history of relationships and connections. But then as I was writing this new book Worth, I realized that our own insecurities can make us reject healthy relationships because there's a theory called self-verification theory that we look for people that verify our sense of self. So if you see me too positively, I think you're going to figure out who I really am. I'm so anxious that I'm going to fall from grace. And so what's the work we need to do to feel worthy enough for positive relationships? Right.

Farnoosh Torabi (4:49)

Oh my gosh. Well, so for anyone who's hearing the term attachment theory and not sure, like I've heard this, that's about babies and parents, right?