Told by a Teen / Female Founder Stories
From Trading Floor to Blonde Money: Helen Thomas on Disagreeing Well
“Don’t think like a victim or you will be a victim.”
Helen Thomas, Blonde Money
Show notes
What is in this one.
- 00:00Why financial markets are the opposite of boring
- 02:51Finance looks male-dominated from outside. Is it?
- 06:13The Wolf of Wall Street problem
- 07:30Underconfidence, and where it comes from
- 08:14How she learned to be agreeably disagreeable
- 11:17Practising it at school
- 12:49What she would tell a 17-year-old about self-doubt
- 16:12Ten years of Blonde Money never going to plan
- 19:07The boat: you get there in the end
- 21:22Four years on her own, and the first client
- 25:50Men apply at five out of ten. Women wait for nine.
- 26:40What does success mean to you?
- 30:09Don’t think like a victim
- 31:24My three takeaways
The conversation
Helen Thomas spent years on a trading floor as one of four women out of forty. She runs Blonde Money now, and she named it to challenge what people assume the second they read it.
I thought finance was boring. That lasted about four minutes.
I went in with a pretty stereotyped idea of what finance was. Men in quarter-zips, yields, a lot of words I didn’t understand. Helen called financial markets the beating heart of the global economy and then explained what she meant, which is that they’re where politics and money and human judgement get argued out in public, every day, with a price on the end of it. Her whole business exists because investors need somebody to read the argument and not just the numbers.
I’m keeping my opinion on the quarter-zips. I’ve changed my mind about the rest of it.
Men apply at five out of ten. Women wait for nine.
That’s the statistic Helen kept coming back to, and it isn’t about who is better at the job. It’s about the bar people set for themselves before they will put their hand up. So a lot of this episode ended up being about permission rather than skill, which I did not expect going in.
I’m starting to see why sponsorship matters so much. Somebody saying go for it, out loud, to you.
Agreeably disagreeable
For years Helen would soften what she really thought in meetings, sometimes agreeing when she didn’t actually agree. Her business partner pointed out that every time she did it she was giving away some of her own power. So she taught herself not to. She went too far the other way first, then found the middle, and she calls it being agreeably disagreeable: polite, firm, and backed by the work.
I tried it on her, live, in the middle of the conversation. She corrected me. That’s in there too.
The boat
Ten years of Blonde Money have never gone to plan, including four years on her own before the first client. Helen describes it as being on a boat. You pick your direction, you build the sturdiest boat you can, and the waves come anyway. You can’t control the sea, only the boat and the heading.
It’s such a simple picture and it changed how I think about ambition. Less about predicting the storm, more about what you build before it arrives.
What I took from it
Hard work pays off, even in ways that you don’t expect.
- Resilience is the whole job. Not a phase you get through and come out the other side of.
- Agreeably disagreeable. Keep having the conversation you’re meant to drop.
- There are no ups and downs, there’s a boat. You get there in the end.
In my words
“The highlights from this podcast for me have been talking about resilience, your journey and being [agreeably disagreeable]. … Keep being hardworking, because you will get there in the end.”
Siya, closing episode 13 at 31:24. Bracketed because she said it the other way round and corrected herself on air.
From this episode
The lines worth keeping.
About the guest
Helen Thomas
Founder and CEO of Blonde Money, a macroeconomic consultancy that connects Westminster and Wall Street. Over 20 years across the sell side and buy side of global financial markets, and a regular on television explaining what markets are doing and why.
