A resource for your circle

The money
emotions wheel.

«Bad» is not a feeling. «Ashamed» is, and it leads somewhere very different from «angry». The precise word is the one that opens the conversation.

It is used alongside the three-axes sheet, not after it. You start at the centre and move outwards until you land on the exact word.

You can mark several at once, even contradictory ones: the same situation can bring relief and guilt, sadness and hope. Write both down. The contradiction is not noise: it is almost always the heart of the matter.

The money emotions wheel: eight families of emotions in three intensities, and an outer ring with the words of money

From the centre outwards

The centre: eight families

Joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and anticipation. Almost everything you feel fits in one of the eight.

The three rings: intensity

The further in, the stronger. Annoyance, anger and rage are the same family in three degrees. Picking the right degree changes the conversation.

The outer ring: money

Shame, guilt, relief, embarrassment, resentment, gratitude, not-enoughness, resolve. These are the words that come up again and again when a woman talks about her money, and no generic wheel has them.

If you cannot find the word

Start with the family: is this closer to fear or to anger? Then go down to the degree: is it annoyance or is it rage? And last, look at the outer ring: there is almost always a more exact word out there than the one inside.

If writing it down made you a little uncomfortable, you got there.

Where it comes from

The three inner rings follow Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions (1980). MQHD drew the diagram from scratch following that structure: eight families of emotions and three degrees of intensity. The outer ring is MQHD's own: the words of money, taken from the vocabulary participants already use on the three-axes sheet.