money stuff sucks not money itself so
much it buys food and shelter and
clothing and can put a man on the moon
no it’s the stuff around money our
feelings our mind and emotions around
money that sucks money is different than
anything else in how it makes it feel
about ourselves how worthy we are
literally in our paycheck how valued are
we at work how much money can we bring
home to support our families how much
can we contribute to charities and
causes that we care about to our
communities in relationships how many of
us have felt a power imbalance in a
relationship because of money
I certainly have and it makes me feel a
bit icky and uncomfortable
we all have this relationship with money
that’s hidden but it affects us
dramatically and my relationship with
money was a mess a few years ago and we
don’t tend to talk about it because it’s
so uncomfortable so I think we should
talk about it I want to tell you today
how transforming my mind and emotions
around money connected me so much more
deeply to the power of my money it
connected me to my family back
generations and it changed the way I
live and love and hold myself in the
world
so I say money stuff sucks but if you’re
feeling nothing right now I totally get
it and I’m actually totally with you
because a couple of years ago I would
have said about money stuff oh I feel
extremely comfortable about money stuff
I’ll take some more in my bank account
please I don’t know magically how that’s
gonna happen exactly probably future me
we’ll figure that out but hand it over
so I was a lawyer at a big law firm I
was working big law firm hours and I was
getting exhausted and burnt out and I
started getting physically ill my
stomach stopped working I started
getting fevers out of the blue and my
hair started falling out in clumps
I had to carry all these medications and
pills around with me a plastic baggie
I was on a date at that time with a guy
and I realized we were going to have to
eat dinner together and I was going to
have to pull
this baggie of pills so I figured okay
fine he’s either gonna run right now or
he’s gonna stay and I pulled out this
baggie of pills and plumped it on the
table and he just stared at me and I was
just like oh my god I’m such a mess I
was such a mess I was under so much
stress that I was desperate to find
another way out but I couldn’t afford it
so I had to become invested in my life I
turned to something I had known about my
whole life but never wanted to do I
turned to my dad
my dad is a investor he has a hedge fund
and he invests in the style of Warren
Buffett which is choosing wonderful
companies with great fundamentals and
holding them generally for a long time
but I had avoided learning from him my
entire life despite having this father
who wanted to teach me we tend to avoid
things that are deeply uncomfortable
often without knowing exactly why and
for me it was planning for the future
and getting involved in the stock market
through my dad for somebody else
it’ll be worrying about those painful
credit-card bills that you don’t even
want to look at or touch for another
person it’ll be feeling like you don’t
deserve the money you have so you don’t
use it or spend it or risk it ever for
me it was the stock market and that fear
was legitimate because the stock market
can be really dangerous if you don’t
know what you’re doing and I didn’t want
to have the responsibility of losing
this money and having it be all my fault
I’m generally to this day terrible with
numbers and I had lived through the
dot-com bubble and the recession and the
real estate bubble and the recession so
when I think about the stock market back
then I felt like I was entering a
dimly-lit parking garage late at night
into an enclosed dark concrete stairwell
with heavy doors at both ends and my
radar is going off saying girl don’t go
in that concrete stairwell when I think
about the stock market my reaction is
get the hell out of that enclosed
concrete stairwell and call an uber it’s
worth the surge pricing so I found a
solution to this surface-level problem
of being afraid of losing my money in
the market
that was simply education and practice
which I got from my dad but then I
discovered a greater person a greater
purpose to this whole investing
shenanigan thing with my consumer money
I always try to buy products from
companies with a mission of integrity
the treat employees well treat animals
well don’t use pesticides or bio organic
free trade all the stuff nobody talked
about 30 years ago by demanding better
and voting with our money we consumers
have changed our options dramatically
we’ve gone from bio and organic products
being available in grocery stores in
tiny hard-to-find shops to now being
available in the front of supermarkets
right there for us and that’s not out of
the goodness of the hearts of the
grocery companies it’s because we
consumers took our money away from them
until they changed so it occurred to me
why couldn’t I do this with my investing
money the same way I did with my
consumer money I had to start thinking
of my money as a vote my money
represents me and my vote matters just
like it does at the ballot box but I
still somehow couldn’t quite connect to
this investing practice or to my money
so why was I still freaking out about
this and feeling like I was in this
enclosed concrete stairwell I finally
sat down I reached deeply inside my fear
and I realized it didn’t actually have
much to do with the stock market at all
I could learn that stuff it had to do
with me what had happened was then I
when I first started engaging with my
money I actually started engaging with
my feelings around money that money
stuff my feelings about security safety
about my relationships about Who I am
about my worth and this investing thing
became so much larger than what was in
my bank account and it had to because
when you truly engage with the power of
your own money it transforms you
internally bringing something out of
this dark fog into the light by talking
about it makes it shine it becomes
life-supporting without using it we’re
missing out on this connection to our
selves and especially to each other
because if we don’t engage on a deep
level with the power of our money
we are abdicating that power it’s still
there but we’re not using it we all have
a relationship to money that we were
taught as kids and a relationship with
money as adults that comes from that
every single one of us whether you were
rich or poor or in the middle it doesn’t
matter we all have one and engaging with
my relationship with money and my money
stuff forced me to go through three
steps they changed how invested I am in
myself and how my money represents me so
the first step was to become aware of
this relationship with money and to face
it for me I thought why am I not getting
into this practice fully I realized I
was afraid because of my teacher I
didn’t completely trust my dad which on
its face is silly because he’s very well
respected in the investing world he went
on CNBC and called the 2008 market crash
he knows what he’s doing when I was 11
my parents got divorced and they went to
war and my dad left and he took the
money with him now once he realized that
he had done this to his children he came
back and he made sure we were well taken
care of and my parents ended up settling
things without lawyers and we all have a
good relationship now but that happened
that’s in me and it marked me because
money can be safety right especially for
kids and I had never thought back to the
money part of that divorce experience it
was covered up by so many other things
that had happened and it was
uncomfortable so here I was having
avoided my dad’s investing knowledge
most of my life because I’m not good
with numbers and the stock market is so
scary and that’s my money stuff back
there deep within me I had to become
aware of it and face it so that I could
move through it when those feelings come
up which they still do for me I told a
good friend about this we’re sitting at
dinner and she immediately goes oh yeah
my parents were gamblers and when I was
a kid they would come around the house
and if I left any money out on the
bedside table
they would take it they would just steal
money from me so I learned never to
leave money out and I thought all kids
had parents who stole money from them
and it wasn’t until she went to
university that she discovered that some
parents don’t steal money from their
kids none of us have a clue and we’re
kids about these money experiences
because it’s hard to see outside of our
own experience and our perspective first
of all but also because we don’t talk to
each other about money it’s not until we
get older and we start to hear about
these things through relationships that
we can actually get some perspective on
how our paradigm around money was framed
the second step that I went through was
to be thankful for the good parts of
what happened that set me up in my life
yes I went through a bad divorce as a
kid so did a lot of other people and
there are many many worse things that
happen to kids
I’m incredibly privileged in a million
ways my own dad was now trying to teach
me investing personally being thankful
for what happened shifted this
experience with money that I went
through it lightened it it made it
manageable and it made me feel
comfortable enough to finally talk to my
dad about it I discovered that we have a
generational legacy of how we feel about
money and it changes with the
experiences and attitudes of each
generation so I went to talk to him and
initially of course my dad said no no I
don’t have any issues with money at all
except that I want some more of it like
classic money manager and I said we all
have some relationship with money and I
know you do because I know your parents
and he said oh yeah well it’s true that
my parents and especially my
grandparents so my great grandparents
he said that they implied that money was
the root of all evil and that rich
people got wealthy by grubbing their way
there so that they could rub it in
everybody’s faces with their limousines
and their big houses I mean that’s
negative and it almost sounds to me like
they felt money kept them from living
their values as good people so I asked
my dad how did you break out from this
mindset so that you could become
successful and he said I just did it
once I made some money and started to
realize that I could still be me
then I started to see it was okay
and then he told me about my grandmother
now my grandmother is a take-charge kind
of woman in a 1950s housewife world if
she had been born today she would be
running the world but at that time she
had a couple small businesses some
restaurants but nothing more and he said
after he made some money he was
financing a housing development and he
offered it to her to run which she would
have been amazing at and she said no and
she didn’t actually say this to him but
his implication was that it was a leap
too far and something in her did not
want to be one of those people those
rich people and she was afraid she just
couldn’t see herself like that and when
he said this to me I thought oh my gosh
she’s just like me and I’m just like her
feeling that enclosed concrete stairwell
feeling being afraid to step into my own
power because I can’t imagine myself
being truly connected to my money and
having it represent me well in the world
but look at how much has changed in only
a few generations that’s part of my
family tradition with money that draws a
red thread through the generations the
stuff they went through the stuff my
parents went through and now the stuff
I’m going through each transformation
generation by generation passing down
the legacy of struggle of wanting a
better life for our kids and our own
relationship with money we can create a
generational legacy of wealth and
connection to the power of our money and
I have the opportunity to make that
change so here’s how I did it the third
step is to transform my awareness of
what happened into my own new tradition
trust that by facing what you went
through and being thankful for that
tradition you will create your own new
tradition with money that’s personal to
you so I connected to the power of my
money my money was now a part of me and
it represents me in the world so what I
do with it reflects on me for me and my
new tradition I took something I saw is
negative and scary and made it into
something where my money as my vote
would be used consciously
and well imagine what would happen if
those of us who don’t invest right now
also face our fears and transformed our
relationship with money and started to
fight for those wonderful companies out
there we would do more than just choose
free trade bananas at the grocery store
we the small little guy investors
actually control most of the money in
the global stock markets it just doesn’t
look like it because it’s invested
through large funds but imagine what
would happen if we took our power back
and our votes back by taking our money
back
and put it into conscious companies with
strong missions and honorable management
the way people do business would change
and our own personal investing accounts
would change and grow right along with
it
we would literally change the global
stock market from one that rewards
short-term profits to one the rewards
long-term stakeholder gains and it would
start to happen very quickly finding
great companies and being able to
support them with my money made me feel
like a warrior from my couch and that’s
how by transforming my relationship to
money it connected me to my family to my
family tradition and to my world around
me I’ve married that guy who wasn’t
scared off by my baggie of pills and I
stopped needing the pills and I don’t
think it’s a coincidence that it
happened at the same time as I was
becoming invested in my life in a much
deeper way I hope you will put your
money in places and with people that
deserve your trust and your vote and I
send you the power to feel your own
worth and enjoy the journey I wish you a beautiful practice
much it buys food and shelter and
clothing and can put a man on the moon
no it’s the stuff around money our
feelings our mind and emotions around
money that sucks money is different than
anything else in how it makes it feel
about ourselves how worthy we are
literally in our paycheck how valued are
we at work how much money can we bring
home to support our families how much
can we contribute to charities and
causes that we care about to our
communities in relationships how many of
us have felt a power imbalance in a
relationship because of money
I certainly have and it makes me feel a
bit icky and uncomfortable
we all have this relationship with money
that’s hidden but it affects us
dramatically and my relationship with
money was a mess a few years ago and we
don’t tend to talk about it because it’s
so uncomfortable so I think we should
talk about it I want to tell you today
how transforming my mind and emotions
around money connected me so much more
deeply to the power of my money it
connected me to my family back
generations and it changed the way I
live and love and hold myself in the
world
so I say money stuff sucks but if you’re
feeling nothing right now I totally get
it and I’m actually totally with you
because a couple of years ago I would
have said about money stuff oh I feel
extremely comfortable about money stuff
I’ll take some more in my bank account
please I don’t know magically how that’s
gonna happen exactly probably future me
we’ll figure that out but hand it over
so I was a lawyer at a big law firm I
was working big law firm hours and I was
getting exhausted and burnt out and I
started getting physically ill my
stomach stopped working I started
getting fevers out of the blue and my
hair started falling out in clumps
I had to carry all these medications and
pills around with me a plastic baggie
I was on a date at that time with a guy
and I realized we were going to have to
eat dinner together and I was going to
have to pull
this baggie of pills so I figured okay
fine he’s either gonna run right now or
he’s gonna stay and I pulled out this
baggie of pills and plumped it on the
table and he just stared at me and I was
just like oh my god I’m such a mess I
was such a mess I was under so much
stress that I was desperate to find
another way out but I couldn’t afford it
so I had to become invested in my life I
turned to something I had known about my
whole life but never wanted to do I
turned to my dad
my dad is a investor he has a hedge fund
and he invests in the style of Warren
Buffett which is choosing wonderful
companies with great fundamentals and
holding them generally for a long time
but I had avoided learning from him my
entire life despite having this father
who wanted to teach me we tend to avoid
things that are deeply uncomfortable
often without knowing exactly why and
for me it was planning for the future
and getting involved in the stock market
through my dad for somebody else
it’ll be worrying about those painful
credit-card bills that you don’t even
want to look at or touch for another
person it’ll be feeling like you don’t
deserve the money you have so you don’t
use it or spend it or risk it ever for
me it was the stock market and that fear
was legitimate because the stock market
can be really dangerous if you don’t
know what you’re doing and I didn’t want
to have the responsibility of losing
this money and having it be all my fault
I’m generally to this day terrible with
numbers and I had lived through the
dot-com bubble and the recession and the
real estate bubble and the recession so
when I think about the stock market back
then I felt like I was entering a
dimly-lit parking garage late at night
into an enclosed dark concrete stairwell
with heavy doors at both ends and my
radar is going off saying girl don’t go
in that concrete stairwell when I think
about the stock market my reaction is
get the hell out of that enclosed
concrete stairwell and call an uber it’s
worth the surge pricing so I found a
solution to this surface-level problem
of being afraid of losing my money in
the market
that was simply education and practice
which I got from my dad but then I
discovered a greater person a greater
purpose to this whole investing
shenanigan thing with my consumer money
I always try to buy products from
companies with a mission of integrity
the treat employees well treat animals
well don’t use pesticides or bio organic
free trade all the stuff nobody talked
about 30 years ago by demanding better
and voting with our money we consumers
have changed our options dramatically
we’ve gone from bio and organic products
being available in grocery stores in
tiny hard-to-find shops to now being
available in the front of supermarkets
right there for us and that’s not out of
the goodness of the hearts of the
grocery companies it’s because we
consumers took our money away from them
until they changed so it occurred to me
why couldn’t I do this with my investing
money the same way I did with my
consumer money I had to start thinking
of my money as a vote my money
represents me and my vote matters just
like it does at the ballot box but I
still somehow couldn’t quite connect to
this investing practice or to my money
so why was I still freaking out about
this and feeling like I was in this
enclosed concrete stairwell I finally
sat down I reached deeply inside my fear
and I realized it didn’t actually have
much to do with the stock market at all
I could learn that stuff it had to do
with me what had happened was then I
when I first started engaging with my
money I actually started engaging with
my feelings around money that money
stuff my feelings about security safety
about my relationships about Who I am
about my worth and this investing thing
became so much larger than what was in
my bank account and it had to because
when you truly engage with the power of
your own money it transforms you
internally bringing something out of
this dark fog into the light by talking
about it makes it shine it becomes
life-supporting without using it we’re
missing out on this connection to our
selves and especially to each other
because if we don’t engage on a deep
level with the power of our money
we are abdicating that power it’s still
there but we’re not using it we all have
a relationship to money that we were
taught as kids and a relationship with
money as adults that comes from that
every single one of us whether you were
rich or poor or in the middle it doesn’t
matter we all have one and engaging with
my relationship with money and my money
stuff forced me to go through three
steps they changed how invested I am in
myself and how my money represents me so
the first step was to become aware of
this relationship with money and to face
it for me I thought why am I not getting
into this practice fully I realized I
was afraid because of my teacher I
didn’t completely trust my dad which on
its face is silly because he’s very well
respected in the investing world he went
on CNBC and called the 2008 market crash
he knows what he’s doing when I was 11
my parents got divorced and they went to
war and my dad left and he took the
money with him now once he realized that
he had done this to his children he came
back and he made sure we were well taken
care of and my parents ended up settling
things without lawyers and we all have a
good relationship now but that happened
that’s in me and it marked me because
money can be safety right especially for
kids and I had never thought back to the
money part of that divorce experience it
was covered up by so many other things
that had happened and it was
uncomfortable so here I was having
avoided my dad’s investing knowledge
most of my life because I’m not good
with numbers and the stock market is so
scary and that’s my money stuff back
there deep within me I had to become
aware of it and face it so that I could
move through it when those feelings come
up which they still do for me I told a
good friend about this we’re sitting at
dinner and she immediately goes oh yeah
my parents were gamblers and when I was
a kid they would come around the house
and if I left any money out on the
bedside table
they would take it they would just steal
money from me so I learned never to
leave money out and I thought all kids
had parents who stole money from them
and it wasn’t until she went to
university that she discovered that some
parents don’t steal money from their
kids none of us have a clue and we’re
kids about these money experiences
because it’s hard to see outside of our
own experience and our perspective first
of all but also because we don’t talk to
each other about money it’s not until we
get older and we start to hear about
these things through relationships that
we can actually get some perspective on
how our paradigm around money was framed
the second step that I went through was
to be thankful for the good parts of
what happened that set me up in my life
yes I went through a bad divorce as a
kid so did a lot of other people and
there are many many worse things that
happen to kids
I’m incredibly privileged in a million
ways my own dad was now trying to teach
me investing personally being thankful
for what happened shifted this
experience with money that I went
through it lightened it it made it
manageable and it made me feel
comfortable enough to finally talk to my
dad about it I discovered that we have a
generational legacy of how we feel about
money and it changes with the
experiences and attitudes of each
generation so I went to talk to him and
initially of course my dad said no no I
don’t have any issues with money at all
except that I want some more of it like
classic money manager and I said we all
have some relationship with money and I
know you do because I know your parents
and he said oh yeah well it’s true that
my parents and especially my
grandparents so my great grandparents
he said that they implied that money was
the root of all evil and that rich
people got wealthy by grubbing their way
there so that they could rub it in
everybody’s faces with their limousines
and their big houses I mean that’s
negative and it almost sounds to me like
they felt money kept them from living
their values as good people so I asked
my dad how did you break out from this
mindset so that you could become
successful and he said I just did it
once I made some money and started to
realize that I could still be me
then I started to see it was okay
and then he told me about my grandmother
now my grandmother is a take-charge kind
of woman in a 1950s housewife world if
she had been born today she would be
running the world but at that time she
had a couple small businesses some
restaurants but nothing more and he said
after he made some money he was
financing a housing development and he
offered it to her to run which she would
have been amazing at and she said no and
she didn’t actually say this to him but
his implication was that it was a leap
too far and something in her did not
want to be one of those people those
rich people and she was afraid she just
couldn’t see herself like that and when
he said this to me I thought oh my gosh
she’s just like me and I’m just like her
feeling that enclosed concrete stairwell
feeling being afraid to step into my own
power because I can’t imagine myself
being truly connected to my money and
having it represent me well in the world
but look at how much has changed in only
a few generations that’s part of my
family tradition with money that draws a
red thread through the generations the
stuff they went through the stuff my
parents went through and now the stuff
I’m going through each transformation
generation by generation passing down
the legacy of struggle of wanting a
better life for our kids and our own
relationship with money we can create a
generational legacy of wealth and
connection to the power of our money and
I have the opportunity to make that
change so here’s how I did it the third
step is to transform my awareness of
what happened into my own new tradition
trust that by facing what you went
through and being thankful for that
tradition you will create your own new
tradition with money that’s personal to
you so I connected to the power of my
money my money was now a part of me and
it represents me in the world so what I
do with it reflects on me for me and my
new tradition I took something I saw is
negative and scary and made it into
something where my money as my vote
would be used consciously
and well imagine what would happen if
those of us who don’t invest right now
also face our fears and transformed our
relationship with money and started to
fight for those wonderful companies out
there we would do more than just choose
free trade bananas at the grocery store
we the small little guy investors
actually control most of the money in
the global stock markets it just doesn’t
look like it because it’s invested
through large funds but imagine what
would happen if we took our power back
and our votes back by taking our money
back
and put it into conscious companies with
strong missions and honorable management
the way people do business would change
and our own personal investing accounts
would change and grow right along with
it
we would literally change the global
stock market from one that rewards
short-term profits to one the rewards
long-term stakeholder gains and it would
start to happen very quickly finding
great companies and being able to
support them with my money made me feel
like a warrior from my couch and that’s
how by transforming my relationship to
money it connected me to my family to my
family tradition and to my world around
me I’ve married that guy who wasn’t
scared off by my baggie of pills and I
stopped needing the pills and I don’t
think it’s a coincidence that it
happened at the same time as I was
becoming invested in my life in a much
deeper way I hope you will put your
money in places and with people that
deserve your trust and your vote and I
send you the power to feel your own
worth and enjoy the journey I wish you a beautiful practice
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