[Applause]
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 out 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 and that was simply education
and practice which I got from my dad but
then I discovered a great
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
have 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
ourselves 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
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 in 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 all 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 faced 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
that 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 [Applause]
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 out 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 and that was simply education
and practice which I got from my dad but
then I discovered a great
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
have 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
ourselves 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
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 in 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 all 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 faced 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
that 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 [Applause]
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