July 15, 2021

Let’s Talk About Money

Let’s talk about money. Oh no, not that!

None of the women I coach ever feel particularly comfortable talking about money. Some of my clients tell me they don’t even talk to their partners about how much they earn. Money, it seems, is one of the most difficult conversations for people to have.

I remember the first time I went to therapy in my 20s and my therapist offered a sliding scale for people like me. I told her that I didn’t want the discount even though I knew I couldn’t afford the hourly rate. When she said she wanted to have a conversation about the fact that I couldn’t talk about money, I refused. I told her I would rather surface any of a multitude of painful childhood memories than talk about money.

My dear friend Brian Portnoy has taught me about “funded contentment”– something he writes powerfully about in his book The Geometry of Wealth — and defines it as the ability to underwrite a meaningful life. He suggests we should approach money by first figuring out what makes us happy, and to do that we have to connect with purpose.

I’ve been thinking about how difficult that is today for most people to figure out, let alone achieve. I’ve also been thinking about how often women (like me) have made choices that ultimately hurt us in an effort to achieve what we think is “funded contentment” but is actually an abdication of our power while playing the primary supporting role in funding someone else’s ambitions.

Financial literacy is a must for all women, and understanding financial health must be a primary goal. I’m not a finance coach, but many of the things I discuss with my coaching clients parallel the steps I’ve taken to change my relationship with money.

1. Figure out who you are and what you want.

The first thing I do in coaching and my online courses is help people figure out what they really want. I ask, “if I’m waving a magic wand and everything is how you want it to be, what does that look like?”

It’s not an easy question to answer. Especially in a world where so many others, like parents, partners and leaders in our organizations, tell us what we should want. Advertisements are everywhere bombarding us with one message, you want what we’re selling. You need what we have to be happy.

I spent a lot of years supporting a lifestyle that wasn’t at all what I wanted. And I didn’t even know it. To get to the place I am today required a lot of soul searching. I started with my core values and moved on from there.

Try sitting quietly and visualizing your life. Remove all of the distractions and quiet all of the voices in your head that tell you what you should want.

Ask yourself, “How do I want to live?” “Where do I see myself?”

Begin to cultivate a relationship with your inner self. Only then can you start to think about what you actually need financially in order to make that vision a reality.

2. Like all other things, build your confidence by getting educated.

When I coach women on what they want in their careers, I often suggest that they do some field work. It’s important to find out what is happening outside of our narrow scope of the world.

If we are considering changing jobs, what do those jobs look like in other places? How do they work? If we want to practice doing something differently, who is doing it that way and how do they make it work?

The same advice holds true for achieving financial wellness. It’s hard to figure out what you need or want when you have not worked out how to manage debt and investments, what a monthly budget entails, how to grow wealth sensibly and what kinds of investments you will need to make in yourself.

For many women, yet again, other people may offer to take care of some of these aspects of life and this leaves us with little sense of what financial health really looks like. This was one of the most devastating and panic inducing aspects of my own marriage. When it came to an end, I had virtually no understanding of what I earned, what life cost, and how to manage my finances.

On some level, it’s embarrassing and painful to admit this. But it’s true and I had to learn a lot fast. Learning about money and finance wasn’t even close to something I wanted to do. But understanding it as a fundamental necessity, in the same way that understanding what I should do to be physically or emotionally healthy, changed my life.

If you’re not in control of your finances at the moment, find someone to help you. Get educated, find mentors, ask people you trust to support you. We don’t talk about money at our peril. Full stop.

3. Face your financial fears by focusing on them.

I know I write a version of this in nearly every blog, but we have to change our relationship with fear. Feeling safe is an inside job.

Lately, I have been practicing focusing. It’s a practice made popular in the 1970s by Eugene Gendlin. His research showed that we need to have a felt sense of a shift in our bodies in order to change our minds. I regularly use this practice to manage my financial fears.

In the first step of focusing, clear a space for yourself and become an observer of your own self. I start by settling into a chair or the floor and doing some deep breathing.

Next, repeat the words that define the problem and notice what it feels like in your body when you say them. Here’s what I look like: I’m sitting on my living room floor with my eyes closed (and my Corgi next to me) giving myself permission to be with my fear and anxiety. Then I repeat the scary words, “I don’t have enough, and I don’t even know what enough is.”

According to Gendlin, the goal of the exercise is to get a felt-sense in your body of what that fear feels like.

When I started focusing, the fear felt like a flat heavy stone in the pit of my stomach. So I sat with that for a while. I stayed with it as long as I needed to get a real handle on the sensation. Understanding the quality of the sensation and the effect it has on the body (and therefore the mind) is the goal.

After going back and forth between the thought (I don’t have enough) and the felt-sense of it (the weight of the rock in my gut), I began to ask myself questions. What is the crux of this sensation in my body? What would it feel like in my body for it to shift? How can I release, shift or change this sensation?

Over time, the sensation did begin to lessen. And as it did I was able to let go of some of the limiting beliefs that have both held me back and led me to make some terrible choices to avoid the money issue. Gendlin discovered that we have to change the feelings in our bodies in order to change what our brains interpret as truth. As the old adage goes, don’t believe everything you think.

Focusing helped me to change my relationship with fear. As it shifted in my body, it shifted in my mind. And that was when I was able to get back to thinking about funded contentment. How much do I need to earn to afford a meaningful life?

4. Connect back to your sense of purpose.

I’ve realized, through hard work, that when I am working with a sense of purpose, I’m in a flow state, where I’m not even aware that I am working. Cliché though it may be, this is when I’ve had the most financial success of all.

April 28, 2021

Braving the 2020s

A few years ago, I read Brené Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness. Like so much of her work, it’s reflective, accessible and eminently actionable. Her acronym BRAVING (which stands for boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault, integrity, non-judgment and generosity) has been my guide for the 2020s.

I was so ready to close the books on the few years that preceded this decade. I was finally seeing the light at the end of a dark three-year tunnel that included my father’s death (the person to whom I was the closest in the world), a painful and unexpected divorce (that left me lonely and afraid), and facing my daughter’s depression and my own anxiety (both of which I had been spectacularly unaware).

Years of hard work with gifted therapists and coaches helped me feel ready to usher in a new era of joy.

Then nothing proceeded to plan (thanks, COVID!).

BRAVING has helped me navigate the new normal. Here’s how:

Boundaries

I went to a parenting class when my daughter was small. We were asked to draw pictures of our child — one in which the child was caged, one in which the child was surrounded by lots of white space and a squiggly line, and one in which the child stood alone in a huge, empty space with no lines.

Like a mother without any sense of boundaries, I showed this to my five-year old and asked what she thought. “You do that one, Mama,” she told me, pointing to the child alone in space. And then she pointed to the squiggly line and said, “I want that.”

I got better (slightly) at setting boundaries for her, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that I got really good at setting my own. And much better at respecting those of others.

We’ve been forced to reckon with what safety means to us and our families, and what it means to those around us. I’ve been asked, at work and at home, to do things I don’t feel comfortable doing. I’ve said no. I’ve asked others, at work and at home, to do things they’ve not felt comfortable doing. They’ve said no. I can’t overstate the positive impact this clarity has had on me and my relationships.

Reliability

If you want to create a trusting environment, do what you say you are going to do. Pre-2020s I was famous for saying, “Sure, I’ll be there,” just before cancelling when my busy life got in the way. I was known for my unreliability. My family started saying, “we don’t know if Ali’s coming until we see the whites of her eyes.”

My daughter tells me beautifully and honestly that I just wasn’t there for her.

I. Had. No. Idea.

This past year and a half has changed all of that. It’s hard not to be where you say you’re going to be when you have nowhere else to go. With all meetings by Zoom and taking place at home, I haven’t missed a thing.

Despite living in isolation, I find I’m having shared emotional experiences with nearly everyone — collective trauma, grief and burnout — all of which have made me even more aware of how important it is for us to keep our commitments to one another.

When my daughter wants my attention, I give it to her fully. When my colleagues schedule time with me, I show up. I can now honestly say, “you can count on me.”

Accountability

Accountability means taking ownership for our mistakes, apologizing and making amends.

There’s nothing like over a year of solitude to create some space for contemplation. I’ve found myself at the line between owning my mistakes and ruminating over what I should have done. And, if you’ve been following me, you know that I preach what I most need to learn — no shoulding on ourselves or others.

Instead, accountability has meant meeting myself with compassion. Reflecting on the things I did or didn’t do, digesting the feelings that accompany how I may have let myself or others down, and integrating the experience so that it becomes a source of wisdom. And then apologizing. To my daughter, to my work colleagues, to my ex-husband, and to others I let down.

I have learned to say, “you counted on me to show up fully, and I did not. I’m sorry for that.”

Vault

The vault is another name for confidentiality. We are reminded to only share what is ours to share. Simply put, don’t gossip. As a coach and a former lawyer, I have always taken confidentiality very seriously. Nearly every professional conversation I have is confidential.

I’ve watched how forced separation from others has changed many workplace dynamics. Without meetings at the school gates, in coffee shops and office corridors, there has been less opportunity for gossip. This has been refreshing!

I’ve also noticed even more space for self-reflection in me and in my coaching clients. Funnily enough, if we don’t hide “self-view” in Zoom, we’re literally “seeing” ourselves in our conversations. That holding up the mirror has helped many honor the commitment to only share what is ours to share. We literally see ourselves making that promise, and we keep it.

Integrity

Do what is right over what is fun, comfortable or easy. That is how Brené Brown defines integrity. We’re living through times where we’re all called to learn about and to address systemic inequality and injustices wherever we can. These conversations are anything but fun, comfortable or easy. The political polarization that’s happening around the globe is frightening. Yet I continue to be hopeful as I, and others with whom I work, find the courage to have uncomfortable conversations every day about what is right and what is just.

Non-Judgment

This has been the best part of this period for me. It’s about not judging ourselves for what we need. And boy has this time taught me that whatever we need is just fine! I’ve never in my many years of coaching seen so much written about self-care, and with such clarity in that it has nothing to do with spa days and facials. It means taking care of ourselves.

I’ve been practicing a lot of gratitude about living in Southern California these last few years for all kinds of reasons, especially sunshine. The number of times I’ve sat outside in my garden tending to (and sometimes talking to) my flowers and heard that voice in my head saying, “you should go be more productive” is a lot.

But I’ve cultivated an inner response. At the beginning of the pandemic, I listened to an interview with the author Elizabeth Gilbert. She says she writes in her journal in the form of a dialogue between herself and love. Here’s my go at that:

Ali: You’ve spent enough time in the garden. You should go work and be productive.

Love: I’m here for you.

Ali: Thank you, love, for being here for me. What does that mean?

Love: Keeping you warm and holding you close without judgment.

Ali: Thank you. I’ll stay in the garden a bit longer and feel this love. It gives me energy.

Generosity

And finally, make generous assumptions. I’ve been let down during this time. We all have. But I’ve found the bottomless well of compassion for myself and others, and the practice of assuming positive intention of those close to me has been utterly liberating.

We’re off to a rough start, but I am optimistic about the new roaring twenties. Stay safe, awake and connected. We’ll get through this together and be stronger for it.