Meet Bari Tessler

[00:00:00] Bari: What financial habits, behaviors, identities were being established in our childhood up through our young twenties? And to understand more of the money story, what are you still holding onto from your past? Money healing is everything about learning somatic tools to help you regulate and understand what’s going on in all of these money moments and decisions.

[00:00:27] Linzy: Welcome to the Money Skills for Therapists podcast, where we answer this question. How can therapists and health practitioners go from money shame and confusion to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Lindsay Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of the course Money Skills for Therapists.

[00:00:50] Linzy: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today I have an interview with Bari Tesler. Bari is a financial therapist. She is a pioneer, as we talk about, in the financial therapy field, and she is the author of The Art of Money. She’s been doing somatic based financial therapy work with folks for decades, teaching courses, writing her book.

[00:01:15] And today, Bari and I talk about how she came into this work, her method for helping folks heal their relationship to money. We talk about some of the parallels. I certainly noticed some of the parallels between, what she has discovered works for people and what I have also discovered works for folks in terms of letting people really start to shift their relationship with money and

[00:01:37] learn the actual skills that they need to learn. Bari is a wealth of knowledge. She’s been doing this work for years and years and years, and it shows. And you can also watch this podcast episode if you want, on YouTube, if you want to watch Bari and I talk in person. Here is my conversation with Bari Tesler.

[00:02:05] So Bari, welcome to the podcast.

[00:02:07] Bari: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:02:09] Linzy: I’m excited to have you here. Your name is a name that I have heard floating about in the air because I think you are a bit of a pioneer in the financial therapy space. Is that a fair term to use?

[00:02:24] Bari: Yes. Yeah. Yes.

[00:02:28] Linzy: Let’s start by digging into your story and how you ended up getting into this work.

[00:02:33] Bari: Yeah, okay, short version I just put this up on my About Me page. I hired a new copywriter and she told my story in a way that I just absolutely love. It’s more of a mini memoir heroine’s journey.

[00:02:47] So condensed version is I grew up dancing. I wanted to be a solid gold dancer. I’m older than you, so you won’t know what that is, but it was this great seventies dance show. They wore gold sequined outfits, and that’s what I want to be. Number one. Number two was a business woman as a preteen had no idea what type of business woman, but business woman,

[00:03:06] and number three, I asked at 16, I asked my parents if I could go to therapy. So I wound up going to talk therapy, and with a male therapist, which none of those were great, but it was a beginning. I did my undergrad in history, having no idea what I was going to do when I grew up.

[00:03:21] I went and traveled, and I thought I made up dance movement therapy and I didn’t. So that’s, I did not. I’m a pioneer of financial therapy in one of my interviews, but I did not make up dance movement therapy. I learned that there’s graduate programs in somatic psychology, dance movement therapy, and I moved back to the States and I started graduate school at the age of 24 in somatic psychology at Naropa University.

[00:03:46] And so my twenties were spent working in the mental health field as a counselor, social worker, working in hospice,doing all my internship work and, you know, it took me from 24 to 28. So half of my internships, I got paid because

[00:04:00] I needed to make money at that time. We had to write a 150 page thesis. My thesis was about helping young women move into the next phase of life into adulthood by using movement therapies, authentic movement in particular, and self created ritual. My topics were sexuality, intimacy, relationships, body, food, grief, and death.

[00:04:24] And yeah, that’s right. Those are my topics in my 20s. And then when the student loan came due, when I walked across the stage, got the master’s degree, was working in the mental health field program, still making 11 an hour. Not getting a raise even after I got the Master’s.

[00:04:44] How was I going to pay back the student loan? How was I going to make more than 11 an hour? So I knew that the work I was doing was very good, and deep, but I wasn’t getting paid well, and I had no idea how to break through any type of money ceiling and make a good livelihood.

[00:05:02] And I really thought I was the only one with money issues at this time, until I started looking around and then realizing, No matter what economic class or lineage or ethnicity or background we all came from, we all had strengths and challenges around money, and it suddenly became either I’m going to run away and not face this, or I’m going to face it like every other big, scary, challenging topic in my life,

[00:05:28] and I’m going to learn everything I can about money from the ground up. I took a little detour and wound up learning bookkeeping, and doing the books for other therapists and coaches and artists and creatives for four years and ran a bookkeeping business. I was taught QuickBooks and fell in love with it, surprisingly, and I, I always say I was ages 28 to 32, when I learned more about people’s relationship to money from what’s important to them to, you know, their cashflow patterns to their values. I learned so much that I say more than if I was doing psychotherapy with them, but I wasn’t ready. I was still too young to say I’m a psychotherapist at the age of 28.

[00:06:17] And so bookkeeping was this very easy doorway where therapists just threw their books at me and had no idea. The masters in psychology were like, take this. I don’t want to have anything to do with this. And I learned so much. And then at the age of 32, and I’m going to be 56, so in 2001 is when I realized it was time to integrate all of the financial literacy skills that I was learning and feeling really empowered by, and all of the emotional literacy and somatic tools and deep psychotherapy training that I had and merge it all together into one of the first financial therapy methodologies in 2001. My husband came up with the term financial therapy, not like, you know, he wasn’t the first one, but I went online and I googled financial therapy and there was one other woman in Canada using that term.

[00:07:07] She was a bookkeeper, and that was it. That’s a teeny bit of how financial therapy came to be for me and my financial therapy method, which integrates money, healing money practices, money maps we’ll talk about, and so that was since 2001 I’ve been teaching in groups of 10 people to 500 person groups online.

[00:07:28] And really sometimes do a mentor program for just therapists and other professionals, but mostly my groups are folks from all different backgrounds and lots of professionals who need a safe and brave space to do their own money work.

[00:07:42] Linzy: Yeah, yeah, I mean it strikes me, you know, as you’re talking about your your focus for your thesis, it’s like all, taboo topics, it’s all the dark, deep, sometimes scary, meaningful, rich things that many others would happily avoid and then once you were done that, you just moved into the next one which is money.

[00:08:01] Bari: Yeah.

[00:08:01] Linzy: And the taboo of money and it’s so telling,as you say that, you know, therapists would throw their books at you. even though you said you had a psychology degree, right? But so happy to give it to you cause I see the same thing. It’s one of the taboo topics that we feel like we can outsource.

[00:08:17] Right? You can’t really outsource,your death, your sexuality, religion, meaning, but I do notice that money is one of the ones that we do try to actually push away from us. To be like, somebody else can take care of this. Somebody else can fix this for me. It sounds to me like that’s kind of what you received in your late 20s when you were doing this work.

[00:08:36] Bari: Yes, we’re not given a financial literacy education from grade school and up. We think we’re the only ones who have these money issues or money shame. Once you’re in a group with even just 10 people, you realize you’re not alone, right? That’s why I started doing group work over individual work day one.

[00:08:54] I do take private clients, but I wanted us to be in community and to be in a group and to see, oh, wow, your story is reminding me of something about my own money behaviors or habits, or it’s reminding me of my mom or my sister or my brother or, you know, there’s just so much to learn. We were not given a financial literacy education growing up.

[00:09:14] We feel so much shame around this. We think everyone else learned this except for us. And then we know we’re smart in so many ways but again, we didn’t learn this. So we feel stupid in this area and it’s hard to learn things as adults. And we’re learning a whole new skill set that we really needed to be taught in small increments.

[00:09:33] You know, everyone is coming to me. My age group is 25 to 80. I mean, that’s an enormous age group and I’d say it’s more middle aged women on up, who are like, oh, I really need to learn about money now, but I get,20 year olds, late 20 year olds, 30 year olds as well, which I think is wonderful. So great.

[00:09:53] Linzy: So great.

[00:09:54] Bari: And when you’re starting your own business, all your money stuff is going to come up. There’s the internal emotional somatic work to do, and then there’s all the practical parts, but it’s the internal and external skill set that we all really need to learn in it.

[00:10:10] So one of the first things I’m always saying is, let’s talk about your strengths. Let’s make a list of five to 10 things that you do well around money because everyone who comes in [thinks] I suck around money. I’m not smart around money. I wasn’t great at math so I can’t do a bookkeeping system. And I could dispel that right away.

[00:10:25] I wasn’t good at math. So that was one of the reasons I was terrified of learning a bookkeeping system, and didn’t think I could learn one. And when someone sat me down, and I do say with a box of tissue and really good chocolate, for chocolate breaks and crying breaks. I was able to slowly learn a bookkeeping system over many months I always say it takes three to six months to learn any bookkeeping system

[00:10:49] and we all can learn one. If I could learn one, we all can learn one. I mean, I do math in my head. I didn’t realize that I actually do numbers in my head. but I couldn’t do hard math. Yes. So we all have these things of: I’m not going to be good with money, or I can’t do money, or I need to outsource it for all different sorts of reasons

[00:11:09] and while yes, it’s important to have a financial support team and maybe have a bookkeeper on your team to show you how to set up a bookkeeping system, to learn how to navigate, to maybe even take it over for you. I do think for a period of time, it is so essential and helpful to do your own bookkeeping for a period of time.

[00:11:30] I did it for a good decade, and it is a mindfulness tool and practice to help you learn about what’s coming in, how many patterns, when it’s coming in… Do you need to bring in more? Where are you spending? I mean, there’s just so much learning that can happen. And then on the business side, it’s great to learn about accounting and cashflow and projections. And there’s just so much planning and understanding of your business. Yes. Yes. Yes. So, yeah, I’ll pause there. Okay.

[00:12:03] Linzy: Well, you’re speaking my language,it feels like we should have met before,because you’re saying words that I hear come out of my own mouth too, and some of the language that I have developed around talking about these ideas is, you know, like you can outsource the tasks, but you can’t outsource the responsibility, right?

[00:12:19] And so that piece about, doing enough of your own bookkeeping and developing enough literacy that you understand what it means, when information is given to you, you can look at it, make sense of it, analyze it, and make decisions with it. Again, we can give somebody the task of doing the bookkeeping and they will probably be better at it than we will.

[00:12:36] They’re professionals at it, you know? They will be able to make it all orderly, but they can’t help you understand what it really means. They can’t help you use it to make strategic decisions, it’s the beginning of learning how to do it that allows you to build the skills that as you say, also like really start to notice where’s the money coming from?

[00:12:53] Where is it going? And slowing down like, Hey, this month I spent a lot on this. Why, what’s going on? What else is maybe happening in my world that’s leading me to make these faster financial decisions, or I still haven’t stopped paying for that thing even though I want to, what’s in the way? There’s just so much there that somebody else cannot actually do that work for you. It’s such internal work in so many ways.

[00:13:16] Bari: It is internal work and it’s really eventually empowering. It can be so scary at first, you know, whatever your money beliefs or experiences are, you know, I was saying mine was, I’m not good at math or I’ll never be able to learn this.

[00:13:31] So when I actually learned a bookkeeping system, it just blew my mind. It was really empowering and these are parts of adulting,that we need to do in our personal financial house and in our businesses as well. So it’s, we’re partnering with a bookkeeper, they’re teaching us and this is their expertise and specialty, and what they hopefully love doing day in and day out, so they can partner with us and show us some things, but we still need a financial support team, whether it’s a bookkeeper, accountant, financial coach, financial planner, so on.

[00:14:04] Linzy: Yeah, and there is always that piece of you. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? So if you have a solo practice, you can probably take care of your books well, but once you get into a more complex business, like group practices, there’s lots of money coming and going. You don’t know what you don’t know.

[00:14:17] And so that is where it does make sense to bring on somebody who lives and breathes these things. And as you said, loves to do these things. They’re going to bring so much more information, insight and energy to that than you would have. Cause it’s not what you love.

[00:14:28] Bari: Yeah, and it is scary to go and trust these people and to, how do you hire someone and how do you pick the right person?

[00:14:34] I have a whole chapter in my book on who are the different financial players? What do they even do? I didn’t know the difference between a bookkeeper, accountant, financial coach, and so on years ago. So I explain all of that and then questions to ask when hiring and, you don’t need to feel so comfortable like they’re your best friend,

[00:14:52] but you need to be aware, like if you’re having a lot of psychology, money, emotions coming up, most of them aren’t trained in that. Some of them may be able to hear you out, but that’s what you do then bring to your therapist, or you take one of the programs, read my books or things like that. But you need to be doing that work so that when you sit down with one of those folks, you have some tools.

[00:15:12] So many folks will go to sit in a financial planner’s office and just start checking out, like going into a fight, flight, freeze on the spot. And so I have so many somatic tools, like the very first tool I offer is the body check in. You may have your version of it, but you know,I’ll tell a short story.

[00:15:28] The very first evening I taught my very first financial therapy group in my living room, in my apple orchard in 2001, the very first evening I was like, okay, we’re going to dive into family of origin, money stories and how were you different from your siblings? You can grow up in the same household and have different financial identities and behaviors like at age five.

[00:15:48] At age eight, you could see, right? And you know, let’s talk about mom and dad spending money, behaviors and pros and cons or grandparents, whoever was raising you. I just saw people go into freeze and shut down, and I thought, what am I doing? I am completely leaving out an entire decade of my somatic training.

[00:16:07] I’m not giving them even a tool. So the very next week we came in, same living room, 10 people. And I said, I’m going to teach you all the body check in, which is just stopping and pausing, asking yourself to slow down and check in and say, what’s going on right now on a physical level in my body? What are the sensations?

[00:16:28] What are the emotions that are present? What is my breath doing? And that is just one part of a body check in. I’m always ending it with, now, what is one little adjustment that you can make to help you feel more okayness right now in your body to help you feel more presence, which is now known as resourcing from Peter Levine’s work.

[00:16:48] But in 1994 to 1998… His first book came out in 1998. My somatic teachers weren’t teaching somatic experience, but we were doing very similar work. And so for me, the body checking, when people say, what is the first step or the first tool, I don’t say bookkeeping systems, which I love. I don’t say, let’s do money dates, which I love.

[00:17:10] I say, start doing a body check in before you’re going to make a money decision, before you’re going to tell your client your fees. Before you’re going to do some online shopping at night. Now, if you forget to do it before, then maybe you remember in the heat of the moment. You’re telling a client your fees and you’re noticing you’re immediately going to, oh, but I can do a discount.

[00:17:30] Or you’re in the middle of online shopping going, What is going on with me right now? Or sometimes you forget and you do it after you leave the mall with bags. The body checking can be done before, during and after, and eventually before, during and after is wonderful, right?

[00:17:47] As prep time, as what’s going on in the moment in the middle of a financial planner’s office, you may be doing a body check in and say, hey, can you slow down a bit and say that again? Yes. Hey, let me look at my list of questions that I wrote before I came in, or hey, you know what? I’m going to run to the bathroom. And take a moment.

[00:18:09] You don’t need to say it. I’m going to run to the bathroom. The bathroom is such a good place to do a body check in and what’s going on? What am I feeling? How do I get my breath down deeper in my body? What’s going on? What is the memory here? Come back. Now let’s go back to this meeting, and look at my notes again.

[00:18:28] And so there’s the body check. That’s my beginning tool to bring to all these money conversations and money decisions and that’s something that I’m teaching over and over to folks. Yeah.

[00:18:43] Linzy: Well, it’s such a valuable resource, to use that language,for someone to start to develop as their go-to,because so often we are in some sort of fight/flight/freeze. We’re actually feeling extremely anxious, or full of grief, and we’re doing this thing with money to distract us from that. There’s just so many versions of how we act automatically with money based on something that might have nothing to do with money.

[00:19:09] Bari: Or with money, with this, with me or this moment.. Yes, absolutely. Yes.

[00:19:14] Linzy: Yeah. Yeah. That slowing down sounds like such a valuable piece. So tell me more about your method. Cause you’re saying this is the first thing that you suggest, you know?

[00:19:23] Bari: Yeah, and I’ll say one more thing about it, So Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn is kind of like the bigger thing. The smaller thing is just what’s the emotion in the moment, which you were just naming some. I’m feeling some anxiety, or for someone else that might be I’m feeling some anger or sadness or grief, right?

[00:19:41] So the fight, flight, freeze may happen to a lot of us, but for me, that’s like a larger scope. It’s in the moment, too, just what’s the emotion? And so for me, the money healing is, out of my three phases, it’s the first one. And I have financial coach colleagues that I refer to all the time because they do more long term support and long term sessions with folks.

[00:20:02] And I like to teach in larger groups, or I’ll do one private session or three, right? So I’m always sending them off to my financial coaches,or I would send them off to someone like you or combination,and they sometimes start with, we’re going to sit down and learn a bookkeeping system, right?

[00:20:18] And I start with, okay, 90 percent of our money decisions are based on our emotions. I see people making money decisions all the time based on their emotions, right? So I see folks who have a lot of money who still feel anxiety, still feel anger, still feel sadness, grief, right?

[00:20:37] The money emotions aren’t going to go away one day. We all have them, so for me, first stop in money healing is really stopping and pausing and starting to understand your money emotions. What cocktail of emotions come up for you? Are there a combination? Are there a lot of them? Are there a few? Diving into more of your money story?

[00:20:56] What did you learn from mom, dad, grandparents, ethnicity, religion? What made up your money story, right? Everything from family of origin to the environment you grew up in to the economic class you grew up… And then also, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Enneagram, my favorite personality typing system, right?

[00:21:16] So what is your nature, right? What did you know like the age of, for me, very young, I was the designated spender in the family. I just like things. I wanted things. I had desires right where my younger siblings one had a bank at age five was saving money.

[00:21:33] And it doesn’t mean that you’re stuck in that financial identity, and it could be given lots of different connotations, like, Oh, if you’re the saver, you’re good. If you are the spender, you’re bad. Instead of, oh, me and my dad we wanted things. We liked things. My mom and my siblings were the savers.

[00:21:50] At some point I had to realize I can be a spender. I can enjoy spending. I can also learn how to save. Yes. You know, and squirrel money away. So, you know my husband and son see me as the “squirreler”. They know I like to enjoy spending, too, we can have many different financial identities, family of origin, new family, chosen family, friends.

[00:22:12] What financial habits, behaviors, identities were being established in our childhood up through our young twenties, and to understand more of the money story, what we want to keep, what we want to let go of. It’s good therapy work, right? That’s the money healing section.

[00:22:30] There’s a lot about: what are you still holding onto from your past? What do you need to let go of? I do a lot of money healing ritual work. So, money healing is everything about learning somatic tools to help you regulate and understand what’s going on in all of these money moments and decisions, so they’re not running you. And so you can learn how to decrease the emotions so they’re smaller. You can catch them quicker and sooner. So there’s all of that to understand more of your money story to do some letting go, forgiveness work. There’s a lot more there, but

[00:23:08] then we move into money practices and the tools. It’s not like one day you’re done with money healing, We’re humans. We’re sensitive humans. I speak for myself, and everyone that comes to me, and we’ll be doing this work forever and fine tuning it and adjusting and you know, until we die.

[00:23:26] But we learn to work with the ups and downs, the ebbs and flows of life and money, we learn to work with our emotions more. Now the same set of emotions come up around money that come up in every other area of life. I didn’t know that back in the day. I somehow thought they would be different. So it’s just really learning how to work with the money emotions that come up when you’re going to buy a car, when you’re going to buy a home, when you’re going to tell clients fees, yes.

[00:23:53] When you’re deciding how big you want your practice to be? Time, energy, money, family, and health is one of the equations I’m always working with. You don’t just stop the money healing section and move on to money practices.

[00:24:08] You bring it with you; you bring those tools. When you go to sit down and learn a bookkeeping system. So in money, practice is all the practical stuff, but it has to have some creativity and fun in there for me. Otherwise, this area is just scary or boring

[00:24:24] Linzy: Yeah, as you’re talking about money feelings. Feelings being the foundation. I have found the same thing, kind of organically in my work, trying to jump ahead to teaching people systems, and seeing them power down and, you know, what occurred to me at some point as a trauma therapist by training is when we’re so activated by the emotions that are going on in the stories, and trauma that’s pulling us back, our learning brain is not available.

[00:24:50] Right? So folks think that they’re dumb about this, and there’s, there’s stories that we can tell “well, I’m not a money person, I’m not a numbers person, I don’t know how to do spreadsheets.” I’m talking to people here who are very smart, very educated, have learned so much, but their brains are in survival mode.

[00:25:04] They have dropped into, their brain thinks that they’re in mortal danger. So of course they can’t sit and learn how to use Excel in that moment. And so what I’ve also found is until we do that foundational work, for some folks, your brain’s actually not available to learn. That’s why you can’t learn QuickBooks, or a spreadsheet, or YNAB,or even just reading a profit and loss,because your brain is really stressed, but once you start to work through and unwind those things, that smart brain of yours is able to come back online,and these things become very learnable. That has been my observation,which totally aligns with what you’re talking about.

[00:25:36] Bari: 100 percent. 100 percent. Some people may want to learn a bookkeeping system right away, a tracking system. They feel they need to be doing both at the same time and you’ve the capacity for that. That’s wonderful, remember it takes three to six months to get comfortable with any bookkeeping system, and then a year before you’re like I got this confidently.

[00:25:53] I know how to do this, right? And yes, I mean, our eyes glaze over, we get free shut down so if you can even do a body check-in when you’re going to sit down to even go online and research different bookkeeping systems, I share those as my books or on blogs.

[00:26:10] So here’s a few things in that. So it’s bringing the body check in tools, and the somatic tools to all of these moments, and I wrap it in money dates. So I’m always teaching people to have a money date. And a money date can be five minutes.It could be 15 minutes, it could be 30 minutes, it could be an hour. Some people need to schedule them at the beginning before it becomes, you know, a habit and then you get more comfortable, the grooves get created, and a money date is really just, hey, money, what is one next step that you need me to take right now?

[00:26:39] For most of us, if we’re doing this for the first time as adults, we’re going to have a whole list. So maybe even a gentle money date is just lighting a candle. I get out my essential oils, dark chocolate, my drink, my mocha. Some people like to play music. I like quiet. Whatever music is going to get you in the mood for a money date, you set it up like a ritual.

[00:26:59] That’s how I’ve always needed to do it. So that’s how I teach about money dates. And even the first money date, maybe just start making a list of the to do’s. That’s your first money date, just start making a list. And guess what? That list is just, you’re going to cross one off, a new one’s going to be added.

[00:27:14] It’s an ongoing forever list, and we’ve got to break it down as you know, another trauma informed teaching, which it wasn’t called that in the nineties, titration, which is breaking things down into small bite size steps. So teaching money dates again, it could be five minutes every day at the beginning. What is one next step?

[00:27:34] So, I do a money date. Now, a lot of people won’t want to start here, but every morning with my coffee, I go online. I check my accounts. I just look around, peeking. What’s the balances? Open an account to see if there’s any funny business, if things look good.If I have more time, I might try to clean up a money leak.

[00:27:53] Oh, I don’t need five TV subscriptions. I need three, you know, just saying clean up a money leak. So for me, that’s like a checking in money date every morning that I do for five minutes. It might be, oh, I really need to call the IRS to set up a payment plan. Oh, I need to hire a new bookkeeper.

[00:28:13] I’m going to be brave and learn a bookkeeping system, or I’m going to hire someone to show me how to do it, Money dates can be practical steps, setting up a bookkeeping system, learning how to track, having someone show you how to read reports, profit and loss, all this stuff.

[00:28:30] I think you do to some degree, and how to read reports, you know, that’s a whole scary thing and exciting thing. Eventually, it will feel empowering. There’s so many things around money dates. But money dates can also just be journaling. I’m going to take a money date to journal some memories that are coming up, or some of the questions in the money healing section.

[00:28:50] What was my money role as a kid and how was it different from my siblings? I’m going to list one pro and one con around money stuff that I learned from mom. In some of this we just get memories, so we may just want to journal some of those questions, and then things will come up. I can remember my mom anxiously paying bills at the dining room table, right?

[00:29:12] I can remember right parents fighting behind closed doors about money. A lot of our money stuff stories comes in memories like that. It’s not like you wrap it up and you have a perfect money story, and you figure it all out. It’s an ongoing, evolving thing. Even when I was writing my first book in 2014, it started, came out in 2016.

[00:29:31] I wrote a whole new chapter that wasn’t supposed to be in there called it’s about money and it’s never about money, right? It’s about money, which we’ve already talked about. We weren’t given a financial education from grade school and up. There’s a lot of skillsets we need to learn as adults. It’s scary. It’s hard.

[00:29:48] Bari: It’s not about money because it’s about all of these deeper themes around safety and security and responsibility. Money dates can be done on a very practical level. A lot of us need to take a lot of steps there. Move money around, pay bills, set up automatic payments.

[00:30:03] There’s so much to be done, and so, twice a week for 30 minutes, every day for five minutes, once a month for a longer time, but you need them to be weekly to get the grooves going, right? They can be solo. They can be done with a partner. We have little family dates with our teenager. We’ve been doing that for years. I look at it as self care practices around money. We all have self care practices, and let’s bring those same concepts to our relationship to money. For me, it is a garden of life that needs our care and attention, but not too much watering, but not underwatering, but right.

[00:30:43] So it’s how do you create a self care practice around money, which for me is around the money dates. There’s a whole thing on renaming things to make it more meaningful. Yes, that’s the whole piece on let’s rename a debt instead of that damn debt or that time that I don’t want to think about. Wait a second. What was going on in your life?

[00:31:06] What was that transition phase? You know, what was that money used for? Let’s understand, let’s honor it. Let’s give it a new name, you know, for example, I worked with one woman, she had a debt, she wasn’t looking at the total amount. So therefore she wasn’t looking at the interest, you know, what that was, and that can get really up there.

[00:31:30] She wasn’t coming up with a payment plan. We sat down and it was this whole journey to Italy that really changed the course of her life and was very meaningful for her. So she renamed it a big Italian experience. And then she sat down and was able to look at the big number, look at the interest rate, and come up with a payment plan that she felt really good about.

[00:31:50] Or I worked with an accountant who at first was like, this is silly, this renaming thing, but he had a debt and they had a medical debt, and the medical debt was his wife’s cancer treatment and she made it through the cancer treatments and had survived and they have more time together. And I don’t know exactly how he renamed it, but renaming it to honor his wife, and that she’s alive, and that they have more time together and he said it, that little teeny renaming thing changed everything for him.

[00:32:24] Bari: So that debt and the number and the repayment. So it could be playful, like my Italian, right. A lot deeper. So, there’s serious. Yeah, more serious. But it could also be more… You know, I had someone rename their mortgage to love shack because they were married for the second time in a really fun phase.

[00:32:44] So, there’s all these things that I’m adding in money practices, what to do, but it’s really money dates, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly to keep checking in. Not to be so vigilant, but to create an ongoing relationship. What do you need to take care of? What’s working?

[00:33:03] What’s not? Adjusting. Where are you spending? Where do you need to bring in more money? How are you going to do that all? And then we get to the third phase and I’ll just say money mapping is what people usually call budgets. I call it a money map.

[00:33:15] And it’s all about what phase of life are you in? How much do you need to make in your personal life?

[00:33:21] What are the numbers? What are your goals there? Your business is going to have a totally separate set of goals. Obviously it’s impacted by personally what you need. They need to be talking to each other, but you need to create a set of intentions, projections, goals for your personal life, separate ones for your business.

[00:33:39] And it’s all about that. It’s also about how you know if you’re making a good money decision? It’s a framework and foundation that you keep repeating each year based on, now what am I working on now? What needs to be updated now? What curve ball did I get in life? Yes. And how you need to adjust for that. Yeah.

[00:33:59] Linzy: Adjusting to your chapter and what I noticed with money is one of the analogies I like to use is: it’s similar to riding a bicycle, right? Once you know how to do these things, you know how to come back to it and keep doing it. There is some revisiting to do sometimes. Sometimes things shift dramatically. What I’m hearing in what you’re saying is something that I very much believe in myself, which is, there’s this important interplay between the meaning we ascribe to money, the names we give it, the stories that we have around it and ourself and who we are, that is so much of our experience with money.

[00:34:30] And then there’s the practicality. There’s the actual taking care of setting up systems, navigating bigger systems like the IRS, confronting and looking at this debt. What does this interest mean? Is this simple interest? Is this compound interest? What does this mean for me financially?

[00:34:45] So there really is this combination that we need to develop around money, which is this emotional intelligence, this ability to be with what you’re talking about and the actual practical knowledge and skills. We need the education that we never got.

[00:34:59] Bari: We never did, and that’s why financial literacy and emotional literacy. So important. Yeah, you know, we’re doing it at the same time. Yes, this is all about understanding the stories and the meaning that we took on and put on a relationship to money as a child and young adults, and learning that we can rewrite these money stories. They are not set in stone.

[00:35:25] I wouldn’t be doing this work if we couldn’t rewrite them or learn things. As I said earlier I was a spender, and I can be a good saver, too. This is about learning new skill sets on the emotional level, but it’s also all these practical skill sets as well and it’s ongoing.

[00:35:43] It’s ongoing. Every year is: what new financial support persons you need to add to your team? What are your questions now? It’s really ongoing, and so, we have to be loving and compassionate and gentle and kind with themselves and understanding we’re always learning and growing.

[00:36:03] And guess what? We make mistakes. I call them so-called money mistakes because we all make them and then we learn, Oh, I would never do that again. Or, oh, I would do it differently next time. Or, oh, now I need to bring on a new person on my team who specializes in this so I can ask better questions.

[00:36:20] We’re going to make mistakes. That’s life. It’s going to happen with money, too, and hopefully we can learn from them and be kind to ourselves as we are updating our financial stories

[00:36:32] Linzy: Absolutely yeah, and as I’m thinking about this, Bari, I’m thinking for people listening.Often folks who listen to this podcast,they might be at the beginning or kind of midway into their journey of developing a more present relationship with money, and developing skills. Often there can be grief with that, but I find sometimes it’s hard to hear from folks who are further ahead compare and despair so I’m curious if you’re up for sharing, what is coming to your world now with this, chapter of life that you’re in now, what is your learning or your exploring or your resourcing that you’ve had to do,more recently as somebody who’s, who’s even been doing this work for 20 years?

[00:37:09] Bari: Yes, So I’ve been, you know, running my own business for 25 years. So for me, I have to come back to that there’s ebbs and flows in life, and in money. I will continue to work on what’s my money ceiling now, just like I did. as a social worker in the mental health field, making 11 an hour. I was like, I want to make more. I was able to earn 13 and 15 an hour by learning some bookkeeping and then 20 and 25 an hour. I did have to shift out of the field a little and then come back and integrate it all because there is a ceiling to many fields. It’s not personal, and that was something I had to learn early on. I was like, Oh, I’m going to become an advocate, and an activist, to get everyone in the social work field paid more. I still think that’s a great thing, but I realized I’m not that person. I’m not going to do that in the field. I’m going to go off to another field, and then integrate, and run my own business.

[00:38:07] So I’m always working on what are the money ceilings that I need to move through? How do I adjust my business model so that I can get savvier and smarter with time and leveraging now? Cause again, there’s a cap to a private practice, the traditional psychotherapy practice. Now I’m so grateful for traditional psychotherapy practices because I get to go to a therapist and be one of her five day clients for that day. And I can trust that. but I knew for myself, I was never gonna have a traditional psychotherapy practice. I like to see one client a day. I know that may sound crazy, but I’m doing many other things. You know, I might do an interview for the day, or I like to teach in groups because for me, you can raise your private fee so much, but I learned that with group fees, I wound up lowering my fees in 2013 and what happened was it made it more accessible. My revenue tripled. I went from pulling teeth to get a group of 50 people. I was getting 40, 42. I lowered the price point a bit, so it was easier on a monthly basis, and I gave a 120month payment plan. I’m not doing my year-long right now or 12 month payment plan, but I, we got 320 people in that first year.

[00:39:26] So I’m showing a little bit that there are some years where we’re growing. We want to grow. We’re going to earn more, save more, give more, all of it. Some years we’re not. When I had my son 16 years ago, I had a big complication during the birth, during the labor, I needed to be in recovery. I had a great team, and a business partner and I needed to let all of that go to recover, and focus on my health and being a parent.

[00:39:55] So for the next few years, income was way down and I had to ask, what can I do now that I love that will earn me a good amount of money that I could do sleep deprived. And I went back to two groups of 50 people twice a year. And that was good for a few years until I was ready to grow again, and that’s when I opened up the year long program.

[00:40:15] I had that year-long teaching model, which gave me tons of time. I would come in once a month and then all the content was online. It brought in a lot of revenue and lasted for seven, eight years. The pandemic happened and things started shifting with how… People start getting tired of online programs or not signing up as much in 2021.

[00:40:36] Things can shift, like having a baby, and you have to adjust or things can shift because someone dies, and you’re in a grief bereavement period. I mean, there’s internal things that are going on, and then there’s external things like a pandemic, right? Or natural disasters or elections.

[00:40:55] There’s larger things that also affect us, we have to adapt and adjust. So I went into a dip about two years ago, in revenue again, and I’m having a better year this year and I’m moving… You know, you just have to know that we’re going to have ups and downs. We’re going to have ebbs and flows. Yes, not every year, as I said, is a growth year.

[00:41:18] Some years are maintenance years. Some years you’re just hanging on and really have some chats with yourself, however you do it. In the shower. Hot or cold. In a bath. On a hike. You know, I’m in a transition year. What phase of life am I in? Oh, I’m in a transition year. Okay, not going to last forever.

[00:41:37] It may last a year or two, but I’m going to be in a growth year again, or… Now I’ve had experience of all of these things. And it takes three to five years to hit sustainability with most businesses and that’s really accurate. So we’re just always having to adjust for what’s going on, what phase of life emotionally, and really work on money stories and understanding our money emotions, and learning tools to work with them at the same time, these external practices of what are your offerings right now?

[00:42:10] How much do you want to be bringing in? How many people do you need? For private clients, maybe moving to one group or two groups twice a year would get you through that money ceiling, to be bringing in more money that would allow you to do things that you really want to do. So we’re just always adjusting, honoring, being realistic of where we’re at right now, while having goals on the horizon and taking bite size steps up the mountain, but we have to break it down into one baby step at a time. And to the best of our ability, really check in with time, energy, money, family and health each year.

[00:42:53] Linzy: Yeah, and I think really honoring those chapters, too, like, some folks that I work with who are in Money Skills for Therapists, my course, they’re back at that stage you talked about where they have young children, you know, there’s maybe like they have two year old. And,you know, I know for myself, I have a five year old right now. It’s a very specific chapter of life. Sometimes I see folks who are in that chapter, kind of despairing of, you know, like they want to be making this much, but they’re only making that much, but they also want to be able to pick their kid up from the bus. And what do they do? And,finding that balance, but something that I try to remind myself and my students it’s such a specific chapter of life, like it will pass in the blink of an eye,you know, and then we’ll be into a different chapter that might have different, you know, ebbs or flows that come with it. But yeah, really being with where you are, making friends with the chapter that you’re in, and letting money support you in it.

[00:43:43] Bari: It’s so important to have a baby, an infant, those few years to have a five year old, to have an eight year old, to have a sixteen year old is one of my favorite chapters. It’s much harder for my husband. I really love it. I have a lot of space and time. Yes, right now. I’m here supporting, but kind of in the background, you know, so you really need to honor.

[00:44:09] I’ll tell one last tiny story. I took a green business class years ago with my financial planner, Christopher Peck. He’s the first financial professional I met back in the day. He runs a socially responsible investment firm and he used to teach sometimes, and he was teaching this green business class, and I know, we had to create a business plan and I was a few years into my business.

[00:44:31] I hated the marketing stuff like I go in and out of loving it, hating it, loving and hating it. And that’s a whole other interview, right? But we had to show up with projections for the next year and I love that part. And so I came in with my numbers because I had a few years of experience.

[00:44:47] Projections, if you haven’t had a business before, they’re just guesstimations. If you have a few years of history, you get to see how your business is done, where it’s at, if you want to grow to a next level. I shared my numbers and Christopher said to me, these are great numbers, but what is your life really going to look like and feel like?

[00:45:07] And we won’t know that until we’re in it, until we have six months, three months, the year, but again, all those little things, I want to drop off my son and pick him up every day. I want to be available for that. I want to be available for making food this many times per week. All of these things. You may not see that in your business numbers, but that’s really important as we’re coming up with how many clients you want to see, how much money we want to make.

[00:45:34] Also, again, the time and energy and family, what is it really going to look like? And for me, time is my top resource. I always want to have a lot of time. When I was younger, I could work 30, 40, 50 hours. I had a baby that was like, oh, I have 10 hours. That’s it. That’s all I got. That’s it. So yes, we always have to be adjusting and really honoring. We have to honor who we are.When I had my son, I thought I was just going to keep going.

[00:46:03] Like all the other women I saw running their businesses. They just kept going with their newsletter, their groups. That’s not what happened for me, and I could have done this comparison thing… And, of course, it happened a little bit like, well, they kept going in the same way, but for me, no, I had to radically adjust my schedule based on the birth, the labor and how it went that we needed and all of that. So I had to come back to who am I? What’s right for me at this time? Again, it’s not going to last forever, it could just be a few years. What’s right for this precious time?

[00:46:40] Linzy: That’s beautiful. Bari, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You have so many resources to share. So if folks are listening, and they want to get further into your world, tell us about your book, tell us about your courses, how can they connect with you?

[00:46:58] Bari: So please come to my website, Baritesler.com. There’s just a blog. You’ll get a little pop up. Hey, you want to join my community?

[00:47:06] If you do, you get a seven day little experience of my method. So here’s a little taste of money, healing money, practices, money maps. It’s called Money Mochas. It’s free. It’s part of joining my community. So do that. Then there’s a menu of my offerings, because it’s very important for me to offer services at different price points, and we all can afford different things at different times. So you can see my menu of, oh, here are my books. So I have two books, The Art of Money: A Life Changing Guide to Financial Happiness, lots of storytelling, and my method. Journaling questions. My second book is The Art of Money Workbook.

[00:47:43] It’s all journaling questions. I have a podcast. I changed my year-long program to a three month program. So everyone still gets all the content, my 12 modules, my library that takes you through my three phase method, but we’re doing 12 live classes of money teachings.

[00:48:01] I teach every week, and then there’s a Saturday coworking group with my alumni guides, because we need community, we need group money dates,we need accountability, we need to take baby steps. So every Saturday we have coworking. So it’s a three month really focused time to learn a lot of the parts and pieces of my method, and I’m loving this format after I used to love the year long, but we realized people’s attention spans are changing And they want more classes and interactions, so we’re doing now a three month financial therapy class and program. So I’d say really look at that as an option and then find me on Instagram. Yeah, beautiful.

[00:48:44] Linzy: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Bari, for coming on the podcast today.

[00:48:47] Bari: Thank you for having me.

[00:48:58] Linzy: This conversation with Bari really has me thinking about what works.She’s been doing this work for so long, and yet I’ve never read her work. I have not read her book yet and she’s a name that I’ve kind of heard, but this is the first day that I’ve met Bari and had the pleasure of chatting with her about money.

[00:49:19] And yet so many of the things that she teaches, that she has developed with her students, are many of the same things that I have also taught and developed with my students because what works works, right? So the pieces that she was talking about developing those skills to be present with money.

[00:49:37] The body scan that she talks about as her leading tool, is really about actually being able to stop and be present. Without that, we can’t move forward, right? Being able to dig into those emotional stories that she talks about, the money healing, which I talk about in terms of money stories and what is your identity around money, and spending time really digging into those things. Without doing that work, we are run by our emotions around money.

[00:50:02] We can’t even stop and do it differently because we don’t know what’s going on. We have to clarify and be with, and then of course the actual skills, because we are living in a world that has financial systems. We have to be able to plug ourselves into those systems, navigate those systems.

[00:50:16] We have to be able to produce numbers for the government, for taxes. So we’re all navigating these systems, and we have to learn how those systems work, and how to find the tools and the approaches that are going to work for us, and our brain. And as Bari said, there’s many ways to do that.

[00:50:32] She teaches some; I teach some. But really it is about that ability to be with, to shift your emotions, to learn practical tools and I love this piece that she was talking about at the end of her own continued learning around the ebbs and flows of business. I think there’s a philosophical, emotional piece there that is really valuable to bring to our relationship to our private practices and our businesses, which is having that perspective, right?

[00:50:57] Not every year looks the same. Not every year is a growth year. Not every year should be a growth year in your business. Some years should be years that you get paid more in time and rest and flexibility than maybe you need to get paid in money, right? And we get to adjust our business, and also adjust our household expenses to prioritize what actually matters to us.

[00:51:18] So many interesting pieces to think about coming out of this conversation. I really appreciate Bari coming on the podcast today and sharing some of her decades worth of learning with us. If you’re enjoying this podcast, I would so appreciate it if you could leave a review for me on Apple Podcasts, share about what episodes you’re enjoying, what you really like about the podcast. That’s a great way to help other therapists and health practitioners find us and be part of these conversations. You can also follow me on Instagram at Money Nuts and Bolts. Thank you so much for joining me today.