Today, I bring you a lovely conversation I just had with my friend and colleague, Rick Kahler.

We just had a wonderful chat about all things financial therapy within the realm of financial planning, and I can’t wait for you to have a listen.

Of all my colleagues in the finance space, Rick is one of my longest running friendships. He’s one of the first financial planners I met when I was in the early years of developing my financial therapy method.

I credit Rick with being the first financial planner to bring therapists into his financial planning meetings.

He was very clear that money is such an emotional subject and that adding money psychology support was essential for his clients (especially for couples trying to navigate different money approaches in the delicate terrain of planning retirement.)

We first met in 2004 at Nazrudin, which is a think-tank for financial planners created by George Kinder and the late Dick Wagner. Rick loves to tell the cartwheel story which you’ll hear at the beginning of our interview, and the Nazrudin event is where my infamous cartwheel happened!

Rick is also a Financial Therapist and has also been on the board of the Financial Therapy Association since its inception in 2009. He’s been a guiding force in that community.

(I’m still not a part of the FTA, since I’ve been teaching my financial therapy method since 2001, before it was formed, and think all financial therapists should have a Masters in Psychology. I do, however, recommend them and they have a good directory to help folks find a financial therapist.)

Starting in 2013, I’ve had the honor of interviewing many of the “elder” money pioneers. Olivia Mellon, Karen McCall, Deborah Price, Barbara Stanny (now Barbara Huson), Saundra Davis, Vicki Robin and many of the next generation folks where I fit in, like Brad Klontz, Mikelann Valterra, Jacquette Timmons, and Rachel Robiasciotti.

Some of these interviews are on my podcast and the others live in my online program library (which people get access to when they join my Art of Money program.)

To date, all of my conversations with Rick have been on his Financial Therapy podcast. He was a guest teacher in one of the rounds of my Mentor Program, but this conversation is our first interview on my podcast.

I’m excited for you to have a listen to the conversation I had with him!

In the interview we discuss:

The realization that money work is so emotional for his clients

Why he started bringing therapists into his financial planning meetings

How important doing his own therapy has been for his life and financial planning practice

His favorite therapy modality - IFS (Internal Family Systems) and how he connects it to money work

Why do we both think the Enneagram (personality system) is so helpful for understanding your money behaviors and habits.

How he has written 7 money books and has plans for more on the horizon

And, some praise back and forth for our friendship over the years

Do you remember that scene in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf and Frodo and the whole fellowship of the ring crew were on a long, epic journey, and they were stuck at large stone doors, called The Doors of Durin, that had a riddle inscribed on it?

For hours and hours they sat before that stone door in the moonlight, trying to solve the riddle inscribed in stone in the elvish language. “Speak, friend, and enter,” was all the riddle said.

If they could solve it, the door would open and they’d be able to travel through the secret passageways that led through the mountain so they could finally destroy the ring of power once and for all.

In many ways, that scene is a perfect metaphor for the money riddles we all face from time to time.

We’re all trying to get somewhere on our epic journeys (a.k.a., our lives), and sometimes we end up blocked by an immovable stone door that has a seemingly unsolvable riddle about money etched on it.

The riddle might be something like “how can we afford to buy a house in this economic climate?,” or, “how can I bring in more money when I have a job where the salary is capped?,” or “how can we save enough money to send our kids to college with only a few years remaining?.”

Money riddles like this (which I also call “money koans,” like the koan questions you sit with in Zen Buddhist meditation practice), aren’t written in the elvish language on a big stone door, but they might as well be.

Just like Gandalf and Frodo and the whole crew sat there for hours trying to solve the riddle that would open the door, we often have to sit with our money riddles for days, or weeks, or months, or even sometimes years for the big ones.

Working with and solving these money riddles is the topic of today’s recording on the first volume of the Art of Money Mixtape I made for you.

baritessler.com/podcast

In this clip, I’m telling stories (which is my favorite teaching method) about the practical, external side of overcoming underearning.

There are mental and emotional internal shifts involved, and a good dose of creative brainstorming, but the focus here is on how we can shift our business models to open up new possibilities for breaking through money ceilings.

I hope you enjoy this third recording on the Money Mixtape. (And believe me, if it was possible to mail you an actual cassette tape with these recordings, I would 100% do that. But…who has cassette players anymore?)

Additional Links:

baritessler.com/art-of-money

baritessler.com/podcast

This second “song” on the mixtape is a clip from the first ever live 3-month version of the Art of Money program that I taught this past Fall in 2024.

It’s a brief overview of my approach to using somatic psychology tools, which forms the foundation of my unique approach to financial therapy.

And yes, this “song”/audio recording is just me teaching live in a recent class, rather than our pretend AI friends Jack and Julia talking about my ideas and concepts. You might hear from them again in the coming days, but that depends on the feedback we hear about their conversation we sent you a couple of days back.

This clip of me teaching is packed with techniques for how to use simple awareness of the sensations and emotions in your body to help unblock the things standing between you and a healthier, less stressful relationship with money.

Find out more at baritessler.com/podcast

As a Gen X’er who grew up through my teen years in the 80’s, long before the internet, social media, iphones, and Spotify, I can clearly remember making mixtapes for my friends.

Back then, it was no easy feat to pull off, and putting together a collection of hand-picked songs and giving them to a friend on a cassette tape was a sign of affection.

It was a way to say, “I see you. I know who you are and what you love, and I care about you. So I’ve made this collection of music that will bring you the kind of feelings I know you like to feel from music.”

So this year, my friend, I’m making a mixtape just for you.

Only, it’s not a collection of songs. It’s a collection of recordings that will take you on an emotional and psychological journey into many different facets of your relationship with money.

It’s…A Money Mixtape, Volume 1, and I made it for you

The first recording on this cassette is something you’ve never heard from me, and unless you’ve spent a good amount of time down in the AI rabbit holes over the recent months, you may have never heard something like this before.

Now, before I tell you what this is, the second I mention the phrase “AI,” I know that can raise some people’s hackles. There’s a lot of hate for anything AI related these days. Trust me, I get that.

My tech geek husband, Forest, has been way down in all the AI rabbit holes for many months now, so I’ve learned a bit about it all at the dinner table.

Here’s the bottom line: there are a lot of crappy ways to use AI tools to create crappy content, and you can make the use of AI tools worse by trying to pretend that what you’re creating with these powerful tools is real, or that what you’re publishing was created by a human, when it was created by an AI tool.

Doing that is just flat out lying. My own personal operating system doesn’t allow for any kind of deception like that, so, I’m doing what I’ve always done: I’m being open and transparent with you.

This first recording was made by my husband. He took an excerpt of a transcript of me teaching, fed it through a couple AI tools, and had the software create a podcast conversation between two people who are talking about the ideas I covered in the excerpt.

The first time I heard it I started laughing. It just sounds so incredibly human, and I couldn’t believe that this podcast conversation about my concept of “money stories” is not actually two people talking…it’s two AI bots.

AI tools are just tools. They can be used for good or bad, like any other tool. There are some not-so-great uses of AI, and some very good uses of AI. This, I hope you’ll agree, is one of the good uses.

Have a listen to this podcast conversation where Jack and Julia (yes, I just made those names up) are discussing my concept of money stories, how you can start to uncover your own stories, and how doing that can help you unlock a new way to relate with money.

As a Gen X’er who grew up through my teen years in the 80’s, long before the internet, social media, iphones, and Spotify, I can clearly remember making mixtapes for my friends.

Back then, it was no easy feat to pull off, and putting together a collection of hand-picked songs and giving them to a friend on a cassette tape was a sign of affection.

It was a way to say, “I see you. I know who you are and what you love, and I care about you. So I’ve made this collection of music that will bring you the kind of feelings I know you like to feel from music.”

So this year, my friend, I’m making a mixtape just for you.

Only, it’s not a collection of songs. It’s a collection of recordings that will take you on an emotional and psychological journey into many different facets of your relationship with money.

It’s…A Money Mixtape, Volume 1, and I made it for you

The first recording on this cassette is something you’ve never heard from me, and unless you’ve spent a good amount of time down in the AI rabbit holes over the recent months, you may have never heard something like this before.

Now, before I tell you what this is, the second I mention the phrase “AI,” I know that can raise some people’s hackles. There’s a lot of hate for anything AI related these days. Trust me, I get that.

My tech geek husband, Forest, has been way down in all the AI rabbit holes for many months now, so I’ve learned a bit about it all at the dinner table.

Here’s the bottom line: there are a lot of crappy ways to use AI tools to create crappy content, and you can make the use of AI tools worse by trying to pretend that what you’re creating with these powerful tools is real, or that what you’re publishing was created by a human, when it was created by an AI tool.

Doing that is just flat out lying. My own personal operating system doesn’t allow for any kind of deception like that, so, I’m doing what I’ve always done: I’m being open and transparent with you.

This first recording was made by my husband. He took an excerpt of a transcript of me teaching, fed it through a couple AI tools, and had the software create a podcast conversation between two people who are talking about the ideas I covered in the excerpt.

The first time I heard it I started laughing. It just sounds so incredibly human, and I couldn’t believe that this podcast conversation about my concept of “money stories” is not actually two people talking…it’s two AI bots.

AI tools are just tools. They can be used for good or bad, like any other tool. There are some not-so-great uses of AI, and some very good uses of AI. This, I hope you’ll agree, is one of the good uses.

Have a listen to this podcast conversation where Jack and Julia (yes, I just made those names up) are discussing my concept of money stories, how you can start to uncover your own stories, and how doing that can help you unlock a new way to relate with money.

Additional Links:

baritessler.com/art-of-money

baritessler.com/podcast

Under-loving, Over-giving, under-receiving. Under-no-ing, over-yes-ing.

It has everything to do with your experience of self-worth whether or not this is reflected in your salary or income.

Finding and claiming your sense of value is a lifelong process.

It unfolds over time in baby steps and leaps and then more baby steps.

Overcoming underearning requires both internal and external work.

For todays money teaching, I offer some of the internal practices that my community and I have found most helpful in growing our sense of value and overcoming underearning from the inside out.

(This is an edited excerpt from my first book: The Art of Money: A Life-Changing Guide to Financial Happiness)

So, which practices are you going to focus on today?

Pick one or two and start slowly and lovingly...

I am with you,

Bari

P.S. My three-phase financial therapy method includes Money Healing, Money Practices and Money Maps. This list of overcoming under-earning practices comes from the Money Healing realm where the internal work resides. We delve into the external practices of claiming your value by moving through money ceilings, learning how to work with cash flow dips and creating sustainable business models in the Money Practices and Money Maps phases of my financial therapy work.

Dear Friend,

Most of my financial therapy work has to do with helping people create a more mindful, savvy and empowered relationship to money.

This could be in the realm of personal finances, couples finances and even in business finances.

In my Mentor program, which is a group program for therapists, coaches and financial professionals, I’m additionally supporting folks to create a more sustainable business.

In that context, we’re not just working on our money psychology, we’re also working on new ways of offering our services and adding new revenue streams.

And the way you do that has everything to do with your business models.

There’s a funny thing about running a business though: once you do it for several years, you realize that the business model you thought would bring in great revenue forever…sometimes starts to not work so well.

And when that happens, it’s time for a business model update.

There are dozens of things that can change in the outside world that can lead to you needing to change something in your business model. It could be changes in a social media platform’s algorithm or something larger like a worldwide pandemic.

And, there can be dozens of things that can change in our inner world that can also lead us needing to update our business models, such as having a new baby, going through a divorce, or experiencing a health crisis.

Sometimes we just need to find creative ways to adapt and adjust our own business model so that it works better for the particular life phase that we are in.

After a recent class I led for my Art of Money Mentor group, I had a strong intuition that there are more of you out there who might be facing challenges in your business or private practice that could be less challenging if you updated your business model.

And I knew then that I had to share the audio recording from this call, because I took a deep dive into the topic of business models: what they are, why we need to change them, examples of different kinds of models, and a box full of stories from times when I’ve had to change my own business models.

So today, I want to share this recording with you from my most recent Mentor Group call.

If you have a business or private practice that could use a business model shift, I hope you find some helpful nuggets in this recording!

Here’s to getting creative and fine-tuning,

Wisdom for money riddles, koans, and super-tough nuts to crack. by Bari Tessler

Bari Tessler interviews Lindsay Bryan-Podvin a Social Worker turned Financial Therapist and they discuss ADHD money tips and more.

Find more on baritessler.com/podcast