Conscious Money with Courtney Pullen

Introduction  1:54
What is Finology? Here we explore our personal relationships with money. monies nature and how we exchange value in daily life, grounding ourselves in the liberal arts, we explore financial planning 3.0 from the inside out, addressing money as the most powerful and pervasive secular force on the planet. Mysterious money merits study.

Jacob Wagner  2:25
Hi, This is Jake Wagner, co-founder of the what is Finology project. If you’re new here, we highly encourage you to listen to episode zero, in which we share where the project started, where we’re going, and some of the intellectual basis that we’ve used to build our body of work. We are grateful that you are a part of the conversation please visit www dot what is finology.org to share your comments and questions. Now back to the episode.

Natalie Wagner Willis  2:56
Hi and welcome to this episode of what is Finology I am Natalie Wagner and our guest today is Courtney Pullen. Our mission here on the what is finology podcast is to dive into exploring money and the human experience.

Our guest today is a long contributor to the up and coming field of Finology, a longtime friend of my father’s Dick, Richard Wagner, who was a founder of Finology. And we’re very excited to have him here today, Courtney, welcome.

Courtney Pullen  3:33
Thank you, Natalie. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Natalie Wagner Willis  3:35
Thank you. Would you please start by telling us a little bit about yourself and why you’re here today as a guest into exploring this question, what is Finology and I also want to tell our listeners that you are a fellow of Finology a Finology fellow and have been selected as such because of this special relationship to exploring and developing Finology as a new field and as, as my father would say, the most important profession of the 21st century. So with that, Courtney

Courtney Pullen  4:09
Yeah, a little bit of context, Natalie is that I met your dad. Well, I hate to admit to being this old 19/20 years ago now. No, actually, I think I met your dad first. Almost 25 years ago, we were in a family firm study group talking about our work with family businesses. And my background is a psychotherapist.

So I have a little bit of a different orientation than a lot of Finology colleagues, and I think it’s one of the things that your dad relied on before was understanding more about the psychology of money.

Yet at the same time, we were learning together because at the time we met, I was just leaving my clinical private practice going into family business consulting and we struck up a friendship and that study group. And that relationship just took off to a number of iterations that culminated after a number of years in the area of finance Finology.

So, now what I do is, I’m a business coach for financial planners. And I also work still work with families, but mostly with what’s called a family enterprise, which is ultra-affluent families.

Natalie Wagner Willis  5:28
Excellent. And tell me, Courtney, why do you think this work is important?

Courtney Pullen  5:34
Well,

at the most fundamental level, like your dad was apt to say is that money is weird stuff.

We, as human beings tend to get more wrapped around the axle emotionally about money than almost any other topic, and something that you know, you and all The listeners will know is that it’s just a people will be more willing to talk about sex and they will about money. It just really gets at the core of who people take themselves to be their worth of value, how they see their relationships.

So there are all these technicals related to money that the financial planning profession just has prior to really your dad talking about it was ignored, discounted, not even seen. And that ironically, and I think somewhat tragically still exists in the profession today.

I think we lose sight of that, that your dad and people of his generation and thought leaders in the area still represent a minority of financial planners. So it’s still something that the profession needs to more diligently get their hands around.

Natalie Wagner Willis  6:55
Absolutely. And that’s a big part of why we’re here. So When you say to get their hands around, what does that mean to you? What do you see as being the body here?

Courtney Pullen  7:07
Well, I mean, there are two sides of money. There’s the technical side. And then there’s the behavioral side, or the qualitative and the quantitative side of money. And what the financial planning profession does, in general, is just focused on the technical side, that’s all the training, the certifications, and so forth, are all focused on the technical side.

And that’s only half of the people’s understanding and the relationship of money. You’ve got the behavior or the emotional side of money, that if it’s left unattended, all the technical application and insight and knowledge is gonna fall flat for your typical client.

Natalie Wagner Willis  7:48
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So one of the things I’m hearing you say, is that for financial professionals, so dizziness solely on the technical side is short-sighted in terms of overall serving your clients.

Courtney Pullen  8:01
Absolutely.

Natalie Wagner Willis  8:03
Yeah. So one of our basic missions here on this podcast and with the what is Finology project is to give people access to more information to bolster that emotional or behavioral or qualified rather than the quantified side of money.

If you could give people a few insights and the kind of some of the basic ways that they can meet their clients here, what would you say are some one on ones with regard to how people can serve that side of their clients?

Courtney Pullen  8:40
Well, I think at a one on one level, Natalie is that just asking people about their relationship with money? And one of the things I do with couples and with families are I’ll do a family tree. And one of the things I’m looking for in a family My tree or in a Gino gram is in my work as a consultant is that I’m looking for all sorts of patterns inside the family system from emotional patterns to psychological patterns, health patterns, and they’re also money patterns. Mm-hmm.

It’s really, I think that most people, most clients out there are not even aware of the influence of how their parents raise them about their relationship with money is that all of us have kind of money values money, beliefs are money scripts that some people call and it’s us understanding the power and the influence of all those money messages and those money scripts.

So at the one on one level is just opening the client’s eyes to Wow, I do have a relationship with money. It has a historical context. It hasn’t a cultural context. And it has a family context in as a psychological context.

So just opening people’s eyes to that influence is really very eye-opening for clients. Again, I don’t want to use the word transformative, that’s too big of a word for this. But it really does adjust people’s understanding about, I have a relationship with money, it’s quite powerful. And the more conscious that they can be about that, then the more intentional the more deliberate that they can be about their relationship with money.

So it’s moving in from an unconscious level, if you will, to a conscious level, which gives him a lot more control and mastery over Okay, now I have a better insight about what I can do with it.

Natalie Wagner Willis  10:48
Yeah. And one of the things that my father talked about and that I see so consistently in my life and in the world around me, is how much money touches our lives. Mm-hmm.

From our most intimate relationships with our family and spouses, it’s, uh, it touches it in every way to even the fact is, is that it’s a global economy, and we share money with people that we don’t even know. And money connects us in a relationship that otherwise we don’t really have. Right? Yeah.

So this relationship with money. I mean, it follows from that, that the relationship is deeply important. Yeah, absolutely.

And so what you were saying, I have a, one of the things that I often think about people is that our understanding of our ability to understand is really one of our greatest advantageous traits in terms of interacting or reckoning with this was a pretty crazy world that we’re in.

So if we do not understand something We are quite literally at a disadvantage, as it seems that as humans, our understanding is how we become successful in this world by problem-solving self-awareness.

And so what you’re talking about is pulling it from a place of unawareness into a place of awareness, which then, in turn, allows us to apply this understanding and then, in turn really cultivate improvement or just overall health in this part of our lives that touches everything. Absolutely. So how did you get into this work? What spoke to you here called you forward?

Courtney Pullen  12:41
Well, probably to answer that question I need to give you a little bit of a historical context of at least my understanding relationship with Finology is that your dad and George Kinder We’re known as The some people regard them as the founders of life planning or if not the founders, the earliest pioneers, at the very beginning to talk about that, wait a minute, people do have a relationship with money.

And we need, as you and I have already been talking about on this webcast is that it’s important that that really be acknowledged and honored. And that really opened up the door to a groundswell of interest in the topic.

So you’ve got all these early pioneers, that we’re really picking up on the thread of the value of taking a look at people’s relationship with money, and that has taken us into psychological realm, social logical realms, and into developmental theory. And I’ll talk about what I mean by all that, but you know, you look at my personal experience, Natalie is that

As your dad was talking to me about this at the early stages of this, is that it to me It felt like it was groundbreaking. It felt like it was really answering a question that people weren’t really posing out there in the industry.

And at the time I met your dad, I was even aware of the industry. But when he talked about the profession, and what was really missing in the profession, and the first time he said this, I was a little skeptical of it, but that he almost compared to the work that financial planners are doing to that of a pastor of a preacher.

But what I valued about him saying that is that it puts it in, it’s an area of prominence that it really needs to be in. And then financial planners are really in a unique position to help and guide and Shepherd people in their religion. With money and areas that they typically don’t address in their lives.

And what I’ve experienced and seen is that is they can be freed up to unhook from some of the weight burdens, unconsciousness around money is they can really liberate them in the lives and the relationships and in their community to really do something when they can see that money can be quite powerful. And what does that look like for them to have really a conscious alive relationship with money, and the same time to put in perspective,

Natalie Wagner Willis  15:39
that’s beautiful.

Courtney Pullen  15:40
And Natalie, I also want to acknowledge that in my mind, your dad was the first pioneer along with George Kinder in this space, but, you know, since that time, or over the years since then, you had all these people that independently were asking similar questions. And it’s ironic that many of us found each other, you know, from Gail Coleman and Rick Kahler and Elizabeth and Michael and Ed Jacobson.

I remember we were all at a George Kinder’s workshop out in the desert in California, really exploring the seven stages of money maturity and George Kinder’s work. And that was the early evolution of this whole space of Finology that ended up being Finology.

And one of the things that I really valued about your dad is that he was always pushing the envelope and doing it in a very progressive way in that he was inviting everyone into the conversation. He wasn’t positioning himself as having all the answers, but he was learning from, you know, Susan Bradley and Carol money quotients and others in really kind of connected All of us too.

Let’s explore more deeply, as I mentioned, the psychological and the sociological implications of this work. And then he really took it, in my estimation, beyond psychology. And I think that’s what financial three financial planning 3.0 is about, is that he did as you know, he and I work with Ken Wilber and develop this model around Integral Finance.

And it was along with a better understanding of developmental theory is that we needed to help clients understand their psychological relationship with money, their emotional relationship with money, but we also needed to be asking ourselves questions as advisors, in our work with clients, what’s beyond that? Yeah, what’s beyond the psychological.

So that really got us into the realm of the sociological and developmental theory and the world. Ken Wilber and others that have come before kit. So that was just something that your dad very consistently did was push the envelope on this and that all those names the people I mentioned, we were all kind of going along and examining it and doing our own critical thinking about it, we would convene from time to time at conferences to really see where were we in the development of, of this profession.

Natalie Wagner Willis  18:27
So first of all, Courtney, where can we find this information on Integral Finance?

Courtney Pullen  18:33
Well, you could do as simple as just googling Integral Finance and what you will find is Dick’s work in this area, and then again, the context is that what he did was the work of Ken Wilber is incredibly valuable and incredibly dense.

Kind of wade through so your dad’s written articles about it. In Integral Finance, I wrote an article about Integral Finance the Journal of financial planning a number of years ago, that would be a good starting point would just to be to Google Integral Finance and you’ll see my writings and your dad’s writings and other people’s responses to that as well.

Natalie Wagner Willis  19:16
Perfect. For listeners’ information and Courtney, please build on this or correct me where I’m wrong because I’m sure you’re more familiar than I am. But the basic context of Integral talks very much about the interior and the exterior, the eye space, and the we space. Is that all four quadrants corny? Yes, okay.

And what’s so important about that is that it really does highlight the fact that we are individuals with an interior world that is rich and important, and a palpable part of our lives. While at the same time we’re in a shared world and that collective being completely immersed in the collective and the fact that we affect each other and the fact that we mean something to each other.

All of this comes together to have this culminating dynamic of that interior and the exterior and the eye and we, that money very much exists within money is something that comes from the outside that is in this collective world.

And then it becomes interior when we bring it into our own world as it enters our bank account that is suddenly our interior world. Mm-hmm. But then we release it back out to the collective. Right. So this is a very tangible way that we connect the interior and the exterior,

Courtney Pullen  20:45
right, exactly where he was.

Natalie Wagner Willis  20:49
Thank you, which really lands us on the importance of exploring money and the human experience and one thing I just can’t quite hold my tongue from saying though, it does stretch into grounds that a lot of people don’t see money having a place in spirituality seems to be a palpitating part of the human experience. So what does money mean?

They are to and I don’t have an answer to that. I just think it’s important to recognize that we are spiritual beings. having a human experience, this money thing is a huge part of our human experience. And what do we do with that?

Courtney Pullen  21:33
Right, right, indeed. Well, I think that’s the gift of Integral Finance and then a Finology is that it gives us a language for really understanding something that felt too much of an extraction, or that we weren’t even aware of.

So that’s part of what I although the Integral Finance language can feel a little bit esoteric. It does give us a better understanding. As you have mentioned, Natalie, we haven’t there’s two sides of that relationship there’s an interior side and there’s an exterior side of the power relationship with money.

So it just helps clients as we can explain some of the Zubiri bc concepts, they can start recognizing what are the patterns that exist in my life between my interior relationship with money and my exterior relationship with money. And I do have a shared bias that you do, which does have a spiritual component to it as well.

As in I think that the four quadrants of Integral Finance, they are large enough and encompassing enough that includes the existential includes a spiritual includes the just the normal grid of us understanding the technical side of money. Also, because it again, there are those two sides of money that need to be honored and acknowledge it or work with clients and in the industry in general.

Natalie Wagner Willis  23:03
Yeah, that’s right. And one of the things that I experienced as well so my work for those of you that don’t know is I’ve been a money wellness coach for quite some time. And one of the things that I really notice with clients is that when we get the money stuff working, the functionality side, it pulls them forward.

And when one of the things about a lot of interior work is that it can remain a little bit, sometimes not land. And the thing about money is that even though when we’re working on our relationship with money, it is interior work because it has this technical component and is a very, very functional real component that literally affects our environment affects our bodies with our food, things like that, that it pulls people forward and that money has a way of taking that interior work and making it very, very real in your life because money is so real in that way that when we improve that relationship of connecting the interior to the exterior, that has a lot of power to it.

Courtney Pullen  24:15
Right? Well, when you’re talking Natalie, what I was recalling is your dad’s phrase that money is the most powerful and pervasive secular force on the planet. And if you know, when you first heard him say that it sounded very provocative, but if I think it was meant to provoke is really, again, to help us all as advisors to understand that this is big, powerful stuff.

It has a huge influence on our client’s lives in our culture. And I mean, you’re an exercise your dad would do with clients sometimes that I witnesses that he would pull out the local newspaper and say Look at all these articles in the paper and find articles that don’t have something to do with money.

And you’d have to, like get to the fifth or sixth page before you didn’t, couldn’t find something that in some literal or abstract way related to money or so it does have such a huge influence in our lives.

And again, as I have said, I guess a couple of times now that personal and family level, the cultural societal level, so that’s a pervasive force that we need to acknowledge.

Now, what I also want to emphasize here, as in our conversation, Natalie is that a little bit of this may sound a little bit esoteric to people, but this conversation is for financial planners for financial advisors, is that a lot of this language, I don’t use like, I don’t talk to my clients. About Integral Finance, right?

They do talk to them about the interior and exterior, and what a pervasive money for citizens are in our society.

So, one of the gifts I think that I appreciated about your dad is that he was, while he was very conceptual, theoretical when he was talking amongst his peers when it came to talking to clients, he was just very plain-spoken. And he could deconstruct which what I would encourage people to do is to take the wisdom behind his words and deconstruct it into plain-spoken language for people. Mm

Natalie Wagner Willis  26:40
hmm. so important for those clients.

Courtney Pullen  26:45
Absolutely.

Natalie Wagner Willis  26:46
Yeah. No, that’s cool. I never got the pleasure of actually seeing my father and a client-facing situation. So that’s a cool image that you just gave me.

Courtney Pullen  26:59
Yeah, your Dad and I went through the George Kinder training at two different times seven stages of money maturity. But then what we did with George’s work is he and I would do seven stages workshops together, and also did some client work together, where he would be working on the technical side, I would be working on the psychological side and then we would overlap our work kind of in the middle because obviously he was very familiar with the psychological side or the behavioral side as well. So it was a fun experiment to play around with.

Natalie Wagner Willis  27:40
Yeah, that is fun. One of the things that he was so good at that I saw him be amazingly good at with his peers and also, incidentally with my friends, a lot of them have told me that he did this for him was too seeing other people but also just give them permission to see in themselves, their own insight, their own specialness that is there as potential and is getting nurtured, but he gave people something that allowed them to step forward into it.

And that is such a wonderful gift and one of the things that we’re trying to do here so it sounds like he did that with clients. But one of the things that we’re trying to do that we’re doing here in the what is Finology project is having this collective place for all of those who had insight into Finology to bring it all together and those who want to study fine ology to have a place to go.

Courtney Pullen  28:45
Well, I and I’d like to think that I had some influence on that with your dad is that when again, as I mentioned earlier is that your dad was such an amazing thinker, and yet At the same time, he didn’t feel like he had to have ownership for the entire field about this area Finology who is always talking to people like we and Marty, and Oh God, Don St. Clair and many others in the industry to develop his thinking his ideas. And one of the things I introduced to your dad is that I said, one of the limitations of psychology, at least in my opinion, is that it has such a tendency to pathologize people, you’ve got the DSM four are all this stuff that’s always putting no pathology around people rather than fundamentally meeting them with where they are.

So I think an important thing to address on our conversation here today is that we say we’re talking to clients about the psychological, it’s not giving us permission to pathologize them or say that they have a harmful relationship with Money pays to bring consciousness to it. So a couple of things I introduced your dad was the first was Appreciative Inquiry, which was to really help identify with clients, what are their strengths?

And how can they build on those strengths and appreciate those drinks? The old adage of Appreciative Inquiry is that change occurs in the direction of your attention. What is it you’re wanting to focus on and get more off?

So rather than a traditional psychological approach of deconstructing pathology, so to speak, preserve inquiry was really taking us in a very different direction about how can we help the skills and the strengths of the client.

And then I also introduced positive psychology to your dad, which was similar to appreciative inquiry in that sense of not focusing on the pathology or the deficits, but how is it’s a string space model, how is it that we can develop strengths in our clients? So it was a, it’s a very forward-facing approach.

And I saw that your dad really kind of allowed that. And again, thinking of any other people besides just me to influence his thinking about Finology so that we were really advancing or thinking about this and not focusing too much on the past and pathology but about helping people be intentional about how is it that we can have a conscious healthy relationship with money and all that influences?

Natalie Wagner Willis  31:36
Yeah, I think it’s really important that folks understand that the purpose here is not to put a box around what is Finology right.

Dad was a big believer in a liberal arts education and that Finology is a liberal liberal arts field, that we do incorporate everything from psychology. tight-knit and technical financial skills to studying money and the human experience through literature through art, of course through history, looking at sociology, and more to grapple with what is seeming to be an endless question of money and the human experience, and bringing the nuggets from all these different places, all these different expertise into a place where we can really have a rich understanding of this, this facet of our lives. That is so powerful.

Courtney Pullen  32:38
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

Natalie Wagner Willis  32:41
Yeah.

Well, Courtney, do you have anything else that you feel like we should incorporate into this conversation?

Courtney Pullen  32:52
Nothing else, in particular, comes to mind and I think if your dad works Hear, he would say, well, we now have a responsibility to do is continue the conversation, let’s continue the conversation about helping clients really evolve their understanding about money.

And that, particularly in his book, financial planning 3.0 He paused a lot of important theories and, and really brought us up to date on his thinking, but he, as your dad was asked to do, ask as many open-ended questions as he did provide answers. So I think it’s an invitation for us, as financial planners and advisors to continue this conversation. And I think that’s the gift of Finology. So thanks for the conversation. And I think that’s all that I’ve got on my mind for today.

Natalie Wagner Willis  33:52
Gorgeous. Well, for all of you listeners, please join the conversation at whatisfinology.org Courtney, thank you. It has been a true pleasure. It’s always a delight to talk with you all the more delightful to have you here as a guest on the what is Finology podcast.

Courtney Pullen  34:10
It was my pleasure, Natalie, thank you so much.

Natalie Wagner Willis  34:13
Thank you so much.

I want to thank the what is Finology team, co-founder and curator Jacob Wagner, Senior assistant Natasha Hoggatt, and project producer Gail Pelsue. This episode of the what is Finology podcast is dedicated to our guiding light, the father of Finology, and co-founder of this project, Richard Wagner. Without you, this doesn’t happen. And thank you, to you, our listeners, this conversation needs you. Please send us your thoughts and questions at what is finology.org or on Facebook. I’m Natalie Wagner Willis, as always be well

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