Today we are featuring financial therapist, mentor coach, and mompreneur Bari Tessler as part of the Women Branching Out interview series.

Bari helps people work on their relationships with money through private coaching and her online program The Art of Money {affiliate link}.

The Art of Money is an 11 month community program, featuring guest teachers Julie Daley, Nona Jordan, Alexis Neely, and more. It begins February 1st.

Here’s Bari…

Tell us about your business. What do you do and who do you love to serve?

I am a financial therapist, a mentor coach, and I lead an online money program, The Art of Money. My work integrates all of my previous training as a body-centered psychotherapist, with all of the tools, systems and planning of bookkeeping and financial planning, that I surprisingly fell in love with (and needed myself) in my late 20s. I love to support women, couples, and creative entrepreneurs.

Since 2001, I have been teaching my money work in every format imaginable (via live in-person workshops and on-line tele-courses and home study programs).

Over the years I have been through a few different biz models to honor and accommodate my phases of life and my growing biz community. For a few years, I had a whole team of bookkeepers and financial coaches under my umbrella. Then, with the birth of my son in 2008 (just as I was turning 40 years old), I shifted back to a one-woman rockin’ show to simplify again. I still collaborate with and refer to other key money support team partners.

As I was approaching 2013, and heading into my 44 birthday, I realized it was finally time for a conscious money movement. Something had matured inside of me and I was ready to reach a much wider community.

So, I dreamed up and crafted my new 11 month program, The Art of Money. This program integrates my tried and true method: An integration of Money Healing, Money Practices and Money Maps. And, weaves together individual, couple and creative entrepreneurial money teachings.

I am the main guide and resident financial therapist in The Art of Money. I have also gathered amazing guest teachers to teach on additional money topics from kids to careers, from debt to ritual, from Enneagram to gender issues. I am so excited about this current phase of my biz and feel it is the most heart-guided and vision-guided program ever.

I also offer private financial therapy and mentor coaching for 11 clients at a time.

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Why do you think it is important that we improve our relationship with money?

Our relationship to money — having a healthy + mature + loving + playful relationship to money — is simply one of the big areas of life to honor and give our attention to.

I’m not talking about bringing an obsessive attention to it, but the right amount of attention and care. Similar to taking care of our health and our bodies, finding our right relationship to work-career, cultivating healthy dynamics with the people closest to us. Our relationship to money is up there with the big ones in this beautiful, precious + challenging human life.

Money was not taught, to the majority of us, from grade school on up in small increments. We simply were not taught these things.

We weren’t taught how to understand our feelings about money, how to manage money, how to speak about money.

It’s time to go back and in fill in those gaps.

We project so much onto our money relationship and the concept of money (earning it, spending it, giving it, receiving it, losing it, borrowing it, loaning it, investing it, exchanging it). It’s ripe territory, where so much is happening emotionally and psychologically — and we simply were not taught how to make sense of it all in a healing way.

This work is still in shadow. It’s slowly coming out of the shadowlands, of taboolands — and I’m here to help that process along, in a big way. We need gallops of awareness, learning, forgiving, tools and skill sets.

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What’s the first bit of advice you give clients who come to you overwhelmed by their current money situation?

First, I share my favorite tool for money awareness, un-shaming, understanding and forgiveness, called the Body Check-In. This will support them to get present, notice their feelings, learn more about their money story and then ask it to have a seat next to you so you can engage with it, instead of being consumed by it.

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What changes have you seen in the lives of your clients when they started to have a more loving and honest relationship with money?

Here are a few of my favorite benefits of money work:

Peace of mind, clarity, and compassion in your money relationship

Deeper understanding and acceptance of the phases (the peaks and valleys) in money and in life

Productive, loving + fun money conversations with your partner (yes, I know you will be moving mountains when you do this)

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How has the experience of coaching others through their money stories impacted your life?

I have really learned that this money work is a life-long practice. This is confirmed over and over by my dear community. It does not mean my clients/students will need to work with me forever! 🙂 It simply means that this work is a practice and life-long journey that will be fine-tuned and updated as we go. It is like a self-care practice for your relationship to money. There WILL BE peaks and valleys in life and in our money relationships. So, my clients and students inspire me to keep taking more steps with my own awareness, clarity and relationship to money. I continue to learn and grow.

Being able to share my work in the world has given me such a full, rich, and beautiful life and community. I love my work and community.

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What are most empowering aspects of having your own business?

Well, to be honest, I don’t think I am made to work for someone else.

I have been an entrepreneur for 11 years now. And, I love the freedom, the challenge, and the passion of this. I love being able to exercise in the middle of the day. I love being able to make my own hours. My biz is a continuing source of creativity, passion, vision, challenges, and psycho-spiritual learning, which I am very grateful for.

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What did Bari want to be when she grew up?

As a pre-teen, I was trying to decide between being a Solid-Gold Dancer or a businesswoman. By the time I hit 20, I added, psychotherapist, to the mix. I do see my work as part therapy, part business and part body-centered-dance work 🙂

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Finish this sentence. I believe …

I believe in…LOVE, PASSION, COMPASSION, CREATIVITY, SIMPLICITY, my family, dark chocolate, kindness, wildflowers, clear communication, loving boundaries, knowing who we are and who we are not, listening to our bodies wisdom as a great life tool, knowing that we ultimately have all of everything inside of us to move through life’s beauty and challenges and that support is awesome too… and I believe collaborative creative teams can bring amazing things to the world.

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Bari Tessler, M.A. is a Financial Therapist, Mentor Coach, Mama and Chocolate Lover. She is the founder of The Art of Money, (formerly Conscious Bookkeeping), which integrates Money Healing, Money Practices, and Money Maps. Bari offers online money programs as well as private Financial Therapy + Mentor Coaching for women, couples, and creative-preneurs. You can follow Bari on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

How are you nurturing your relationship with money? Please comment below!