Family Money Wisdom Unlocked with Diana Chambers

Podcast
Written By Geneva Tolentino

Also known as the Family Wealth Mentor™

SHOW NOTES | TRANSCRIPT

Most people see money as a tool, but what if it's also a mirror reflecting your hidden emotional landscape? Join us this week with Diana Chambers, renowned Family Wealth Mentor™. She is committed to helping her clients manage their wealth in emotionally intelligent ways. She has always been a trailblazer. Not only was she the first woman hired into management as a member of the strategic planning team at Redland PLC, a major British company, but she also subsequently became the fundraiser for an educational project in Bosnia during the war and then the team director launching schools of servant leadership in the United States. In these settings and others, Diana reflected on the impact of money on her life, and she is now a trusted confidant to others as they address the challenges and opportunities they and their families face when owning, spending, and allocating their wealth wisely.


Whether you're wealthy or working to build resources, this episode offers transformative insights into creating a healthier, more conscious relationship with money. Listen in, and this may guide you through understanding family wealth dynamics, overcoming financial trauma, and developing a more integrated approach to prosperity that honors both personal and collective well-being.


In this episode, we cover:

  •  Diana’s journey from corporate finance to understanding the emotional dimensions of wealth

  • Financial IQ and Financial EQ

  • Feminine Wisdom and Money

  • Types of Trauma and Financial Behaviors

  • Positive approach to money and importance of giving and receiving

  • Different models of charitable giving and trust-based philanthropy

  • Intergenerational communication strategies and steps for having constructive money conversations

  • The 9 Lives of Woman

  • Living Tantra


Helpful links:

TRANSCRIPT

Diana Chambers  0:01  

I had a young client a long time ago, and she was about to inherit some Trust Fund money, and her parents asked me to talk to her. They thought they knew how she would spend it, but in reality, she told me that she wanted to give it all away. When I delved a little deeper, she had seen that money had been a source of conflict in her family, and she thought that money would create conflict in her life, so she just wanted to keep separate from it.


Christine Mason  0:30  

Hey, it's Christine, and you are listening to the Rose woman on love and liberation. I don't often talk about money on the show, not because it's not interesting, because it is. It's like lots of cool ideas around how energy moves and things like that. But I've often seen money and the mishigas we have around it as more of a symptom of unresolved underlying things, rather than root cause. For example, if we're clear on what we value or what we're here to do in the world, then we sort of build an embankment around our use of resources, like they're going to go in this channel. And that is sort of how the the energy of the money, like, if you think of it as water, can move with clear direction and generate more energy, more activity, more manifestation. A lot can ride on things when you have a clear channel, but without clarity of how you might be using it, it diffuses. Imagine that water going across the floodplain and that has a sort of slow seeping, nourishing quality to it. It's not bad. It still trickles into all the nooks and crannies and nourishes someone, but it doesn't really have any obvious, directed manifestation, and so we sort of Eek, you know, we eke away our life energy in that way by not having clarity in our purpose and values. And I want to say before we're starting today, this episode sort of makes the assumption that you have some resources to work with. But that doesn't mean the lessons in it aren't applicable to everyone. The stuff that my guest is talking about today applies to anyone who's got sort of an unwillingness or a shadow around earning money, saving money, spending money, and encourages us to look a little bit deeper on the things that happen in that domain for us. We also talk about charitable giving, philanthropy, life, legacy, family, discussion around money, particularly if you saved a little bit and you want to have a dynasty of some sort, and you might notice that the modern family is completely structured to diffuse coherent wealth holding like we just assume our kids are going to grow up and move out of the house, and everybody's going to set up their individual homes, and they're going to buy duplicate things, and then we'll spend money traveling back and forth, when, in fact, we could all basically compound it up. You know, we could live an incredible way if we were all collaborating, but that's not a US centric philosophy that happens in a lot of other places. And it's not without issues on who makes decisions and family difficulties, but I really feel like we could craft a whole new model on keeping more resources in the family and in the lineage in a way that makes life easier for everybody, while honoring everyone's independence and strength. So in this episode, we're also going to talk a little bit about family conversations around wealth and around what we want to make happen in the world with our resources. Diana, who you're going to meet is a person who represents, to me, the power of having people who accompany us on the path of growth and blooming. I met a group of women last month, and they have been for 15 years meeting once a month with their spouses to work on themselves in a non denominational, non religious sort of self development, spiritual development, using a lot of different modalities. And I was thinking, what is it like for people to be in such collaborative, mutual transparency, witnessing one another in growth. And I think that is like a life dream. That is a good life to make that sort of depth of community. But in order to do that, you have to really be willing to share what's going on inside of you and and trust that the other person is going to hold it well. I feel really lucky to be a part of multiple communities around the world that do that with such grace and elegance. And today's guest, Diana chambers, is just such a person, as you'll hear as we get going, talking about unlocking money wisdom, getting down and dirty with your shadows around money, inviting a deeper kind of prosperity, and doing so in the context of harmonious. Family Relations. Let's go. I'm so happy today to be introducing all of you all to Diana chambers. I met Diana many years ago in a deep investigation of trauma with our mutual teacher, Thomas Hubel, and we got to witness each other, not only through that investigation, but now through another teaching community. So one of the first things I want to do is thank you, Diana, for your relentless inquiry and interest in growing and becoming spiritually and emotionally free.


Diana Chambers  5:32  

Christine, that is such a beautiful introduction. Thank you. And of course, it's completely mutual. I am so, so happy to share this journey with you, to be dancing on this path with you. We are


Christine Mason  5:46  

going to talk today about one of the things that people don't like to talk about so much. They're deathly curious. They want to know everything. They want to know how to get in control. And it's not sex, you guys, it's money. We're going to talk about wealth and money and how that relates to our development as humans and living a happy life. And Diana couldn't be more qualified as a person to talk with us about it. She's a renowned family wealth mentor, a philanthropic advisor with over two decades of experience who specializes in this and the emotional dimensions of wealth. She guides individuals and families to align their financial behaviors with their core values, and has authored a book called True wealth, letters on money, life and love, and an essay the first piece that I read of hers called Money wisdom unlocked, which integrates some of this trauma work with finance. So I thought we could start Diana by talking about your path to becoming interested in this topic.


Diana Chambers  6:40  

I was very fortunate. I went to study at the University of Edinburgh and did an undergraduate business degree, and then I also spent my junior year abroad at the Wharton Business School. So I was very well educated financially. I was fortunate to get a major career job at a company called Redland in the United Kingdom, where I was the first woman that they hired in management, and I was in the corporate strategic planning department looking at large scale mergers and acquisitions, things like that. So in my 20s, I had this meteoric career success, but it was really a pretty significant personal cost, because it was a competitive environment. I was considered to be an honorary chap, and rational mind was truly dominant, and my feminine intuition pretty much went underground in many ways. I was saved by hitting the glass ceiling when I was in my late 20s, and I did a U turn into the nonprofit world. And over a period of 15 years, I directed three different nonprofits. At this point, I was living in the US. I saw poverty up close. I was very engaged in high donor fundraising for the organizations that I was working for, and it was the first time when I wrote my own money autobiography as part of the spiritual community that I was with. And the money autobiography was a fascinating exercise, because I looked at my life through the lens of money, the role that it had played in my life and my relationship to it. So money has been there as an undercurrent for a very long time. And then fast forward to what is now 28 years ago, I had a challenging inheritance experience when I would have appreciated someone present to accompany me through that. And because of learning about the way that money played out in my family of origin, I was then able to establish a business practice around helping other families to navigate the sorts of challenges that played out for me. So I started my business practice in 2002 and you already mentioned I'm a family wealth mentor focused on the human dimensions of wealth and also a philanthropic advisor. But what's been intriguing to me since I started the business is how I have still continued to make mistakes or poor decisions around financial choices, in spite of my financial background, in spite of the fact that I enjoy reading the Financial Times that I was good at corporate analysis. So for example, I was a yo yo risk taker myself in terms of my own investments, especially in the 80s and 90s. And then I was actually out of the stock market for most of the 2010s when, clearly it would have been advantageous to be in I've experienced myself to be overly generous at times, and I would look back on that now as seeing myself to have been, in some ways, buying love and detention. So. Here I am immersed in this world of money and looking at myself and becoming very curious to see clearly why was I making such mistakes. And money has become a lifelong journey for me. Money still is a teacher for me, and I believe that if we invite it. Money can be an amazing teacher for all of us, pointing us to the underlying dynamics in our lives. It's a great entry point for raising our consciousness and our clarity. First,


Christine Mason  10:32  

I want to resonate with the idea of being an honorary chap. That was an interesting turn of phrase. I just wonder if you could say a little bit more about what that means, and the journey from honorary chap to being more integrated in your feminine wisdom.


Diana Chambers  10:48  

So my honorary chap phase was in my 20s, first woman hired in management in a building materials company where there was a phrase we call a spade a shovel. So it was really sort of basic. And all my colleagues, except for the assistants and the secretaries, all my colleagues were male, and I was included with them. When we would do whatever business activities we were doing, I'd be the only woman in the room. So there were many instances where there were literally caricatures that played out that if I were to detail them now, you would go really those things happened, but they did happen during my 20s. I was eager to succeed. I wanted to prove myself, so I compromised my sense of self in order to belong and succeed in that environment, it was only when I left that setting and really pursued a much more proactive spiritual path that I was invited to reclaim some of the feminine. So I'll tell a story that happened because it was so profound for me. I was on a retreat in a cabin in the woods in Maryland, and this cabin had several doors to the outside, and I was sharing a room with another woman whose name also was also Diana, and the door to the outside into the forest was locked, the door to the inside of the cabin was open, and I woke up in the morning and she said to me, Diana, you were sleepwalking last night. And I said, I was really and she said, Yes, would you like to know what you said? I said, Of course, I would please tell me. And apparently I had been standing at the door that led out of the cabin into the woods, which was locked, and I had been rattling at the handle trying to open it, and the other Diana had said to me, what are you doing? And I had said, I am letting the woman on the other side of the door in.


Christine Mason  12:55  

Woo hoo. I got the chills from that completely chill.


Diana Chambers  12:59  

I mean, I can tell you the exact phrasing of that story, because it was so profound. It was like this, wow, I have shut her out, and now I'm welcoming her back in. And I can say that most of the rest of my adult life has been continuing to embrace aspects of the feminine.


Christine Mason  13:18  

I've had so many experiences like that early in my corporate career, and I thought I couldn't have both, but now I know I can have both. I can lead and be in my feminine in a very different way than what it looked like in my 30s. But it's very exciting. It's very exciting. And then the other thing in your in your intro story that you mentioned was this moment when you were going through this inheritance process and that there was no one there for you. I really, I really felt that potently in my body, like that sense of being unaccompanied, and how that moment of suffering sort of birthed this initiative to help others. And I think that's also kind of a universal theme when you find your dharma, that it sometimes comes out of this pain.


Diana Chambers  14:00  

That's exactly right. That was my experience. And then you were saying


Christine Mason  14:03  

here something that's also very universal about knowing in your investing, or knowing your behaviors, the sort of textbook intellectual right thing to do, but then still not doing it, doing something else. And I think you speak to this, it was a very interesting differentiation between IQ and EQ in the financial world, financial IQ and financial EQ. So maybe we can talk a little bit about that as a concept, right?


Diana Chambers  14:27  

So financial IQ is all the cognitive elements of wealth, and you know, at the most basic level, those would be knowing where your money comes from and goes to how you are spending it. Is it thoughtfully and wisely how you're saving it? Are you investing it in thoughtful ways when you have more complexity? Have you planned your financial life and your estate in a thoughtful, strategic manner? So those are all financial IQ topics. Parallel to that, there's financial EQ, or emotional intelligence, the awareness side of money. So when you think about the definition of emotional intelligence, it's, how do we manage our feelings and emotions in the face of another's feelings and emotions, throw money in the mix, and the pace of it ramps up. So how do we manage our feelings and emotions about money in the face of somebody else's feelings and emotions about money? And that begins with knowing how money affects us. That's the place to start. What is our relationship with ourselves and with money, and to know that as well as we can. And Christine, you were referring earlier to our teacher, our current teacher, Patrick Connor, and he would call this an inside job. This is our work to do the inside job. So that's the first element of financial EQ, to know how the money is affecting us. The second one is, how is it affecting our relationships? And people of wealth know that when, wherever they are, whatever room they go into, it's almost like they're wearing an invisible cloak. People know who they are. They know how that they're wealthy, and it's part of what they carry with them in their lives, and other people relate to them differently because of it could be close family members who could be competitive or jealous. It could be any number of things that would surface because of the wealth that an individual has, so to be thoughtful and aware of how others are relating to us because of our wealth. And then the really important third dimension, and there are multiple dimensions to this, including, for example, negotiating over money, resolving conflicts over it, etc. But the one that I want to highlight right now is the ability to talk constructively about money, especially in our close relationships. And that's sort of where you started off about money, potentially being you didn't use the word, but a taboo subject. I believe that the ability to talk about money constructively is one of the most important and essential skills for all of us, doesn't matter what our wealth level is, especially important for who have significant wealth, but for all of us, it's a vital life skill, and very, very few of us were ever taught how to do it, which is why, when it comes to money conversation, we often think that we don't know how to Do it well. So we might, for that reason, choose to avoid it. There would be other reasons we might choose to avoid it as well. So those are the components, as I see them. It's so very


Christine Mason  17:49  

rich you when you're in the essay, you speak to common behaviors, sort of a taxonomy of how people manifest unresolved trauma in their relationship with money also. So it sounds like you spent enough time talking to people working with clients, that you can really parse that out. Do you want to go through some of those? Sure.


Diana Chambers  18:07  

Let me preface going through that by maybe framing out how our relationship with money actually gets shaped, because you just picked straight up on the trauma and life experience piece, which is huge, there are some, in a way, more accessible places to start thinking about our relationship with money. For example, the money messages that we received when we were younger and that we essentially didn't have a filter to determine which of them we were going to evaluate as valuable to us. So we took them on board. And those money messages have shaped into belief systems about money. And if you think about what are the money messages that you or I received, or that are very prevalent in society, say for a rainy day, never be in debt. That was a big one for me. Another one for me was always be the first to pay for anything. So there are money messages that we get and that we sort of take on as absolute truths, and when I say them out loud, we can hear that there is an absolute language element to them. Never, don't, doesn't always, you know, and so if we can identify the money messages we received, we can then look at them, take them apart and retain the kernel of truth that's in them. But we don't have to engage with them fully as if they are exclusive and absolutely true. So that's one way in which our relationship with money gets shaped. I think it's really helpful to look at this, because if there are people who are listening to this talk and their parents. What money messages are you giving to your children? And are they the money messages you actually want to give to them? And if not, you have a chance to stop the ones you're doing, edit them or start new ones. The whole thrust in this is to do everything as consciously as we can. That's one of the ways in which our relationship with money gets shaped. Another is within our families, where there is an inherent tension, and I've talked about this in some of my writing, and I'm grateful to Thomas Hubel, our teacher, for the insights onto this where there's an inherent tension in families between wanting to belong to the family, but also wanting to become all of our unique individual selves, and sometimes in families, we compromise ourselves in order to belong. And how does money play into that equation, too? So that's another area, our life context, our generational context, our motivations, our intrinsic versus our extrinsic motivations. Do we get pulled to the extrinsic things like status and power and wealth before we've actually fully shaped our own intrinsic motivations with meaning and purpose and fulfillment? And then, Christine, to the topic you raise, the trauma and life experiences, and I find it very intriguing when I'm in a setting where I'm speaking, and I'll raise this topic, and I'll ask for a show of hands in the room, and I'll say, How many of you in the room believe you're traumatized? And Some brave souls put their hands up. Maybe 20% might. It's a smallish number, and I always respond with actually, we're all traumatized. It's just that many of us don't really realize it or understand that, or appreciate the impact that it's had on our lives. So then I will explain how trauma can be ancestral, passed down to us through the generations collective have been experienced by a group to which we belong in some way or another, or individual. And individual traumas can be what I would call a big T trauma or a small t trauma, where the small t trauma might have been quite moderate, but have gone on for a very long period of time and had quite a significant impact in our systems. So when you start to unpack what are these traumas that we have experienced, you can see the potential impact on us and our relationship with money. And I just want to give one quote here, and then I'll stop to go in whatever direction you would like, but it's a quote from Oprah Winfrey, and she has done a lot of work in the education system, and I remember this, she said, I think it was on a news program. We should stop asking what is wrong with that child, but we should start asking what has happened to that child.


Christine Mason  23:00  

I read that in your thing, and I said it to someone just the other day. I was like, that's such a profound shift from blaming to inquiry exactly. I don't


Diana Chambers  23:09  

think I answered your question about the sorts of financial behaviors that get influenced by those life experience and the traumas I'm happy to go in that direction, or any direction you would like I


Christine Mason  23:20  

could, we could do a whole conversation just around the instinct to adapt oneself, to fit the family of origins needs in order to feel love, to feel belonging, and to lose the contact with the soul's essence. I think it's such a beautiful introduction to sort of the taxonomy of where people go wrong in their relationship to money. And I also want to state that it's an invitation that I feel to return to the core, undimmed essence of yourself and to really make decisions and clarity, to lose all those patterns. So just by naming them, you're helping people become more aware of them. So I think you've divided them into three main categories and then even subcategories. From there, I looked at it per your instruction to look at, sort of what are my own stories. And if I was going to say I'm landing between, let's see, there's scarcity, there's separation, and there's absence, and I would say I land squarely in the absence part of your model. But let's go through those. And


Diana Chambers  24:24  

the reason that I have those three categories is because they are structured according to what I think of as the primary hallmarks of trauma. So scarcity, separation and absence and scarcity behaviors. For example, these would come readily to mind for people greed when we have an obsession with gathering more than we might really need, because we just have a desire for protecting ourselves with. Live something that we felt like we lacked at a time in the past closely associated with that could be hoarding and not allowing things to flow in and out of our lives in an appropriate way. I had a very dear friend, and she lived she was elderly. She lived with her daughter and son in law, and her daughter was a hoarder, to the extent that when I went to visit my friend, I could barely walk through the hallway in the house in order to reach my friend's apartment, because there was so much that had been gathered and accumulated. So I saw it firsthand, what that can really look like fighting over money. That's another expression of scarcity, when we feel like there won't be enough for us, so we have to fight for it. And it may not be over something that's worth a substantial sum of money. It may be over something that carries a lot of emotional weight, which points us back to the fact that it's important to us because of the relationships, not so much the financial value. Fear of loss would be another topic that would come under scarcity. So we're really wanting to protect against loss, and many of the financial models on the IQ side are focused dominantly on protecting against loss rather than maximizing gain.


Christine Mason  26:29  

Do you think that's a more feminine or masculine behavior? That's


Diana Chambers  26:31  

such an interesting question. Christine, I haven't considered that in any depth. I mean, I was kind


Christine Mason  26:36  

of pulling that question out of the part of your essay where you were saying that women often underestimate their financial acumen, and I wonder if that also leads to sort of less risk taking more defense rather than offense tactics.


Diana Chambers  26:49  

Yes, those two would appear to be connected. I can't say definitively. I haven't done any research on it, but for sure, the research that has been done on women and financial confidence shows that women are not typically as overtly confident as men, and they will often defer to the men in their lives about how to make financial decisions. That's sad.


Christine Mason  27:17  

I don't mean it's sad. I just mean that this confidence question. You know, how do you I'm very interested in how one builds confidence.


Diana Chambers  27:24  

The way that I look at it is, many of us are doing really, really well with our relationship to money. I put this taxonomy together to help people where they're getting stuck. Because if you're doing well, that's great. If you're getting stuck, how do you get more insight into it? Because it's a hugely valuable insight. So if you look at the separation category, that could be everything from hiding, lying or keeping secrets about money, or it could be that someone might want to give all their money away, sometimes that's done for very laudable, positive, conscious reasons, and sometimes it's because the person is concerned about what the wealth will do to them. I had a young client a long time ago, and she was about to inherit some Trust Fund money, and her parents asked me to talk to her, and they thought they knew how she would spend it, but in reality, she told me that she wanted to give it all away. And when I delved a little deeper, she had seen that money had been a source of conflict in her family, and she thought that money would create conflict in her life, so she just wanted to keep separate from it. So there can be any number of reasons behind why we might choose to give our wealth away. Another big one for me in terms of separation was fierce independence, like I really wanted to be independent within my family system, and one way to do that was to be financially independent. So it was a path that I pursued, and saw it very clearly in myself, and a big one, and this affects many of us is compromise giving and difficulty receiving, and how hard it is for some of us to receive, and yet, how when we do receive, we're giving a gift to the giver to allow them to give to us. So the whole question of giving and receiving is quite a complex and I find it intriguing flow.


Christine Mason  29:33  

Yeah. I mean, there's a very core message throughout this section that to be truly in a relationship with money or resources and happy and healthy, you have to be in this flow of giving and receiving like it's not you're not gripping, and you're also not like pushing it away from you. It's it actually feels like the kind of attunement practice we do when we sit across from each other and feel ourselves and feel the other person that you're. Resourcing yourself, and you're able to give, and you're doing it in confidence and ease. I would actually like to do the positive psychology framing of this section, like if you had an ideal relationship with your wealth, it would look like this. You would not borrow or steal. You would have ease giving and receiving. You know, you would feel like you could collaborate with others, and you could trust others, you would tell the truth and to create a picture that we can live into around with a healthy side of this. I love


Diana Chambers  30:30  

that positive reframe that's really a beautiful way to position it. Thank you for that. Let's


Christine Mason  30:36  

talk a little bit about the absenting category, for sure, and


Diana Chambers  30:41  

absence is a really hard category to identify, because it literally is absent when we are struggling with scarcity or separation, we can feel that much more readily than we can feel when we are absent. So it takes more identifying a clear and easy one to start with is when we're very wasteful of any resources, because it's almost like we don't feel them. It's easy for us to waste things because we are absent from the impact of that, whether it's a big impact environmentally or on our budgets, whatever, when money is neglected, that's another place where we can be really absent. I had one client who would leave very substantial checks lying around in her home without banking them, just because she didn't pay attention to them. And she was quite absent when it came to the finances in her life. So these are just examples. I also have experienced excess spending and real frugality as another place of absence. I tell a story about a partner of mine who had leaking hiking boots when he was out walking. If ground was wet, his feet would get wet, and he chose not to replace them for a really long time. My question was, how could he not be feeling his feet? You know? How could he be disconnected from that in that way? So again, it was an absenting piece. These are just examples. Christine,


Christine Mason  32:29  

yeah, I think they're very on point. I want to ask you about this sort of mimetic, positive psychology, affirmation approach to your relationship with money. Like I do notice that there is a whole movement in pop psychology and pop culture. There's even entire affirmation songs on Spotify about using your words in a positive way to attract money waking up and saying like, I'm I'm abundant, I'm call, I'm here to receive. You know, Money loves me, those kinds of things, but that, I know a lot of people who are practicing that, but it doesn't actually manifest. And so I want to see, see where you land at the intersection of the way we speak and doing the deeper shadow work, and how those work together.


Diana Chambers  33:14  

I think that's a fabulous insight. Christine, I think the way that we speak to ourselves and about ourselves is hugely important, because it does influence how we are in the world and in parallel, we've come into the world and we've had our life experiences that have formed and shaped us. If we choose to evolve to our fullest capacity. We want to examine those, bring light into them, allow them to heal and release much more of our capacity. So I think the two go hand in hand. I think the language on its own isn't enough, but it can remind us and be a pointer to the direction that we want to go. I'd


Christine Mason  34:06  

love to take a little pivot now let's assume we've gotten into right relationship with our our emotional lives, with the use of money in our daily lives, earning money, all of that. And now we're going to move into giving, healthy giving, philanthropy, and what I'll tell you, what I noticed in myself. I did my inventory of what I gave last year, and I gave to people who are in need, who tugged at my heartstrings. I gave to friends who were doing projects, because I like supporting my friends and their dreams and visions. I gave to a couple of strategic things that were in alignment with my overall mission in life, and then I supported my teacher because I feel like they're doing great work in the world. But I wouldn't say that the majority of my giving was pre planned, and I'm curious about about that, like, what's. A blend between sort of ad hoc slush fund, responsive, reactive giving, and the and the piece that is sort of trying to build something long arc or legacy. Christine,


Diana Chambers  35:11  

you are such fascinating questions. So I started my philanthropic advisory practice in 2002 so I've been at this for a while, and there are multiple models about how to think about being generous and philanthropic, and very few people actually get to the strategic piece, which is, here's the need. This is the gap. I'm going to fund it. Most of us are really more engaged with, you know, some social relationship my neighbor's child has a need, or it might be that we meet someone that we think is the most extraordinary person, and we know that whatever they touch will be magical, therefore we want to support them. It's that old adage that people give to people. So there's the there's a whole spectrum of how to think about philanthropic gifting. And as I've gone through this maturing process myself, I am more and more inclined toward giving from the heart as opposed to giving from the head. So the strategic piece tends to be more cognitive, centered, head centered, and the heart piece tends to respond more to the human needs in the moment. Clearly, they don't have to be exclusive. I'm someone who really operated strongly, as I've illustrated from my earlier story from my head. So I've been bringing the heart piece more and more and more and more into how I express myself. So that's why, for me, at this point in my life, the heart piece is really important to me. And I think we can look at our own giving from those two perspectives and say, Is this the blend I want? Is this how I want to express myself? I think most importantly underneath it is the freedom and desire to give freedom. I don't mean in terms of how much money we have, because even if we don't have much money, we still have the freedom to give. I mean the internal freedom to say, I do not have to hold on to this, because I trust that there will always be enough for me and for whatever I actually need. Therefore I am free to let this flow through me.


Christine Mason  37:32  

I really love that. I mean, I think when I'm talking about the strategic piece and the cognitive side, I was thinking about like the Robin Hood people in New York, when he started that. They were doing that in response to a sense there was no transparency in nonprofits or GuideStar. But then I thinking about which, which of those famous, I think it was Jeff Bezos, his ex, who's just decided to give unrestricted gifts, like she doesn't even want accountability. She just, she just picks organizations, and then she trusts them to do their best work based on what her priorities are in the world. And that's such a different mentality versus like, Be accountable. Report to me, how do you feel about that? It's a whole


Diana Chambers  38:15  

movement. It's called trust based philanthropy, and it started getting traction just a few years ago, and it really does say the nonprofits that we are supporting understand their space better than we as donors could possibly understand it. So if we trust the organization, let's gift to the organization. We're not going to put any limitations on you know what sort of program it has to go to, or whether it can be spent on overhead or not. We just say you're doing great work. Here's a gift. Please do more of your work. And that's the nature of trust based philanthropy. In essence, this


Christine Mason  38:54  

combination of people give to people and trust based philanthropy feels like it has no separation from the heart like the other piece, where I'm constantly measuring and looking for feedback and not trusting feels like it has the sponsoring seed in it of a less effective gift. Yes,


Diana Chambers  39:11  

I hear that, and having raised money for three different nonprofits over a period of 15 years, I can tell you that on the receiving end of a donor wanting very detailed accountability, there's a way in which that obviously you're going to respond to it and respect it, but it is undermining of the relationship. You know that there is not a foundation of trust that says, I trust you. Go do it.


Christine Mason  39:43  

That's That's beautiful. Okay, let's move into a how to so people have a wide variety of relationships with money, awareness, no awareness, but they finally realize that they need some assistance. And if a family comes to you, you. And they present, what are they presenting with? What are the things they come to you at the surface level? And then, what have you noticed and how those evolve?


Diana Chambers  40:07  

Two primary categories. One would be that a family has good self awareness and essentially says, We want to have money flow in the best possible way in our family, it might be that they're new to significant wealth or something like that. So they say we don't know what we don't know. We've never been taught how to do this. Please lead us through this. So that's a very open hearted, fulfilling exercise to help educate, help give examples, just help the family to communicate well around money and have it be a genuine resource within the family. The second category would be where there is an issue, a challenge, something that has surfaced around wealth and is causing friction, and there needs to be some resolution. And then there could be anything in the middle of that. For example, I would quite often be in the situation where an older generation is determining how to structure their will and their estate for their next generations, and their questions would often be colored by the culture, which would say, Well, can we trust our children to be responsible with money, even though their children are already 40 years old and have proved themselves to be, you know, serious professionals and capable and responsible with wealth, there is often this sort of fear in the culture that says, oh, but we have to protect against every potential eventuality. So that's one perspective. And in all of these situations, crossing from the we want to do this as well as we can. Category to there are significant challenges, I believe, which I think I said at the outset that the most important skill that we can have is the ability to talk constructively about money. So in all families, I would hope to enhance harmony through their ability to have whatever money conversations would be helpful to them. Often, those conversations have been avoided because they're concerned about the outcome of they think they might damage a relationship, or, as I said earlier, they're not sure how to have the conversation. So a large part of my role is in helping people to decide, yes, I want to have this conversation, and two, to facilitate the conversations as helpful so to make sure that every family member's voice is heard, and take the situation of an older generation who are planning their estate for their next generations, the younger generations can still have a voice. The older generations can still make the decisions that they choose to make, having listened to and respected the voices of the next generations, it leads to a much happier outcome, and one where the next generations understand the process that led to the decisions that then got made. Yeah, I mean,


Christine Mason  43:23  

this transgenerational, intergenerational communication is vital. I think there's a lot to be learned in the empathy component. You hear so many stories about the generation that made the money, the generation that grew the money, and then the generation that sort of lost touch with the effort it took to grow the money or to or to make it originally and without sort of bridging those stories and those values, it could be very confusing to everybody at each stage. Sort of, why are they behaving that way? You know, as I love this invitation to cross generational dialog,


Diana Chambers  43:58  

it's very important. It's a significant piece of the work that I do, and helping generations to speak to each other is so important if


Christine Mason  44:07  

you're getting started on this journey, what are some beginner exercises that you might engage in, in becoming aware around your behaviors?


Diana Chambers  44:13  

So let me give a few suggestions. One would be to decide to write your money autobiography to look at what has influenced you to date through the lens of money. Did you grow up poor? Did you grow up rich? You know, did you have to earn the money to pay for everything extra you wanted, or was it gifted to you? Did you pay for your own college or not? All of those sorts of topics, I have guidelines for how to write a money autobiography and Christine. I don't know if you have a mechanism for posting those, but I'd be happy to provide them. Yeah, absolutely. That's one very concrete tool that people can use. I highly recommend naming and assessing and evaluating the money messages you have both received. Perceived and that you are giving so that you can make conscious choices. Are they the ones that I want to live by? Are they ones that I want to give to others? And then a third takeaway would be to decide which money conversations you think would be really valuable to you, that you might have in one of your close relationships, which up until this point, you have chosen not to have, because it has felt too challenging. So in order to do that, I'm just going to run through a few overview steps for any listener to think about. The first one would be, know what it is that you want to discuss. I mean, that might sound really apparent, but often it's not, because it's muddied by the emotional weight behind it. So what is the real topic of discussion here? Then think about the fact that if you're going to talk to someone about it, it's going to be a conversation which is a dialog, and it's not a monolog. So you're not going to go to the person and say, I need to tell you a, b and c and expect no response. You you're going to be inviting a response. So the third step would be to go, Well, who am I? What am I bringing to the table in this conversation, going back to being as conscious about ourselves as we can and then the following step would be to be curious and compassionate about the other person. Who are they? What are they bringing to the table in this conversation, so that you have prepared the groundwork as carefully as you can to go this is the subject. This is a dialog. This is what I'm bringing, and this is who the other person is. And at that point, then you invite the other person to have a conversation about this topic. You need to be willing to hear, no, I don't want to have this conversation. Or no, I don't want to have this conversation. Now see if there's still an open door, but you can't force it. If the other person's not ready, hopefully they're going to be ready, at which point you can then create what I would think of as a spacious, unhurried and safe opportunity to talk. So if you have young children, make sure either that you have childcare or that they're in better sleep. But if they're in better sleep, don't have the conversation be at nine or 10 o'clock at night, when you're tired and maybe you've had alcohol to drink with dinner. That's not going to be conducive to the sort of conversation you want to have. Pick a time and a day when you're not going to be interrupted, when it can be fairly open ended, and as you then have this conversation you want to listen as actively and reflectively to the other person as you can, so that if you're not sure 100% what you think they said, repeat it back to them and say, I believe you said this. Is this correct? And let them tell you if you really heard them right. Also hope that they're going to engage you in the same way, and if you feel that they haven't understood, you find another way to say the same thing, because sometimes we need to say the same thing from multiple angles in order to be heard. And then finally, at the end of the conversation, summarize any takeaways or agreements reached, and I suggest doing that in writing, in the simplest possible way, not like a legal document or anything like that. Could be a simple text. Really happy we were able to talk this morning. Thank you so much. I appreciated that we came to some common ground on A, B and C, very simple, few lines. It's there because in three days, three weeks, three months, three years, we all have different recollections of that same conversation. So for me, those are what I would call the steps to a skillful money conversation, just encapsulated. And then there's one other really interesting piece that I picked up from the title of the book by Claude Steele called whistling Vivaldi. And it was the story of Brent staples, the African American New York Times writer who would walk through Hyde Park in New York at night whistling Vivaldi. And he did it for two reasons. One was to signal that he was educated, because he was whistling Vivaldi, and two was to signal that he was non violent. And I love this concept of signaling, so I would recommend, I recommend to my clients, to everybody be aware what you're signaling. You might not have said the actual words, but through your behavior and other ways of your being you are signaling to the other people in your life who you are. So choose your signals. Christine, it takes us all the way back to being as conscious as we can be and as clear sighted as we can be about making our choices.


Christine Mason  49:59  

Thank you. This is wonderful, helpful information. You're doing such great work in the world. I feel like these topics that we hide, anything we leave in the dark, that we don't want to examine, are the places of our greatest potential expansion and money is right up there at the top of the list. So if people would like to find you in your work, it's dianachambers.com Yes,


Diana Chambers  50:22  

and anybody is welcome to email me diana@dianachambers.com


Christine Mason  50:27  

and this PDF, this booklet, is available. Her Download. Your book is available. But I think a lot of people are going to be interested in how you help them as they navigate this in in our community,


Diana Chambers  50:39  

I have loved being with you. Christine


Christine Mason  50:42  

and I have loved being with you. Diana. Okay, everyone, thanks for sticking with us today. I hope you learned something. Diana's got a lot of resources that you can check out. Show Notes, show notes. Show Notes. I have news. Well, I have a lot of things going on for you, and I'm so excited to tell you a number one that my latest book, which I've been working on for three years and is coming in as a whopping 424 pages, called the Nine Lives of woman, sensual, sexual and reproductive stages from birth to 100 is launching on April 1. It's up for pre order on Amazon, and it's up for pre order atrosewoman.com so here's the deal. Amazon pays a lot of attention to first day reviews and sales, and if you pre order, everything counts on the first day. And then I would super love it if you would leave a review and a really good review, like, five stars. Awesome. Job. Great job. Christine, I'm so interested in this topic. And you know, a lot of times working on women's health or sexual health gets a little ghettoized, like, Who would want to listen to that other than other women? But I will tell you that I had a couple of male readers in the pre reading phase, and I had a moment of utter joy when my friend looked up and said, Oh, my God, I just read the section on a teenager approaching her first sexual experience. And I had no idea I have so much empathy. And about three chapters later, when he was in the part around menopause, he said, Holy Well, I won't say what he said exactly, but he had an expletive, and he said, every man should read this book. So if you're thinking it's ghettoized, think again. If you have a mom, a sister, a lover, a wife, a daughter, get to know what the opposite sex goes through. And if you are a woman, one of my major goals in this is to rewrite the story of maiden matron Crone, which was defined as had a baby, able to have a baby, has had a baby and can still have more or can no longer have a baby. And that's such a narrow, transactional, utilitarian view of the stages of a woman's life when actually sort of this stepping into full potency, power, pleasure, desire, full living in the body begins as a child. So the first stage of development is birth to 12, birth to your first period about and that all of the things we learned about naming our parts and being in our joy and owning our preferences begin very young. There's some great interviews in the book, probably 30 interviews with from people who have been on the show, many more interviews and research papers that are cited, and a lot of first person interviews with readers and friends of all ages. And then the last stage, I'll just sort of the bookend it. The last stage is 80 and up. And if a woman has lived till that age, and you know, a good the average age of it right now is 83 for women. But there are many elders who go well into their 90s, and they're very sensual and sexual, much more than you would think. Maybe not in the penetrative sex way that you are at 35 or 40. But you know, definitely, like still very sensually alive. And there are a lot of lessons in there. And one of the things I write about is a concept called Gyrotranscendence, or the sort of transcendent glow that happens in a certain point as you become older. And I know you're going to love that. And in between our scientific and spiritual takes on how to not only age with grace, but with utter physical yes to being alive from the moment you are born until you take your last breath. So please check it out the nine lives of women on Amazon or @ rosewoman.com Okay, other things. April 1 is the beginning of the next set of courses on living Tantra. Six weeks there is some stuff on my site. Christine mariemason.com, on that class and conscious menopause also starts in April. And then we have a big retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains. North Carolina from May 14 to the 19th, that I know you'll love. And then finally, if you're in the Bay Area, come and see me April 13 with Yasmeen Turayhi, the host of gateway to awakening podcast, and we will have a day long Kundalini bhakti Tantra. Hang out at this amazing cactus and succulent farm on the coast of California in Bolinas, where there's a man who was collecting for 50 years rare succulents and turned it into a bunch of greenhouses, and now it's kind of a gathering space. So we are really excited to be hosting you. You can find out more about that at christinemariemason.com also. All right, what else do I want to tell you? Ah, yes. Rosebud woman, our main sponsor, invites you to come over if you have not yet, and discover the best in intimate care products, the most beautiful balm for the Yoni, that's the Indian word for vagina and vulva, that has incredible ingredients for replenishing the skin of that part of the body, and it's pleasurable, and it tastes good, and it's all the things as well as our aroused serum, our stimulating serum, which is kind of a pleasurable add on to any intimate contact. And finally, I just want to give a shout out to my daughter in law, Allie Ward, the host of ologies for winning Best Science Podcast in the iHeartRadio awards, she is really something I have never seen anyone as devoted to her community, devoted to spreading information that has utter transparency, integrity, clarity, with such humor and joy and Science has never been more important than it is now, and it needs beautiful voices like alleys to tell the truth. So if you're not already a big fan of ologies, check it out. O, l, o, G, I, E, S on any podcasting platform and give her a listen. All right. Thanks, everybody. All love, all the time. You




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