Financial Therapy: Alleviating Nonprofit Leaders’ Financial Anxiety

John Hankins has a range of experiences in nonprofit management and is also a certified financial therapist and licensed social worker and worked for 35 years in IT and internet services business. He has several years experience providing pro bono management services to numerous nonprofits and iscurrently on the Board of the Financial Therapy Association. He has also served for 5 years, starting in 1990, as CFO of an organization that was funded by several large universities and the National Science Foundation for the purpose of providing internet services to smaller colleges and research organizations. His interest in becoming a financial therapist was sparked by volunteer work he was doing with a number of nonprofit organizations to help them with budgeting and planning. As a trained social worker, he was quick to pick up on the high level of anxiety that many nonprofit managers, EDs, etc. have around money. He thought his work would focus on helping them build a budget or other financial management issue when it was often overshadowed by the need to work with them around their “money anxiety”. Three years ago he learned about Financial Therapy and immediately grabbed on to it as it was the first program he had ever seen which directly addresses our relationship with money.

For more information, so to – https://www.financial-therapy.me 

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Okay. Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, founder and president of SynerVision Leadership Foundation. We help leaders create synergy by clearly identifying their vision and being able to articulate it. My guest today is John Hankins, and we have a really good topic that I think is at the heart of a lot of the issues that we in the nonprofit world deal with every day. The title of today’s interview is Financial Therapy, Helping Nonprofit Leaders Overcome Financial Anxiety. So, John, before we get to the topic, tell people a little bit about who you are, your background, and your passion for this work.

John Hankins:
have been involved with nonprofits dating back to about 1990 when I became the CFO of a small nonprofit that was part of a consorti of some major universities around internet access. I have a degree in social work that I earned in the 1980s. I then spent about 35 years in the for-profit sector working in a variety of technology businesses, including IBM. I retired in 2017. I, at that point, began doing volunteer work with a nber of small nonprofits as essentially a business advisor. And what I came to see rather quickly was the really startling level of anxiety that I was encountering with these leaders and these small nonprofits as they were becoming successful and having to manage money in ways they had never encountered. They might get a grant for $200,000, half a million dollars, whatever, centers of money they really had never dealt with in their lives. And I shifted from this business advisor role into really being more of a therapist And along the way, I learned about financial therapy and made a decision to go back and reinvent myself as a financial therapist. And I’ve been doing this work for the last three years.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. Wow. So there, some psychiatrists, I think it was Jung, talked about the shadow. And there is a money shadow. Is that something that you talk about?

John Hankins:
Yeah, not really. I’m not a Jungian, so I don’t go in that particular direction. But what I do focus on is understanding and helping my clients understand their relationship with money, which kind of first and foremost comes from a money story. We all have a money story. We all have things we learned about money with our family of origin. What’s the first thing we learned about money? How did we handle money as a kid? What did we observe in our parents? Were we in a household where there was a lot of arguments about money? Money was never talked about. Just what did we learn as we were growing up? And how does that impact how we relate to money today?

Hugh Ballou:
So what is your personal journey with money? You want to share some of that?

John Hankins:
Sure. My personal journey has two kind of interesting features. One is, and they were both came from my mother. One is that I always worked. I had my first job, I think, when I was like 10 years old. I delivered newspapers. I sold subscriptions for Christmas cards, something that, you know, that business departed a long time ago. But I always worked. At the same time, my mother always resented people with more money than she had. And what I took from that was I thought we could have been a whole lot happier as kids. We weren’t poor, but my mother always made us feel like we never had enough money. We could have been a lot happier if we had just focused on what we did have instead of what we didn’t have.

Hugh Ballou:
I can understand that. I grew up as a Scottish Presbyterian. The emphasis on Scottish. So interesting. We call it frugal. Other people have other names for it. So what is a healthy and an unhealthy relationship with money? Give us a contrast there.

John Hankins:
Well, that really covers quite a spectrum. I think a key feature of that is kind of how it aligns with your own goals and how it aligns with your behavior. I mean, we have three things that we can do as human beings, right? We’ve got thoughts, we’ve got feelings, we’ve got actions. And if they are not in alignment, for instance, my thought, my goal is that I want to save. But what I find happening is at the end of every week, I’m spending money that I did not, when I look back, that I did not want to spend. I have some compulsion to be shopping all the time and I just can’t reach my goals. The flip side of that could be someone who has plenty of money and I see this quite frequently. When you grow up in a Scottish Presbyterian household where scarcity and savings is the theme of the day, you wind up as a successful adult, but you never feel like you have enough. You’re always feeling like you need to save more. Think when you’re out of alignment between those feelings and goals and your actual actions, that’s where money’s really a problem.

Hugh Ballou:
Yes. And you and I, before we came on, spoke about the work of Murray Bowen, and there is the multi-generational transmission process where we inherit some things from even generations we don’t even know. And he also talks about anxiety. So I want you to talk about what financial therapy is, But before you do that, talk about how we create this anxiety. We have anxiety about a lot of things, but let’s just stay to the money piece of that. And I think it’s on our plate to deal with that anxiety, isn’t it?

John Hankins:
Absolutely, yeah. So there’s lots of sources of anxiety. I think that one of the problems that we have is the role of money in our society. We live in this very, I think, kind of convoluted world around money. On the one hand, we are continually driven, I think, through social media, marketing, all these different pieces. This has gone on for a very long time, but we are continually pushed to acquire things that demonstrate how much money we have. You want to have a fancy car, you want to dress nicely, you want to have a big house. All of these things are just these outward statements of who we are that all flow through money. But at the same time, we have this very weird attitude towards money. You don’t talk about money. It’s very impolite to go around talking about how much money you make, there’s certain things this is considered a real private thing that we don’t share with others. I think when you go back to Mary Bowen and you go into the therapy world, I think that as therapists, we have done a pretty poor job of helping people to address this whole relationship with money. I think that’s the financial therapy has really come out of a need. to be explicitly focused on this one element of our lives that I think, in some sense, the therapy community has explicitly avoided.

Hugh Ballou:
Yeah, and it’s a huge issue, isn’t it?

John Hankins:
Absolutely. And I think back to your work, I think when you bring people into a leadership role in a nonprofit, you then introduce another piece of this. So you’re making an explicit statement as an individual. I value something other than money. I’m doing this work in a nonprofit. I’m not expecting to get rich. I think that there’s a tremendous value in that, but I think underneath that there can be all sorts of internal conflict around it as well. I mean, I’ve had people when I was working in a nonprofit looking at me, you know, giving me the kind of, well, You’re missing the boat here, pal. You really need to be focused. It needs to be all about money. You need to be making more money. So I think there’s social pressures and our own internal pressures that really benefit from work, that could really benefit from talking to somebody or really being able to explore what’s going on with all these different pieces that we have to navigate.

Hugh Ballou:
Talk a little bit more about financial therapy and how it works, because as you’re speaking, it’s just so obvious to me that this issue impacts most everything else we’re doing. And it starts with the word non-profit, which is not a word IRS uses, and it puts us in the scarcity mindset. So talk a little bit about the financial therapy and how does that work?

John Hankins:
OK. Yeah, financial therapy should be viewed as an overlay to therapy. It is, think of it this way, we have all sorts of aspects, conditions, whatever you want to call them, factors that we deal with. I mean, we deal with, you know, addiction issues, we deal with food, you know, we deal with sex, exercise, you know, as I said, anxiety, depression, all these different pieces. And within the therapeutic realm, you have people that come at this from EMDR, Jungian analysis, cognitive behavioral therapy. There’s all kinds of different modalities. And you can view financial therapy as an overlay to that. So there are financial therapists that use all sorts of different modalities. But at the core of their work is this idea of building a more positive relationship with your money and your approach to money.

Hugh Ballou:
Yeah, yeah. And you’re part of an association, a financial therapist?

John Hankins:
Yeah, there is the Financial Therapy Association, which was founded in 2009. So it’s been around for a while. And it’s a very interesting organization because it’s composed of both individuals from the therapy world as individuals from the financial planning world. They came together because the financial planners saw that they were trying to help people with planning and running into all these emotional issues where they needed a broader skill set to deal with that. And folks in the therapy side saw that they had people coming in where they were helping them with emotional issues and money was part of that. And they felt like they needed additional skills there as well.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, I’m so glad you’re on my show today. I’ve never, in 35 years of working with nonprofits, this is my first acquaintance with this discipline. So I’m sorry, I didn’t know this before. So talk about, Dig a little deeper into the behaviors around money and how it penalizes us. People say to me over and over again, I know it’s not about money. Well, but they complain because they don’t have money to run their programs. I don’t wanna beg for money, which I say, you’re not begging for money. So what are some of the behaviors that we create that are not beneficial to the work that we do?

John Hankins:
That could be a pretty big basket of behaviors, I would say. Well, pick the top five or something like that. Well, I think it goes back to what is your money story? The thing that I encountered that really drove me to doing this work is that I was working with people that came from Their money story really had some legitimate scarcity in it, for starters. They came from families where you know, they struggled with money, they struggled with adequate resources. And so when suddenly, I can think of one particular woman that I dealt with, who was built up this really fantastic educational program. And she had, I think, she had about $400,000 in her organization. And It went from anxiety to fear of, I have never dealt with, you know, money in this amount, can’t, never imagined I would be working with this. I am really scared to death that I am going to fail with this. And my response to that is to run away. Okay, it’s I don’t want to look at this. I don’t want to open this spreadsheet. When I have to open this spreadsheet, I break out literally break out into a cold sweat. And so my work with her was simply just to take her through that it was kind of a A little bit of a desensitization exercise of, okay, let’s do this. Let’s talk about how you’re feeling. Let’s step through this very slowly. Let’s get you to the point where you can see that this isn’t a thing that is going to overwhelm you. This is something that you can do. You have the skills to do this. I think that piece is very typical. I think another piece, particularly coming from a social work background, is this guilt piece as well. And you touched on it. I got into being in a nonprofit and even talking about money, that I need to raise more money is, yeah, it’s kind of an embarrassing thing. It’s something that I just can’t get comfortable with. I think that’s, again, we have this saying, we talk about noble poverty, that I am not worthy. I’m not worthy of this. And I think there’s kind of a fairness piece that comes into this. You’re doing hard work. You’re doing hard work. You’re doing work that’s important. You deserve some reward for this. Noble poverty, for most of us, just isn’t very fun. Worrying about how you’re going to pay your bills at the end of the month reduces your effectiveness as a leader. That’s not to say we all need to explore some kind of overcompensation. But I think the nonprofit world, we need to be adequately compensated. That’s okay. And we need to feel okay about it.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow, this is big. So for those that are listening to this or watching the video and you didn’t capture some of these nuggets that are coming by, do not worry. On the website, you’ll find us at thethenonprofitexchange.org. You’ll find the full transcript on that page. So you’ll be able to unpack some of these gems that John has given us today. So the anxiety about money, not looking into the details because you don’t want to deal with it, and then just having a shame around money. Those are some of the things. I mean, just a reluctance to even talk about it. We’ve been taught that, haven’t we?

John Hankins:
Absolutely. Yeah. Again, it goes back to our money story. But I think that for a lot of people that go into the nonprofit world, I do think there is a thread that runs through this that is really trying to take a step away, especially in the world we live in today, where greed is good. They’re really trying to take a step away from that. So achieving that kind of balance of that I am not just in it for the money. I’m in it for something that’s much more important. But in fact, money has to be a part of this as well. I’ve got to recognize the role that money plays in this work, the importance that it plays, and my responsibilities around managing it.

Hugh Ballou:
Yes. There’s a personal issue here for leaders and there’s an institutional issue. There’s a mindset in the nonprofit culture as well as the mindset of the leader. Talk about the word therapy. Some people say, I don’t need that, I’m not sick. Therapy is for healthy people, right?

John Hankins:
Absolutely. And I think in the financial therapy world, we actually have this kind of continuum that goes from therapy through to coaching. And we see more and more of this just across the wellness spectrum, I would say. But we carry these burdens with us. We carry these burdens. That I’ll give you an example that I was this is not a nonprofit thing that I was dealing with this this woman. I was working with her and she and her husband as their kids were growing up, they made some decisions about their kids’ education primarily, and they put a tremendous amount of their resources into their kids’ education. And even though her husband was actually in quite a senior position in an organization known for paying well, so he was making plenty of money, but they were spending all of it. And this went on for 25 years, and she was talking to me about this and now they were at the point of retiring and they were struggling they should have been given her husband her husband’s position that they should have been cruising into that instead it was like we really don’t have very much she took me through this whole story and I said to her so have you ever talked to anybody about this just says no I’m and I said so in 25 years you’ve never talked about these issues to anybody She said, yeah. And so to bring this back to therapy, carrying these burdens, it really diminishes our quality of life in some fundamental ways. And one of the messages of financial therapy is it’s OK to talk about money. You got the green light. It is OK to talk about it. And a lot of people, I think most of us have never had that green light.

Hugh Ballou:
Oh, people listening, that’s the big deal right there. It’s okay to talk about money. John, our primary audience is nonprofit leaders, but it’s also board members who are business people. We have clergy, we have associations like chambers. This is not an isolated problem for nonprofits. This is a personal issue. And so even though, and people would, I think excuses, I would anticipate, oh no, I’ve got a financial planner or CPA on my board. I don’t need this. Well, you come in as neutral in a safe place to talk about things that they may not feel safe talking to people about. So let me share. your website, the link for your website. Let me share that real quick. And then for people that are listening to this, we’ll talk about it so that you can then go to the web page and click on it. It’s financial hyphen therapy, T-H-E-R-A-P-Y, I have trouble spelling, so I wanted to spell it out, dot me. So this is about me. It’s about us. So when people go to your website, what will they find?

John Hankins:
Well, I try to give them some understanding of what my work is about, which really covers the spectrum of financial therapy, financial coaching, and retirement counseling. Just for pure transparency, I’m 74 years old. And I think I have a little bit to say about all of those issues that can be helpful. So I try to both talk about therapy, the services that I offer, and who I am, and how they could be of benefit to you as an individual.

Hugh Ballou:
That is so good. The health of our organization depends on the health of the leader. And I’ve got you beat by four and a half years. But old age kind of creeps up on you. So the example you gave earlier is probably not uncommon. People who are spending all they make, and then they get to the place in life and say, uh-oh. uh-oh, I haven’t thought ahead about this. So I think it’s never too early to have someone like you in the conversation. I noticed on your website there’s a place for a free consultation. There’s no obligation. People want to talk to you.

John Hankins:
Absolutely. And I want to be really clear about this, because I think when people were thinking about, maybe I should see a therapist, maybe I should see a coach, that real first step in action is to have that initial consultation session with somebody, just to actually be talking to another person and checking this out. For me, I love doing that piece of this work. I am happy to talk to people if they just want to learn about financial therapy. Not necessarily that they’re ready to go into a financial therapy program or to see a therapist or a coach. I’m happy to talk about that. If they just want to get some advice from me on what really would work for them, I’m happy to do that as well. So I view that as not, I try to make it not about a marketing session for me, I try to make it about something I’m trying to do for you in this little piece of time that we have together.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow, wow. So this is very important information. It’s a refreshing view of how we can deal with this topic because it causes a lot of anxiety. I know, been in the marketplace a long time. What thought or tip or idea do you want to leave people with today?

John Hankins:
I guess the important thing I would say is that You have a relationship with money. Doesn’t matter how much money you have or don’t have, you do have a relationship with money. And it may be beneficial to you to explore what’s happening in that relationship and trying to improve it in some way.

Hugh Ballou:
John Hankins, it’s been great hearing from you today. Thank you for being my guest on the Nonprofit Exchange.

John Hankins:
You, thank you very much. I really appreciate it.