Money as Energy: The Mindset Shift That Turns Financial Planning Into a Flourishing Practice with Tom Shepard

Ashish Kothari:

Tom, it is so lovely to have you with us. This is the first time we're talking live. We've exchanged lots of emails on LinkedIn and elsewhere, but it's our first live conversation, and it's such a joy to be with you.

Tom Shephard:

I'm so looking forward to this. It's been on my calendar for over a month, and I'm just happy to be here right now and looking forward to this conversation. We just seem to have so much in common.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yeah. Well, Tom, I want to start with this question. You've written this book—I have a copy of it here with me for those who are going to be watching it on YouTube. For listeners, it's called Money Isn't Everything. Everything Is Money. And I love it.

It’s a book on happiness, and it’s a book on financial planning. I'm just curious—what inspired you to integrate these two elements together? I've read the book, I think it's fantastic. So tell me a little bit about that intersection for you.

Tom Shephard:

So I grew up in this era, but my dad was an engineer, and I thought I would go off and become an engineer and get into managing manufacturing processes and things. But my mom had a different idea—she thought I'd be an international mediator.

When I got to school, I struggled with engineering because I just didn’t like it. So I took a couple of business classes, then I took some economics classes, and I even took a class on literary journalism. I almost failed out of school, but transferred to a different school. One was public, one was private.

The relationship I had with going to school, there's a story there that was so informative later in life. I looked back and reflected on why I made the decisions about going to one school, being unhappy, and transferring to another one. What made me happy and what got in the way of happiness?

I was very unhappy at the first school I went to, and I was much happier at the second school. So this intersection of happiness and money, it's been with me for a long time. And then, having my first two kids, little girls, nothing makes a dad happier than playing with his daughters. But they were different. So I was trying to figure out what makes each of them happy.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yeah.

Tom Shephard:

 This personal experience and the observation of these new creatures coming into the world, what makes them happy?

Ashish Kothari:

I love it. One of the things that shines through is that self-exploration and a very different perspective. I went to Booth. I got my MBA in finance and strategy, and accidentally in organizational behavior, I didn’t really think I would be doing this work back then.

But it’s so interesting to me. We spend so much of our lives pursuing financial wealth because we believe that is going to make us happy—whether it's wealth, whether it's worth, whether it’s titles.

But really, we’re on this journey that we find ourselves in. And we know from research the other is true—that those who are happier are actually more successful, have more money, etc. In fact, if you're just accumulating, there is never enough. You don't actually quite know, so you're just in this accumulation cycle.

We think about currency as a way to buy our life and everything else. I love what you highlight when you talk about currencies. It's not just about how many dollars or euros or rupees or yen you have.

But you talk about four currencies. So talk to us a little bit about how, as you work with your clients, you invite them, as they think about financial planning, to expand beyond the traditional wealth currency view.

Tom Shephard:

 Yeah.

Ashish Kothari:

So what are those four?

Tom Shephard:

 The four currencies are: time, energy or health, relationship—communication in words—and then there’s stuff, the material world. Money falls into the fourth category.

So the life that you're living, the time you're here on this planet, you're trading with energy to get money so you can come back and maybe buy the things that help you have a good relationship with life.

Those are the four currencies. The way you trade them—the very approach you use—is one of seven paradigms, or what we call financial natures. When we think about trading time and energy to get money to come back and create a life, the way we do it is unconscious until we become aware of it.

I was in my 40s by the time I became aware of it. I’d taken all kinds of other assessments—Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, DISC, Kolbe. I was in management, and management wanted to know what kind of person I was. But I’d never taken an assessment to tell me what kind of relationship I had with these currencies—with money.

Ashish Kothari:

I want to explore them a bit. The question I have is this—I love time in particular. If you go back to the Stoics, they would say it’s not money that defines who’s rich or wealthy—it’s those who have their own say on what they do with their time.

Tom Shephard:

 Right.

Ashish Kothari:

And so many people, in pursuing wealth, actually become slaves. They feel they have no control. And then we add in—what’s interesting, I was having a conversation about this yesterday—the other thing we do is when we fill our life with stuff, we again trade our time.

Since we’re so busy running—I was talking to a mother yesterday—we lose relationships. We think we are building relationships because we’re taking our kids here, there, everywhere, trying to give them all these experiences. But your experience of that time is just busy and frantic and frustrated—like, "Come on, we’re gonna be late!" or drained, especially if you're working.

So the relationship again, right? It’s really interesting. The one that I didn’t see in your currencies—and I’d love to talk about—is meaning. There’s one I talk about. We have a similar assessment. I talk about wealth—which is your stuff—health, which is the same, then love—relationships. And the fourth I always have people think about is meaning.

What is the meaning you find in your life? What are you doing that fills you with joy because you're pursuing something bigger than yourself—maybe even your personal legend that you think you were born for?

I'm curious about your take on meaning also as another source of currency. Where does meaning fit into your wheel?

Tom Shephard:

One of your posts talked about an acronym called SHARP.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yep.

Tom Shephard:

 And the S, H, R, and P mapped very well onto time, health and energy, relationships, and stuff. The A in the middle is almost like a triangle—motivation. Are you motivated to protect? Are you motivated to manage? Are you motivated to pursue it?

We talk about discipline as one thing people write about—how to be successful, you've got to be disciplined. The Stoics were like, “You’ve got to be disciplined,” and that’s kind of the Roman notion of "deny the self." But the Greek notion of "know thyself" is about what motivates me. What drives me?

The third piece is that management piece, what motivates me to be disciplined? When I was writing about this, when I was motivated to actually produce the book, I had to hire a ghostwriter who had discipline. Since I was paying her and I wanted to get the book done, I was motivated to be disciplined. She helped me to be disciplined. She helped motivate me to be disciplined.

So this notion of desire, or what’s my direction, what’s my purpose, I’m trading those four things to bring purpose and meaning and focus to this life that I am creating.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. It’s such an important conversation to have, and I'm so glad we have you. We haven’t had anyone else from the financial planning world on the podcast yet. It’s so interesting because I turned 50 last year. I came to this country with $5,000 on my first trip at 23.

Tom Shephard:

I came here with none.

Ashish Kothari:

That $5,000 was a loan. And I found myself, 25 years later, even though I’d never really thought about investments, in a place where I felt we had enough—not to live a luxurious life—but we weren’t just surviving. That notion of “enough” is powerful. So, as I was turning 50, I felt this invitation to dedicate the second half of my life to filling my meaning bucket.

Because with wealth, there is no limit. We come with nothing, we go with nothing. You can decide how much you want to accumulate and leave behind. That’s it. But meaning, significance, and impact? Those live on well beyond you. In fact, they multiply—over and over—similar to compounding interest you put in the bank.

So, I decided I was going to make a pivot and accumulate wealth through meaning, rather than wealth without meaning. That’s what I often find curious. I’m curious—do you have people who come to you in their late 40s or 50s who don’t even know how much money they have? People who don’t realize they can break free from the cycle they’re in? They feel like they have to keep running, but in reality, they already have enough income, passive income, disposable income.

They could make a pivot—maybe focus on their relationships, maybe rediscover love or deepen love, because they haven’t spent enough time. Maybe their health is not where it needs to be, and they need to spend more time on that.

Or maybe their time, which is all going into work, could be redirected toward meaning—toward something they were born for. I’m curious—do those conversations come up? And how do you handle them?

Tom Shephard:

Absolutely. I'm going to change names here, but let’s call this one woman Jane.

Jane has been approaching retirement for the last five years. She actually has enough money to retire. In fact, this year, with a change at work, she has a solid reason to leave. But she’s so attached to working to a certain point.

In our last meeting, she said, “Next year, I will retire.” I looked at her husband, and he rolled his eyes. He said, “Next year is year 25. But you said that at year 20, 22, 23, 24…” This is the fifth time she’s said she’s going to retire.

So, there’s a certain type of person who finds it very difficult to go from 40 years of working and earning—defining themselves as an earner—to actually knowing what they’re retiring to. For that person, happiness might be the satisfaction of working at something.

Maybe it’s hard, maybe it’s challenging, but they find meaning in the doing. The earner-manager type of person finds it very difficult to retire, period.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yeah. Even the definition of retirement—for me, I always say it’s about changing your tires. Not stopping, because that’s scary. But what do you actually want to do? What’s the second race?

Most of us don’t choose our first race. We don’t choose the first mountain. Maybe some people do, but most of us—especially in our generation—don’t. I became an engineer not because I thought I’d be good at engineering—I didn’t know anything about chemical engineering. But it was my ticket out. I got into the entrance exam and pursued it.

I think as people hit the 20–25 year mark, or approach their late 40s or 50s—if not earlier if they’ve made certain choices—there is a choice we can all make: what’s the second race we choose to run? I didn’t choose the first one, but what is that second—or even a third—race?

People are living longer. There’s no reason we can’t have a 40–60, a 60–80, or even an 80–100 phase. It’s so important to choose that next race. But to do that, you need to know your financial nature. You need to know yourself. That race is unique to you. The way you make meaning is unique.

Talk to us a little bit about that. I love this. I'm a huge fan of assessments because they give you a mirror. I took the one at currencycamp.com . You outline seven financial natures. I’d love for you to get into them and take us through each one so listeners can start figuring out which one they might be. And of course, we’ll link the assessment in the show notes.

Tom Shephard:

There are seven financial natures. I was a math teacher for a little while. I went to the blackboard and asked, “How many relationships with money are there?”

I drew a graph. First, there’s the nature of the relationship when there’s not enough—when the money coming in is less than the money going out.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yep.

Tom Shephard:

That’s a state of insufficiency. It comes with a certain energy. If you have that relationship with money and you thrive in that environment, we call that person the Taker.

Ashish Kothari:

 Mm-hmm.

Tom Shephard:

Who do you want taking the shot at the end of the game? You want the Taker—the person who’s up for the excitement.

The next nature: what if there's sometimes enough, sometimes not? Over time there’s enough, but it goes up and down. We call that person the Spender. We associate that with people who want to use money to have fun.

The third nature is the Earner. It’s a state of efficiency—there’s always enough, but never more than enough. You can align with it as it rises and falls. That’s the earner.

Then there’s the Saver—someone happy just having money in a savings account. I was talking to a woman who viewed her savings account as sacrosanct. When I told her a 401k loan isn’t really a loan or true savings, she said, “I should’ve used that to buy a house.” She couldn’t think outside her box as a saver, but when she identified a different pot of money as something other than savings, she could relate to it differently.

Then you have the Investor. Investors tend to be creative types—they’re looking to produce value or income from their savings.

Levers are the ones who use that extra money to make life simpler, easier—turn it into a system. They focus on leverage, not debt.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yep.

Tom Shephard:

And the last one—though not hierarchical, just the last in the order—is the Giver. The Giver is someone who has enough to meet their needs and has extra they can give away.

I was talking to a Lever trying to understand giving. I asked, “Do you give?” He said, “Yeah, but it doesn’t work.” I said, “That’s investing, not giving.”

It took me 20 years to write this book because I had to get very specific about terminology and words. In The Four Agreements, we’re introduced to the idea of being impeccable with your word. It’s also about being impeccable with words. They mean something.

Some people latch onto the term Giver and think, “I wish I was that.” I had one woman who got Taker. I could see she was agitated. I asked, “What’s the matter?” She said, “It sounds so bad. I don’t like what I got.”

I asked, “What do you do for a living?”

She said, “I’m a photographer.”

“Okay, great. You take pictures for a living. Do you do it instinctively?”

She said, “Yes, it’s like a gift.”

I said, “Then you should accept it. The word isn’t bad. It’s just a symbol of the energy you bring to a career you love. You are a Taker. Own it. Love it.”

Ashish Kothari:

I think that's actually quite powerful. So, friends, one reaction to what you just said, Tom—tell me if I'm getting this wrong—but the nature isn’t something fixed, like “this is who you are” and you’ll always behave that way. I think what I’m taking away from this conversation is that while you might fall into a particular archetype, it’s more about your tendency.

Instinctiveness can be a strength. Impulsiveness, as you highlight, is a weakness. If we’re unconscious, we’ll be moved in predictable ways. But we can consciously choose to take that energy and act—or not act—on it.

Tom Shephard:

 Right.

Ashish Kothari:

It’s not just “you are a taker.” And it’s interesting, because when I first read “taker,” I was like—wow. I thought of Adam Grant’s Give and Take, but that’s not the taker you’re talking about.

Tom Shephard:

When someone gets “giver” or “taker,” I often mention Adam Grant’s book. I tell them, “This is a great book for you to read.” Because if you give with the right intention and in the right way, you’ll be successful. Otherwise, you’ll become a doormat.

Every single one of the natures has a strength…

Ashish Kothari:

Has like everything else.

Tom Shephard:

Each nature also has a shadow side. The Saver—ever watch the show Hoarders?

Ashish Kothari:

Oh my God, yes.

Tom Shephard:

I think about the Investor—investing, taking too much risk, or having overly concentrated risk. But you know what else can be too much? Over-diversification. There are ways to overdo or underdo every one of these relationships with money.

To be successful in life, you’ve got to master them all. And you get to master them through different stages of life, different levels within that stage, and different states as you move through each level.

For me—I’m a Lever. I built this system. But it’s not even something I built—it’s more like I discovered patterns in all kinds of places and realized, “This applies to money too.” Because money is energy. And if energy behaves this way at a cosmic or quantum level, maybe it behaves the same way in the day-to-day way we deal with money—over time.

Ashish Kothari:

So in this assessment—I came out as a Giver. But do we go through a cycle of all of these across different stages of life? Or do we always start from one place? How does that work?

Tom Shephard:

You did a post where you talked about being more human. So, what does it mean to be more human?

If 5% of your brain is what you're consciously accessing—because you were born wired that way—that 5% is driving everything else. That 5% is what we refer to as your nature.

But here's the thing: you can use that 5% to become aware of the other 95%. And guess what life is trying to do? It’s trying to teach you—by introducing you to people who are not like you—how to become more like them.

That’s where we need each other. We need each other to self-actualize. We need each other as mirrors to reflect our blind spots, because they can see them better than we can.

Ashish Kothari:

Yep.

Tom Shephard:

I hurt my neck a while ago, and now even just turning takes effort. Peripheral vision is in black and white—so you’re aware of what’s there, but only what you focus on becomes full color.

The goal in life is to become all of these things. There’s an order to it—just like playing scales in music or mixing colors in art class.

When we work with these money relationships, we’re doing our scales. We’re mixing our colors. And if we do it well, we move from one state to another, then to another level. That’s how we become more fully human—more useful as a human being—with more skills and more resources to draw from.

In our words: evolve with your money. You were born to evolve—to become a better version of yourself.

Ashish Kothari:

I love it. So what you're highlighting is that there are these seven types, and as you master each, you move to the next level. It’s an infinite game.

You can keep playing—Level One, Level Two, Level Three—it’s a journey toward higher and higher maturity. And with that, more freedom and more choice. You're choosing to design consciously.

I like the metaphor of seven colors. It’s hard to paint a beautiful picture with just one color. I’m looking at some of Gaudí’s work here on our wall—all those different colors. We want that variety. We don’t want just one.

Tom Shephard:

If you think about The Dark Side of the Moon album by Pink Floyd, the cover has a prism. White light goes through the prism, and seven colors come out the other side.

There was a point in my life where I was going through something hard, and I kept seeing rainbows everywhere. They became a symbol of hope—that I could get through this. And on the other side, life would be even more vibrant.

At the time, it was stark, white, and too bright. But I believed it would be better. And it was. That rainbow was hope. A promise.

The way we get through life is by going through it.

We’re all trying to protect what we have, manage what we have, and get what we want. So need and want are both in play. And neither of those words is bad.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. And pursue something—something we’re being called to do. Like innovating the future.

I love those three: protect, manage, and pursue. Each of the seven types you highlight carries all three. And they lead to different behaviors, depending on how they manifest.

You were touching on it earlier—how we evolve with money, and through that, we flourish. So talk a little bit more about what “evolve with your money” actually means. How can people start that process?

Tom Shephard:

The tagline came from our attempt to bring Eastern philosophy, Western philosophy, and science together.

“Evolve with your money” means taking wisdom from both East and West—state and flow. It means identifying your current state and the direction of your flow based on who you are.

If I asked you, Ashish, to come stand exactly where I’m standing—it would still be a different place. Because you bring a completely different experience to that spot. Immediately, it becomes a different place.

So: Who are you? Where are you? Where do you want to go?

We start there. We gather the information. We get the black-and-white data. Then we ask: Who do you want to go with? When do you want to start the journey?

We work through a process that helps you identify all the moving parts—and how to bring them together in a way that allows you to follow your own personal journey.

And money is the perfect place to do that. Better than time management, energy management, or even relationship management. Because money is black and white. It’s material. You can get it out of your head and onto paper.

Once you see your pattern with money, you can reflect that back onto how you manage your time, your relationships, your health, and your energy.

Because in the end, money is just another form of energy—just like time, just like your words. And those words shape the relationships you have with yourself, with others, and with the world.

Ashish Kothari:

I love this picture that you have in your book where you show one of the levers, one of the seven, where all of them are these wavy lines pointing from left to right, but one is top to bottom.

And you talk about this notion of stuckness. If you're stuck, then you're not flowing. If you're flowing, you have a choice. And over time, as you shift from needs to wants, you have a chance to level up. You can't level up if one or more of those are stuck. So how does somebody unstick them?

Tom Shephard:

In the book, the lever or the dial—it’s turned a long way. So if I’m trying to flow in a certain direction and I keep banging my head against something, and I'm looking to have a breakout, a breakthrough, or avoid a breakdown, then I need to be able to define the thing that I'm experiencing.

That picture comes from yoga. If I'm moving my energy through seven chakras and it's cycling back around, and my energy is good, but all of a sudden it gets turned sideways and shut off, then I'm going to have problems that are related to that lack of flow. It’s the same thing with money.

If my issue is I cannot save money, and the reason is because I’m looking backwards at my life—at my experience with money—and the language I'm using is to describe that past experience, then the story I’m telling is facing backward.

I'm not actually looking in the right direction to solve the problem. Because the problem isn't where you were or where you are—it's where you're going. As soon as you turn and look in that direction, you've actually turned the dial.

Now the question becomes, “Can I take the next step? And then, what’s the step after that?” Oftentimes, people are taking the same step that runs them into that wall. And then they retreat, and they go back.

So instead of living a cyclical life—where patterns repeat in growth—they end up going in a circle. It's like a rudderless ship: it goes in a circle. If you wander around in the woods, you’ll go in a circle unless you’re able to anchor yourself to items that show you the direction you’re trying to go. And accept that the next thing you have to do is take that next step in the direction you want to go.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. I love it. And it’s so intuitive, but I’ve never seen it presented that way. It’s a beautiful meld of East and West, and how you outline it—so logical, yet, as I always say, common sense is not common practice.

If we don’t think about the full picture, we get stuck playing just this chapter or maybe the next chapter—but not our life. And then life doesn’t evolve the way we want. There is a notion of flow and consciously choosing how we live.

I was just reflecting—you have, in this particular flow, earning. I'll just start there. If you're not earning enough, you probably won't save enough. But if you are earning and saving enough, that gives you choice to invest.

If you invest, it allows you to not just invest your money, but think about leveling up to make more than what you could with just the money. And from that place, you can think about giving. If you give the right way, you almost go back to the beginning: from that, what becomes possible?

I really like this. And I think you do this with your clients—have a conversation about what they want to do with money and the life they want to live, which is so interesting. We come to the question of what life we want to live only after we have enough money to go see a planner—instead of asking at the beginning, “What life do I want to live?” and then, “What should my journey through these seven look like?”

Tom Shephard:

Notice that Spender comes before Earner. So we’ll ask people—before we talk about what you earn, I want to know how you’re spending your money. Then we do an exercise.

Once we've identified how you spend your money, I want to know what you want to spend on. Dream about what you want in the future—the way you did when you were 9, 10, 11, and 12 years old.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yep.

Tom Shephard:

You were young at a certain point—young enough to not have been indoctrinated into trying to fit your life into how much you make. No. The question is: how much do you want to make?

When I was 15, I knew I was going to be a millionaire by the time I was 30. So when I talk to a 50-year-old who wants to be a millionaire by 65, I look at them and say, “You've got a lot more experience. You know a lot more. Why can’t you have as much optimism about the next 15 years as you did when you were 15?” That makes no sense to me—that you're burdened by knowing more.

So it's our nature and our story that we look back at. In Peru, the future is referred to as being behind us because they’ll admit they walk backward through life. But the truth is...

Ashish Kothari:

 Tell me more about that. I’ve not heard that—you have to tell me more. I’m very curious.

Tom Shephard:

When we’re trying to make a decision about what to do, we often look at our experience. If time is the independent variable, then life is a series of ups and downs.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yep.

Tom Shephard:

But if time is the dependent variable, then it’s lefts and rights.

Einstein freed us from the notion of time being the independent variable. In the book The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, he talks about Einstein Time and uses the good date/bad date example to explain how time is experienced on a relative basis.

You’re on a good date—it goes by quick. You’re on a bad date—it goes by slow. Why? Because on a bad date, you’re paying attention to every moment. On a good date, you’re in the flow. You’re experiencing it, loving it, and not paying attention to time—so it flies by.

In transcendental meditation, they talk about how, if you can get into this flow state and stay there, life will go by really fast—but it won’t matter.

But for the person who’s experiencing drama after drama after drama, life feels like, “When’s it going to end?”

Ashish Kothari:

 Right.

Tom Shephard:

So by paying more attention during the good date, being present, you can make it last longer.

Ashish Kothari:

Really savoring those moments.

Tom Shephard:

Yeah. Really savor it. For the bad date, just carry cash. And when you feel like it needs to end, pay your half and call it a day.

I was sitting with my middle daughter, she’s a Saver. We were watching a movie and sharing a bowl of popcorn. I’m a Lever, so I went in with my crane hand to just scoop some out. She took one piece out, looked at me, and said, “You know, you could savor it.”

I’m like, “Yeah.” But for me, the experience is about leverage. For her, it's about savoring—comfort, relaxation.

So, on so many levels, we’re naturally a certain way in how we go through this world. We build these experiences based on being that way. And then we look back at them and think the way we were, and the experiences we had—that’s how the future will play out.

But in truth, the future can play out any way.

Ashish Kothari:

We control very little of what happens. We just control our actions. But somehow, we feel we control our destinies.

Tom Shephard:

I was, in some respects, kind of leaving behind my engineering degree, but I’ve come back to it more recently because of this whole notion of quantum mechanics, quantum physics.

We have the four basic building blocks of “evolve with your money.” And we have four basic building blocks to DNA.

And we have four basic forces: electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force, and the weak force. I was trying to figure out—what’s the weak force? The weak force is love.

The weak force is the one that gives us direction. The weak force on a ship is the rudder. It’s not gravity, which holds the ship on the planet. It’s not the power being burned to drive the propellers. The weak force is the rudder.

These four things are what we trade. We trade them to get more. We trade to manage. We trade to protect. And we do it at different levels. That pattern is everywhere, and it is most material when it shows up in your money.

This was the first cover we had.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yep.

Tom Shephard:

And we were stressing the four currencies. But the reality is—the personal assessment of knowing yourself—that's really where the journey begins.

Ashish Kothari:

I couldn’t agree more with you. And it’s so interesting, right? At Rewire, we talk about wealth, health, love, and meaning as the four areas of your life. And then ask, “What do you want more of? What do you want less of?”

We usually take people through those nine “hardwired for happiness” practices. And self-awareness is at the center of it—at the center of the sunflower—for a reason. You can't access anything unless you're aware.

I love it. Your book resonates a lot with me because of this focus on starting from where you are and who you are—and from that, making choiceful actions. As you say, from what motivation states do you operate, and how do you, in a structured way, continue moving forward?

So Tom, I think this was a good date. I didn’t even notice that we’re 45 minutes into a conversation. We could go on and on.

But my friend, as we bring this to a close, what advice would you have—based on your many rich years of experience working with clients?

In the end, we all want to flourish. Not just be happy—but flourish. Grow, do meaningful work, contribute to the world, take care of our health, and have strong relationships. All of these, collectively—as you say—these different currencies give our life meaning.

If we’re growing in all these dimensions, rather than just one, that’s what I would call flourishing. Not just, “I have lots of money,” or “I have lots of relationships,” but I’m always struggling or I don’t have health. So what advice would you have for people who want to flourish? How should they think about financial planning as an important lever to actually help them flourish?

Tom Shephard:

Money is just energy. And what’s not in the book—because the book had to stop at some point—is this notion that we live through different life stages. That pattern shows up everywhere, but the book had to end somewhere.

One of the first things you can observe about yourself is: what life stage am I in? Am I in the allowance stage, where my parents allow me to do things? Am I in a creative stage? Or am I in a stage where I’m trying to find more meaning?

We go through these different stages. And based on how we’re wired to do money, there are certain stages of life that are going to align more synchronously with that wiring.

Like when I was raising little kids—there was a point in their upbringing when we were on the same page. I had a mattress I was trying to get rid of. I put them on it, attached it to a lawnmower, and we drove that thing all over the place. We were playing, and we were having fun.

Then they got to an age where I didn’t quite know how to relate to them. That’s the same thing with your money. But if you can identify it and see it—that’s what our whole process helps people do. It helps them visualize something that feels invisible.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yeah.

Tom Shephard:

Take it from underneath the table and put it on the table. If I have a spouse who manages money or has a relationship with money that’s different from mine, take the Financial Natures assessment. Know your nature, know their nature, and start to have a dialogue around curiosity for what it’s like to be the other person.

What’s it like to live your life preferring a different kind of relationship—with time, with money, with health? It was easier to do that with my children than it was with my spouse.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yeah.

Tom Shephard:

But it’s more important to do it with your spouse. Because if you don’t do it, you’ll end up doing it when it’s required. And the only time I can think of when it’s truly required... is during a divorce.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for this beautiful work—and that quote: “Money is just energy.”

Your book, Money Isn’t Everything, Everything Is Money—I invite our listeners to go check it out. Take the assessment.

People often look at what they want to achieve in life and where their finances are. But very rarely have I seen someone ask: “What is your financial nature?” Where are you? What are some of your strengths and weaknesses?

And this notion of playing the up-level game continuously—I really enjoyed it. I think it’s a beautiful way for us to have a different relationship. Not one of scarcity, but one of abundance. And to know that if we play the game right, we can constantly level up—not just in one aspect, like money, but in all the others.

Because we can’t take money with us. It’s nothing we can keep. But money is what we do with it. And what we do with it becomes relationships, meaning, health, and freedom. Time. Time to be. The choice of where we want to spend our time.

Tom, this was incredible. I’m so excited to have met you. Thank you for following our work—I love yours. And hopefully, together, we can help a billion people flourish, my friend.

Tom Shephard:

I look forward to remaining entangled.

Ashish Kothari:

 Thank you.