It was a great honour to speak about wealth counselling with Brian Adams of The Capital Club podcast recently.
The transcript of the podcast is below.
Speaker: Brian Adams
Guest: Amanda Falkson
Welcome to the Capital Club podcast. This episode is brought to you by Excelsior Capital, an investment platform focused on democratizing private equity by providing individuals access to direct opportunities. To learn more about the firm in the Capital Club community, visit our website at www.excelsiorgp.com. And connect with Brian on LinkedIn.
Brian: Welcome back to Capital podcast. Today I’m here with Amanda Falkson and Amanda, thank you so much for joining us today.
Amanda: Thank you.
Brian: You have come a long way and it’s late your time and so I appreciate you carving out part of your schedule. Amanda has been in practice as a wealth counselor with high-net-worth individuals in the UK and internationally for over two decades. She works with the internal challenges that being a wealth holder brings and her clients describe her as a trusted confidant in their personal lives. So, let’s start with your personal life. How did you get into this? It is a really esoteric business I must say.
Amanda: Yes, it is. How I got into it is, I’ve been a psychotherapist in the City of London in the financial district for 18 years. And the reason I mentioned City of London is, it’s a direct link through to me working with high-net-worth individuals and ultra-high net worth individuals. Where I’m based, I’m surrounded by, I don’t know if you know Brian, the City of London, the Wall Street area of central London.
Brian: Yes, I just refer to it as the city, if I’m correct.
Amanda: We just call it the city.
Brian: The city, yes.
Amanda: And so, it’s a square mile, if anybody doesn’t know it, that we’re speaking to the square mile within the very, very center of London. It’s a very old part of London. And it’s where banking started in coffee houses. I think it was Lloyd’s coffee house that then became Lloyds Bank, I think was the first bank if I’m not mistaken. So here I am with my psychotherapy practice in this area and, not by design, I was meeting clients. It just happened very organically but my clients were coming to me, not originally for wealth counseling, but for all the other reasons that people come to a psychotherapist.
And I noticed that if I ever mentioned wealth holding to them, there was a kind of a clamming up and a reticence. That got me curious and wondering why will people talk to me about childhood abuse, about their divorce, about business problems, about relationships. But if I referred to something they said, such as “so you flew into such and such an air field”, clearly to me being somewhere where private jets come in. Yeah, yeah, backtracking, backtracking.
And so, I, with my natural innate curiosity got to talk to people, got to ask people questions. You know, I’ve just mentioned to you about the likelihood of you flying in on a private jet, and I noticed that you’ve been very quiet.
And I realized it didn’t take me long to realize that people thought I would judge them. I would judge negatively. And I’m not going to do that. I’ve never done that. Being a wealth holder is one aspect of you.
Yes, it can define you. It doesn’t necessarily define you. But for me as your therapist, it’s one of the things that I’m interested in about you.
And the more I had conversations with people about their wealth holding in the early days, the more I learned how fearful they were of being judged, and how they tended to keep on the download their financial status. And in the years to come, the word went around that I was a safe person to discuss financial issues with, problems around finances, relationship issues around finances, family issues, and so forth.
As I say, organically my practice has taken me in that direction. I wasn’t seeking it, but it’s taken me there. I’m glad because it’s very, very interesting for me, and I’m very happy to do this work.
Brian: It’s fascinating. And I read an article that you were quoted in, about this issue about wealth counseling. And I just sent you a note.
And here we are, because I think it’s fascinating too. Let’s get some definitions out of the way so that we can explore a little bit deeper. Can you talk a little bit about what wealth counseling is? And the relationship there may or may not have with psychotherapy, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, just so people understand exactly about your subject matter expertise?
Amanda: Yes, that’s a fantastic question and something I really wanted to discuss with you, because I realized in reading profiles of other wealth counselors, mostly in the States because in the in the UK, I can only find two other people doing this, but I’m learning that wealth counseling means different things to different wealth counselors.
What it means to me is, it’s the personal interface between the individual and their wealth. That really, really interests me. So, people are born into wealth, or they acquire it as they make their way through life.
They work hard, sell a business, they get divorced, they inherit or they’re in receipt of an intergenerational wealth transfer.
People generally tend to see you as lucky and that you should be happy. And in fact, for some people, neither of those things is true.
Many people tend to seek me out for wealth counseling, either when a change in circumstances has happened or is about to happen, or they’ve had enough of trying to make sense of an enduring problem on their own, and their circumstances have changed or are about to change.
I help them to make choices and decisions that are supportive of who they are at their core, and I help them with the psychological and emotional aspects of change.
I am a psychotherapist at heart, but this isn’t me advising on wealth, and what to do with their wealth. It’s helping people be congruent with who they are, and how they want to be with their wealth.
We would look at any effect on relationships, we would look with their families and their friends. And I would help them make sense of things that show up that aren’t necessarily logical in their lives.
They can be existential challenges for someone, if there’s change on the horizon or changes taking place, in that they may have known who they were before the acquisition of wealth, and they may not really understand who they are.
Now, who do you choose to be when your circumstances change?
But you know wealth counseling can be a story of transformation of reinvention.
But wealth counseling for me is going on an internal journey with somebody and is never ever simplistic.
We’re multi-dimensional, and there’s always a bigger context for wealth. There’s always a bigger picture to explore, Brian, and wealth counseling for me, wealth is a door through my vision that I pull on, and a long string starts to appear and unravel and the whole world appears to both of us near my client, that you as my client may never have talked about before.
And it can be a deeply personal journey and it’s never less than fascinating. And it could be emotional, it could be to do with loss, it could be to deal with grief, trauma, family history, betrayal, challenging relationships.
They can all be part of the landscape. experiences that I see as being able to take a chunk out of a person, can be around the issue of wealth. Of course, it can.
Brian: And we’re speaking, we’re recording this on the day, at least in the states that Queen Elizabeth has passed away and I think this is a good example, right?
It’s, you’re talking about on one level, maybe the largest transfer of wealth that will occur in Britain ever, or at least, you know, one of the largest, wealthiest families in the UK.
There’s this transfer of wealth that is occurring simultaneously. But then there’s the other side of the story, which is that there is a death involved, right? This inheritance is triggered by a very sad event, the loss of the Queen.
And so, I think it’s important for people to understand this distinction or this odd duality that can occur where Charles has had a liquidity event, but he’s also suffered this tremendous loss in his life. And there are people that will help him with the capital side of it. But then there should also be professionals involved with his emotional well-being and that’s really where you come in.
Amanda: That’s exactly fine.
Yes, you got it.
Exactly.
That’s exactly where I come in.
Charles will be anybody where there’s a transfer of wealth. There will be a surrounding of advisors. Of course, there will be and of course there should be wealth advisors, lawyers, the full panoply of people come in to support that person.
But yes, absolutely where I step in is, well, how are you?
You know, and also, where I come in is, I have no personal investment on what you do now. I just want you to, I just want you to be congruent with what your wishes and desires. I just want you to be. I want you to have peace.
And yes, of course, with any transfer of wealth, there’s the potential for the issues to come in that you’re not expecting. It wouldn’t be it as you’re flagging up with Charles with a bereavement.
However much that might be expected and a lady of 96 years old. I don’t suppose anybody thought she was necessarily going to die yesterday; you know at my time yesterday.
So, there’s going to be all there comes with loss and distress to encounter. Same with selling a business. Same with getting a divorce. Same way as being in receipt of a lifetime gift.
You know, these things can be really loaded, really, really loaded.
And people often don’t know how to make sense of them personally. I’ve been thinking about this conversation with you this evening, and I thought maybe it would be helpful to illustrate some things that I’ve, some issues that I’ve worked with, and I absolutely want to prefix anything I say now with the fact that I keep everything 100% confidential that client told me.
Anything I say is not about a particular person. So, what I’ve done is I’ve created scenarios to exemplify the kinds of things that I worked with, would that be helpful if I were to run through a couple of things like inheritance?
Brian: Yes, I was going to, this is perfect because I was going to ask what are some common threads that you see over and over again, what are some, that patterns that repeat themselves within your clientele, so that maybe we could extract some learnings from that.
Amanda: Yes, absolutely.
So, the most common things that I work with are inheritance, intergenerational wealth transfer, and people selling businesses. They’re the most common things. Not the only things but they’re the, yeah, they’re the kind of the bedrock of my practice.
So yeah, so as we’re talking about what’s happened in England, in the last 24 hours, inheritance would absolutely be something that I’d like to talk about a bit more.
So, inheritance will obviously, this can denote a massive change in a person’s life and with it would come the grief or the bereavement.
And I, and again, as I said, this is about a real person, that I’ve written and has a little story because it’s a good way to illustrate it. I had a young one who was in receipt of a tsunami of wealth that he nearly drowned.
He gave up his job, which he loved. And the job also gave him a vibrant social life. He had very, very good relationships with colleagues, and instead he started to sleep in late, watch daytime TV and did lots of pointless internet shopping.
By the time he came to me, I would say he was stuck in a bereavement pattern because what I’ve just described is a pretty common bereavement pattern, which then tipped into a pattern of spending that I would call almost addiction.
Like it was certainly disruptive, if not quite addictive, buying loads of things that you didn’t really want or need, and he kind of felt lost, lost in it by the time he came to me. I would say that he was destabilized by the inheritance, which he expected to come when he was much older.
And by then the sum of money that he inherited would have been considerably diluted.
He had a lot of conflicting emotions with the loss of a parent making this inheritance available, that we believe that money can make us happy, and indeed, it can make life easier.
And it can make some people happy, but it can also throw people completely off course, especially if somebody is young.
If you’re a young inheritor and you’re not in a position yet in life to know how you want to be with money.
So, there was a true story of transformation through therapy and crucially, over time, he reined in his spending, and he got to grips with what he really wanted to do with the money and appointed a lawyer who put him in touch with an excellent financial adviser.
And where I believe I was useful, was he would discuss different people with me, I’ve met this lawyer, she seems fine.
But I was a bit concerned about these aspects. And we would discuss and debrief “oh, and these lawyers are now ones I feel much more comfortable with and now they’ve suggested a financial advisor, and they seemed fine, or they don’t seem fine”.
So, we, between us, I guess I could describe it, Brian, as I accompanied him on a journey of finding the right people, gathering the right people about him, as somebody with no axe to grind myself.
I don’t mind who he goes with, as I say, I just want him to have peace in his heart, really.
So, he bought, he ended up buying rental properties, that he gets a steady income from now, as I say, he’s curtailing all the disruptive behavior, the bereavement aspect has gone down, and he’s got himself a job which although he doesn’t need the salary, it brings back structure into his life, brings meaning, purpose into his life and self-worth as well.
And the respect of his new partner he met because the partner was coming home in the evening to see her boyfriend, who hadn’t been out doing anything all day. She didn’t have that much respect for him, but now he’s regained self-respect, and has reconnected with the world of work.
So, that’s an idea of what can happen in inheritance counseling. I hope that that makes some kind of sense to you in how I’ve described it. I mean, please, please ask me if something doesn’t make sense.
Brian: It does. And it’s certainly a fact pattern that we hear about often. And my question for you is to what extent do you think the issue is that there needs to be a sense of self identity beyond just the money? Because it seems like when the money is the only thing that defines you. There’s a spiral into self-hatred, destructive behavior, depression, and drifting almost into the world.
Amanda: Yes, yes, absolutely.
It can’t be the only thing that defines you and the three words that are the basic tenet of my practice, Brian are meaning, purpose and structure.
And if your wealth holding has stripped you of any of these, I think you’re screwed. Because then you are only about the money. That’s all for you to go on, but you know, we need to be more multi-dimensional than that.
Yes, it’s an important factor, as I said before, but it’s not everything. It’s not what you should only be considering about yourself.
You need to be doing something constructive during the day. That’s what I would always advise somebody to do. Always keep, keep involved with something, that blows your hair back really, otherwise you are circling the drain onto as you’ve just described, of depression or addictions, because your belief in yourself is really, really flattened.
And there’s no reason why wealth holding should do that to you. There’s always options that people might not see alone.
Brian: I tell my children in more simplistic terms, because they’re little still but success in whatever you’re pursuing does not equal happiness. Because I’ve seen many times, there’s an old adage, in the investment banking world in America, that the saddest person in town is the one that just sold their company for $50 million.
Amanda: Oh, yeah.
Brian: Because the pursuit was their happiness. And they achieved this goal that they had been chasing for a long time. And when they hit it, and the money comes to the bank account, and they wake up with nothing to do, it can get pretty scary and dark for those people pretty quickly.
Amanda: Yes, yeah, yeah. 100%.
And my favorite time to start working with somebody around selling a business is a year before they sell, a year before they go to market.
If they do go to market, it might be that they’re approached and they don’t need to go to market, but at least a year before to start looking at, are going to be on the other side of this.
Who do you want to be on the on the other side of this? It’s the same as retirement. It’s the same thing, you do want to be in retirement because the business has defined you for a long time. As you say, the saddest person in town can be the person who’s just sold their business for a huge amount of money.
Brian: There’s that litmus test of when you’re at a cocktail party and somebody asks you what you do, and if your response for the majority of your life was, whatever you do for work or whatever company you’re involved in your position, and when that goes away, you know, it’s not a very healthy thing for your mental awareness, and it can really hurt people.
So, let’s talk a little bit more granular. The work you do, say you engage with somebody a year out from a liquidity event, what is the work that you do and wherever you found people to be successful on the other side of that type of transaction.
Amanda: Yes. Yeah. So, it takes a lot of soul searching about what you want to do and who you want to be.
And you’re absolutely on the same page as me with this. There can be a real sense of loss in selling a business and adjustments absolutely required.
It doesn’t necessarily make logical sense that people can feel completely duress. Should be fantastic, shouldn’t it? It should be absolutely fantastic, more time and more money.
The trick, that’s what everybody wants. But what do people do? What do people do then?
And when advisors say whichever advisor, it is, what you need never work again, which was meant as a very good thing. And I think that that’s the kind of projection coming from the advisor, the advisor might not ever want to work again, if they’ve had the opportunity not to, the belief that everybody wants to hear you don’t have to do anything. Again, I think it is, if I’m mistaken, belief because it can have the effect of pulling the rug out from under somebody.
Well, yeah. What do I, what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do now? And I’ve seen people in crisis, with that rug being pulled away.
It’s possible that it might be more or less likely, perhaps, it might be more advantageous not to be working to continue earning, but it’s crucial to start looking at what you might want to do, what’s going to make you get up in the morning.
Once you sold the business, I remember working with somebody to whom this was said, you need not work again. And just that statement, upon selling his business, I mean, just that statement to this particular person, just kind of stopped him in his tracks in every respect as a hobby. He had been a landscape painter for years and just stopped, stopped.
He stopped painting. He no longer blogged about art galleries, which he loved doing, and he certainly didn’t want the stress of setting up another business, kept taking trip after, trip away, after another trip, after another trip. For the trouble is Brian, you take yourself with you wherever you go.
And I learned over time that you, you know people, that there’s going that this going away for this person, constantly going away on trips, was trying to escape this, what do I do now? What do I do now? Who am I now? What am I trying to do now? One day in our work together I said to him, what points in your life did you feel most alive?
And what was it that made you feel the most alive? And it turns out that volunteering for an aviation organization, an NGO that made food drops into famine situations, was the time of his life when he felt most juicy, most lively.
And he’s now back with that organization, but in a trustee role. And he’s been and he’s investing in the NGO. And he’s taken his inestimable financial knowledge to help that organization. He’s very committed and his life force has returned really now, it didn’t take much. It didn’t take much to turn the thing around. It’s just people tapping into the innate knowledge of themselves, their innate memories themselves. What do I enjoy? What do I like? If your life has been about building a business, it’s easy to forget. What else makes you feel alive? Because the business has provided that to you, for you for so long. There’s always more, there’s always more, it’s just asking the right questions to unlock, that’s required to unlock what there is.
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Brian: So, such reflections being open and vulnerable to a professional teasing these things out from you. It sounds like we’re, I’ve had mentors or people 10, 20 years, I’m 40, older than me. Talk about the emptiness syndrome. And just the words we use and the framework that our culture puts on it. And we really need to push against that and almost flip the dynamic, because your children leaving the home should be a success story. It should be celebrated because you’ve done your job, you’ve done the work and it’s just the next chapter of life. And it seems like a pretty apt parallel here, where if you built the company to sell and you have liquidity, then you should be celebrating but you also should be preparing for that inevitability of what’s on the other end of that.
Amanda: Oh, yes, yes, absolutely.
Always, always, always looking ahead. Yeah. Oh God, emptiness, emptiness syndrome is, I think, other than the reason, Brian, I think emptiness syndrome is the most direct that I’ve seen people. And as you said, the person who sold their business for a large some but don’t know what to do with themselves.
Brian: So, what are some, if people are listening to this conversation, examining their own behavior, what are some red flags? What are some things that if they’re being honest with themselves, what are behaviors that they should start monitoring and considering making some changes in their lives, so that they can deal with this inevitability of this season of life and they get another one beginning.
Amanda: I would say always remaining in your integrity is essential. And what I mean by that, not integrity in the way that the words are usually used. The way I mean, it is always being authentic with yourself, about who you are at your core, and what’s important to you in your heart. Yes, of course, when you know, anybody in business rarely leads with their brain. That’s right, that’s exactly where they should be, up in their heads, driving things forward. No problem with that at all. That’s exactly where they should be. But I would say always, always tap into what’s important in your heart, in your, by your heart. I mean, your core. There’s a lovely, there’s a lovely quote, let me just see if I can capture it from, you know the book, The Little Prince.
Brian: Sure.
Amanda: There’s as the lovely quote, “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye”.
And that’s something I would always work with, that principle I would always work with a person. If you’re truthful and honest to your core, if you’re authentic to what you really want in life, and especially about what serves you well, and what doesn’t serve you well.
The flow of energy in your life will occur. I have no doubt about that. If you’re kidding yourself about who you are and trying to twist yourself into a pretzel shape to accommodate the business or accommodate the rest of the board or accommodate your family.
That energy will hit a logjam and become stagnant. So, I would say always keep an eye on being authentic with yourself. And another thing I’d always say is, trust your intuition, really trust your intuition. I don’t just mean your business instinct. I hope you’ve been trusting those, whoever’s listening for a long time by now. But trust your intuition. It’s your mind that can throw you off course sometimes they think about who you are.
I suppose simply put, if something looks like an elephant, smells like an elephant to you. It’s an elephant. Don’t tell yourself it’s a pussycat to please others. I suppose the upshot is just always, always, always be true to the core of yourself. And that way, you’re not going to get into a position, when you stand your business of thinking. Geez, what do I do now? What you know, who am I? Once I’ve sold this business because you’ll know, you’ll know.
Brian: Why do you think it is that people typically have very good tax professionals, investment professionals, bankers, accountants, etcetera. But they don’t feel it necessary to have somebody like you on retainer, to help with the other side of life, their mental health, their mental wellness, is that a social stigma? Do you think it’s cultural?
Amanda: I think it has been cultural, a social stigma, I think, in the commercial world, whereas it’s perfectly, perfectly acceptable and perfectly normal to have your personal trainer and maybe your nutritionist and you know that those people around you, having your wealth counselor, having your counselor at all.
I’ve seen it flourish with people who’ve worked in the city, who have come over from Wall Street, that seems to be culturally very acceptable, that you have your counselor and I’ve known people land in London and set themselves up with all three that get their counselor, their you know, their personal trainer, etcetera. That just seems to be completely normal, but not generally.
I don’t know that the value has been seen widely of having an impartial person to be a sounding board with impartial, serving somebody on your team to chew things through, I don’t see, I think it’s also still relatively new, certainly new in the UK.
I mean, my clients, mostly not UK based, Brian, for wealth counseling. This is an opportunity that COVID has given me because I transferred all my work online, so I’m not solely working with people in the city now. I’m working with people in the States and the United Arab Emirates now. So that’s the benefit that that COVID has brought me. I think, anything to do with therapy, the UK is a little bit behind the USA.
Brian: I would think, like everything on Wall Street, if people thought that they could gain an edge and optimize your performance, they would do it. Right and that show billions was probably a catalyst for a lot of people to start thinking about having professionals on retainer internally, to help their professionals work through whatever issue that they have to work through. And that’s interesting about the difference between UK and non-UK in terms of your client base.
Amanda: Yeah. Yeah. And my USA clients, say, are more naturally willing to talk about their wealth holding. I don’t notice or so far, I haven’t experienced. I’m going to find out uncomfortable things, shaming guilt, that I noticed sometimes in British clients, real discomfort. And I think this is a cultural thing. I really hope that this will pass sometime soon, but part of my work with some British clients has been to process with them, their way through shame and guilt that they feel around wealth holding.
Brian: What’s best practice in your opinion, how often what’s the regimen? What’s the kind of typical schedule that you have for professionals? Typical schedule.
Amanda: Typical schedule usually starts out at a session every fortnight and then it depends really on matching diaries. It can stay at once a fortnight per session and sometimes broadens out to three weeks or a month. I really don’t like sessions to go beyond, you know, having a month gap because then, you know, we can go off the boil, really, if it’s too long, but two to three weeks sessions. And then after that how long is that a piece of string? That depends on the issues that my client would bring, really and so what about.
Brian: And so, what about yourself, I know oftentimes within the professions that we’ve kind of mentioned at the beginning of the show, it’s best practice for a therapist to have a therapist.
Amanda: Oh, yeah.
Brian: What do you do in your own personal life to find equilibrium, to find peace?
Amanda: Well, first of all address what you directly ask. Yes, I have a therapist, and I have what we call in in my profession, a supervisor. And the word supervisor is different to how it is in other commercial practices.
This isn’t somebody looking over my shoulder just to make sure I’m doing it right. This is someone that I have through my entire career with me, because therapists work on their own.
This is somebody with whom I can confidentially debrief how I’m working with somebody. Any issues that I might want to discuss about how I am the client, things that the client is saying to me, and my supervisor will have her therapist and her supervisor. So, there’s always a trade within any psychotherapeutic practice like that.
That’s the formal. That’s the formal thing, the formal aspect. The less formal is that COVID kind of, the last two years of COVID focused me very, very clearly on what’s important. And I think it did for a lot of people, what’s essential for me, and I’ve learned that an awful lot that I was doing pre COVID that now feels a bit like a waste of time.
What keeps me afloat, is caring for my 91-year-old mum who is made of love and inspires me. Being in touch with friends, that’s very, very important. Making sure that I get to the ocean whenever I can and making sure that I see art whenever I can.
The rest now feels a bit like window dressing. But those are the things that keep me keep my head on the right way round. And it’s important that I keep my head on the right way round, because people rely on me to be stable and clear-sighted and clear thinking and especially through the last couple of years.
Brian: Oh, Amanda, I want to thank you for taking the time to join us today. It’s been terrific. If people are interested in learning more about your practice or service areas or subject matter expertise, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?
Amanda: Best way to get in touch with me is via my website, which is psychotherapycity.co.uk and my email address which is visible on the website is, Amanda@psychotherapycity.co.uk
Brian: And I’ll say you’ve got some great resources and content on the website. So definitely encourage people to go and check it out. And so, Amanda, thanking you for coming on. It was a ton of fun and really engaging conversation. And probably listeners, don’t forget to leave us a review and let us know your favorite part of today’s episode. Amanda, thank you again for taking the time which is late in Europe. Hope you have a wonderful weekend and I look forward to staying in touch.
Amanda: Thank you so much, Brian and it’s been a joy for me. Thank you.
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