Dennis Harhalakis Podcast Transcript

Dennis Harhalakis [00:00:00]:
The problem was that now my money anxiety was out of control. And so somewhere, I think it was triggered by Brexit. For whatever reason, I just went into a very, very dark place for a couple of weeks and found it really hard to leave the house. Money is so much more than numbers. So, yeah, helping people to have money conversations, I think is the broadest way of looking at it. And really, when you think about it from that perspective, it’s helping someone to talk about something that could be really difficult or challenging for them. They may have guilt, shame, anxiety, resent. What I want to do is craft a new message that’s based around or changing the money in your life to be a source of empowerment and energy.

Melody Moore [00:00:53]:
Welcome to the Secret Resume. I’m Melody Moore, leadership consultant, coach and endlessly curious human. For over 20 years, I’ve been helping leaders unlock potential in themselves, their teams and their organisations. Before we dive in, do you want to know how entrepreneurial your leadership really is? Why not try my Entrepreneurial Leadership Diagnostic? It takes just 10 minutes and gives you instant insights to grow your impact. You’ll find the link in the show notes. My guest today is Dennis Harhalakis. Did I say that correctly, Dennis?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:01:30]:
You did, Melody. Well done.

Melody Moore [00:01:34]:
I’m just laughing because I’ve been saying it wrong and I’ve got it correct now. So, Dennis, really thrilled to have you here today. I think of everybody who I’ve had on the podcast, you are the person who I have met most recently before, before recording an episode. So I think you and I only met two weeks ago. Probably something.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:01:55]:
Yeah, it was a Wednesday.

Melody Moore [00:01:56]:
Yeah, yeah. So why don’t you introduce yourself?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:02:02]:
Thank you very much and thank you for the. The warm invitation to be on your podcast, Melody. So I am currently a money coach. I run a money coaching business and what that really means is I help people to understand their money behaviour, their relationship with money, their patterns, behaviours and emotions around money. If you kind of want to break it down a little bit. So, money coaching, in the way I look at it, it’s not financial advice, it’s not telling you how to make money, but it’s telling you how to understand the money in. In your life. So it’s a framework for understanding patterns, behaviours and emotions around money.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:02:47]:
And you can take that framework and point it in a number of directions. You can understand yourself. I work with individuals, I work with couples, I work with parents about how to model good money behaviour or teach your children around money. And I spend a lot of time with financial advisors and Other financial professionals, planners on understanding client money behaviour because they talk to clients all day long, but they’re only trained in dealing with numbers. And money is so much more than numbers. So, yeah, helping people to have money conversations, I think is the broadest thing, the broadest way of looking at it. And really when you think about it from that perspective, it’s helping someone to talk about something that could be really difficult or challenging for them. They may have guilt, shame, anxiety, resent a whole bunch of stuff around it.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:03:45]:
We carry this stuff around and it’s difficult to talk about it. It’s not just us as the Brits or the English that have a taboo around money. I think it’s just difficult because it’s so connected we with so many things that are, that are triggering for, for us and difficult to talk about. And I would say as a society, there is nobody or that models healthy communication around money. So if you like, maybe that’s what I’m trying to do. And then within that safe space, I can help people to talk about things about money or the money in their lives that they’ve been struggling with.

Melody Moore [00:04:28]:
So I’m completely fascinated by this, which is why I asked you to come on the podcast as you. As I said to you that, you know, this series is coaches and therapists and I’d been looking for a money coach to come on the podcast and then I met you and immediately asked you. I was like, please come on my podcast. It was straight away I asked you because it wasn’t just the fact that you were what you did, it was the way you talked about it. I think is really aligned with, with a lot of what I do anyway. But I think as coaches, you know, business coaches, executive coaches, we don’t talk enough about money. And I was saying to you, I talk to my clients quite often about money because I think when you are making big decisions and a lot of my clients are at that point in their lives where they’re maybe in their 50s and thinking about what they want for the rest of their career, etc. Money has got to be part of that equation.

Melody Moore [00:05:34]:
So it is something I, I do talk to clients about. But I’m really looking forward to this conversation because I think as a result of it, I’m hoping I will be better at talking to my clients or more comfortable, if nothing else, talking to them about money because it, like you say, it’s. It’s a really tricky subject. So we’ll come back to this and we’ll talk a lot more. I Think about how you got into it and. And a lot more about. About what you actually do and your thoughts and philosophy. But let’s, you know, go back in time first and.

Melody Moore [00:06:14]:
And talk about your family background and why I struggled so much to say your surname.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:06:22]:
You didn’t. You’re not the first, you won’t be the last. Yeah. I grew up in the 1970s in this country when foreign names really were a challenge for a lot of people. So the Harlekis is Greek. It’s very Greek, if you want to narrow it down. It actually comes from the island of Crete where the Turks, as part of. What’s it called? Mental repression or whatever.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:06:53]:
There’s a nice name for it, made everybody change their names to the more diminutive version. So my eldest son is called Nicholas. If I wanted a diminutive version, it would be Nicolakis. So is a diminutive version. So it’s part of that whole period of psychological control. That’s where it comes from anyway. And that’s where my father’s side came from. A long, long time ago.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:07:22]:
They killed a Turk, I think one of them did. Which was, you know, politically incorrect in the day, probably still is. Probably no offence to Turkish brethren. And so they had to leave. And so actually my father came from. Originally comes from Piraeus, which is the court of. Of Athens. He moved to this country after the Second World War in the early 50s, where he met my mother.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:07:46]:
My mother is from Switzerland and she was here au pairing in the early 50s. Interestingly enough, when. When I kind of dig into their stories a little bit more, from what I understand it is they both kind of left their own countries to come to England for. For a better life. Greece was devastated after the war, so that was a natural place for my father to go. And I think for my mother, Switzerland wasn’t devastated, but she felt kind of limited by some of what she grew up around and wanted to go to London, which at the time in the 50s was. She was quite in. Was really, really open and interesting experience for her.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:08:29]:
So they met there in one of these kind of classic I saw you in a coffee shop kind of moments. And I was born. I’m the eldest of two. I was born in 1964, so that makes me fairly old. Just the wrong end of the 60s to be having fun.

Melody Moore [00:08:55]:
I think you’re too young to be having the fun of the 60s.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:08:59]:
Just old enough to get into the 1970s ELO and flares. I had to live without the benefit of the 60s. So actually that’s music has been a big thing through the. The whole of my life. Possibly one of the most positive things that my father ever brought into our lives was his love of music. He was making mixtapes in the 60s and 70s and so that kind of continued through the generations. My kids, two of them are quite into DJing, so in each generation I think took a. A.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:09:32]:
My brother’s kids are in bands, mine DJ, and we both have very large vinyl collections. That was our kind of musical. What we took away from my.

Melody Moore [00:09:44]:
There’ll be people listening to this who don’t know what a mixtape is or vinyl. My daughter’s got into vinyl. She’s 15 and she’s got into vinyl.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:09:56]:
It’s making a comeback. I think it’s come back for the last six or seven years without wishing to feel I can precisely date anything. It’s a very interesting way of looking at kind of how we could used to consume music. And I think what’s interesting about it is that it required a level of commitment to sitting down, putting a record on. You couldn’t turn it over, you couldn’t flick the tracks, you couldn’t do a number of different things. And in some ways the, the move to online digital snip, snip, snip kind of mirrors our lack of commitment to what we’re doing in the moment. Whereas vinyl required you to commit to listening.

Melody Moore [00:10:42]:
I’d never really thought of that. But you’re absolutely right. You couldn’t carry it around with you. Not really. Until the Sony Walkman. You couldn’t carry music around with you. You’re absolutely right, I had not thought of that. So tell me about growing up in the 60s and 70s having a, a different sounding name, you know, two parents that were not from here.

Melody Moore [00:11:08]:
Did that have an impact on you?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:11:12]:
Yes. And it’s one of the things that I kind of only began to understand in retrospect when I started. The kind of coaching journey that I’ve been on for a while is to. Is to look back at your childhood and try and create a sense of understanding or awareness around what was truly going on for you. I think at the time it was just slight unease. So Hahalakis is a funny name. People have been laughing at it ever since I was born and certainly at school it was always that slight moment of that’s the word I’m searching for. Discomfort.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:11:56]:
I think when they go through the Alphabet and they’ll be like, you know, something beginning with G, it’ll be golf and it’ll be hargreaves. And then it’ll be. And you know that they can’t pronounce your name and you’re just, there’s this kind of roll calls are a big thing and it’s just this moment of like, oh yeah, here we go. And that’ll be me, you know, so, so I can spare you the embarrassment of not being able to pronounce my surname. Although I think in some sometimes people were very proud of the fact they couldn’t pronounce something they. It was almost like, haha, let’s see if I can mangle this as much as possible. So one of my earliest memories around that is first day at prep school, I think, or second day someone says what football team do you support? And we didn’t have a football team. My father wasn’t into football.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:12:47]:
A lot of Greeks are, but he wasn’t. And yeah, we just didn’t have any sport. So for in a boys school sport is this kind of anchor point for everybody. What football team do you support? They’re rubbish. I do this, I do that. So I’m like, I knew I, I knew that I don’t, we don’t have a football team. Whatever. Blue wasn’t quite the right answer and it was only in retrospect that I begin to understand that that’s like, ah, so there’s this kind of slight isolation you feel because you’re no longer.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:13:21]:
It was just one of those interesting moments that, that I realised that, you know, I just wasn’t quite gelling with, with, with the other kids and we all crave connection and we all crave kind of being part of the gang at that silly surname, no sport. And that beyond that I, neither of my parents kind of really understood culturally kind of what being English was, which is not a criticism at all. Neither of them were English. So I think this is a, there’s, it’s not as exactly a first generation immigrant story, but there’s this kind of, there’s always a point at which you’re trying to adjust to, to your environment, which is growing up in England as a kid and yet your home environment is a little bit different. So if I look at now my kids grew up in this country, mostly in this country. I look at the amount of work that, that as parents we did in terms of sports and taking them backwards and forwards and having their friends around and mixing with people. There’s a whole kind of infrastructure that the parents create around supporting their children through the school experience, which I don’t think has changed a Great deal maybe there’s obviously there’s more out of school activities, there’s more this and all that. You know, we kind of have scheduled our children to death in some ways in that, but only with the kind of desire usually to, to help them fit in and belong and pursue all the things that they, they want to pursue.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:15:09]:
None of that existed either in my day or at least you know, from my, my parents understanding of what kind of supporting the school experience would be like. They were up in an environment. You went to school, you came back, you know, it wasn’t about parents supporting kids, school experience. So yeah, I think there was just this overriding, not quite fitting in thing without really knowing why because I didn’t have the understanding as to what was what, what was kind of I wasn’t fitting into, if that makes, if that makes sense. So I have no regrets around it. It just is interesting to, to see what you took away, what I took away from it and how that has impacted me and what I, what I, what I consciously do around that now to, to rewrite some of that internal kind of monologue that followed me around for a while after that.

Melody Moore [00:16:23]:
And were the other kids unkind to you?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:16:26]:
No more than, than they are normally. It’s not. What’s that thing? Not bonfire Vanities. What was that other, was that other thing with the school kids where they all eat each other or something at the end.

Melody Moore [00:16:42]:
Oh, the Lord of the Flies. Lord of the Flies.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:16:46]:
No, it wasn’t Lord of the Flies. Yes. So I went to a great school. My parents chose it because that’s where some of their friends had sent children to. So even in that sense they were in, in this straight. They were strangers in a strange land trying to navigate and the, the process which was well, you know, send them to a good school. So I went to, I went to a great school, it’s fantastic school in Barnes. And so from an education perspective it was, it was outstanding.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:17:19]:
So yeah, my brother went there as well, the two HAHAs. And yeah, off, off, off we went. So fantastic education kind of left me with this rather unfortunate 1980s public school arrogance that, that I was much smarter. And I think in some ways when I look at it now, because there are various ways to survive in school. You could be good at sport. I wasn’t because I was actually the smallest in school for a long while. I did end up participating through rowing as the cox. But there anyway, there are a number of ways to show yourself and one was kind of being faster or smarter or whatever and So I came out with a kind of intellectual arrogance that was really rather unattractive, but kind of used your mind to.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:18:22]:
To survive and prove that you were good enough in, in. In a lot of ways. And that stuck with me along a long, long time as my kind of primary defence mechanism. And I’ve realised through the coaching route that what’s really interesting is to ask interesting questions. So as opposed to being the one with all the answers, I think school is very bad for teaching people about curiosity. It stamps it out of them completely. It teaches you that the one with the answers is a smart one and the one with the questions is just a pain. So is it safe to ask questions? But.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:19:11]:
So then, you know, being smart with the answer, the put down the. Whatever it is can become your route to. To survival and kind of how you show up in the world in a slightly defensive thing. That’s, that’s what you use as your. As your crutch. So that was the. That was a space I came out with and.

Melody Moore [00:19:37]:
Go ahead.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:19:38]:
Yeah. And of course then actually there’s a huge. So we are talking kind of 70s. I left school in 81, I think, to go to university. Then there’s. There was a lot of kind of very. Well, there was a lot of misogynism and there was a lot of kind of very kind of. What’s the word Civilization stops at Watford kind of approach to anything outside of southwest London, really, even North London was, Was, Was, you know, suspect.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:20:07]:
So yeah, there was a. There was a lot of tropes, a lot of really negative tropes. And in some ways that kind of shuts down your curiosity. You can get curious about the intellectual endeavour you’re involved with, even though. Even though I lost interest in geography fairly early on at university. But it stops. You kind of. You’ve bucketed everybody else and you put them all into.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:20:31]:
Into various like, oh, that’s the north and. And that’s this. And that’s. That just keeps you very kind of blinkered in. In your. In your world. I don’t know whether that’s unique to my own learning experience, but certainly it’s. So it’s at those formative years that you don’t even begin to think that you’re.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:20:51]:
How fixed your views of the world are, because they just are. Yeah, they’re re. You don’t know that by that system. And yeah, then my parents didn’t really know much about England either, so it wasn’t like they would go, oh no, wait a minute, this, this, this, or there’s that when they didn’t. So none of our holidays were in England. Our holidays were beautiful. They were in Greece, they were in Switzerland. They were fantastic.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:21:17]:
We didn’t go anywhere in England either. So I didn’t get to explore that until much later on in my life.

Melody Moore [00:21:25]:
And, you know, you and I had talked before about how, you know, a lot of our attitudes to money are formed at this early age too. What, what, what was your learning about money at that age? What did you pick up from your parents and from, you know, what sounds like a quite privileged schooling system? What, what was, what were you learning about money at that point, do you think?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:21:56]:
Oh, the messaging on money was very clear. So my father grew up, he was born in 1919, so he went through a few things and he was very clear that money was not to be wasted. He had extreme money anxiety and, and a scarcity mentality, something that I, I kind of absorbed my, my brother did as well. My mother came from this slightly frugal hair shirt Swiss tradition. So again, a great deal of respect for money. And so, yes, money was not wasting. Money was really, really important, or not wasting. It was really important.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:22:43]:
So it is that classic scarcity mentality. There won’t be enough, they’ll never be enough. There was always a, if this goes wrong, we’ll be in the streets. And there was a whole bunch of stuff around that, that me with, with my, well, money anxiety that I’m working on, but also a scarcity mentality. And there are a number of negative issues with that. But a lot of the time, if you kind of go through that exercise where you imagine money as a person, you’re hanging on to them so tightly, there’s no room for anyone else or anything else in your life. Does that analogy resonate with you?

Melody Moore [00:23:21]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:23:23]:
And you’re, you end up with this focus on preserving what you have rather than growing into what you could be. It’s not the growth, the fixed growth mindset thing. It’s just a view that the preservation is more important than building in some senses. So you end up very conservative, very afraid to take risk, very kind of almost afraid to embrace life and the what the hell, you know, it doesn’t really matter kind of attitude, which certainly you should have in your, in your younger years, maybe later on in life with kids, a little bit more, a little more conscious around it. But yeah, so it was, in retrospect, I think it left me with a whole bunch of issues that really only became apparent when I heard someone talk about where Money anxiety and money, you know, where patterns, behaviours and emotions come from. When I realised I went, oh God, yeah, I’ve been dragging around my father’s money anxiety for the whole of my life. It’s his, not mine. And this was kind of my point of inflection somewhere later on in my life, which we’ll already come to.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:24:39]:
But it’s just this kind of realisation that what you so a. There’s an awareness of like, oh, actually I do have money anxiety. And then there’s a kind of aha. And now I begin to understand where it came from, how it was messaged to me and that gives me a path to, to redemption in some senses around this. But up until that point, which was seven or eight, seven years ago, I had no idea really. I was lucky because I went through university, I had a great time, didn’t do very much and came out and kind of fell into, into a job which in a dealing room in, in London in a trading room for a bank which a friend of the families was, was head of treasury and he was looking for a dealing room trainee. And so even then I kind of stumbled into it I think actually. I think if you go back to kind of mid-80s, a lot of people stumble into jobs in that.

Melody Moore [00:25:41]:
Well, to be fair, I think people still do. You know, a lot of the work that I do with people is around their, you know, careers and, you know, what’s coming next. And the vast majority of people I work with have just stumbled from job to job. There’s very little thought most people have given to what a career path, you know, unless I think you’re someone who’s got a specific profession, for instance, where there’s a very defined path, most people I work with have, have wandered about. So let’s talk about then about your university. So you went to university to study geography? Fine subject. My dad was a geography teacher. Where did you study geography?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:26:28]:
I went to Reading university. So just up the river from, from Barnes, I, I’ve coxed on every bit of the river from Oxford down to the Thames Barrier in, in, in various years and so yeah, reading was, was a nice, I was in the kind of red brick college in Reading. So I turn up with my, with my arrogance and my sense of entitlement and the first year university was, was like my last year at A levels, so I was like bored to death and just went out and, and had fun in, in all sorts of different areas. I was hoping that, that I would kind of get away from school and The. I got a lot of bullying at school and you know, that whole atmosphere which I achieved to a reasonable extent but it actually kind of. I had like a lot of social anxiety as, as well. So you’re like great new start here we. Oh no.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:27:26]:
But I find it really scary to talk to people. So yeah that was interesting to manage. So I managed to find a whole bunch of people that wouldn’t judge me and they were basically, you know, getting spliffed up. So that was kind of like a nice good. Ended up doing that. Not really, not really working very hard. Did a lot of coxing and kind of ended up with a 2, 2 at the end of three years and no idea what I really wanted to do but I knew it wasn’t geography related so it was my first kind of exposure to the world outside of the school I grew up in, the area I grew up in and the people like the very few people I’d hung out with beforehand. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough wisdom to, to hope to know, to understand it fully.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:28:21]:
But I don’t think that’s necessarily unique to me and it’s really only something that I’ve. I’ve become much, much more aware of in, in recent years. But I had a damn good time, I really did. It was hilarious, absolutely hilarious. Just far enough away from home and yet close enough to pop back to London and, and so. And do all the fun things that you do as a university without any pressure to do anything. Last of the years before they had yet to pay for tuition. So you know, it was, it was a privilege, it was a gift.

Melody Moore [00:29:03]:
Do you think your children’s experience of university, assuming they’ve gone, went to university, think that was very different for them because they’re very firmly in the. You have to pay tuition. You know, it’s so expensive to go to university these days compared to. I was the same. I. There was no tuition fees when I went.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:29:23]:
Well, it’s different for a number of reasons that maybe we’ve never really. We’ve talked about the fees and we’ve, we’ve taken the loans and I don’t think that’s been a major. I don’t think that’s been the major changes. I think the biggest change is, is that when we went to university it didn’t matter what, didn’t really matter what you did at university because you could usually fall into something immediately afterwards. So it really was kind of like a kind of end of school gift if you weren’t particularly academically minded or, or Fixed on a, on a, on a profession like engineering or, or veterinary, whatever else it is. You could just really just, you know, fool around for three years and not pay anything, come out and off you go. And that situation has changed very dramatically in the last few years. Not just in terms of the fact that you have to pay for it and you’ve got like 50 grands worth of debt.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:30:28]:
It’s also a very unhealthy environment now for graduates and in the world of work. So I think they’ve been far more conscious around choosing it and what they’re going to do with it and get out of it. Whereas for me it was just, well that’s what you do, right, you’re done with the public school, now you go off and go to uni. That’s just what you did. So my middle son, so my eldest has finished uni, my middle son’s just started. My eldest has finished uni, he went to Edinburgh, my youngest has just started Unique. And my middle child, three boys, is going to the marines next week. So he chose a different path and to his credit he recognised that universities wasn’t for him and he didn’t need to follow the path that had been laid out through school and the path that most of his friends are on.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:31:33]:
And he felt strong enough in himself to go, no, this is what I really want to do and that’s a credit to him.

Melody Moore [00:31:42]:
So yes, I think it’s really interesting what you said about, you know, pre, pre tuition fees. I guess you didn’t, you know, I think I came out with like a 500 pound loan that was it out of university, like it was nothing. But these days people maybe are looking for more of a return on investment. If I think about my masters that I did, which I did pay for, I was far more concerned about what skills was it teaching me. It was supposed to be an occupational masters, occupational psychology. And I remember asking them about where do we learn the skills that’s going to be helpful to us. And they said, oh, you learn that on the job. And I was really pissed off because I was paying, you know, shed load of money to, for, for them to teach me that.

Melody Moore [00:32:40]:
But I think it’s interesting, you’re right, that people perhaps are taking a different, having a different thought process about going to university because of the financial implications.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:32:53]:
They all. They ought to because it’s really quite expensive as a process and I don’t think the. I think if you kind of. It hasn’t changed much in 700 years. This idea will teach you how to think won’t teach you how to do this and teach you how to do that. Well, I can get chat GPT to teach me how to think that. So, so it’s crumbling. It’s been, it’s been on, on, on borrowed time as a model for a long period.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:33:23]:
I think again, obviously, if you’ve got a, if you’ve got a career or you want to be an engineer or a doctor. I think obviously I’m not against formal education, far from it. It’s just as you say, no longer this kind of rite of passage, kind of what you do after, after you do your A levels. It now needs to be considered as to whether A there’s a return or measurable return on it. But also I think you need to understand your relationship with learning. And if you don’t have a positive relationship with learning, which most people. Not say most people. Well, let me break it down.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:34:12]:
The numbers I Understand it are 30% of people have brains absorb information in the way that the educational system presents it to them. I am one of those. I think you might well be too. My eldest is actually. No, I should ask that as a question. As a coaching class.

Melody Moore [00:34:28]:
Yes, actually, no, not particularly. Certainly not in the style of examination. That’s not my thing. But probably the learning is, but not the regurgitation.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:34:40]:
So 30% of people engage with learning and it makes them feel good about themselves because they get validation through it. 30% of people are good at some areas and maybe not other areas. And another, the rump. 30 or 40%, whatever number it is, actually come out of school feeling really bad about themselves because the educational process has taught them well, they’ve learned from it is I’m thick, I’m this, I’m that, I’m the other. And now there’s a lot of correlation with that unfortunate group with learning what is now efficient. And it’s kind of learning disabilities. Your brain physically cannot absorb it. Right.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:35:17]:
It’s just, you know, but then that calls into question what’s the point in creating an education system that is really based on, on, on factory floors in the, in the 1800s. So, you know, it doesn’t change much since then. This is not an educational rant. But what I’m saying is that.

Melody Moore [00:35:36]:
If.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:35:37]:
You have come out of the educational process without what I might call is a secure relationship with learning, then you probably should think very hard about university because if you don’t enjoy the learning process and if it’s difficult for you and it makes you feel crap about yourself, it’s not worth 50 grand.

Melody Moore [00:36:00]:
It’s very expensive to continue to make yourself feel bad.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:36:04]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Melody Moore [00:36:06]:
Let’s talk about. You said you kind of fell into your first job. So you. That was through a family friend, through a network that you got your first job.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:36:18]:
That’s right. So I started in 1986 working in the City for American Express and yeah, I really thrived in it. I spent 23 years working from American Express in various roles and the way I kind of look at it is I did a whole bunch of different jobs just for the same. So the same organisation. So that worked for me. Quickness with numbers, quickness of thought, quickness of Ray party. And it was a very interesting period of time. So it was that 80s city exploding, you know, finance takes over the world pay before it didn’t.

Melody Moore [00:37:00]:
Did you have a pinstripe suit?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:37:02]:
I. I didn’t have a pinstripe suit. Now it was done and company or somewhere and no, so it’s not, it’s. It’s a dealing room. It’s. It’s a lot of. It’s like arming, waving, shouting, screaming, kind of, you know, stuff. And so over the next 23 years, I worked in the UK, I worked in the US, I did a stint in India, I worked in Singapore twice.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:37:31]:
And, and that was kind of my core base for a number of years over. Over 13 years in working and living and working in Singapore. And so I learned a lot about the financial system, how it works. I knew a lot about money.

Melody Moore [00:37:49]:
And.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:37:49]:
As I came to realise afterwards that I didn’t know very much about money and myself.

Melody Moore [00:37:55]:
So how was that scarcity mindset that you’d picked up from your. Primarily from your father. How was that playing out in your life? I’m assuming it was fairly lucrative, the type of work that you were doing.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:38:07]:
So, yeah, I was really, really, really lucky. I was well paid. I love the job I did. I worked with great people and I learned things not about myself. It was really interesting. I set up businesses, I set up a private bank with a couple of other guys. So really kind of, you know, interesting stuff now where it. Man, it went.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:38:33]:
So the interesting thing with the, with the scarcity mentality was it. It was just under the surface. And the reason it was under the surface is because I was earning. I mean, not, not megabucks, but enough to. To not really actually have to worry about it. So oddly, I didn’t budget. There was always enough money at the end of the month and I, and, and I got a bonus and that was put into savings, so they were really engaged with it. But, you know, I was tight, parsimonious, mean, you know, a whole bunch of things, and would always try and get away with spending the least amount of money in whatever context it was.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:39:14]:
So it’s bubbling away under the surface, but it never really manifested itself until I left Singapore. We came back because we wanted the kids to be English English, not Singapore English. And we wanted to make a conscious decision. And we were at that. Well, do we live in Singapore for 10 more years or do we come back here? And we came back here and I didn’t have a job and I couldn’t get a job. And so now I’m in a very kind of edgy space for me, because there’s no longer that chunk of money coming in at the beginning of the month. It’s, it’s. There’s.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:39:48]:
There’s a summer money which I’ve saved, which is starting to dwindle. And I’m also trying to build a house at the same time. So when you buy a house, you make kind of one money decision.

Melody Moore [00:40:03]:
Yes.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:40:05]:
When you build a house, there are thousands, thousands of money decisions, and they all involve spending. I have, I don’t know, 200 plugs or something in this house. Oh, I just buy a plug. Which one do you want? The architect says, this one. This one. This one. Well, that one looks nice. Okay, now multiply it by 200.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:40:25]:
Oh, well, okay.

Melody Moore [00:40:26]:
You know, maybe that perhaps not quite so nice. Yeah, that. That’s quite a risky decision to build a house for someone who was a bit anxious about money.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:40:38]:
Yes. And the reason that I’m building a house is because I thought I could do it cheaper than buying one. So I refused to pay the amount of money I needed to buy a house in Cambridge. I thought, oh, that one looks nice. It’s half the price. We’ve watched lots of grand designs. This will be fun. So it came from scarcity.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:41:06]:
It’s like, I’m not paying that. I can build myself a nicer house for a lot less than that.

Melody Moore [00:41:12]:
Were you right?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:41:16]:
Was I right? Well, I’ve got a very nice house at the end of it. You know, what’s the. Yes, in. In some senses, yes. From a. When you do build your own house, you do end up with a much nicer house than if you’d have spent that amount of money buying one overall for various reasons, not least the. Obviously there’s a developer profit in there or the 20 tax on. On the VAT, but, you know, Actually, I enjoyed the project.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:41:47]:
The problem was that, that now my money anxiety was out of control. And so somewhere, and I think it was triggered by Brexit. For whatever reason, I just went into. Into a very, very dark place for a couple of weeks and found it really hard to leave the house. And I had done the classic thing, which was instead of. So this is one of the interesting things about anxiety is that instead of actually engaging with my finances, I’d step back, partly because I never really engage with them, but partly because I was too scared of what they might show. So when you are in extreme levels of scarcity, you are paranoid about running out. And even if you don’t know whether you’re running out or not, if you spend as little as possible, then you somehow feel that you’ve done everything that you could to prevent running out.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:42:56]:
Does that make sense?

Melody Moore [00:42:57]:
Yes. And were you not working at this point?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:43:01]:
No, no, I still wasn’t working. I decided then, having been unsuccessful in about a year, that if I was going to build this house, it wasn’t fair to put all of it on my wife, so I should just focus on building the dentist. Hopefully at some point something would come out of it and towards.

Melody Moore [00:43:17]:
Was she working?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:43:19]:
No, no, no. We had, we had a. We had a. A lump sum saved up that was going into the house. Yes. So. So in my career, I managed to save enough money to, to act as a nice buffer. And we didn’t have a house in the uk, so we had some money from the house we sold to, to, to.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:43:41]:
And so we continued and we finished it in a state of anxiety. And also to your earlier question around, you know, how does it manifest itself? It just ripples out across the family, which is possibly my biggest regret, is that I got my father’s money anxiety. He got it from his mother and I gave it. It just kind of came out across everything. And so when you’re looking at holidays or meals out or experiences and always trying to spend the least amount possible, that’s just a very, very negative, negative kind of energy to, to radiate. And yet when it’s a. Feels like it’s a matter of life or death, then you kind of go, yeah, I know I should be nicer about this, but I’m trapped. I’m trapped in this, in this anxiety and scarcity space.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:44:51]:
So at that very point, I come across money coaching, and I start on that healing journey around money and around myself.

Melody Moore [00:45:02]:
And how did you come across it?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:45:05]:
Just a random podcast. I was writing some stuff on Financial literacy. And I was listening to podcasts and there was a planner who talked about the money coaching course she’d just been on. And that was my aha moment. It was like, yeah, that’s my father’s money anxiety. And that gives me a path to, to changing it because I’d never fully recognised it. And then I hadn’t been able to manage it either, manage my reactivity around money and plus, you know, a bunch of other stuff that I picked up from my father who, who was fear based in his parenting as much as it was around money. So angry, shouty stuff, slight narcissism, my way or the highway, you know, if I drive off the cliff, you’re all coming with me and we’re like going, oh, no, I don’t think so.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:46:03]:
I don’t think that kind of works for us. But that was his very kind of fixed views. So his, his, his parenting was Victorian. My grandmother, his side was born in the 1890s or something or other. So that generational thing came down hard. And what I’ve learned about, about money is that it’s just one of those things that we’re very reactive around. Once you understand your reactivity, you can start to recognise where it’s showing up in other areas of your life, like defensiveness, like not want, not enjoying being challenged. My father hated being challenged and so we generally didn’t.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:46:50]:
But then I inherited that defensiveness around being challeng as well. And so that’s how that parenting thing gets transmitted. I hope that I think it might. So actually what happened was that the finances piece changed and it’s still changing, but my ability to connect with my children changed dramatically because I moved much more into a space of. Well, that sounds quite hard. Tell me a bit more about that. And interestingly, our roles within the family, where I was bad cop, my wife was good cop, switched around a little bit because I could then actually step back completely from it and go, if I put my coaching hat on, how would I approach the situation? How do I help whoever it is feel seen, heard and understood? And it comes back to that classic thing that you never really understand parenting until you passed it or at least halfway through. But one of those questions around that you can ask a child, which is, do you want to be heard, hugged or helped? I mean, I think we should do it with our clients as well, but I’m like, wow, wait a minute.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:48:13]:
So there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s three alternatives and I’m not using any of them. But I’ve just, I’ve just turned up to fix and the, the quickest and least effect, least costly solution is, is the preferred one here. Now of course you can use your brother’s boots. So. So it kind of detoxified the environment that I’d created, which I’d kind of almost dragged probably from my childhood, and rebuilt it a little bit in the Philip Larkin esque way that you do. And so when my experience of coaching is that if we just stick to money, most people inherit one of their parents money behaviours. Some, some people come out, there’s a small amount that come out and go to the opposite extreme. What’s interesting about this is they never, they go straight past the safe bit in the middle.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:49:23]:
So if you grew up in scarcity as I did, you’re going to probably have a scarcity mentality. If there’s three or four of you as kids, one of you definitely won’t. You’re going to. But if you grew up in scarcity you’re likely to have a scarcity mentality or you’re possibly going to go to the. That felt so awful in my childhood. I’m making sure that I never give that when I’m an adult. That’s not happening to me or when my kids. It’s not happened to me.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:49:49]:
But you miss a safe spit in the middle, you go straight opposite extreme and it’s also conscious, it’s subconscious pact with your future self that you are never going to be like that. But in amongst all this mix is this idea that you very often with the parent you resented the most, you very often don’t recognise how similar you are because you never wanted to be that parent because it was so painful to live with when you grew up. And just to be clear, this is not a parent shaming, parent blaming process. I have moved from where I was to deep compassion for the child that I was and I’m just approaching a space of compassion for my father who never got to have the relationship with that amazing child that was me because he was incapable of it because of his parenting. So exploring money history or any kind of history is not really a blame and shame exercise. Although some people will, will go aha. Right now I know why I can’t do this or be this or whatever.

Melody Moore [00:51:10]:
I think there’s, there’s something quite interesting about being able to be both. So both angry with your parent or caregiver for the experience that you had and the impact that’s had on you and feel that compassion.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:51:29]:
Sure, sure. You need the compassion, otherwise you can’t move on. And my parents were two people trying to do the best they could with what they had and so were their parents. So it doesn’t make it right either. It’s not a kind of like ignoring what happened and went, ah, you know, that was the 1970s. No, it wasn’t right, you know, oh, different times. No, it was still never right. Things that happened to you that were wrong at the time are still wrong, but if you carry them around, it’s like that old Buddhist saying about anger.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:52:15]:
Anger is like carrying around a hot coal and looking for people to throw it at. And so the compassion, once you can understand the self compassion, you can give it, you know, give it to others. My, my experience around kind of I’m using the money coaching framework. Is that what most people seem to struggle with from money perspective? And I’ll explain why in a sec. Isn’t what happened to them so much as what didn’t happen to them. It was what was absent from their lives. Not just money. I mean the absent of the absence of feeling seen, heard and understood and valued has as many problems later on in life and creates as much issue around money as kind of living in scarcity or poverty or having contradictory behaviours, conflict, confusion around money that also manifests itself later on in life.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:53:18]:
But a lot of the time it was just, it’s just helping people connect with kind of and understand a little bit about the. Yeah, just not feeling valued or seen or heard.

Melody Moore [00:53:35]:
I could imagine that particularly for people who spend that, that’s a kind of nervous system calming activity. In the same way that for some people drinking is sure what, whatever else people do, you know, watching, going down a, you know, YouTube rabbit hole, you know, it’s a way of distracting yourself from unpleasant feelings.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:54:08]:
Sure, it’s oxytocin in boost in its simplest sense, but there are other ways. People could be looking for serotonin or oxytocin if you want to noodle into the neurotransmitter. But there are ways that we look to get a little boost that makes ourselves feel that we feel a little bit better. A like a comment or whatever it is, the oxytocin, it doesn’t really matter in the end. It might be interesting to recognise what’s driving it so you don’t switch one thing to another thing. A lot of people who’ve had bariatric surgery to stop them putting food into themselves then go out and start spending because the food was never the issue, it was the Symptom of something that’s underneath it. And so, yes, in that sense, it can manifest itself through spending or accumulating or whatever. It’s all about how do I try and feel safe in the moment.

Melody Moore [00:55:10]:
So tell me then, how you. So you heard a podcast about money and money coaching. What happened? Did you then go on a programme yourself? What was the process that you went through in order to do what you do now?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:55:27]:
I did. I went on a money coach training process. Money Coach training, Certified Money coach with the Money Coaching Institute of California. And part of what they do is they make sure you, before you can be a coach, you have to be coached. You have to go through that process yourself. That started the personal journey as well as what you kind of loosely call the professional journey. And I did that in 2018. And so that’s been kind of my path since then.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:55:59]:
I have joined the Money Coaching Institute as a money coach trainer about three and a half years ago, so that I’ve come full circle on that.

Melody Moore [00:56:08]:
So you teach others?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:56:11]:
I train money coaches as well now, so I do that for them, which is a profoundly powerful process. Not only does it kind of challenge you to articulate. Articulate it in a way that people can. Can. Can connect with it, and, and it’s always challenging you to do it because everybody comes into it with, you know, a little bit. A lot of people start this kind of process going. I think it’s going to be this, and. And so it may be this, but it’s unlikely to be this.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:56:48]:
A lot of people come into it going, oh, you know, I was good with money. I just want to teach other people. It’s like, okay, fine, let’s start with your relationship with money. So my relationship with money, my model for this is, how do I feel about myself? How do I feel about money? How do I feel about money and myself? So when you start to examine that, you go, okay, well, what do I believe about myself or money or money and myself? Where did that come from? So we’ll go back. What went on around you as you were growing up? What messages did you attach to that? What stories did you create? What meaning did you create around what happened at that incident or this incident or whatever? And how has that shaped your beliefs? Because your beliefs will drive your behaviour. So if you think of that as a kind of fairly standard, therapeutically informed model for understanding why you do what you do, what I find fascinating is teaching people how to have that conversation. What questions do I ask? How do I help the client to feel Safe. What do I do with the information that comes back to me? How do I know what’s significant? How do I ask follow up questions, how do I explore and how do I hold this space for them to share something that’s been profoundly difficult and troubling for them for the whole of their lives? Amazing to be able to be part of that.

Dennis Harhalakis [00:58:28]:
And I don’t mean that, you know, in any big headed sense. I mean it’s like as someone who was, had zero emotional intelligence for most of his life, to learn this skill set in my 50s is transformational to me. So I’m so grateful and so happy to have found that point because it opens up so much and it’s a gift to me and I try and give it as a gift to the people I interact with, the people I train, the people that I coach, the people that, you know, that I bump into every now and then, just go, wow. You know, give them unconditional listening for whatever period of time that we’re together.

Melody Moore [00:59:21]:
And how, what kind of person comes for money coaching? How do they even know it’s a thing?

Dennis Harhalakis [00:59:28]:
Well, that is partly the problem in the money coaching space is that most people have never heard of a money coach and they’ll assume that you’re probably trying to teach them some kind of, some kind of unregulated financial advisory, however. So I think my experience is that everybody should have a money coach because no one or most people have never been shown how to understand or manage money and yet we have to use it every day. So you have a. You want to get better? We are, we have just joined Mic Drop so we can get coached on public speaking. You want to get better at tennis, you go to a coach, you want to get, learn how to be a cook, you get to a chef or a coaching school. So the concept that if I want to understand and manage the money in my life, I need someone to help me. That’s a money coach for you. So people generally find me through Google because they’re like, I cannot live with this pain anymore.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:00:26]:
Maybe there’s something like a money coach and they’ll go money coach near me and I’ll pop up on the radar. Now in the background, money coaching, financial coaching is starting to become part of the public consciousness. But maybe that’s just because I’m in my own echo circle, echo chambers. Sorry. But yeah, it’s, it’s. Some people have heard of it, most people haven’t. Everybody should, should probably, could probably benefit from it. And I say that not as a money coach, kind of looking for clients, but because my coaching journey, my own understanding of myself and improving my own money behaviours is ongoing.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:01:15]:
So I mean it, I teach it, I have a mentor that helps me and I’m still learning about myself continuously and trying to make myself a little bit more happy with, with who I am and the money I have. And I think, you know, part of the major problem is that it’s not just that we have no healthy communication around money as a society. It’s that we’re operating with a whole set of subconscious pattern, subconscious behaviours. And it’s that problem where you are, I’m an adult, it’s only numbers. Why can’t I do this? What’s so hard? Why is it so hard? And then you go to what’s wrong with me? And then you’re trapped in the shame cycle. There’s nothing wrong with you. No one showed you how. It’s not easy.

Melody Moore [01:02:11]:
It’s made me think about entrepreneurs. I’m very interested in how people run their business and I could imagine that this shows up in how people run their business because, you know, we’ve talked a lot about people’s personal finances, but when you own a business, you’re also responsible for your business’s finances.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:02:37]:
You are. And they’re not two discrete circles. So if you start small and say, okay, I’m a solopreneur, then there’s no neat separation between business finances and personal finances. How what you believe that you can do, be or have with money isn’t going to change just because you’re now in the flower shop or the, you know, whatever business that you set up for yourself. And nobody sets up a business because they enjoy doing the accounts or the money piece. It’s just One of the 10 hats you have to wear. But it’s not what’s driving you in that, in that sense. So the two get overlaid and, and whatever self limiting beliefs you have around money are going to impact your business one way or another.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:03:38]:
I worked with a client who carried great shame around money and he had a small business, 20 people. And yeah, he didn’t, didn’t engage with the finances at all. And he had a cfo. It’s like, okay, fine, give it to the cfo. But he didn’t question the cfo. The CFO lost him a hundred thousand pounds and nearly bankrupted his business. And so now he’s got even more shame around the fact that he didn’t engage with it, try to push it off to someone Else it’s his business. And so at that point he came to me and we worked on his fear around the finances and it just turned the whole place around.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:04:31]:
I mean that in the sense that he then had. He lost his fear of engaging with money personal, at a personal, but at a business level, got another cfo, but this time went through everything at a line item as opposed to like, I can’t deal with this, shoving it over there. So. So that’s one example. One of the more, again with the small business space, is people who don’t like to invoice their clients, people don’t like to ask for money. Why is that? Well, because when you ask for money, you are five year old Dennis or five year old Melody, with your hand held out asking for 50p or a quid or whatever it was at the time to buy a magazine or an ice cream or something or other, or a pair of boots or. And if that didn’t go well for you as a child, it’s not going to feel any easier in, in adulthood.

Melody Moore [01:05:32]:
Yes, I see that a lot in the entrepreneurial world. People really struggling with pricing, Pricing, I.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:05:42]:
Think broadly asking for and claiming their full worth, which is a how do I feel about myself thing. Not just how do I feel about money thing, there’s a how do I feel about money thing in the sense of like, well, you know, I’m in the healing profession, I’m a therapist, let’s say, and I should be helping people and it’s, you know, it’s not fair to ask them for money for something. You know, it’s like, so there’s a whole, for some people, there’s a whole set of stories around that that makes it difficult for them to ask for money. But a lot of it is kind of what do I deserve? What, what, how do I value myself and then how do I ask for it? It’s fascinating how that, how I was talking to someone about this last night and she said, well, when I was asking for 45 quid an hour, it was fine as I put my prices up. There was a choke point for me personally when I got really, really good at my job and I’m asking for whatever the number was that she felt really difficult. Part of her said, you’re worth it and part of her choked when she put it out. And then she says, well, do I put my fees on the website? Do I not put my fees on the website? You know, and all of this is driven by a set of stories about me, about money, about what I can do what I’m allowed to do, that. If you don’t have someone you can explore them with and not going to fix themselves, and I use fix in the loosest sense of the word, they’re not going to resolve themselves because you need someone to bounce this stuff off and go, okay, well, your fear of asking for money based on what happened to you as little Melody makes total sense.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:07:31]:
But that experience and the message you’ve created around it can be changed. Because what happened then when you were told, don’t be so spoiled, don’t be so greedy, don’t be this, don’t be that is someone else’s projection onto you, nothing to do with you. It was. You were never anything other than enough at that point in time. Other people’s scarcity, other people’s lack, other people’s whatever at that point in time, maybe they, you know, just having a bad day. You took that and created something in yourself, a story around your self worth, when in fact it’s just someone, it’s just someone who’s mean. It’s nothing to do with you. And we go fast forward 20, 30 years and unless you’ve addressed that, understood that and healed for it, that same fear of rejection comes up.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:08:34]:
So that’s the asking for money, space.

Melody Moore [01:08:36]:
Love it, absolutely love it. And I, what I found interesting, it’s made me think about my own attitude and I found it much easier talking about and asking for money when I worked for a big organisation, worked for a big consultancy, because it wasn’t me asking for it, even though it was for, sometimes for me to deliver the work. Often as I got more senior, it wasn’t even me doing the work, it was someone else. And I was comfortable talking about, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds, million pounds, who cares, right? But when it’s you asking for, you delivering, it’s. I felt a real difference. I, you know, I definitely experienced a different, different sensation.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:09:26]:
And that means you felt it in your body.

Melody Moore [01:09:28]:
Yes. Correct. Yes.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:09:31]:
It’s not in here. It’s in here. It’s an embodied experience that is really hard, really difficult because it’s paralysing in some senses. There’s that thing about public speaking, but it’s kind of like when the cortisol takes over, it’s, it’s paralysing for you and you can, you can try rehearsing it as many times as you want. And I work on, I work on this with, with people, so I, you know, fully understand it. You know, it’s what’s interesting about it is, it’s not just in that space, it’s everywhere. Because even if you are a financial planner and you are talking to a client about fees or you’re talking to your client about getting some more money sent in or an increase or this, it’s still asking. It’s still asking it.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:10:28]:
Another example would be a client who grew up where there was no, there were no money discussions between parents. There was only massive nuclear style conflict between them. And so for him in later life he was a successful lawyer and now he’s a successful ifa. He couldn’t ask because he couldn’t. There was no discussion that didn’t turn into a massive row. So he couldn’t start that process. He would just discount his fees and hope that the client never asked. So that’s profoundly disempowering at an individual level.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:11:13]:
Slightly different history as you, as you can see. Although there was some other stuff mixed up in it as well. But you know, fundamentally money discussions meant money conflict. I’m conflict averse because that was really, really painful. So I’m going to avoid the conflict by just making the fees as low as possible and I’m going to over deliver so the client never questions me so I don’t have to have that, that discussion with the client about the fees or the what am I getting for my money or the self worth or the, the value. Big problem in, in a lot of space to, in a lot of kind of the IFA space, like how do I demonstrate value? So the way I would look at it is like, well, if your value is only in terms of deliverables, well, here’s your plan and here’s your cash flow, then yeah, it becomes difficult. If your value is that I provide a safe space for you to talk about something that’s really hard, which let’s face it, people go to IFAs because they’ve got retirement or a whole bunch of stuff going on. So if I can be much, much more than numbers, I’m creating a relationship with you that goes beyond, you know, cash flow planning and writing at will.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:12:28]:
And then the value can’t be tied to specific things and it gets a little easier then I don’t have. I personally in this space have no challenge claiming and asking for my value because I’m very clear on what it is and you can’t, you can put numbers on it in some senses, but it’s not like, well, I’m going to pay you 1% of AUM, I’m going to charge you 200 quid for a plan or whatever else it is, right?

Melody Moore [01:12:56]:
Yes. I’m not going to save you X amount of money.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:12:58]:
Yeah, yeah. And if you don’t value it, that’s okay because I know it’s just a mismatch between what you’d like and what I’d like and that’s also all right. So I’m not going to get bent out of shape over it. So this whole question of value, asking for money, you don’t want to be the five dollar shoes. Have you heard this one?

Melody Moore [01:13:25]:
No.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:13:26]:
The five dollar shoes. Okay, so if I gave you a pair of shoes, Melody, I’m giving you this pair of shoes. The only thing you know about them is they cost five quid. So. Okay, tell me about the shoes. Are they going to be. Tell me what you think.

Melody Moore [01:13:43]:
I think they’ll be cheap plastic.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:13:47]:
Gonna go hiking in them?

Melody Moore [01:13:48]:
No, I’m imagining something like, you know, like Jelly beach shoes.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:13:53]:
Right. Are they going to be your favourite pair of shoes?

Melody Moore [01:13:56]:
Probably not. No.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:13:57]:
No. So you can create a whole story around. And I’ve given you one tiny piece of information, which is the cost. So when you go and compete in the world, and you are the five dollar shoes, people already have a story around your value because you priced yourself at $5 or 5 pounds, you were not Amazon. We don’t compete. We can’t compete at that level. It’s just a night. Does that make sense in terms of like, totally.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:14:23]:
Your story about what you’re worth has compromised your ability to claim it, but also in someone else’s mind, it’s created a story about what you. They think you would.

Melody Moore [01:14:38]:
Yeah, Yeah, I like that. Tell me what’s next for you, for you, for your business. Clearly you’re going to be doing tonnes of public speaking because that’s where you and I met on the mic drop.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:14:58]:
What I really, really want to do is I used to frame what I do and I did this at the beginning in terms of, of helping people to understand patterns, behaviours and emotions around money. And that’s. That’s kind of nice, but it’s not really a message that necessarily resonates with people. What I want to do is craft a new message that’s based around money or changing the money in your life to be a source of empowerment and energy and away from a source of shame, guilt, regret and whatever else that is heavy in your life. And I want to articulate that, develop it and take it out into the world, because I think the world is profoundly. The messages we get around Money ultimately are profoundly disempowering. It’s seen as this root to everything and yet we, we get a whole bunch of shame around it, shame around not earning enough, shame around not being able to spend enough, shame about not being able to save enough. So it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s pervasive.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:16:13]:
We’ve, we’ve bowled everything down in the world to, to a number. We’ve taken everything that community used to do and boiled it down to, to numbers. And that is profoundly disempowering and shame inducing. That’s kind of what I’m, what I’m trying to get at.

Melody Moore [01:16:32]:
I think it’s really interesting. I, I find this absolutely fascinating. I find, you know, the overlap between what you and I do absolutely fascinating because I work with people a lot around their shame and guilt and, you know, the, the things that they carry around with them from their childhood. I do talk to my clients about money, but often not in anywhere near the depth that you’re talking. You know, I talk about other things, but there’s such a huge overlap. I think it’s absolutely fascinating and I think you’re absolutely right. We are ripe for people like you who can help us understand these things better. Because it’s only really, I would say in the last year or so, two years maybe, that I’ve really heard people even talking about a money mindset or, you know, how, what is your attitude to money and the impact that has on you, you know, your personal life and your business life.

Melody Moore [01:17:42]:
So I think there’s, you know, you’re, you’re there really at the forefront of, of this being a topic that people are going to be talking about a lot more.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:17:54]:
I hope so because it touches all of our lives. And when you realise that your belief system is driven from child primarily by childhood experiences, what you’re really talking about is a process you can’t explain, which is childhood learning, infant and process you can’t control. I should say infant learning and a whole bunch of behaviour in the background that you also can’t control but is usually quite negative. So you’re carrying this stuff around your subconscious inheritance and it’s, there’s all parts of it that, that are taking you away from the person you want to be. Usually quite large parts that. So you can use the word disempowerment if you want. Yeah, there’s just stuff that you’ve picked up that sits away underneath that is undermining you on a daily basis. And the, yeah, the, the kind of lie that we live with is, is that it’s not money’s, you know, the money’s to blame, but it’s not money’s fault.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:19:04]:
Money has replaced so many things. So before we had money we would get all of our survival needs met by living in communities. Who you were, what you did, or is it? I wrote a blog on it today which is we. Where are we? Yeah. Status, belonging, identity, everything’s based in community. Child rearing as a community activity, Food, shelter, communal activities, entertainment, learning, healing, safety, protection. They’re all commun. They’re all based in communities.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:19:42]:
We’re only only going back about 5,000 years and now all of those things that the community used to do, we can get money to do. So what we’re now doing is money in its purest sense is a store of value and it’s something that allows us to exchange your time and energy for money so that you can take that and buy other people’s time and energy to store a value. And it’s a medium of exchange. But now it’s replacing all the things or has replaced all the things that we used to do as a community. And so we are putting so much weight on it, we’re asking it to do all those things that we used to get from living in communities. Status, belonging, identity. It’s not money’s fault.

Melody Moore [01:20:41]:
So we will put a link to your blog in the show notes because I think that sounds like a really interesting read. And speaking of reading, what book or books would you recommend to people? Now? It doesn’t have to be about money. It could be any book that you would particularly recommend to people, something you really love.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:21:06]:
If you want to understand a little bit more about the psychology behind money habits, then there’s an amazing book called by a woman called Vicki Raynal and it’s called Money on your mind. She brought it out this year. She is billed as the first financial psychotherapist in the uk. She’s really, really interesting. It’s an amazing book. The book that I really enjoyed reading this year was called how to know a person by David Brooks.

Melody Moore [01:21:40]:
Not come across that.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:21:43]:
And it’s a journey of his wish to understand how this how to know how to know someone from being a slightly nerdy left brain type as a he, I think he’s a journalist and, and a book writer and just going into this subject and it’s got so much in it around listening, around understanding someone’s story, around how that works and it’s just a brilliant read. So yeah, that one David Brooks, I would highly, highly recommend Nice.

Melody Moore [01:22:23]:
That’ll be on my Amazon list before the end of the day. What advice would you give to your younger self?

Dennis Harhalakis [01:22:33]:
Yeah, well, other than my younger self not being very good at taking advice when I would have, I. I prefer framing this as a question of what would I have liked my younger self to know. And I think that what I that is that curiosity and compassion is a much better way to navigate the world than reactivity and judgement. I think that just opens up everything that the world has to offer.

Melody Moore [01:23:10]:
And what would be a takeaway for our listeners today, if you were to have one thing that you would want them to take away, what would it be?

Dennis Harhalakis [01:23:28]:
This thing in your life called money. It’s not easy if you struggle with it in one form or another. I think the thing to the place to start is that you can’t blame yourself if you can’t do something that no one ever showed you how to do. Start with self compassion and then look to change the things in your life that are disempowering you or taking you away from the best version of yourself. Always start with self compassion because if you don’t, then it’s almost impossible to make any changes. There is nothing wrong with you. There never was anything wrong with you around money. You’ve just picked up a bunch of habits from a bunch of reactive people around you as you grew up and a set of beliefs and that’s where it comes from.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:24:28]:
And you can change those. But go easy on yourself.

Melody Moore [01:24:33]:
I love that. I think that’s beautiful. Start with self compassion. It’s a beautiful, beautiful way to end. So, Dennis, thank you so much. This has been as good as I thought it would be. I’ve learned an enormous amount and I think, like I say, it’s absolutely fascinating, fascinating subjects and I’m sure it’s a subject we’re going to be hearing a lot more about because it feels like people are waking up to, to understanding the importance of this.

Dennis Harhalakis [01:25:03]:
Right. And, and, and they have a right to explore it. So thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this and I really enjoyed the question that you’ve asked because I think it’s really helpful. I enjoy what I learn about myself from being asked great questions.

Melody Moore [01:25:19]:
Perfect. You’re very welcome. This podcast is brought to you by Liberare Consulting. If you enjoyed today’s episode, hit subscribe. So you’re the first to hear new conversations. And if you found it valuable, do a friend a favour and share it with them too.