Karen began her career in Human Resources. She was the one you could count on to get things done. She came in early and stayed late whenever necessary. Hard work and budgeting were second nature to her. Having observed her parents all her life, long hours were a matter of course. She had an innate sense of how much to set aside when she needed to buy something, and her bills were always paid on time.

She began to notice that it wasn't so natural for others, this world of money management. One day a friend came to her for help—he was in over his head in credit card debt and didn't have a clue about how to balance a check book. Karen taught him how to get his finances in order. The word spread and soon Karen had others tugging on her sleeve for help. What seemed overwhelming and mysterious to them was easy and obvious to her.

At first her friends and colleagues struck her as naive. She was repeatedly bewildered by how lost they seemed to be with what, for her, were simple financial tasks, until it finally dawned on her that it wasn't that they were clueless—it was that she had a natural gift that not everyone had. When she realized this, she was immediately clear that she wanted to develop this natural gift and find ways to help others.

She also knew the dinner table talk she'd grown up with, the price of wheat, for instance, needed to become more about investing, intelligent planning, and wealth-building. She needed more knowledge, and after some research began taking classes to become a Certified Financial Planner®, though she barely knew what that was. She signed up for a class.

A defining moment came in the middle of one particular class in which compensation models were being discussed and the apparent importance of selling products on which you earned commissions to supplement the usual service fees. Her instructor dramatically and vehemently stated, "You will never make it financially as a fee-only financial planner." She looked around the room to see the other students nodding their heads in agreement, but she was not comfortable. She knew that any time commissions were involved, from the consumer's point of view came the suspicion that the motive might be the planner's personal gain rather than the client's well-being. She couldn't imagine having that conversation over and over, never fully having her clients' trust, when what she wanted was to work in an atmosphere of trust and to treat people the way she would want to be treated.

As so often happens, providence comes along at the right moment and makes your dreams possible in ways you never expect: Karen was laid off! In a moment of soul searching, Karen pondered whether she should pursue another job in Human Resources or a career in financial planning. Would she return to the safety of a sizable paycheck or move on to a path with much less certainty and apparent greater risk but one that seemed to be calling her onwards?

As she was sitting in her living room gazing out over the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, she heard a voice say, “Work with people and their money.” Karen knew there was no one else in the house—she knew that God, Spirit, Divine Wisdom, whatever you prefer to call it, spoke to her. It was a voice that spoke to her soul and that touched the deepest part of her being. At that moment, she knew exactly what to do—open up a financial planning practice that embodied her ethics and values. She took three months to develop a business plan, working with the gifted career counselor David Goodenough, and opened her practice on October 1, 1990.

Karen was convinced that doing things her way would work, and her first day on the job happened in that spirit: she got up, had breakfast, grabbed her Rolodex and phone, and climbed back into bed. From there, with the gumption of a farm girl and the vision of a pro, she called everyone she knew to ask if they could think of anyone who needed help with their finances, and to please give them her name and number. It worked! Charging a straight hourly fee from the beginning with no commissions or hidden fees, Karen went from a dreamer in her PJs to one of the most respected wealth managers in the nation.

Karen began to create a seminar that would facilitate this discussion, which was growing within her financial planning business, and take it out to larger groups of people, including businesses, support groups, and schools. She came across a book that changed her life forever. In Money and the Meaning of Life, Jacob Needleman speaks about money from a philosophical point of view and says that money has a vital role to play in the unfolding of each individual’s ultimate purpose, their meaning in life.

Karen took Needleman’s words to heart and did the work on herself, exploring her deeper beliefs around money and uncovering what she came to call her money baggage. She saw the importance of letting go of the ideas of her past, saw that those ideas, formed early in her life, were the root of her own incessant struggles, her feeling that she never had more than just enough to squeak by no matter how hard she worked. Karen became very clear that hard living was not what life was about and that it was really about living her purpose. Her relationship to money had been standing in the way long enough.

Since Karen knew that she was not alone in her struggles around money and work, her calling to help people was deepened by her realization: that we were all being held back by a past that was not even real! We all had this money baggage, these reactions to what we had seen or experienced growing up. And most important, we were not bound to those views—we could choose a new money message by which to live. In discovering this, she was empowered to live her dream of helping people.

For over more than a decade, Karen has grown in her ability to engage the dialogue that brings individuals into our own “aha” moments. By giving her workshops and writing books on the topic, she has come to understand at a deep level:

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Each of us has a custom-made gift to give the world.

Our soul matters in money, because money affects every area in our life, and our soul wants us to do more than just survive, but to thrive living an authentic and fulfilled life.