Money Koan with Jenna Nicholas
#87 the Money Koan: How can we notice the connection of care and curren(t)cy?
practices for shifting currents and integrating our philosophical values into everyday life with investor Jenna Nicholas, author of The Enlightened Bottom Line
Love and Philosophy and Jenna Nicholas
May 21, 2026
Andrea Hiott in conversation with investor Jenna Nicholas. What would it mean for money to be understood as a sign of what we care about and what we want others to care about? Is it already? How do we shift the current in ways that help?
Jenna discusses her book The Enlightened Bottom Line and how spirituality, love, and purpose can inform investing and business rather than oppose them. She traces formative experiences from ages 11–14 in a Swiss “Transformation for Peace” program and speaking at Commonwealth Day in Westminster Abbey, including meeting Desmond Tutu, to the confidence instilled by her mother and grandmother, faith, and a lifelong practice of hosting “Saturdays at Jen’s” discussion groups.
After moving from London to Stanford, she was inspired by social entrepreneurs, worked on socially responsible investing in China with mentor Wayne Silby (Calvert Funds), and later organized experiences and interviews exploring profit–purpose paradoxes. She describes practices like symbolic objects to bridge divides, dreams-based decision-making in the Amazon, and a HEAL framework (Hope, Empathy, Abundance, Legacy), emphasizing pauses, stewardship, seven-generation thinking, and money as “currency” valuable when in motion.
Find Jenna’s book The Enlightened Bottom Line here.
Jenna’s website with further links.
Parker Palmer conversation with Andrea is here
Jacob Needleman conversation with Andrea is here.
00:00 Welcome and Book Setup
00:25 Teen Years and Abbey Speech
02:25 Tutu High Five and Lasting Joy
04:01 the Women Who Raised Her
06:48 Holding Paradox in Community
08:56 From Stanford to Impact Investing
11:40 Choosing Stanford by Fate
14:43 Wayne Silby and Legacy Shift
17:18 Bhutan and Business of Happiness
19:24 Enoughness and Inner Compass
22:52 Saturdays at Jens Conversations
25:14 Fierce Love in Organizations
27:25 Creating Listening Spaces
28:03 Building Impact Experience
28:40 Coal Meets Solar Values
30:13 Redefining Money Capital
34:00 Heal Framework Questions
35:37 Hope Empathy Abundance
37:16 Playful Abundance Wand
40:04 Amazon Dream Circles
43:03 Death Joy Legacy
46:31 Stewardship Seven Generations
49:02 Reflection Questions Pauses
52:40 Grandmother Loving Kindness
55:37 Honoring Stories Love
57:15 Podcast Substack Farewell
The Enlightened Bottom Line by Jenna Nicholas
Jenna’s Substack is here.
Jenna on LinkedIn
Books discussed in addition to the Enlightened Bottom Line:
InnSaei: the Icelandic Art of Intuition by Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir
The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist
#73 In the Belly of a Paradox with beloved educator Parker Palmer
Andrea Hiott, Parker J. Palmer, and Love and Philosophy
·
3 October 2025
Episode 73
TRANSCRIPT AND NOTES:
Currents and Currencies
A conversation on Love and Philosophy with Andrea Hiott
“There’s an amazing talk that Bobby Kennedy gave in 1968 where he talked about gross national product, and that it doesn’t measure some of the most important things in our lives. It measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile. And so I think this real interrogation around what are we optimizing for? A theme I come back to a lot in the book is: what is enough? Having this conversation with ourselves and with our family and with our community, to not just take for granted what success means.”
— Jenna Nicholas
Introduction
Hello everyone, welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott, and today we’re going to be talking about money.
Money is a word that might strike you in all sorts of ways: motivating, painful, complex, exciting. The words go on and on with how we could describe this, or when we think of a certain time in our life when we had to deal with money in a certain way.
But I wonder how many of you thought of the word care when I said money. Did anyone have that idea come to mind — that money might be a way we’re caring for one another? What if it were? What if we could think of money that way, as somehow connected to what we care most about? What if we thought of it more like a currency, actually — that’s always shifting and changing, and that we shift and change through our bodies and through what our bodies care for? Which means also our minds, of course, because our minds are part of our bodies.
So what if, as we’re navigating this world, care is already something like a currency, and we begin to think of money like that? Is that too wild? Maybe it’s not too wild. I think a lot of people are starting to do things very similar to that. But of course, we have this whole long history of money and what it means in so many different cultures and so many different languages.
Today we’re going to talk about it just a little bit — really one specific area of it, which is actually the first time I think we’ve ever talked about investing and business ideas directly on the show. Jenna Nicholas is a founder and an investor, a graduate of Stanford Business School, and she’s written a book called The Enlightened Bottom Line. She’s done a lot of interviews with investors and people who are trying to consider the bottom line through an enlightened perspective.
I was already thinking about a lot of ideas relative to this paradox of money — of this seemingly invisible and yet ever-present idea, currency, flow, actual material exchange, non-material exchange, digits, paper, metal, all these different ways that we think of money. So she reached out, and I thought, “Oh, this is a good chance to start on this subject a little bit.”
For those of you who like the more practical or everyday sorts of episodes where we talk about someone’s life and their work and their practical ideas and advice, this is one of those shows. Her book is like that too. For all of you out there who are working with businesses, starting a business, part of a business, dealing with anything like that, the book itself is really trying to help you think about your business and what you’re investing in and what you’re doing with your investments through a more enlightened lens — or what I’m thinking of as care. Actually thinking about what we care about, and taking it very seriously that where we put our money is somehow about what we want to grow in terms of what we want the world to have more of, what we want to be able to share with others, and how we want to relate to others.
Jenna and I talk about money as currency here in that way a little bit. She’s really trying to think through these ideas, and she’s trying very hard every day to live through them in the work she does, even as an investor working in all these different situations. So we will talk about that through her life — about capital and conscience as not being opposites but as being somehow connected as this currency.
She brings up Parker Palmer, so I’m going to link to a conversation I had with Parker in the show notes, because I think it’s actually very interesting to listen to these together. Parker has lived his whole life toward what he really cares about, and part of that for him was healing what was a divide in him relative to what he cared about, what he wanted to do with his life, and what these other structures said he should do.
Another person I thought of a lot after talking with Jenna was Jacob Needleman. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him — he was an American philosopher, and I read him a lot when I was a teenager and even in my early 20s. I actually had a chance to have some conversations with him, and I remembered one of them after talking with Jenna, because in this conversation I say something about money being like a koan. A koan is this spiritual insight or meditation in Zen Buddhism, where you just sort of hold something contradictory in mind, or you think of something like: What is the sound of one hand clapping? The point of a koan isn’t to solve something. You don’t really answer that question. It’s more about sitting with the tension or the paradox or even the absurdity, and therefore noticing your old habits of thinking, and then you can sort of use that as a threshold to think — what I often talk about as a constellation.
This is possibly what money could be for us. Jacob was actually telling me about that, and I will also link to that conversation, because it’s very interesting. He talks about money as not being sacred in itself, but actually being something that does alert us to the sacredness and the love and the ongoing relation that we have with each other and with the world.
When we think of money as a koan, then it becomes a mediator. It’s actually something that’s there to help us expand and connect from life to life through life — not a goal or an endpoint, which is how I think a lot of people grew up thinking about money right now. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It really could be more like a currency that’s helping us flow along our path, and that we give to help others flow along their path.
Another idea that came into my mind after this conversation was this line: we had the experience but missed the meaning. That’s from T.S. Eliot. You won’t be surprised, because I talk about T.S. Eliot a lot and the Four Quartets. That really feels like what I’m trying to describe here — that the meaning is here, and we could actually think of money through and as meaning, and as part of the urge of our body caring for what it cares about. Which would be different for each of us, because we each have something different to give. We could help each other do that, because each of us would have something to gain from that, because we have so much knowledge from everyone else to gain.
So what if we think of it like that? That’s really the idea here — just to hold that question. What if we thought of care and money together?
To really change these wider systems which constrain a lot of us — all of us, I guess, in different ways — we really have to dance with this, rediscover exactly what’s going on here, and try to shift it from within. Shift the current from within. We can do that, but only together.
I hope that wherever you are in the world, you’re feeling the currency today in a good way — feeling the flow — and that you receive what you need to receive and can give what you need to give, because giving is itself a form of wealth.
I’m happy to bring you this conversation with Jenna Nicholas.
The Conversation
Andrea Hiott: Hi Jenna. It’s so wonderful to have you on Love and Philosophy. Thanks for being here today.
Jenna Nicholas: Thanks so much. It’s wonderful to be here.
Andrea: To get started, I’m thinking about maybe starting when you’re around 13 or 14. Does that sound okay?
Jenna: That sounds great.
Andrea: Is that when you did this event at Westminster Abbey? Can you just tell us where you were around that age and what happened in your life that seems to have kind of prompted you toward this book, even though you couldn’t have known it back then?
Jenna: Yes. It’s definitely a really formative time in my life. Leading up to that — from the ages of 11 to 14 — I took part in a program in Switzerland called Transformation for Peace. It was with young people from all around the world, and it was all about reflecting on our values and place in the world. It was inspired by the Bahá’í teachings, and it was very much focused on looking at themes around love and philosophy in practice — actually very much aligned with your podcast. That really kind of helped to spark within me this idea of: how do we integrate our values into our life on a daily basis?
I was invited to speak at an event at Westminster Abbey. It was Commonwealth Day, and there were leaders from all around the world. Archbishop Desmond Tutu had come from South Africa with a choir. The Queen was there, and Tony Blair was Prime Minister at the time. It was an incredible event. They had young people from different faith backgrounds share a passage from their scriptures and reflections around how that played out in their thoughts and philosophy.
I had a chance to share this line from the Bahá’í writings that has continued to be a deep inspiration to me: “A human being who is organic with the world, his or her inner being molds the environment and is deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other, and every abiding change in the life of a human is the result of these mutual interactions.”
I continue to this day to think so much about this idea of: how are we shaping the environment around us, and how are we also shaped by that?
Right before I did this sharing, I had a chance to meet Archbishop Tutu. He said to me, “Are you nervous?” And I said, “No, are you?” He gave me a high five. It was just such a beautiful, joyful interaction.
About 10 years later, I was in the process of building a coalition of foundations to shift capital from fossil fuels into new economy solutions, and I had a chance to meet him again, as he was a big proponent of that work. I told him, “Ten years ago, I met you and you gave me a high five.” And he said, “Well, I gave you a high five then, I’ll give you a high five and a hug now.” It was just so beautiful — always laughing. I think laughter in so much of this work is such an important aspect. So I always remember him.
Andrea: Such joy just coming from him. You said so many powerful things there. The quote is very powerful. A lot of people who listen to this podcast — we talk a lot about embodied cognition, and you talk about embodiment too, but also this participatory kind of sense-making that we’re always doing with the world. I really heard that in that quote from a different angle, which is beautiful.
You said you were 14, you were invited to speak, the Queen was there — as if it was so normal. How did you have this poise that you weren’t nervous at 14? Did it have something to do with the women in your life? As I was reading your book, I noticed you had some really strong women in your life. The spirituality seems connected to that. But I really want to know how you had that poise, and what brought you to that place.
Jenna: I love that question. A hundred percent — a huge amount has to do with the women that raised me. I was raised by my mother and grandmother. From a very young age, they really cultivated in me a deep confidence, but I think it came from a deep place of love. I could feel so viscerally the love that they had for me.
My mother almost passed away giving birth to me. My grandmother was there, and it was a pretty traumatic experience. I think because of the fact that we were all alive, I always had this sense of gratitude for even being here. As a result of that, there was just a lot of love.
Faith and spirituality was a really big part of my life from a young age, and I think a lot of confidence and strength came from building from a resource that was beyond just me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t nervous at all — I mean, I was being a little cheeky when I interacted with Desmond Tutu. But to this day, where the confidence comes from is when I’m able to get out of my own way, and actually be more of a channel for something bigger than myself, rather than “oh, I’m so great and that’s why I can do these things.”
Both my mother and grandmother have since passed on, and if anything, I think I feel that love and that strength maybe even more greatly since they’ve passed on.
Andrea: Wow, that’s amazing. The joy that I was thinking of with Desmond Tutu — that’s kind of an example of it too. Being so aware that this life is miraculous and amazing all the time. We get kind of numb to it, almost because we can’t handle it — because if you really think about how precious and amazing every moment is, it’s quite overwhelming. It sounds like your mom and your grandmother were aware of that.
You also talk about holding the contradiction, which is another theme of the show. Is that what you were just talking about? Of not getting in your own way? When you’re holding the contradiction — and the way you express it in the book — there is a kind of conversational happening with the world that feels like that kind of love you are expressing. Does that make any sense at all?
Jenna: A hundred percent it makes so much sense, and I think that it’s in community where so much of that love and resourcing comes from. Certainly a big part of the motivation for me in writing the book was less as a sort of “this is the set of answers,” but more: how are we holding these questions in community together?
The book is based on a series of interviews with various investors and business leaders and other thought leaders about how they have cultivated these concepts of bridging this paradox — of finding meaning within money, and the balance of profits and purpose, and how these pieces come together. The extent to which we’re able to hold that in community, and to hold it with love and grace and gentleness, and know that these are complex topics where there can often be a lot of emotional baggage and context that we’re bringing to some of these conversations — the more that we can hold it with care, the more opportunity there is.
Andrea: I want to get into what your book is really doing and how you got into this. It’s about investing and business and doing this with purpose and meaning. But you’re also challenging something that a lot of us just kind of assume — and maybe don’t even know that we assume — which is that spirituality goes on one side of life, and it’s the opposite of what we think of as material concerns, which is where we lump everything like money and financial gain.
What you’re saying in the book is that true power is what we’ve been talking about: holding that, embracing that as a kind of seeming contradiction that, when you explore it, becomes not really contradictory so much as like a resonant tension. I want you to tell us how you got from that place at Westminster Abbey into even thinking about investing and money. Then maybe we can start to understand how you’ve come to develop it in this different way.
Jenna: I was brought up in London, and then I came to the U.S. to do my undergrad at Stanford. Growing up, I actually thought I might go into human rights law — I was very motivated by social justice work. So the last thing I thought I would be doing, to your point, was working in business or investing.
But coming to Stanford — I remember in my first year taking a class and hearing from these social entrepreneurs. I remember calling my mom and saying, “I want to be a social entrepreneur.” And she said, “What is that?” I was like, “I don’t know, but that’s what I want to do.”
I was so motivated and inspired by hearing from these incredible people who had really bridged building sustainable, revenue-producing models with having deep social and environmental impact across a broad range of areas — within healthcare and climate and education. It really captivated me. This could be a career and a pathway to follow.
It became really organic from there. I had a chance to meet some incredible investors that were doing work in China, and began to collaborate with them on some projects. I ended up moving to China to teach a class on socially responsible investing. We would lead delegations for U.S. and European investors to China and Chinese investors to Europe, all with a focus on socially responsible investing.
I kept seeing models — and this is over the last 15 years, so the industry has really developed over these years. Previously there really was this sense of: we have one pool of capital that we’re just focusing on maximizing wealth, and another pool of capital that’s for philanthropy. What’s been really exciting to see is more and more of these innovative mechanisms bringing those elements together, and really seeing this as something that can exist across our whole portfolio and whole life.
I think a lot about this line from Parker Palmer where he talks about being “divided no more.” It really is that sense of: how do we achieve that with our lives and our work, with our lives and our capital? This really is something that’s possible.
Andrea: Why did you want to go to Stanford? It seems like it’s played a very big role in your life — you’ve met so many amazing people there. It’s like a scaffolding to the book in a way; you bring in a lot of stories and very interesting, very successful people who are doing this more impact-based, purpose-based work. But why Stanford? Where did that come from?
Jenna: It’s actually a pretty fun story. I was curious to go to university in the U.S., partly because of the approach to education — just the breadth of exploration. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to study, and I liked the ability to engage with multiple different subjects. In the UK, you choose the one subject and that’s all that you do for your time at university.
I was actually choosing between Stanford and Yale, and it was the night before I had to make a decision. I was parking my car in London and I started to talk to this man about whether or not I could park there. I said, “I know this is really strange” — he had an American accent — “but I have to make this decision. What do you think I should do?” He was a professor at Stanford.
It’s just one of these things — this through line of the power of the universe. Things come up and you’re presented with people and opportunities that are beyond what we can fully understand. Once I had that conversation, I was like, “Okay, I think that’s what I’m meant to do.”
Andrea: That’s wonderful, because as you were answering the last question, I was actually thinking you seem like someone who’s followed the yellow brick road, so to speak. I just talked to Sophie Fiennes, and she told me that her brother Ralph is always talking about “follow the yellow brick road.” When you were talking, I was thinking, oh, that’s what it is — this kind of “when you are holding the contradiction, things are sort of in this conversation, and it’s naturally leading somewhere.” It’s very interesting that you listened to yourself and talked to that person. Imagine if you hadn’t.
Jenna: Exactly. I think it connects so much to your work — it’s following love too, right? Love in the biggest sense of the word. That deep love and calling within, and how that’s manifested in the people and the situations that we have the opportunity to encounter. Not to take that for granted — what a blessing it is that these signs come into our lives, and that we can so easily be so busy and preoccupied with what we think we’re meant to be doing that we don’t even see that these people in the street are maybe there to teach us something. How we continue to stay open to that is something that is an ongoing practice for me.
Andrea: Absolutely. The noticing and trusting — trusting that that conversation will continue. It makes me think about Wayne Silby, who seems like an important person, because as you were talking I was thinking: we get so distracted about the bottom line. That’s part of your book. We have to make money, we have to do this, we have to become someone. This can seem really different from what we’re talking about with following love — which I guess is the yellow brick road, actually. Wayne seems to have had a moment where he realized that. Maybe you want to introduce him.
Jenna: Sure — this is something I come back to a lot. Wayne Silby started a fund called the Calvert Funds in the late 1970s. At the time, it was just a successful financial firm. He went to a Buddhist retreat, and at the retreat, they had them reflect on: what would it say on your tombstone? His reflection was, “It would say: the man that made 2% more than the next man.” And his reflection was, “This isn’t really the legacy that I want to leave.”
So he went back to his colleagues and said, “We need to make this socially responsible.” It’s now a $45 billion firm. It’s been really a pioneer in this area of socially responsible investing — and that really came from this moment and this reflection on what really is the legacy that he’s trying to leave.
He wrote the foreword of the book and has been a deep inspiration and mentor. I had a chance to work with him within China and DC and various projects. He still serves on a board, and is a deep friend. What is this ability to take these catalytic moments and then transform them into the organizations that we build and how we live our lives as a result? That continues to inspire me.
Andrea: Is that how you ended up in China working — was that connected?
Jenna: It’s a big part of it. I did my thesis while I was at Stanford on socially responsible investing in China, and through that got to know Wayne. We first met and just had the most beautiful conversation — kind of like our conversation today — about the universe and love and the meaning of life. We were like, “We have to do something together.” So we started just working on some projects, and one thing led to another. We’ve now been collaborating for about 15 years. Quite a privilege.
Andrea: I’m thinking also about the 14-year-old girl who I’m seeing as a very strong — I really like her. I’m thinking about her many years later. You also seem to have been creating things and projects. Didn’t you go to Bhutan? Can you tell me a little bit about that side of what was going on with your creative conversation with the world?
Jenna: I love the way you phrased that — “creative conversation with the world.” That’s definitely what it feels like. Yes, I went back to Stanford for business school, and while I was there, I had a chance with some of my classmates to organize a trip to Bhutan. We called it “the business of happiness.”
In Bhutan, rather than focusing on gross national product, they focus on gross national happiness. It’s pretty amazing in terms of what that looks like. That was a big part of what we wanted to investigate as part of this trip: how does that play out in reality?
One of the things I was really struck by was that they have what they call spiritual consultants. Their role is to help support the implementation of these principles around gross national happiness within all levels of society — within healthcare organizations, the school system, and so on. To see the experiment with the implementation of some of these ideas — and of course there’s a lot of challenges in that implementation — being able to really look at what’s working, how they’re implementing it, what lessons learned could be applicable in other parts of the world, was a big part of the conversation.
It made me really look at so many of the challenges that we have around thinking about metrics. There’s an amazing talk that Bobby Kennedy gave in 1968 where he talked about gross national product, and that it doesn’t measure some of the most important things in our lives. It measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.
Andrea: There’s a documentary I’ll try to find a link to, because I think a lot of people don’t know that experiment is happening. From your point of view, has all this travel — you’ve been a lot of places, lived a lot of places — changed how you think about what the bottom line actually is, or what that means?
Jenna: Totally. And how we think about what success means, and how we should be living our lives. Spending time in India — people often reflect on this — sometimes it’s people that have the least financial resources but have the biggest sense of happiness and fulfillment and contentment. So often in the Western world there can be this sense of “if only I have more and more money, then I will be more and more happy” — and of course we see that that so often isn’t the case.
I think this real interrogation around “what are we optimizing for?” — and a theme I come back to a lot in the book is what is enough — having this conversation with ourselves and with our family and with our community, to not just take for granted what success means. It can and should be, I think, a real conversation and exploration.
Andrea: I like the enoughness part. But I even mean more in your own embodied understanding that there are so many different ways that everything can be done. Is it helpful in a way that helps you not get stuck? How many companies have you created?
Jenna: About four.
Andrea: So you’re a very high-powered person, you’re creating things. I’m just wondering if knowing that there are many different ways to do things is helpful for you, so that you don’t get sucked into trying to play the game the way it’s being played by those around you.
Jenna: For sure. Coming back to one’s body and that lived sense — there’s an amazing book called InnSæi, which means “intuition” in Icelandic, and it literally means “inner sea.” It’s “to sea” like the ocean, and also “to see” — to perceive. The author Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir is a dear friend, and I think a lot about: how are we creating the spaces to tune into our innsæi? That can certainly be through walking in nature, through prayer, through meditation. I love swimming — anything that reconnects us back to our center and to our body, to be able to really tune into that.
I also do think that so much of that is through inquiry with other people too. I have a dear friend, and we do regular spiritual inquiry — where we’re really trying to interrogate in a loving and graceful way, and with deep care, the different contours of our lives, such that we’re able to not just take things at face value.
Part of, I think, the gift of being exposed to so many different ways of being and showing up in the world — and this came through in so many of the interviews that I did for the book — is that we can think there’s only one way of doing things and it’s the way that we’ve always done things. Continuing to interrogate that is certainly a goal that I have.
Andrea: Have you always had these kinds of conversations with people you can trust, where you can explore meaning and purpose and this spiritual side of yourself and life?
Jenna: It’s actually pretty funny. You started with talking about age 13 or 14 — actually about age 12, I started, at my home in London, what we called “Saturdays at Jen’s.” They were just these discussion groups. We would often bring in speakers around different themes, and it would be about love and justice. It was very philosophy-based. We would have quotations from different philosophers and poets, and from different faith backgrounds as well. That’s really continued to this day. I still host those discussion groups in my home and in different cities around the world where I’ve lived.
Being in deep conversation around some of the biggest topics at a deeper level is something that I really cherish — particularly having people that are coming from different backgrounds and contexts, where we can in a really loving way push our thinking around some of these areas. It’s been a huge source of strength and inspiration to me over the years.
Andrea: I think it’s so important — something so many of us could start trying to do earlier on in our lives, that we don’t actually realize is so important. Because you’re building those habits. You’re creating a way to have trusted conversations that helps you in all these other areas.
These are not easy things. I don’t want it to sound like, “Oh, you just become enlightened and you just choose love.” In the moment, in everyday life, we get stressed, we get worried. There’s a lot of actual tension that I’m trying to bring out. It sounds like you’ve had ways to deal with that.
I’m thinking of this saying that you say in the book: “Let your heart burn with love for everyone you meet.” The “burn” part — caring is a kind of tension, sometimes extremely transformative and flowing and ecstatic. I just wonder if that makes sense to you, if you think of care and love in business and investing in this way at all — not as just sentimental, but sort of this active feeling.
Jenna: A hundred percent. People use language like “fierce love.” The line you’re referring to is from the Bahá’í writings: “Let your heart burn with loving kindness for all who may cross your path.” I think about that almost every day. It’s so easy to interact with people not from that place — we’re busy and moving on with our lives. But what does it really mean? And what would the world look like if we were to actually let our hearts burn with loving kindness for all who may cross our path?
One of the examples I share in the book of how people have embedded concepts like this into organizations: there’s a company called Devoted Health. They’ve been very successful in the healthcare space, and they credit a lot of their success to a simple exercise. Before they engage with any of the patients they interact with, they’re encouraged to close their eyes and imagine that the person they’re about to interact with is a beloved family member.
It’s such a simple exercise, but it’s kind of incredible to think and imagine: what would it look like if in all organizations, that was the way that we were to engage with people? From this place of: “If you are part of my family, how differently am I going to engage with you as a result?” And what is the strength of that love that will emanate from that?
How we can come back to that — it’s not always easy, to your point. It is a constant reminder. In the same way that we might go to the gym to work out physically, I think there’s a muscle that can develop around the cultivation of some of these principles. Seeing the impact that can have, both on our own wellbeing, the wellbeing of the organizations we’re part of, and the broader community, is a huge opportunity.
Andrea: Have you found you can create conversational spaces — and I mean that not just with words, but with bodies and environments — that help people, so there’s less of that tension? I’m thinking, for example, of the one example in the book about the coal and the solar panels. One of the practices that you tell us about in the book — and that you’ve also asked people to do a lot — is for them to bring a symbolic object. Maybe you want to tell about that, and about how you can create spaces where we can listen, but we can also recognize that we already have a shared conversation going.
Jenna: A hundred percent. About 10 years ago, I co-founded an organization called Impact Experience. It was really based on a lot of what we’re talking about here — how disconnected we can become from ourselves and from each other. The real motivation was: how do we create spaces to build bridges between investors, entrepreneurs, artists? We’ve now had about 6,000 people that have gone through these experiences. We start each of our gatherings — it’s typically about 30 people at a time — with everybody sharing a symbol, an object that has significance to them.
The experience you’re referencing was in southern West Virginia, a community where we’ve done a lot of work over the years. It’s a community with incredibly high rates of diabetes, obesity, drug offense rates, and many laid-off coal miners. In the group, we had a former coal miner come and bring a piece of coal as their object, and share about the role of family and values.
In the group, we also had somebody who’d spent her life fighting for environmental causes. She brought a solar panel. On the surface, they couldn’t have been more different — a coal miner and a solar executive. And yet underneath the symbols they were sharing, the values there and what really motivated them, and their care and love for their family and for their community, were actually much more similar than we would’ve thought on the surface.
What we found is that through the process of them connecting and being able to see each other beyond those professional roles — but really who they were as full human beings — the collaborations they were able to have as a result were that much greater than if they had just seen those differences.
How we create those opportunities in our daily lives for us to truly see one another and to see beyond the labels is certainly a big part of the inspiration behind my work. But I think it’s something that we can all do in our different respective roles.
Andrea: So after you’ve created all these different companies, how do you see money? What do you really think of as money? It still seems like something separate from all this we’re talking about. But how do you see money after having worked in it and with it, and with so many very successful people, investors, and companies — being one yourself? What is money?
Jenna: A few elements. One is thinking about money and capital — the different types of capital. So often we think about capital and we just think about financial capital. But thinking about social capital and human capital and spiritual capital as part of the fullness of this picture.
We talk about currency — but there’s current embedded within that. Money has value when it’s in motion. So often we can get stuck in more stagnant environments. One of my mentors, Lynn Twist — who’s also referenced in the book — wrote an amazing book called The Soul of Money. She talks a lot about this idea that money is a form of medicine, and that money gets its true value when it is in circulation, when it has this currency and flow.
So much of it is what we subscribe to it. Often in many of the discussion groups that we have, we engage around our money stories — and sometimes that can be pretty traumatic for people. It can be a taboo topic to engage around in many contexts. How we lower the barriers to entry for being able to have some of these conversations, and to explore what role money plays for us, and it being a tool rather than an end in and of itself.
Andrea: That word “value” has such weight in economics, in a really scholarly way of thinking about it. But of course in philosophy it has a different way of thinking about it. I want to get a little bit messy for a second. Can we think of money as the currency, the flow toward what we care about? But I also mean that sometimes we don’t know what we’ve chosen to care about. We are just in a kind of system that tells us to care about a certain kind of fame or a certain kind of success or a certain kind of product. We’re not really thinking about it. We’re not in these kinds of groups like you are, where you’re conversationally noticing your care.
Care is the orientation toward your urge, your desire. Maybe I want to buy a bunch of stuff to make myself look better so other people like me — but I’m not really thinking of it like that. Of course that gets nested into much bigger things when we think about tech companies or whatever. I just wonder what you think about that — that money has a kind of currency of the orientation of our care. But when we notice it, and we notice what we’re actually putting our energy into, we shift the current.
Jenna: I couldn’t agree more. There’s so much in the process of even realizing how we may be unintentionally oriented toward certain ways of thinking about or engaging with money, or how we’re thinking about the intersection of care and money.
Part of the opportunity — there’s a framework that I present in the book called the HEAL framework, which stands for Hope, Empathy, Abundance, and Legacy. These are based on the interviews I did for the book. So much of that is, actually through the process of reflecting on some of these themes — around the intersection of value and care and currency and money — having some of these tools and questions to navigate the complexity of these intersections.
I don’t think these elements are simple. For generations we’ve been trying to engage around the nuances here, and I don’t think we’re going to solve it today. But Parker Palmer talks a lot about the power of holding the questions. I think that’s part of the hope and goal with this engagement — less “how do we get all the answers now,” but rather, what is the practice of holding those questions?
Andrea: Hope, empathy, abundance, legacy. We can talk about those in different ways, but I wonder — when you were doing all these interviews and these were the themes that you ended up finding, did any of them feel surprising that it surfaced so much? Was there anything surprising in this process of writing the book? Which one was harder for you to hold?
Jenna: I think each of them in their own ways felt like stretch elements and had their own elements of surprise. With hope — there’s a concept in the Bahá’í writings around the forces of disintegration and integration in the world. So much of what we see on a daily basis are these forces of disintegration. With the media and everything we’re seeing, it’s all of the terrible things going on in the world. This active cultivation of hope — Brené Brown talks about microdosing hope — is something where, coming back to the muscles that we’re building up, how do we continue to reorient around that?
I generally like to think of myself as a hopeful person, but also realizing that it’s something we can’t just take for granted, that we have to keep front and center.
With empathy, the examples like Devoted Health — what does it look like to really imagine people as part of our family? That can be complex. We can sometimes have complex relationships with our family. With each of them, it’s how do we continue to hold them as a kind of north star for us to continue to strive toward, and also have grace and care and love for ourselves in the process of trying to cultivate some of these ideas.
Andrea: So nothing was really super surprising. You felt like most of it kind of fit with what you’ve already been thinking about.
Jenna: Some of the things that surprised me was — to your point earlier about joy and play — how people went about trying to cultivate some of these ideas. Within abundance, there’s an example that came through in one of the interviews with Scott Shickler, who runs a company called Seven Mindsets. It’s been a very successful company in the education technology space. When I was asking him about how he cultivates a sense of abundance, he shared this example of how he has a wand on his desk. When he finds himself in more of a scarce way of thinking, he literally waves the wand, and it helps him to cultivate more of a sense of abundance.
I’ve known Scott for many years and worked on different projects, and I never knew that before. What I really appreciated, and what consistently surprised me in some of these conversations, was being able to see more of the fullness of people. There’s a line that just kept coming up in so many of the conversations: “I don’t really feel like I can talk about this, but...” — and then people would share these incredible stories.
It was both surprising and inspiring to me how, for many people, they had these really inspiring and meaningful experiences and motivations. The opportunity to be able to elevate some of those stories and create more of a space for that is something that was exciting for me.
Andrea: That’s exactly what I was hoping you would talk about. There are these moments where this wonderful strangeness kind of comes in — these moments of vulnerability where we’re talking about power and money, and then something like using the wand to dispel the bad feelings or the self-sabotage. It’s playful, and it can be playful. It speaks to that contradiction: if you’re doing something spiritual or “woo” — these words we’ve taken on for good reason — a lot of people are motivated to try to find those strange ways of getting out of your comfort zone, feeling more optimism, believing in the world.
Sometimes it’s these strange moments that help us get out of our habits. It’s a little like what I was asking you about — if changing place so much helps you. In the book, you write about going to the Amazon, for example. I imagine you had to get out of your normal habits there. To me it’s a similar feeling. Do you know what I’m saying?
Jenna: Definitely. A hundred percent. Engaging with other ways of being and doing — I had a chance to write a Substack piece recently around one specific event in the Amazon. This trip was organized by the Pachamama Alliance — I mentioned Lynne Twist earlier; she started this organization about 30 years ago, and they’ve been leading these trips to the Amazon in collaboration with the Achuar and Sápara communities.
They have a practice there as a local community: every morning at 5 a.m., they come together in their local community and they sit in a circle and they share the dreams that they had the night before. They make decisions on what they’re going to do that day based on the dreams that they had the night before. We had a chance to participate in one of these activities.
It was an incredible experience on many levels. To your point about just being exposed to other ways of being and doing — when I look at my calendar in typical days, it’s back-to-back meetings. Even if I wanted to create space for thinking about what my dreams were and how I might live my day based on that, there’s no space for it. This idea of what we can take for granted — how we live our lives, what success means, and even the role of money...
This particular community that we were engaged with has only actually had physical currency over the last 15 years or so. So the whole way of interacting with one another is different. We were there exploring around different investment opportunities. Even thinking about what investment looks like in a context where there’s been such a different way of being and doing... I couldn’t agree more around the importance of being exposed to other environments as an inspiration for thinking about things from a different angle.
Andrea: I also find some of your faith adds a bit of this element of — I can’t figure out what the word is I’m trying to say — kind of thinking strange, or kind of waking up. These moments of, I’m thinking of like a Zen koan. There’s one quote in the book where you say that death is a messenger of joy. Is that right?
Jenna: Yes, exactly.
Andrea: Those things don’t seem to go together at all, is what I’m trying to say. In a similar way that often we think investing doesn’t go with spirituality, or a lot of these seeming opposites — which are kind of ways of opening us into different ways of being in a surprising way, like waving the wand around.
Let’s think about the death thing. That actually is a part of your book, and it seems to be a very important word for a lot of reasons for you. You already shared that you’ve lost your mom and your grandmother, and that seems important in this book, even if you don’t really talk about it directly. And also the tombstone with Wayne — that’s a big thing, right? That changed his life when he thought, “What should I write on my tombstone?” The idea of legacy, which is the L in HEAL.
I want to get into that just a little bit. What does that all mean for you, also to go back to the very beginning — your mom and your grandmother being appreciative of life. What does that bring up for you, in the sense of the way we can think of our legacy in this bigger way than just our own life?
Jenna: It’s something I think about a lot. Another example I bring up in the book on this point: there’s a professor in the UK, Peter Hawkins, and he has a coffin in his office. Before you get to see him, you see his coffin. His point is we should really spend each day reflecting on the fact that we’re going to die one day, and that being an important thing for us to reflect on.
Certainly this passage from the Bahá’í writings — “I have made death a messenger of joy” — is something I reflect on a lot. In the passing of my grandmother and mother, at the beginning it was: how does this make sense? It has been really over time that a fuller sense of what that really means has come to me.
So much of it is around an escape from sometimes the limitations of this physical reality, and how we are embracing the fullness of our spiritual reality in addition to our material reality. That’s, in many ways, part of this intersection of money and meaning — being able to hold all of these parts of our reality as part of the broader contours of our life and work. It gives this sense of importance to the decisions that we’re making.
I think about this a lot in running an investment firm — Phoenix Capital — and we’re investing into companies that are trying to be at the forefront of innovations in climate and healthcare and other sectors. What does it mean to leave a trace, and what is the trace that you are trying to leave?
Sometimes we can think, “Oh, we’ll get to that later on.” But we don’t know how long we have in this world. There’s another line in the Bahá’í writings that says, “Strive that your actions day by day may be beautiful prayers.” I love that imagery — that our actions and the ways that we engage with one another can in and of itself be a beautiful prayer, or work as a form of worship. Truly, whatever it is that we’re doing, doing it with love and care is part of a way of us expressing the fullness of who we are.
Andrea: You talk about stewardship sometimes in the book too. That’s a word that does recur. What I’m trying to get at too is — we have this sense of self, which can feel very narrow, in which we can get very caught up in the ego side of things, or even like you were saying about your calendar, just staying busy and following the next thing that’s going to ding on the calendar. That feels different than what you’re really saying about leaving a trace, because that makes me think of how we’re all opening paths for each other all the time. Our life is a path that we’re opening for others, from others. Does that ring true with any of your experiences — with your mom and your grandmother, or with your faith, with your business? Are you ever able to get out of your own individual definition of self and feel that a bit?
Jenna: Totally. I try to all the time. I don’t always succeed. Sometimes people would refer to that as a “flow state.”
To your point about stewardship, I think a lot about — and talk about a bit in the book — the indigenous concept of seven generations thinking. How are we thinking about the impact of our decisions now, and seven generations to come? And the legacy that we’re inheriting from seven generations in the past, and how does that impact how we think about decisions as a result?
I think about that a lot in the investing work I engage in: what are the repercussions of these decisions, hopefully for generations to come, and what impact might that create?
A lot of what my mother and grandmother cultivated within me was a sense of really trying to see the full picture. There’s a line from Martin Luther King where he said, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, but take the first step.” There’s something about: how are we just taking each step? Sometimes that can be really challenging, even just taking that first step. But there’s power in what can unfold when we just take each step, and trust that things are unfolding as they’re meant to.
Andrea: I want to hear you tell what you want other people to really know about this book. The message feels very important right now. You do talk about AI a bit too, and that’s part of it — but also just that we can remember that where we’re putting our energy, our money, our currency, can be meaningful and can have purpose, and can be about stewardship and about love. I really feel that in the stories of the people. If there’s anything that comes up that you want to share with everyone, please feel free to do that.
Jenna: I love that — and that was certainly the intention. One thing: in the book, at the end of each chapter, I have a series of reflection questions. The real hope and intention there is to provide spaces for people to think about how this shows up in their lives and work. So many of these conversations of how we think about money and meaning and purpose and profits is going to be different for each of us. It being a lifelong journey of continuing to ask some of these questions, and what’s resonating, and to engage with it, to this point we’ve been talking about — from a place of playfulness and joy and exploration — and to often do so in community, where it’s something that we don’t have to be alone in a process of trying to figure all of this out. How to enjoy the journey along the way.
Andrea: That conversational aspect — you really fill in that part. There are a lot of intense stories and ideas, and then the reflection questions give you a moment to really process it at the end of each chapter. I imagine that’s been very helpful in more business situations too, where you’re sharing this message. People can do that in their own teams and businesses.
It makes me think of resilience, coherence, integrity — those are names of the chapters. Did you build that in on purpose? You’re building resilience, you’re building coherence, and there’s an integrity to that. Was that on purpose, and has it been good in practice too?
Jenna: Very much so. This idea of: how do we be gentle with ourselves in the process? These are all hard things to do, and we’re going to fall short sometimes.
One of the things that really struck me recently — there was a foundation with about a billion dollars in assets, and they mentioned that before they made an investment, when they went through their investment committee process, they actually read an excerpt from the book. I was like, what an amazing use of the book — so inspiring to hear that.
Part of what I reflect on in the book is the power of pauses, and through creating pauses we create the spaciousness to be able to tune into a lot of what we are talking about here. The idea that maybe reading an excerpt of the book can help to spark some of these conversations within organizations, or as people are trying to make difficult decisions — it can then become a living laboratory for the deepening around some of these themes.
Andrea: I feel like the pause is a very important thing you bring in. But before we go, I have to bring up this other thing, which I think is very important — something I talk about a lot here — these seemingly small moments that can actually be enough meaning for a lifetime.
To go back to your grandmother — she was a shop owner in London, and basically she took the time in a busy day to listen to someone who was at a very desperate moment in their life, and it made all the difference. Your grandmother kind of told you this — that even if she didn’t do anything else in her life that she did, there’s meaning in that. That’s the trace, the continuity. I really think about that all the time — that we try to be these big people doing these big things, but those moments are what really matter, and actually what feels fulfilling. There’s a reason your grandmother told you that. Maybe you want to tell that story, or just what that brings up for you relative to these ideas we’ve been talking about.
Jenna: I love that story, and it is one I come back to a lot. It does seem to be resonating with people. It is something of: how do we think about what those elements are on a daily basis, and that we never really know the impact of how we’re engaging with people?
To this earlier passage: “Let your heart burn with loving kindness for all who may cross your path.” That’s really how my grandmother interacted with everyone — but certainly on that day, interacted with this woman. It clearly, given the circumstances and everything that was going on in her life, was something that had such a deep impact in terms of keeping her alive.
It would’ve been so easy for my grandmother to have just focused on continuing to serve other customers and be in the busyness of life. But actually being able to be in tune enough to be able to see that this woman was struggling and needed that time and space — this element of how we continue to stay open, and to then also realize that we are enough, that yes, there’s more that we can do, but not to become so attached to the doing of more that we lose sight of our inherent nobility.
Andrea: At one point, one of your friends wrote something similar to you on a card — like, “Just remember, you’ve already done enough.” Everything else is kind of extra, because you’ve given a lot of meaning to the world. But I think that also holds that tension of — your grandmother was working in a busy store, and it was not easy for her to take a moment with this person. So it’s not that these things are easy. It’s not a complacency. You talk about it not being transactional — it’s more communicative instead of transactional. Making that choice actually has these very big repercussions for resilience and integrity, and this elasticity that you talk about. You’re building your power to understand what the enough is for you.
The last thing before we go: if there’s anything you want to share relative to an experience of love or care that helped you write this book, or that just comes up today in connection to any of these themes we’ve been talking about.
Jenna: That is definitely one that I come back to a lot, with my grandmother. More broadly — I mentioned they’ve both passed on, but I dedicated the book to my mother and grandmother, and I could feel them guiding me throughout the process as I was writing and pulling the pieces together.
Another aspect: part of the inspiration for me in writing the book was that there are so many people that have so many incredible stories, and I was thinking that many of these people are getting on in life, and will these stories be told before they pass on? Actually, a few of the people I interviewed for the book have since passed on. My hope with the book — and hopefully it’s playing out — is of honoring the legacy of those people and their stories.
A couple to mention: Bob Chapman, who just passed away just a few weeks ago — incredible leader. And Lisa Hall, who passed away last year, also an amazing leader in this area of socially responsible investing. I can feel their love — both in my relationship to them, but also love for the world and love for the advancement of these ideas. That’s certainly been a catalyst for the writing and also for much of the work I engage in.
Andrea: That’s the other word that’s actually surprising me right now, but comes up the most powerfully: this conversational quality, this conversation. The pause is important, and the message of what you’re giving in the book is very important. But also just that conversational thing that we started with — and that you started with when you were 14 — of having these conversations and taking them seriously, documenting them. It’s a real sign of respect, I think. A lot of your conversations — did you record them? Are they available?
Jenna: Yes, I’ve released many of them in podcast form. I have a podcast and a Substack, which is very much trying to engage around some of the broader conversations. I could only have small tidbits from them in the book itself, but I try to hold the fullness of some of these stories through some of these other platforms.
Andrea: We’ll be sure to link to all of it. Is there anything else you want to make sure we say before we go?
Jenna: No — just thank you so much for this opportunity, and thank you so much for all that you’re bringing into the world. These are such important conversations, so I really appreciate it.
Andrea: Thank you too. It means a lot, what you’re doing. I want a lot of people to know more about it, think more about it. So thanks for coming on today, and I wish you all the best. Have a great day.
Jenna: You too.
Closing Reflection: T.S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages
I said I’d read this poem, which I found — the part of Four Quartets called “The Dry Salvages.” Here is the passage in context (though remember, this is from a much longer, fuller poem, so go check it out):
It seems, as one becomes older, That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence — Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy, Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past. The moments of happiness — not the sense of well-being, Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection, Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination — We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness. I have said before That the past experience revived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But of many generations — not forgetting Something that is probably quite ineffable...
What Eliot is sort of pushing back against here is this idea that the past is just some sequence, and we move beyond it, or a development. Actually, it’s still part of us — or at least that’s how I’m thinking of it. We are memory. We’re carrying it with us. It’s changing. It’s becoming. And the meaning comes back to us later, and it’s restored as experience in a different form. And this is constantly going.
So even now and later, before, past, present — these are all actually sort of right now in our bodies. We don’t want to lament the lost time so much as make the shift right now. Recovery through return, I guess, is sort of what I’m thinking of — and what I’m imagining is how we might shift what we think of as money toward currency and care. Which is a kind of weird stretch with this poem, but just this idea that the experience and the meaning can be together.
Jenna Nicholas is the author of The Enlightened Bottom Line. Andrea Hiott is the author of Thinking Small, Holding Paradox, and How to Be Alive (coming 2027).