Financial stability has become a cornerstone of personal wellbeing, alongside health, career and social connection. Yet the journey to financial security can feel like navigating a labyrinth of spreadsheets, conflicting advice, and overwhelming choices.
It’s easy to view finance as a purely transactional aspect of life; a series of numbers to manage or problems to solve. But in truth, our relationship with money is deeply personal, emotional, and often tied to our broader life aspirations.
Holistic financial coaching takes a step back from the spreadsheets to look at the bigger picture. It’s not just about crunching numbers and creating budgets. It’s about understanding what drives your financial decisions, clarifying your goals, and aligning your finances with the life you want to lead. This approach combines the practical tools for managing money with the deeper work of addressing your mindset, habits, and emotional connection to finances.
Holistic coaching puts you in the driver’s seat. With my ‘Holistic’ financial coaching package, I provide the structure and guidance to help you define your priorities and chart a path forward. But ultimately, you decide the destination and the pace. Every client’s journey is unique, and that’s why flexibility is at the heart of true coaching, allowing sessions to be tailored to your evolving needs.
In this article, I’ll break down what makes holistic financial coaching distinct and transformative. We’ll consider its principles, the balance it strikes between practical and emotional aspects, and the tangible benefits it can bring to your life.
What is holistic financial coaching?
Holistic financial coaching should feel like an empowering approach to managing your money and your life. Unlike traditional financial advice, which tends to focus more on numbers, strategies, and specific products, holistic coaching focusses more on values, goals, habits, attitudes, emotions and aspirations.
It’s about understanding the “why” behind your financial decisions as much as the “how.”
It’s an approach that’s just as much an investment in yourself as it is in your financial position. It takes time, but this enables deeper work and longer lasting change.
At its core, holistic financial coaching is designed to help you align your financial resources with the life you want to lead. This means looking beyond budgets and savings plans to explore your relationship with money. It’s about creating a balance between the practical and the emotional, so you can approach your finances with confidence and clarity.
How does holistic coaching differ from other financial support?
To understand holistic financial coaching, it’s helpful to contrast it with other approaches:
Traditional Financial Advice:
Financial advisers often focus on recommending specific products and strategies, such as investments, insurance policies, or pension plans. Their role is typically to provide expertise and direct clients toward solutions. Often, advisers will then implement the solutions and manage your money on your behalf.
Self-Help Approaches:
Books, blogs, and online resources can offer valuable information and I often direct clients towards such material as part of the learning process. But they can sometimes be a bit “one-size-fits-all” and they lack the tailored guidance and accountability needed for meaningful progress.
Holistic financial coaching stands apart by putting you at the centre. It’s a collaborative, client-led process where the coach acts as a guide, not a director. Together, we uncover what’s most important to you and craft strategies that reflect your unique circumstances and priorities.
A Personalised, Flexible Approach
No two people have the same relationship with money, which is why a one-size-fits-all solution won’t work for behavioural change. Holistic financial coaching is deeply personalised, adapting to your goals, challenges, and pace. Whether you’re seeking help with practical issues like budgeting and saving, or you’re looking to explore the deeper emotional patterns that influence your financial decisions, the process is tailored to you.
Flexibility is another hallmark of holistic coaching. Clients have the freedom to determine the frequency of sessions and the focus of each discussion. Some clients may want weekly or fortnightly sessions to build momentum, while others may prefer monthly check-ins to reflect and refine their plans. This adaptability ensures that coaching fits into your life rather than adding pressure.
The Holistic Perspective
Holistic financial coaching isn’t just about solving immediate financial problems. It’s about creating a framework for lifelong financial wellbeing. By addressing both the practical and emotional aspects of money, it empowers you to:
- Gain clarity on your financial situation and goals
- Build skills for effective money management, saving, and investing
- Break free from unhelpful financial habits and emotional blocks
- Align your financial choices with your personal values and long-term vision
The key principles of holistic financial coaching
Holistic financial coaching is guided by a set of core principles that help ensure the process is both effective and transformative. It’s these principles that differentiate it from traditional financial advice or self-help approaches:
1. A Client-Led Approach
At the heart of holistic financial coaching is the belief that you are the expert on your own life. While a coach provides guidance, tools, and insights, it’s ultimately you who defines the goals, sets priorities, and determines the pace of progress. This collaborative approach empowers you to take ownership of your financial journey, ensuring that solutions are deeply personal and meaningful.
2. Balancing Practicality with Emotion
Money isn’t just a tool for transactions; it’s tied to your emotions, values, and sense of security. Holistic coaching acknowledges this duality. It addressese both the tangible aspects of money, like budgets, savings, and investments, and the emotional or psychological factors that influence financial decisions. This balance helps you build not only financial skills, but also a healthier relationship with money.
3. Integration with Broader Life Goals
Holistic financial coaching views money as a means to an end, not an end in itself. It aligns financial strategies with your broader life goals, whether that’s achieving financial independence, supporting a family, pursuing a passion, or preparing for retirement. By connecting money to purpose, you gain clarity and motivation.
4. Tailored and Flexible Support
No two financial journeys are the same. Holistic financial coaching adapts to the unique circumstances, needs, and preferences of the client. This includes flexibility in session frequency, topics discussed and the tools or strategies used. Whether you want to tackle immediate challenges or build long-term plans, coaching is tailored to your pace and priorities.
5. Empowerment Through Education
Rather than providing prescriptive advice, holistic coaching focuses on equipping you with the knowledge and skills you need to make confident, informed decisions. This might involve mentorship around the creation of a budget, understanding investment basics, or navigating financial products like insurance and wills. Empowerment is a key goal. You should leave coaching sessions better prepared to manage your finances independently.
6. Long-Term Transformation
Holistic financial coaching is more than a quick fix for immediate financial issues. It’s about fostering lasting transformation, helping you build sustainable habits. It can shift unhelpful mindsets and create a financial framework that supports wellbeing over the long term. This principle ensures that you continue to benefit from coaching long after the sessions are complete.
How These Principles Work in Practice
These principles come together to create a coaching process that is both structured and adaptable, practical and reflective. For example:
- a session on budgeting might also explore the emotional triggers behind overspending
- a discussion about long-term savings might include aligning those savings with any dreams of early retirement or travel
- progress reviews might celebrate not just milestones achieved but also shifts in mindset or behaviour
By adhering to these principles, holistic financial coaching will help you gain clarity, confidence, and control over your finances.
The practical side of financial coaching
My “SPEND” framework summarises five key areas for financial success in a practical sense. Not all elements are relevant to everyone, and it doesn’t need to be followed in order. Remember, holistic financial coaching is personalised and led by you.
Savour Your Spending
Understanding how your money is saved and spent is foundational. This is about gaining clarity and building gratitude, not just for your money, but also your time. It can include:
- Calculating your net worth: a snapshot of your current financial situation
- Creating a Spending Plan: an intentional breakdown of future spending and saving
- Building gratitude: nurturing appreciation for what you have now
- Aligning spending with values: ensure your expenditure contributes to your overall happiness and life goals
Protect Your Family
Safeguarding yourself, your loved ones and causes that you care about against unforeseen events. This includes:
- preparing for unexpected expenses: build an emergency fund to providing peace of mind and stability, no matter what life throws at you
- assessing the financial impact of illness or death: evaluate and obtain appropriate insurances, such as life, health, and income protection
- securing your business continuity: if you run your own business, consider how it would be impacted upon your own death or illness, or that of a key employee
- arranging wills and powers of attorney: ensure your wishes are honoured and your family is cared for in your absence
- enjoying gifting and legacies: plan for effective and tax-efficient financial support to those you love, or causes that are important to you
Eliminate Your Debt
Managing debt effectively is vital for financial health. For some, the priority may be to work towards a debt-free life. Steps might include:
- reviewing your spending: identify opportunities to free up funds
- assessing your interest rates: work out the costs of your existing debts
- designing your repayment strategy: review different methods and timescales to reduce debt
- tracking your progress: implement a way to monitor progress that keeps you motivated, without being onerous
- accelerating your repayments: gradually “nudging” and building new habits to make increasingly effective progress
Nurture Your Wealth
Growing your assets can create long-term financial security and help you achieve financial independence. This encompasses:
- understanding your retirement provision: be clear on your starting position, including the value of your existing pensions
- maximising free money: take advantage of employer pension contributions and other opportunities
- learning how to invest: understand the various investment principles, providers, products and how to align them with your risk tolerance and objectives
- reducing unnecessary tax: make the best use of tax-free and tax-advantaged opportunities
- pursuing compound returns: embrace long-term thinking, patience and the ‘magic’ of compounding
Design Your Future
Planning for the life you’d love to have in the future requires intentional action and alignment with what’s important to you. This includes:
- identifying your values: think holistically and really consider what matters most to you in life
- assessing your strengths: focus on what you’re good at, but also what you enjoy
- imagining your best future: really take time to dream how you’d love to spend your time
- considering your legacy: think beyond your own time on this Earth and imagine what you’d like to leave behind
- building your plan: pull all of this together, into a flexible and visual financial plan; one that can be adjusted and refined as your life changes over time
The emotions and behaviours of money
Money is never just about numbers. It’s deeply tied to your emotions, beliefs and behaviours. From childhood experiences to societal influences, the way you interact with money is shaped by a complex web of psychological factors.
Holistic financial coaching recognises this. It addresses not just the practical side of finances, but also the emotional and behavioural patterns that influence financial decisions.
1. Understanding Your Money Story
Your relationship with money often begins in childhood. Messages you absorbed about spending, saving, and financial security can shape your habits and attitudes as an adult. For instance:
- were you taught that “money doesn’t grow on trees” and should be saved at all costs?
- what about messages like “money is the root of all evil” and should not be hoarded?
- was money always secretive and never spoken about at home?
2. Assessing Your Money Habits and Attitudes
Having a solid understanding of your habits and attitudes around money can help to untangle behaviours and decision making. A great way to do this is to play Money Habitudes, a gamified assessment of how you feel and behave around money.
It’s an engaging and fun way to explore the extent to which you use the following 6 “domains”:
- Carefree
- Planning
- Status
- Spontaneous
- Giving
- Security
3. Recognising Emotional Triggers
Money is often linked to powerful emotions like fear, guilt, shame, or pride. These emotions can lead to behaviours such as:
- impulse spending: a response to stress, boredom, or the desire for instant gratification
- avoidance: ignoring financial issues because they feel overwhelming or shameful
- over-saving: hoarding money out of fear of scarcity, even when it’s not necessary
Holistic financial coaching helps you identify these triggers and develop healthier responses.
4. Breaking Unhelpful Habits
Many financial behaviours are habitual, driven by unconscious patterns rather than deliberate choices. Coaching provides tools and techniques to:
- recognise automatic behaviours, such as routinely overspending on non-essentials or procrastinating on financial tasks
- replace unhelpful habits with constructive ones, like setting boundaries for discretionary spending or establishing a regular financial check-in routine
- build self-awareness and mindfulness around financial decisions
5. Developing a Positive Money Mindset
Your beliefs about money can profoundly impact your financial outcomes. Negative mindsets like “I’ll never be good with money” or “Wealth isn’t for people like me” can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Holistic coaching helps you:
- reframe limiting beliefs
- cultivate a mindset of possibility and self-worth
- focus on growth and progress rather than perfection
By shifting your perspective, you can open yourself to opportunities and feel more confident about your financial future.
6. Embracing Accountability and Support
Making changes to your financial habits can feel daunting, but coaching provides a supportive framework to help you stay on track. This could include:
- regular check-ins between coaching sessions to celebrate progress and address challenges
- encouragement to step out of your comfort zone and tackle areas you may have avoided in the past
- a safe, non-judgmental space to explore your financial fears, hopes, and aspirations.
What does the holistic financial coaching journey look like?
Every client’s financial journey is as unique as their life story, but you can expect a process that broadly follows these steps:
1. Initial Chat
All new clients begin with a no-obligation, 30-minute ‘initial chat’. This allows time to explore what you’d like to gain from coaching, check that it’s the right type of support; and that we ‘click’. When working with a coach, it’s important to make sure the ‘chemistry’ is right.
2. Life Balance Consultation
In most cases, the next step is a 90-minute session to explore where you are right now, practically and emotionally. This includes reflecting on your satisfaction with various aspects of life, not just money.
This gives more of a sense of what it’s like to be a ‘coachee’ and crucially, it allows time to fully uncover what you’d like to gain from the overall process. By the end of this session, you should have a personalised financial roadmap towards your desired outcome.
For some, this stage can be a one-off standalone exercise that provides enough clarity to make progress without further support. Or it may even highlight that coaching is not the best approach and that regulated advice or therapy may be better suited.
You can gain more of a sense of what’s involved at this stage by reading my earlier article about the Wheel of Life.
3. Coaching programme
Once you have a clear sense of your overall desired outcome, it’s time to get down to business. A holistic programme of coaching is likely to take place over 6 or more hourly sessions, with a frequency that suits you. This could be variable, depending on the nature and volume of actions that you take away from each session.
It’s important to strike the right balance between maintaining momentum and avoiding overwhelm. For most people, breaks of 3 to 4 weeks between sessions works well.
The coaching sessions themselves will always begin by agreeing what a good outcome will be for that particular session. This could be about making practical progress, or about gaining insight and awareness on the emotional and behavioural side.
4. Accountability Support
Between sessions, you may find it useful to have check-ins by email or WhatsApp. This can help maintain a sense of movement and offers the opportunity to ask questions or share progress as you go.
More creative methods of accountability may include video updates, or using other friends and colleagues for support. You can read more about the benefits of accountability partners here.
5. Post-coaching support
After the initial package of coaching, many clients then move into a period of ongoing support. This may take the form of quarterly or even annual coaching sessions to review progress, set revised goals and maintain the sense of accountability.
The Journey is Yours to Shape
The beauty of holistic financial coaching is its flexibility and client-led approach. Whether you need intensive, short-term support or ongoing guidance over months or years, the journey is entirely tailored to your needs. At its heart, this process is about empowering you to take control of your finances and build a life that aligns with your values.
Real-life applications and examples
The true value of holistic financial coaching lies in its potential to transform your finances and your life. While every client’s journey is unique, the results are consistently impactful. From overcoming financial stress to achieving lifelong goals, the stories of real clients demonstrate how this approach can make a difference.
From Overwhelmed to Empowered
Many clients come to coaching feeling overwhelmed by their financial situation. Whether it’s managing debt, feeling stuck in their savings habits, or simply not knowing where to start. Through holistic coaching, they’ve:
- built confidence in their ability to manage money effectively
- gained clarity on their financial priorities and established actionable plans
- experienced a sense of control and empowerment that extends beyond their finances
- achieved goals, big and small
Whether it’s changing your relationship with money, learning how to invest for the future or working out if you have enough to retire, you can take control with the right support. Clients consistently highlight the tangible progress they’ve made.
Don’t Just Take My Word for It
If you’re curious about how holistic financial coaching could work for you, I’d encourage you to explore the experiences of those who’ve already taken this journey.
Clients have shared their thoughts in independently verified reviews on VouchedFor. These reviews provide an honest, unfiltered view of how coaching has impacted their lives.
You can also hear directly from clients in their own words through the video testimonials on my website. These stories offer a glimpse into the transformative process of holistic coaching.
Summary: a path to financial wellbeing
Holistic financial coaching is about so much more than money. It’s about empowering you to take control of your financial future in a way that aligns with your values and preferences.
By addressing both the practical and emotional aspects of money, this approach gives you clarity, confidence, and the tools needed to create lasting change. It’s a journey that’s as unique as you are. Through a personalised, flexible process, you’ll enjoy the freedom of not being forced down a particular route or process.
Is Your Success Story Next?
Every journey starts with a single step. If any of this resonate with you, now could be the time to take the first step toward transforming your own financial future.
Why not get in touch to learn more about how holistic financial coaching can help you? Take action now to achieve your goals and create a future you can feel excited about.