Radio Front Desk

How to feel confident about your clinic finances: Money tips for new practitioners

• Jane.app • Episode 17

Share episode

What if your biggest business challenge wasn’t logistical, but emotional? In this episode of Radio Front Desk, ⁠financial therapist Aseel El-Baba⁠ sits down with Denzil to unpack the emotional and psychological roots of our money decisions, especially in the early stages of private practice. 

She invites new health and wellness practitioners to rethink budgeting, paying themselves, and why money has more meaning than what’s on paper.

Whether you’re launching your first clinic or just beginning to charge for your time, this episode offers a refreshing and compassionate approach to building financial confidence.


What You’ll Learn

  • The hidden emotional stories that shape how we earn, spend, and save
  • Actionable tips for managing money in the first year of private practice
  • How to separate your personal worth from your bank balance


Guest Bio

⁠⁠Aseel El-Baba⁠⁠ is a visionary financial therapist, speaker, and founder of ⁠⁠Holistic Optimal Wealth⁠⁠. Using her background in psychology and financial planning on Toronto’s iconic Bay Street, she helps individuals heal financial anxiety and transform their relationship with money. Through a blend of modern psychology and ancient wisdom, Aseel empowers others to see money as a tool for healing, self-actualization, and sustainable change. A sought-after speaker, she captivates audiences with her empathy, storytelling, and insight.


Resources mentioned


Enjoyed this episode? 

Here are a few ways to stay in the loop:


Radio Front Desk is Brought to You by Jane

We like to make sure that when we tell you more about Jane, it’s super helpful. Here’s one we think you might like: 

Great tools don’t just do the job — they stay out of your way. That’s the idea behind AI Scribe, Jane’s new charting assistant.

We love how AI Scribe listens in during the appointment and starts your chart note for you — kind of like having a quiet assistant who catches the details while you focus on your patient.

You still review and approve everything, but it saves a ton of time. It just works without getting in the way, and that makes a big difference in a busy day.

⁠If you're curious, here's where you can learn more about AI Scribe.⁠

Speaker 1:

When it comes to money, we think we're dealing with numbers, Rates, invoices, overhead. You know the deal, but more often than not we're actually dealing with feelings Scarcity, guilt, shame, avoidance and sometimes hope. And when you're starting a practice in health and wellness, those feelings show up at full volume Because suddenly you're not just a practitioner, you're also the accountant, the salesperson and the CEO. You have to put a price on your time, talk about money with clients and face your own beliefs about what you're worth. It's vulnerable, it's a mirror, and the better you understand what it's reflecting, the more confident you become. Today, we're joined by someone who helps people do just that. Her name is Asil Elbaba. She's a financial therapist and this is how she got here. Got here.

Speaker 1:

Aseel's career started where a lot of traditional finance careers do, in a sleek glass tower on Bay Street, Toronto's version of Wall Street. She was a financial advisor working with high net worth clients, people who, on paper, had it all together. Then came a conversation that shifted everything for her. One of her clients was a high-profile executive, someone you'd expect to have it all figured out, but behind closed doors. Things were falling apart. His finances were so strained he was preparing to downsize his home. He wasn't looking forward to retirement, he was afraid of it. And as they talked it became clear this wasn't really about numbers. It was about family history, generational pressure and emotional blind spots.

Speaker 2:

I was very intrigued and curious to understand what was happening and I wanted to dig deeper into the story and I I took his permission.

Speaker 2:

I'm like can I please probe to understand more about what's happening here, because if I don't, you'll end up in my office in another five years needing to refine us again. So we started exploring his childhood and he uncovered that he grew up with a father from the post-depression era and his father had a very stingy relationship with money, which created such tension in their relationship and eventually estranged him. So he promised himself that by the time he is going to be a father he's not going to repeat these patterns. But what he ended up doing is going to be other extreme and became what I now understand considered financial enabling. So he continuously supported his adult children without any financial boundaries, without any understanding of the consequences it will have on his life, simply because he was acting from that space of trauma and he jeopardized his own financial health as a result, that conversation stayed with Aseel long after the spreadsheets were closed, so much so that when he left her office, she went straight to Google and typed how to become a therapist in Toronto.

Speaker 1:

If you've never heard of financial therapy, you're not alone. It's a relatively new field that sits at the intersection of psychology and personal finance, but once you hear how it works, it makes perfect sense, especially if you've ever avoided looking at your bank account or felt weird about raising your rates.

Speaker 2:

When I tell people I'm a financial therapist, their first reaction would be, oh, my wife or husband needs that. But then they pause and they're like, but wait, what does that really do? Needs that? But then they pause and they're like, but wait, what does that really do? So a very common question, given that this particular title is relatively still new, but it's about addressing how clients feel, behave, think and communicate with money.

Speaker 1:

Aseel explains it using Dr Bruce Perry's model regulate, relate, reason.

Speaker 2:

Most financial advice focuses on the reason part Budgets, investments, tax strategy but few people talk about regulation how to stay emotionally grounded when money enters the room, and actually this is where the Sanarsol therapist's role is to support clients in understanding all the different emotions they experience when the topic of money surfaces in their day-to-day life. All these different instances bring up emotions that we're not necessarily equipped to understand, let alone regulate, and sometimes, when we're not regulated, we're sent into a flight or fight response which hinders our cognitive ability. So it's not that we're bad with money or we're just not good with it, we're often just not regulated.

Speaker 1:

That's where financial therapy begins, because when you're dysregulated, your decision-making changes, your body goes into protection mode. You can't reason your way through a trigger, and so a seal helps people notice those patterns and gently starts to untangle them.

Speaker 2:

One of the taglines that I came up with in reflecting on the work that I do is that the relationship you have with money is a reflection of the relationship you have with yourself. Money is a mirror. It reflects back to you what values you're living by, what belief systems and attitudes and mindsets you have about yourself and the world. And it's fascinating to to look at it from a different angle.

Speaker 2:

I personally grew up in Lebanon and Lebanon remains a very volatile place and, because of the environment that I grew up in, I grew up witnessing a lot of associations with wealth to equate, corruption, greed, selfishness, everything you don't want to be associated with, and there was a lot of almost virtuousness to hard work, to sacrifice.

Speaker 2:

It's almost like you're blessed with having a hard life because that means you're virtuous and you're a good person, and I grew up with that and I took pride in it Even when I explored what I wanted to be when I grew up. That and I took pride in it even when I explored what I wanted to be when I grew up. That question, the infamous question for me was always about like working in charity, working in non-profits, and I felt that's the path to go to continue being virtuous and a kind-hearted person who cares not just about myself but the world at large. And money constantly contradicted these values. And I remember I was in a competition at one point and I was being asked what would you rather have, a big wallet or a big heart? And instantaneously, without even having any time to think, I just answered obviously a big heart. And now, in hindsight, I would say both, absolutely both, and I don't see them as competing forces anymore.

Speaker 1:

That mirror metaphor really resonates with me and I think for many of you listening it'll hit home. But what if you're too scared to look? That's why I love Aseel's approach. She starts with play, humor, curiosity, not to minimize the issue but to make it feel a little more tolerable.

Speaker 2:

The very first thing is awareness, and for that I sometimes ask fun questions to help Koreans start that self-discovery journey. And some of these questions could be like if your money could talk, what would it say If you had a relationship with money? What status would it be If there's a song or a book or a movie title that represents a relationship with money? What is it?

Speaker 1:

I love that frame because it takes the pressure off. When you stop trying to fix, you make space for noticing, and when you notice your patterns, you start to get choices. What Asil learned and now teaches is that those early stories do shape how we spend, save and earn, but they don't define us. So once you start spotting the patterns, you get to decide do I stick with them or try something new? One of the first things a SEAL teaches is knowing your real numbers, not your dream income, but your baseline. That number is your financial GPS, because without it you end up flying blind and often you stop paying yourself. According to a SEAL, paying yourself even a small amount shouldn't feel like a luxury. It's more of a statement. It says this business is here to support me, not just scrape by. And when you start paying yourself, something shifts. You start looking at your spending in a different light. Asil talks about drawing this clear line by asking yourself is this an investment that helps me grow or just a coping expense that makes me feel better in the moment?

Speaker 2:

It's really important to start discerning the difference and understand, like what emotion is driving this. I actually customize decision trees with my clients, like here's a decision tree that you can filter a decision through and see where it lands and common things that are under it are like is this aligned with my values and, if so, what value is it? What emotion emotions driving this behavior? Is it within my budget more to identify the need that this purchase is, when so fully? Is there a different way to fulfill that need and which doesn't involve you spending money?

Speaker 1:

she also encourages people to keep it lean, to focus your resources on what actually brings in revenue. Asil admits she used to chase every idea and creative impulse, but over time she learned that passion doesn't always mean profit and clarity creates sustainability.

Speaker 2:

Get really clear on the revenue generating parts of your businesses that you need to invest in. I am somebody who comes up with a gazillion ideas at once, like I can literally start an idea book, and if I was to write every idea I have in that book, like I'll have at least 10 ideas every day. I just keep coming up with them. Reality is a lot of these ideas were either passion driven or creative driven, but not necessarily revenue driven, and a lot of the times I wasted money. So if I was to look back and get really clear, at least so that I can build a steady income and then from the additional revenues that I was making, I can certainly reinvest in the business and maybe go after some of these small creative ideas that still matter to me. It just feels like a better approach because you reduce financial strain from the beginning and give yourself a longer runway to grow your business, which minimizes financial regret and debt accumulation, especially when you're starting.

Speaker 1:

She also teaches clients to watch for their spending. Kryptonite For some it's a new software, for others it's courses, planners or coaching packages the things that feel productive but might just be emotionally comforting. The trick isn't to avoid them entirely, but to pause and ask is this moving me forward or just easing my anxiety? And if you've made a decision you regret, let it go. That's what she calls regret residue. Learn from it, but don't let it cloud your next choice. One last practice a CEO recommends Rename your accounts. Debt becomes past support and your emergency fund becomes your peace of mind fund. It sounds small, but language matters and the way you label your money shapes how you engage with it.

Speaker 2:

This woman called Barry Thesler who's a pioneer in financial therapy and she wrote a great book called the Art of Money, which is one of the books that first helped me further understand my role as a financial therapist when I made that decision. And she came up with this thing where you rename all the different expenses on a traditional budget, like a mortgage and tax and student loan, visa debt and all these different names. Just looking at it, you know, I can feel my body feeling constricted or my heart rate pacing faster because there's certain connotation associated with these things. So they're liberating ourselves by reclaiming. How we refer and relate to these symptoms is a mindset shift in itself.

Speaker 2:

So I had a client who was going through a transition phase where she had about a $1,000 deficit on a monthly basis, projected for at least a year. So looking at her savings account dwindle. I'm just going to give an arbitrary number. Let's say she had $30,000 in her account. So going from 30 to 29 to 28 to 27,000 to $28,000 to $27,000 on one basis was extremely anxiety-inducing.

Speaker 2:

Saying you're saving this window obviously creates that emotional response. But what if we open a new account and this account now is called your bridging or transitory account or whatever, and put in it the $12,K that you need for this year and now take the money from that, knowing that this is what the intentions of this account was. Automatically that released all the anxiety that was wrapped up in. I'm spending my savings and at the end of the day, we give power to how we refer to these things, and a lot of people have anxiety from spending their savings. That's what savings are for. You just have to redefine your relationship with it, but also redefine the intentions you had to drop them there to begin with what I learned from a seal is that we don't have to fix everything overnight.

Speaker 1:

We just have to be willing to look to notice the patterns, to make small, intentional changes, because when you start a practice, you're not just building a business. You're standing in front of a mirror, so what do you want it to reflect? Big thanks to Asil Elbaba for the insights in today's episode. You can learn more about her work and explore the reflection questions she shares with clients in the show notes.