Kim Stephenson

People often ask about my name, Kim, assuming it's short for something or a nickname; because male Kim's are pretty rare (think Novak, Basinger or Kardashian, depending on your age). My usual line in public speaking is that my parents wanted a girl, or possibly a dog.

Maybe that made me a bit different, because I should have been really conventional. I was born and raised in London, England, went to a public school (which is a private school anywhere else in the world), and was expected to go to university like 95% of my school friends and become a doctor, lawyer or accountant.

But I went to work in finance (mainly because I did pure and applied mathematics, economics and English at A-level) and became a financial adviser. I did all the exams that were around then (the Chartered Insurance Institute and the newly formed Personal Finance Society ones) and got the qualifications in 1991 that, in 2013, they finally made compulsory for people giving advice (up until then, you didn't really need to have any idea what you were doing). I was good at what I did, I dealt with what are now called Ultra High Net Worth clients, professional firms, expatriates, the technically sophisticated. And I was bored. I didn't know quite what I did want, but I knew that I didn't want to keep doing this when I grew up.

So after about 15 years of finance (and over 1,000 clients) I tried to find something interesting, and settled on psychology - not the dodgy beard and even dodgier middle-European accent, lie on the coach and tell me about your mother type, but business psychology. Things like, what makes a team effective, how can you be a good leader, are great employees born that way or is it coaching and development, how do you identify high potential people? For the first time in my life I actually worked at studying, since for all my school and finance exams I put in the absolute minimum effort - often none at all. I worked hard enough in psychology to get a distinction at masters level (and got a post-grad diploma in computing simply because the human machine interaction aspects fascinated me) and qualified as a psychologist in the minimum time that's possible. I got a job and worked with helping people reach their potential - so much more interesting and complex to deal with people with all their unique qualities than interchangeable and boring money.

And as I worked, I found masses of people, intelligent, mature people, who were totally baffled by finance. They stressed over it, hated discussing it with their partners, dreaded talking about it to their children and made patently stupid decisions about investing, the company pension scheme and so on. They all thought that they needed to know about money - but I knew about money, and their problem wasn't their knowledge of finance, it was their knowledge of themselves. They had no idea what they really wanted, what they needed (not always the same thing), what would make them happy or what their loved ones really wanted from them. And they couldn't set sensible plans about money or stick to the ones they did make, not because they were stupid, but because they didn't understand how their own minds worked.

I started getting invited by charities to help them, to do talks to professional institutes, to write pieces for the media and I realized that I could do something that few other people could do, explain the money but also explain the people, and why they didn't do (and often were wise not to do) what the "experts" told them.

Now I have a portfolio career. I do some lecturing, tutoring and assessment in academic settings, do standard business psychology work like executive coaching, development and selection, team-building and top-team decision making, consult and speak on the psychology of risk and decision making and coach, write and speak on personal finance. I'm trying to influence the way that financial education is arranged (it's still all about money, and that's the simple and unimportant bit, it needs to focus on the people who are important and complex). And to apply the principles to adults as well as children.

Because the point about money is that it's just a tool. It's not a goal, or a reward or anything like that, and it doesn't make you happy. In fact, being obsessed with material possessions, trying to be the richest person in the graveyard is a pretty good way to be miserable (and make everybody around you miserable too). However, one of the things that does make you happy is to have goals that are bigger than simply acquiring riches. And my goal is to make a difference to how happy people are and how they use their money as a tool to be happier. That's why I do a lot of the work I do, talk, lecture, and write books.