Financial success is not just about numbers; it is about confidence, clarity, and courage.

Nancy Griffin is the founder of Women, Worth & Wellness®, a connector and influencer who has spent decades helping women take control of their financial lives. Since establishing her practice in 1994 as a Private Client Wealth Advisor, Nancy has focused on empowering women to understand their health, wealth, net worth, self-worth, philanthropy, and legacy — so they feel fabulous, generous, joyful, confident, and fully in control of their futures.

In this episode, we explore the powerful relationship between net worth and self-worth, and why women must integrate health, wealth, philanthropy, and legacy into one holistic plan.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • Discover why personal health must be integrated into financial planning.
  • Know the difference between net worth and self-worth and why they are not the same thing.
  • Find out why you are your number one asset and must treat yourself that way.

“Net worth comes from all the different aspects of all those dollars in your life. Self worth comes from having the confidence that you’ve got all your affairs in order.”

– Nancy Griffin

Topics Covered:

01:27  –  Why personal health is foundational to long-term financial security.

06:10  –  How preventive and contingency planning protect both your health and your wealth.

10:54  –  Integrating health strategy into a comprehensive wealth plan.

14:56  – How women approach philanthropy differently — and why that matters.

17:44  – The rise of women as powerful and transformational philanthropists.

21:40  –  “You are your number one asset” — reclaiming self-worth in financial planning.

Key Takeaways:

“Self-worth comes from having the confidence that you’ve got all your affairs in order.” – Nancy Griffin

“You put the oxygen mask on yourself first so that you can be your best and therefore bring out the best in others with the strength that you have to offer.” – Nancy Griffin

“Women are really, really gonna be in the driver’s seat from both a powerful and transformational state of philanthropy.” – Nancy Griffin

“You are your number one asset. And women generally don’t make themselves the priority.” – Nancy Griffin

Ways to Connect with Nancy Griffin:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

(AI helped us put this together, so if you see any weird grammar or missed words—just know we nailed it during the actual chat.)

Nancy Griffin

Net worth comes from all the different aspects of all those dollars in your life. The dollars that you earn, the dollars that you invest to generate more dollars, the dollars that you set aside for your retirement, that’s all your net worth. That’s working on that whole side of the ledger. Self-worth comes from having the confidence that you’ve got all your affairs in order.

[Intro] 

Hello everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women, where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown. 

Sarah E. Brown

My guest today is Nancy Griffin. She is a connector and influencer. She attributes her success to personal courage, determination, and joy when focusing on women’s health and wellness. Thus, she created Women, Worth, and Wellness. 

Nancy enjoys every opportunity to inspire and inform women about their personal health and wealth, their net worth and self-worth, and philanthropy and legacy, so that women feel fabulous, generous, joyful, confident, and on top of their game every day. 

Nancy established Women, Worth, and Wellness in 1994 as a private client wealth advisor for her female clients and their families. Her overall purpose is to connect and influence for positive impact every chance she gets. Welcome, Nancy. 

Nancy Griffin

Thanks so much, Sarah. I am delighted to be here. 

Sarah E. Brown

Well, I’m excited about having this conversation primarily about the connection between health and wealth and net worth and self-worth. So before we jump into those two things, which I think are interesting concepts, tell me how you got into this business.

Nancy Griffin

That’s a very, very interesting story, and it’s one of life’s learnings for me. I would never, ever have been a wealth advisor if this one woman who got to know me and heard about what I was planning to do next said, Nancy, I’m not sure you want to spend the next 20 years of your life doing that. And she had been a VP at a big organization, had been given a package, outplaced, had a bag load of money, met with a broker, was not happy with the treatment that she was getting, so decided herself that she would get into wealth management. 

And so as a result of her being in wealth management and getting to know me a little bit better, she said, I think you really should take a look at this and consider it as a possibility. So of course, the next step is to meet with her manager, get some more information and decide if I want to go ahead. And he said, of course, before you get into the business, you’ve got to have some licenses. You’ve got to go and do that. 

And when you’re successful, come back and see me. So I came back, I said, I’m ready to go. And he said, so are we. We’ve got a fabulous training program, but you know what, Nancy? You’ve got to go find your own clients. We don’t give you any clients. Now, maybe longer term, once we see that you know what you’re doing and you’re doing it well, we might pass along a few that come to our attention. And that’s what I decided. 

And very simply, they said, you have to approach people to become your clients as ones whom you feel you can add value to their lives. So I felt I would focus on women. In the 90s was when women started to earn more and they were paying more attention to their whole investment portfolio and their whole wealth plan. So that’s how I got started.

Sarah E. Brown 

So did you find it challenging to find your initial clients?

Nancy Griffin

Yes and no, because you need to get your legs and you really need to. There’s a lot that you have learned and a lot that you bring to the table. And the key to your success is getting to know that individual client so you can bring all of your offerings to them in such a way that’s going to really enhance what they’re doing. One of the groups that I was working with at the time, one of the investment firms, had a program that was focused on women. 

So I took that program, you know, they’d done a lot of the different aspects of putting together a seminar. So I took that information, hosted the seminar and had a hundred and, I don’t know, it was like 56 women. It was huge. It was at a golf course. It was the first Saturday in November and all these women came. And so of course there, I had a whole bunch of prospects to follow through with, which is exactly what I did.

Sarah E. Brown 

Wow, very interesting. Did all of those women play golf?

Nancy Griffin

Well, that’s the next step. Because in Toronto, we have a fabulous hospital called Women’s College Hospital, over 100 years old. Obviously, if I’m focusing on women, I partnered with them, and I started their first golf tournament in 1994. 

Sarah E. Brown

Really? 

Nancy Griffin

And in 1997, you know, when you start a golf tournament, if you can get 20 or 30 people there, that’s great. Well, in 1997, we had 144, which is a full compliment. I think we had three good men. And we had so many gifts, so many donations. I mean, now it would be impossible to even get a golf ball donated by an investment firm because of all the conflicts of interest and blah, blah, blah. But it was a huge success. So to your point, yes.

Sarah E. Brown 

Very interesting. So what I really wanted to focus on today talking with you is the marriage that you have, the two marriages that you have of personal health and wealth and net worth and self-worth, because I just think they’re two incredibly interesting concepts. So let’s talk first about the combination of personal health and wealth and how you see that. 

[Advertisement]

Hi, this is Sarah Brown again, the host of the KTS Success Factor podcast for women. I hope you are enjoying this episode and gaining some tips and inspiration on how you can be happier, more successful, and experience less stress at work. If you would like to learn more about how you can take control of your career and do it your way, visit sarahebrown.com. 

There you will be able to download a free chapter from my book, Let Your Personality Be Your Career Guide. It contains information and exercises on how you can identify your unique interests, strengths, and needs, and translate that into career goals that are just right for you. Now back to this informative episode.

Nancy Griffin

Okay, well, again, working with women, as I sat with them one-on-one to understand their situation and how I can add my unique value, I found that these women had a disproportionate amount of responsibility in their family for their family’s health and well-being. It was like every family needs a nurse practitioner and its mom. Well, how much knowledge do these mothers have? But they’re expected to know. 

And so that’s when I started to partner with not-for-profit health-related organizations focusing on women’s health. I’m not the expert on any aspect of our health, but I know people who are. And the best thing I can be is a catalyst. So I would host these various events, my clients would bring their friends, and I would charge them a nominal amount. I would charge them $25 or $50, and those dollars would go directly to that not-for-profit organization. 

And in doing so, that introduced charitable giving, that also introduced net worth in terms of donating as a way to save on tax dollars. That’s a deduction, minimizes the amount of tax. Obviously, if you’re not donating a very large amount, the impact is not going to be significant. But my goal was to help women realizing the impact of charitable giving. 

And of course, fast forward 30 plus years later, now it’s philanthropy and legacy planning. And I’ll get into that in a minute. We know that heart disease is the leading cause of death for women, not cancer, which often women think it is. We also know that the symptoms of heart disease for women are quite different than they are for men. Women were considered to be little men. 

And so back to the nurse practitioner mom, how is she to know what those symptoms are if she hasn’t known the difference between what she’s previously understood and what new research is showing? And also building on the net worth, as soon as we’re giving or we’re sharing, more often than not, the biggest beneficiary is you, because you feel very, very good about sharing, helping others, donating, and that really, really enhances your own self-worth.

Sarah E. Brown 

Okay, I’ll get to that in a minute. So tell me how you combine this concept of personal health and wealth in your practice.

Nancy Griffin

Well, what I very quickly realized, and I’m sure your mother said the very same thing to you, as mine really emphasized, and that was, if you don’t have your health, you’re not going anywhere anytime soon. And we take our health for granted. We get up in the morning and we expect to just go. And we do go until something stops us. You know, it’s a pain, it’s a, whatever the incident is. And so that’s when, as I started to work with my clients, I started with health, and then wealth, realizing that a proper wealth plan includes a focus on your health. 

How can we anticipate and protect ourselves against a critical illness, a disability, a premature death, whatever. So it all circles back to let’s make sure we’re as healthy as we possibly can be to begin with. And again, it’s like the oxygen message we get every time we fly. You put the oxygen mask on yourself first so that you can be your best and therefore bring out the best in others with the strength that you have to offer.

Sarah E. Brown

OK, so planning to be healthy is at the core of what you’re doing. But also you mentioned something that sounded to me like contingency planning for in case something goes awry.

Nancy Griffin

Right. 

Sarah E. Brown

Ok.

Nancy Griffin

What I did was I focused equally on health and wealth. We need to be healthy to go forward and we need to have wealth to go forward and live the lives that we want to live.

Sarah E. Brown 

Got it. So I can tell you when I did my financial plan, my financial advisor did not talk to me about health at all. 

Nancy Griffin

Ridiculous. Because we don’t want to live our lives with regrets or surprises. 

Sarah E. Brown

Right. 

Nancy Griffin

And so what happens if you have a critical illness or you have a disability? You can’t go to work and you have to cover your monthly expenses. You may have to draw down from your investment portfolio. When in fact, if you’ve had insurance in place in anticipation of something possibly happening, then that’s a proper wealth plan, in my opinion.

Sarah E. Brown

Yeah, and my financial advisor did work with me on that contingency piece, you know, what if something happened, but not on the prevention piece. And I like the idea of getting that in balance. 

Nancy Griffin

Right. 

Sarah E. Brown

Yeah. OK, so let’s pivot a minute to the net worth and self-worth concept and why you marry those two concepts up.

Nancy Griffin

Well, net worth immediately, what comes to mind is money, dollars, bottom line, top line. And so net worth comes from all the different aspects of all those dollars in your life. The dollars that you earn, the dollars that you invest to generate more dollars, the dollars that you set aside for your retirement, that’s all your net worth. That’s working on that whole side of the ledger. 

Self-worth comes from having the confidence that you’ve got all your affairs in order. You know, have you got a current estate plan? And even if you’re 32 years old, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an estate plan. And so self-worth comes from having that confidence that you’ve considered all of those sophisticated aspects of a total wealth plan, including an estate plan. that has all of your affairs in order. 

Now, jokingly, I would say when my clients left my office, I would want them to understand what they have, why they have it, how it’s going to protect them, how it’s going to work for them. And they walk out with a level of confidence that if they get run over by a bus, as they’re heading into the parking lot, everything’s in perfect order. We’ve had all those conversations. We’ve anticipated all sorts of different things and all of their affairs in order. And that gives people a whole level of self-worth as it pertains to their net worth.

Sarah E. Brown

Got it. So it’s not, you’re not making the point that the more net worth you have, the more self-worth you have. 

Nancy Griffin

No, not at all. Not at all. 

Sarah E. Brown

What you’re doing is making the point that the self-worth comes from the fact that you have an accurate inventory of what you have and a plan in place to deal with it for your benefit. 

Nancy Griffin

And an understanding of what you have. I really, really have gone back and forth with people to understand what you have and why you have it. That gives you a whole level of confidence and an enhanced level of self-worth. You know, you’re proud of yourself that you’ve done the homework on your life.

Sarah E. Brown

Right. Right. Okay. And you’re controlling what you can control. 

Nancy Griffin

Correct. 

Sarah E. Brown

Okay. All right. And the third concept that you had is one around philanthropy. Do you find that women approach philanthropy differently than men do?

Nancy Griffin

Much differently. 

Sarah E. Brown 

How?

Nancy Griffin

First of all, they don’t think they’re worthy. They don’t think they have enough wealth to even be bothered because they consider that to be kind of a, excuse me, a man’s world. If they do have significant wealth and if they have stepped up to make a philanthropic statement, they don’t want to go public with it. I mean, how many hospital wings do we see named after a woman? Or big significant stakes in the community. 

Now, what we’re seeing more frequently, and this is a statement of our new reality, is you’ll see couples. You’ll see, you know, Joe and Mary Brown, whereas in the past it would have been Joe Brown only. But at the same time, a lot of my, and I just did a post on LinkedIn just 15 minutes ago from the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, That’s a really, really, really positive link to hook up with because of course what they’re doing is bringing a lot of information to the public about the whole new era of women’s philanthropy. 

And we know about the whole transition of wealth that’s coming or is occurring. and will come to an even greater extent, that women are really, really gonna be in the driver’s seat from both a powerful and transformational state of philanthropy. And of course, we’ve got women like Melinda French Gates and Mackenzie Scott being very public about who they are and what they’re doing, and being role models to younger women about, listen girls, this is something that you can do. We’re not telling you you should do it, but we’re certainly encouraging you to think about the power of women’s philanthropy.

Sarah E. Brown 

And so, you are seeing the situation change.

Nancy Griffin

Definitely. With a whole lot more to come.

Sarah E. Brown 

And do you find that you’re doing less education now, or do you still have to do a lot of education of women about their potential role in this?

Nancy Griffin

No, a lot of education, more and more and more all the time. Because one of the next steps, once you’ve decided that you want to be a philanthropist, is to whom are you going to direct your dollars? And then once you’ve identified to whom you want to direct those dollars, how effective and efficient are they at running that organization? So the word that I use frequently is discerning. You have to be exceptionally discerning and following through with your choice to make sure that those dollars are being directed as efficiently and as effectively as possible where you wanted them to go to begin with.

Sarah E. Brown 

Okay. So we’ve still got a lot to learn as women.

Nancy Griffin

A lot.

Sarah E. Brown 

But it’s interesting. So what is behind women becoming more and more of a powerhouse in the legacy field? Is it their own self-worth or they’re taking more of an interest in having more of a say in their family net worth?

Nancy Griffin

I think it’s a combination of everything because all of a sudden, I mean, women really didn’t set out to design that they’re going to end up with a big inheritance. A lot of this is just happening. And because it is so significant, you can’t ignore it. Like if your parents, if one parent has passed away and now the second person has, and you end up with a significant amount of wealth, if you haven’t learned earlier on how to steward your own wealth, how do you then take this whole gob of wealth and steward it effectively? You know, it’s just a big, huge responsibility. 

Now, more and more, I mean, in the past, parents were not public in those conversations about these are the sorts of things I’d like you to learn about. But more and more, parents our age are. You know, this is something that may become a reality for you, and these are some of the considerations to think about. Actually, on one of the other podcasts that I was on, the question is, well, how do we learn all this? Like, how do we learn this? 

And I said, well, everybody lives in a community where there’s a local hospital, and hospitals are frequently doing events from their foundation because they’re always looking for more support. and attend those. If it’s a webinar, obviously online, it’s even better if you go there in person because what you’ll end up meeting is other like-minded people who either are already a big supporter or they, like you, are learning how to become a supporter. And you’ll get a really good feeling or not about who these people are and what they’re doing. 

And there will be other people there that will be asking questions, ones that you may not have thought of. So a huge learning opportunity. And again, once people are interested in this whole topic, all sorts of great places to go to. And again, I’ll go back to the Women’s Philanthropy Institute on LinkedIn, sign on, everybody’s welcome. Everybody’s welcome. And there’s a plethora of info there.

Sarah E. Brown 

OK, so we’ve talked about several things. One is the link between personal health and wealth and the importance of incorporating health both from a preventive and a contingency perspective in your financial plan. And we’ve talked about the link between net worth and self-worth and that they’re not necessarily, what’s the word I’m thinking about? Well, the point is, your self-worth is not linked to your net worth. 

Your self-worth is linked to your understanding of where you are and how it can benefit you. And we’ve talked about the growing role of women in philanthropy and how that needs to get dialed into financial plans. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that women should think about as they’re thinking about their overall life and financial planning?

Nancy Griffin

Well, the Women Worth and Wellness brand is very holistic. And so if you care about health, that’s a great way to circle back from a legacy and philanthropic way to invest back in health. You know, sometimes certain things will impact certain families that they really want to engage in, like Parkinson’s disease. So, you know, there’s a way that you tie in a lot of different things all in that holistic brand. 

Sarah E. Brown

Got it. 

Nancy Griffin

I think actually the other thing that I haven’t emphasized, which I always do, and that is you are your number one asset. And women generally don’t make themselves the priority. It’s everybody else. And we love doing that. You know, we really do love looking after our families and helping them be the best that they can be. But you’re the number one asset. So you need to really, really pay attention to you. Not feel guilty, but be selfish. 

Really be selfish so that you really can be the best that you possibly can be. We all know that Taylor Swift Era’s Tour and how successful it was. If I could ever do a tour, it would be called The Worthy Tour. And it would be all about Women Worth and Wellness. It would. And it would be, you know, young girls and it would be seniors. It would be, it would be everybody. You’re worthy. You’re the asset.

Sarah E. Brown 

And that’s a great thing to end on. Nancy, thank you so much for being with me today. 

Nancy Griffin

You’re welcome. My pleasure. 

[Outro]

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes and learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown