The Financial Return on Knowing Yourself

Frugal Chic® #49: I Went on a Wellness Retreat. Here’s the ROI.

I joined a cult.

Okay, not really, but I got invited to a “wellness retreat” which feels entirely off-brand for the woman who makes finance-related content. Bear with me though, because what I came out of it knowing was completely unexpected.

In this issue:

• Why wellness and finance are more linked than you’d think

• The NEST personal branding framework

• Breathwork and the 8x8 method

• The 1:1 coaching that genuinely changed me

• The ROI: what I’m actually changing

I spent a few days in Crete with a group of creators, founders, and marketers. The schedule was a mix of yoga, cold plunges, personal branding workshops, and 1:1 coaching. The aim: bring ambitious people together in an intimate environment to connect, share ideas, and collaborate. Full transparency, I was invited with no obligations to post anything - but I felt so inspired by it that I wanted to share.

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We tend to think of finance as the cold, soulless topic. Something entirely separate from the world of yoga mats and morning rituals. And equally, wellness, to me as the Frugal Chic®, has always felt slightly gimmicky. Vibration plates, LED masks, bone broth at 7am. I partake in some of it, but I’ve always thought the overall message has been diluted by consumerism, this creeping idea that you can buy your way to feeling okay.

But here’s what I couldn’t keep ignoring: our nervous system and our sense of self are more intrinsically linked to our financial behaviour than we like to admit. So much of the way we handle money has very little to do with information and a lot to do with identity, self-trust, emotional regulation, and the beliefs quietly running underneath everything. You can know how to budget, how to invest, and how to build wealth, but if your nervous system is permanently fried or your self-concept is shaky, that will show up in your financial life somewhere.

I’m fortunate to have financial abundance now. Increasing my income dramatically changed my life in very real ways. But money fixes money problems; it doesn’t fix everything else. What I realised at this retreat was that I’d been carrying a lot of what the workshops called “limiting beliefs,” and some of them were quietly running the show.

Equally, wellness has been largely commodified and turned into a $224 billion industry.¹ But that doesn’t mean at Frugal Chic® we have to partake in the same way. Simply making more intentional choices about where you spend your time, energy and money is part of it.

In the last issue, we talked about unlearning unhelpful money stories, like “I’m bad with money.” This retreat pushed that thinking further: if you don’t understand yourself properly, nothing you build on top of it will feel aligned. It was like doing a money audit for my confidence and career direction. Here’s what I learned.

The emails you don’t skim

It was a random workday. I was in my light-work window, the part of my day I keep for emails and admin, typing away at a LinkedIn post when an email notification dropped. “The Growth Collective: Wellness Retreat.” I clicked, intrigued, then immediately forwarded it to my talent manager: “is this legit?”

Then I spotted Sedge Beswick in the deck they’d sent over. I’d just done a panel with her at the NXT LVL event. That was enough for me.

The retreat was organised by a startup called The Growth Collective, a members club connecting people in the founder space with senior mentorship and the right contacts, through events, retreats, and an online platform.

On paper, the agenda looked like workout after workout. And to be honest, I’m not the sportiest person. I go to the gym for mental clarity, not to get results. So arriving as someone only six months out of their 9-5, surrounded by founders and people with decades of experience, it would be fair to say I was braced for imposter syndrome to make an appearance.

What I felt when I was there couldn’t have been further from that fear. Instead, three other women in the room, including Sedge herself, felt exactly the same way. At one point she said I ought to be the one giving the presentation. It’s funny how as women, no matter what we achieve we can still be susceptible to imposter syndrome.

Overall, there were three pivotal workshops we had that changed the way I see myself and personal brand.

Build a 1% personal brand

The first workshop was led by Sedge Beswick, a British marketing strategist, speaker, and founder who’s held senior roles at companies like ASOS, built multiple businesses, and is now one of the most recognisable voices in the personal branding space. She’d made a video about me and Frugal Chic® a while back, and I’d spoken on her NXT LVL panel. What strikes me about Sedge is that she’s genuinely omnipresent; she has so many fingers in so many pies while also navigating motherhood, which I find so incredibly impressive.

Picture the setting: a room of mostly women, a Greek hotel, blue skies through the windows, that kind of warmth that kisses the skin. The room was full of people who wanted to build, who were mid-build, who were trying to figure out what they were even building.

Sedge opened with a story I wasn’t expecting. A £24 million private equity deal, negotiated while pregnant. A boardroom full of traditional finance types, men in suits, with presentations that effectively framed her pregnancy as a liability. She was told to buy a £10,000 Rolex just to be taken seriously in the room. The whole room gasped. She shared it not to invite sympathy, but as context for everything she’d learnt about building something that’s actually yours, on your terms.

This isn’t about posting better on LinkedIn.

This is about how you’re read in rooms that decide your income.

The reframe that stayed with me most: most people treat personal branding as a content problem, a posting frequency problem, a niche problem. Sedge’s argument is that it’s a clarity problem. Until you know your values and can prove them consistently, you’re just producing noise.

Her framework is built on three circles:

1. Who you are in real life. Not a curated version, the actual one. She used the example of swearing on a podcast, it’s the parts of you that you are unapologetic about. If there’s a gap between who you are online and who you are in a room, people feel it, and it costs you trust. A compliment I always value is if someone says to me “you know what? You’re exactly like you are in your videos.”

2. What you can prove. Not what you claim, but what you can point to with evidence, stories, and results. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a PhD, a Forbes 30 under 30 list or an MBA, sure those things are great, but most don’t start out with them, they’re a product of the work. Instead, lean into your specific expertise in an area of life where you had a significant transformation.

3. How consistently those two things align over time. It really is about showing up long enough. Most people give up after starting but those who stick it out long enough are the ones who become an ‘overnight success’ because no one was watching before.

She also laid out the NEST framework for monetising a personal brand:

Networking — building relationships that open doors you can’t access alone.
Events — putting yourself in the right rooms where opportunities naturally circulate.
Speaking — turning your ideas into paid authority.
Thought Leadership — consistently sharing perspectives that position you as someone worth paying attention to.

Something that resonated with me was that her own content process is deliberately unglamorous; voice-noting LinkedIn posts on the go, testing ideas before overthinking them, using platforms as live testing grounds rather than performance stages. This is something I relate to as a former perfectionist who now believes that the sooner something is out in the world, the sooner you can iterate.

What I took from Sedge’s session was that a strong personal brand is not built by trying to look impressive, but by getting clearer on who you are, what you can genuinely stand behind, and how that translates into actual commercial value. In other words, the goal is not just to be visible, but to be legible, memorable, and monetisable.

Breathwork with Leo Oppenheim

The next session was in a yoga studio. Candles lit, a jute mat laid out in the centre of a circle, stones and crystals arranged around the space. Before anything started, Leo burned what I think was sage. This kind of ritual, burning sacred plants to cleanse a space before ceremony, has roots in indigenous traditions across the Americas and beyond.

Leo Oppenheim is a breathwork, yoga, sound, and movement facilitator based in Manchester who draws from ancient traditions including pre-Columbian and indigenous Peruvian culture.

We started seated, setting an intention. Then we lay down, put on eye masks, and the music began. The breathwork moved through different patterns over the course of an hour: eight seconds in, eight seconds out, breath retention, then shorter cycles of four counts each. The patterns shift the chemistry of your body in a way that’s difficult to explain until you’ve done it.

Leo had prepared us for what to expect. Tingling in the hands and legs, involuntary muscle contractions, sudden movements. The body processing something it’s been holding. A few people in the room had visible emotional releases. The environment was deliberately judgement-free, which made that safe.

I didn’t have anything dramatic. What I had was stranger, and more useful.

Behind the eye mask, with the music moving through me and my breath doing something I’d never consciously asked it to do, I started seeing thoughts and memories, not in a distressing way, but almost cinematically. And the strange thing was, I wasn’t in them. I was watching them from the outside. Like looking at my own life through the eyes of someone with no stake in the outcome.

By the end, the room was quiet. Someone described it as relief, which is exactly the word. Not euphoria, not a breakdown, just a quiet settling. A sense of: oh, there I am.

I felt more present afterwards than I had in months. Not because anything had been resolved, but because for an hour I’d stopped performing my own life and simply observed it.

If you want to implement this yourself, try this:

1. Try it for 5 minutes, not an hour: you don’t need fancy crystals or anything really - just yourself and slowing down.

2. Track what comes up afterwards: just a short sentence about what you saw, how you felt - it doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s for you to notice patterns.

3. Try it when you are tempted to self-soothe with spending: If you feel that itch to buy something because you’re tired, flat, insecure, or overwhelmed, pause and breathe first. You may still want the thing afterwards, but at least the decision will be yours, not your nervous system’s.

4. Practice observing your life from an outsiders perspective: The most useful part of the session for me was not some huge emotional breakthrough. It was being able to watch my thoughts from the outside, almost cinematically, without immediately getting swept up in them. That alone is a skill. If you can observe your patterns without judging them, you can actually change them.

5. Treat nervous system regulation as part of financial wellness: optimise for slowness, intentionality with what you allow into your life through what plans you say yes to, what you buy, who you surround yourself with.

1:1 coaching and insights workshop

This was the session that surprised me most, partly because it looked, on the surface, like a standard corporate personality test.

We’d filled out the Insights Discovery assessment in advance, based on Jungian psychology, the idea that we each have a primary way of engaging with the world driven by four energy types: cool blue, earth green, sunshine yellow, and fiery red. My result came back as Observer; analytical, considered, and introverted in its orientation.

But before we even got to the group session, we had 1:1 coaching calls, which I’d never done before.

I’ll be honest with you: it was more emotional than I expected. Jess asked what my goals were, which sounds simple enough, and then gently kept going. What came up, sitting there answering questions I’d been too busy to ask myself, was the realisation that I hadn’t been taking care of myself properly. Not in a dramatic way. Just the quiet, accumulative neglect that happens when you’re optimising hard for output. Saying it out loud to another person made it real in a way that thinking it to myself never had.

The group session involved sitting in a circle opposite our psychological opposites, and then doing something uncomfortable: telling each other honestly what it’s like to work with or be around the other type. There was something liberating about being honest about what introverts felt frustrating with extroverts.

The extroverted, action-oriented types said about us: we can be too introspective. Too cautious. We can miss opportunities because we’re still processing while the moment has passed.

Because I’ve always framed my tendency to think carefully before moving as a strength, and it is, sometimes. But there’s a version of it that becomes avoidance dressed up as reflection. A version of “I need more time to process this” that is actually just fear of being wrong before everything is perfectly understood.

The framework isn’t about putting yourself in a box. It’s about recognising the box you’re already in, and deciding, consciously, when to step outside it.

The ROI of wellness

Every good investment deserves a returns breakdown. Here’s mine.

The underlying theme across all three sessions was the same question: do you actually know who you are and how you want to show up in the world. When was the last time you questioned thoughts and actions that happen on autopilot?

Here’s what I’m doing with what I found:

• Stopping optimising for noise. Sedge’s workshop reframed something I’d been doing without realising: chasing reach over resonance. Going forward I’m doubling down on values, impact, and my story, the parts of what I do that are actually mine, rather than what performs well in a given week. The compounding effect of a clear, consistent brand is one of the highest-returning assets I’ve built; I just need to stop diluting it.

• More intentional wellness, specifically breathwork. Not as an aesthetic or a routine to photograph, but as a genuine tool for nervous system regulation. If our emotional state drives our financial behaviour more than we’d like to admit, then investing time in regulating that state is, by that logic, a financial decision.

• Leaning into my type, and working better with my opposite. Knowing I’m an Observer means I can stop treating my need to process as a flaw and start using it intentionally. It also means I can actively seek out the people who are wired differently, the ones who move fast, who decide in the room, because the gap between us is where a lot of good decisions live.

None of this required a retreat in Crete. But something about being away, the warm air, the slow mornings, the fact that your phone barely mattered, made it easier to actually receive what was already true.

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1. (£134 billion-£175 billion+) as of 2022/2023 data, Global Wellness Institute