_

For over 30 years, Shirah has helped private clients and businesses in finance, strategic planning, and human relations. Shirah served in a variety of financial and general management positions in large, small, and family businesses. She facilitated financial and strategic planning for Exxon, Tektronix and Pacific Bell Yellow Pages, and served as chief financial and operating officer for a startup software company. Shirah has taught courses in personnel, communications, team building, creativity, and spirituality as well as personal financial planning.

A graduate of Smith College with a B.A. in Economics, Shirah earned her MBA and Ph.D. from Stanford University Graduate School of Business in Finance and Organization and Human Behavior. She is certified as a Spiritual Director by Mercy Center’s Spiritual Director’s Institute in Burlingame, California.

Shirah resides in Alameda with her husband, Chauncey Bell, an international business consultant, and their children. Active in the community, she serves a number of spiritual, educational and charitable organizations, including the International Listening Association, Spiritual Director’s International, the Financial Planning Association, and the Ontological Design Community. She and her husband are currently writing a book on listening.

Shirah Alice Bell, Ph.D.

Shirah is a certified spiritual director and financial planning consultant. As founder of Living Wealth, she helps individuals develop their financial capabilities and capacity to take action in their private lives and in organizational settings, alongside their deep lifelong values and goals. She is also an associate of Financial Design Associates, through which she offers clients investment management services.

Shirah is committed to enabling people to choose to live their lives freely, with inspiration. She teaches people how to expand their thinking about wealth to include more than just money, and how to gain an awareness of how their thinking, rather than their circumstances, traps them. She helps her clients build new practices that allow them to focus on what really matters to them.

Shirah bases her work on continental philosophy and language action theory, which address the nature of human action and listening; modern neurobiology, which recognizes the importance of the body in learning; organizational and communications theory; and behavioral economics. She has studied and experienced a variety of spiritual, contemplative and coaching practices.