Financial Behavior Workshops · Greater Los Angeles
Anna Ishkhanyan
Financial stress is a body problem before it's a budget problem. Anna teaches people to notice what their body is doing when money is on the line, and to stay steady long enough to choose differently.
The partnership
A sound plan fails when the person holding it is under pressure.
Your Legacy Begins Now teaches the thinking behind money behavior. That work changes what people know and believe. It doesn't always reach the moment that matters most: the tight chest at the register, the dread of an unopened bill, the urge that arrives faster than any budget.
Anna joined the Financial Behavior Workshops to address that moment directly. She's a Mind-Body Psychology Specialist, the founder of Balanced Mind, Inc. in Los Angeles, and a somatic wellness facilitator who works with individuals, couples, and groups. Alongside Brian A. Street, MSW, Financial Behavior Specialist, she leads the experiential half of the room.
Where her work fits
Every money decision runs the same five-step chain.
- 01Situation
- 02Thought
- 03 · Anna's focusFeelingThe body reacts
- 04Behavior
- 05 · Anna + BrianResultRead from both perspectives
Brian's cognitive-behavioral model maps the whole chain and retrains the thought. Anna works the third link, where a thought becomes a physical state and a physical state becomes an action.
She comes back in at the fifth. Brian and Anna review results with participants together, so every outcome is read from both a man's and a woman's perspective. Men and women often carry money stress differently, and a household rarely changes when only one of those views is in the room. Participants leave with tools for the mind and the body, and with a fuller picture of what their results mean.
Expertise
What Anna brings to the room
Mind-body psychology
How belief, attention, and stress show up as physical states. Anna helps participants trace a bodily reaction back to the thought that produced it, so the pattern becomes visible and workable.
Somatic practice
Body-based skills people can use anywhere: breath pacing, tension scanning, grounding, and a deliberate pause between urge and action. Simple enough to use in a checkout line.
Multilingual facilitation
Anna works in English, Armenian, Russian, and French, opening the room to Los Angeles communities that standard financial education often misses.
The discipline underneath
Presence and restraint are trainable skills.
Anna's practice also draws on a centuries-old contemplative discipline built around one skill: attention. Its students train to stay fully present with a sensation or a desire, and to let it rise and settle without acting on reflex. Financial behavior change depends on exactly that capacity.
Different vocabulary. Same muscle.
In the workshop
What participants do with Anna
- Settle first. A short regulation exercise opens each session so people can think clearly about hard numbers.
- Learn their own signals. Guided practice identifying the physical cues tied to spending, debt, and avoidance.
- Build the pause. A repeatable technique that pairs with Brian's thought-reframing tools at the moment of decision.
- Take it home. Brief daily practices that support the accountability follow-up after the workshop.
For banks, universities, and community organizations
Bring both halves of the work to your people.
Brian and Anna deliver Financial Behavior Workshops across Greater Los Angeles, with programming suited to community development and CRA-aligned initiatives, student success offices, and nonprofit partners.
Workshops are educational. They don't constitute therapy, medical care, or individualized financial advice.