For more than two decades, Sheila Baroro built her career around the language of finance: budgets, accountability, planning, performance and sound decision making. As a CPA and finance executive, she managed multimillion dollar budgets across the nonprofit and public sectors, developing the kind of technical expertise that comes from years spent close to the numbers.
Yet experience eventually led her to a more complicated question. Why can someone understand money, earn well and make responsible financial decisions, yet still feel anxious, fearful or unsettled around it?
For Baroro, the answer required looking beyond spreadsheets.
Today, as the founder of Rise & Rebuild Academy, a certified Trauma of Money Practitioner and transformational speaker, she is bringing that perspective into conversations about financial wellbeing. Her work examines how life experiences, trauma and deeply held beliefs can influence the way people earn, spend, save and think about money.
When Financial Knowledge Is Only Part of the Picture
Much of conventional financial education begins with practical instruction. Create a budget. Reduce debt. Save consistently. Invest for the future.
Those skills matter. Baroro’s background as a CPA makes her particularly aware of their importance. But she believes financial knowledge can have limits when the behavior behind a person’s decisions remains unexplored.
A person may know exactly what responsible financial behavior looks like and still struggle to follow through. Someone else may reach conventional markers of success while carrying persistent anxiety about scarcity, security or self worth.
Baroro’s own experience helped bring that distinction into focus.
“My own journey taught me that financial success isn’t always the same as financial peace,” she says. “That’s why my mission is to help people heal their relationship with money, release the limiting beliefs shaped by trauma and life experiences, and create lives of confidence, freedom, and true abundance.”
That realization eventually expanded the direction of her professional work.
Bringing Trauma Into the Money Conversation
As a certified Trauma of Money Practitioner, Baroro works with a methodology that considers how emotional experiences and learned beliefs can shape financial patterns.
The premise adds another layer to financial education. Instead of treating every money challenge primarily as a knowledge problem, the approach asks people to examine where certain behaviors and beliefs may have originated.
For some, money may represent safety. For others, it can become connected to fear, control, shame or identity. Those associations can be difficult to recognize because they often develop long before a person consciously begins thinking about financial strategy.
Baroro’s work through speaking, education and consulting is designed to help people recognize those patterns and develop a healthier relationship with money. Her finance background remains central to that work, but it now sits alongside a broader understanding of personal transformation.
That combination has also shaped the direction of SMB Finance Consulting and Rise & Rebuild Academy, where financial expertise is connected with education around financial wellbeing and personal growth.
A Finance Career Takes on a New Purpose
Baroro brings more than 20 years of finance leadership experience to this chapter of her career. She has worked with multimillion dollar budgets and understands the discipline required to manage financial resources responsibly.
Rather than leaving that experience behind, she is applying it to a different kind of financial conversation.
There is a practical tension at the center of her work. Money is measurable, but people’s relationships with it are rarely that simple. A balance sheet can show what happened financially. It cannot always explain why someone repeatedly makes a particular choice, why earning more fails to create a sense of security, or why a seemingly straightforward financial decision carries an unexpected emotional weight.
Those questions are increasingly part of Baroro’s public speaking.
She is currently available for conferences, organizational programs, podcasts and community events across Canada, with virtual presentations available internationally. Her Trauma of Money keynotes and workshops are offered throughout the year.
The subject gives Baroro an unusual bridge between two areas that are often discussed separately. She can speak from the perspective of a CPA who has spent decades working with financial systems while also addressing the human experiences that influence financial behavior.
For audiences accustomed to hearing that better money management begins with another spreadsheet or strategy, her message asks them to consider something more personal: before changing a financial pattern, it may be worth understanding where that pattern came from.
Learn More
Learn more about Sheila Baroro’s financial consulting work through SMB Finance Consulting and explore her financial wellbeing and personal development work through Rise & Rebuild Academy.