Chapter Five: Renewing the Spirit

In Chapter Four we found that sharing special experiences creates powerful relationship bonds.  When we exit normal routines and experience each other in fresh ways, our relationships are deepened and renewed.  This, in turn, provides new ways to experience ourselves, which we progressively internalize.  What this means is that one of the most powerful paths toward expanding the self is cultivating our ties to others.

There are times, however, in which we also require renewal from within:  renewal of the spirit.  Perhaps we are burned out from responsibilities.  Perhaps what we're doing no longer feels meaningful and fulfilling.  Perhaps we have made effort after effort, only to meet one obstacle after another.  Spiritual renewal is an awakening of our larger selves:  it provides us with an expanded experience that places us on fresh life paths.

Let's take a look at how we can move beyond the mundane--beyond our day-to-day ego concerns, re-new our souls, and reinvigorate our trading.

Spiritual Renewal and Our Environment

In the last chapter, we saw how honeymoons provide deeply meaningful experiences that affirm and enhance relationship bonds.  When we enter a unique, stimulating, exciting environment with another person, the shared experience becomes a source of bonding in itself.

Some of the greatest sources of spiritual renewal can be found in travel to unusually beautiful settings.  One of the most memorable vacations Margie and I have taken has been to the fjords and glaciers of northern Alaska.  Surrounded by vivid blue icebergs, rare eagles, and one pristine vista after another, we felt invigorated and inspired.

What is it about the experience of nature that touches us spiritually?

In the majesty of mountains, canyons, glaciers, and oceans, we immerse ourselves in the surrounding grandeur.  We become less filled with our own preoccupations.  It's not uncommon to sense ourselves as small in relation to towering peaks, vast plains, and endless skies.  Interestingly, this smallness is experienced positively, as an inspiration.  During those moments, we feel connected to a larger world of beauty and significance.  I recall my breath taken away when first standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.  Somehow, in that moment, fretting about what someone said about me or how I did on a particular trade would seem absurd.  Taking in the grandness of the canyon, I felt above the pettiness of daily concerns.

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Changing Our Environments:  A Powerful Path for Accessing the Soul

In earlier chapters, we've seen how radical change requires a shift in our states of consciousness.  When we are in our usual states of mind, body, and emotion, we tend to think, feel, and do the same things.  That keeps us tethered to the ego and its needs for gratification.

When we undergo powerful experiences, whether in therapy or in close personal relationships, we access new parts of our selves--and that opens the door to meaningful change.  What we'll see in this chapter is that shifts in our environment can be every bit as powerful in connecting us to the soul as shifts inspired by relationships.  Indeed, artists have known this for centuries!

As a rule, more radical shifts of environment bring more profound shifts in consciousness and greater opportunities for renewal.  Note, however, that environment does not have to solely refer to the world around us!  We can change our internal environments as well.  A common tradition in the world's spiritual traditions is fasting.  During a fast, we step back from the physical world and its gratifications.  Once we get past our initial hunger, we find ourselves in a more quiet place--no sugar highs and lows, no feeling stuffed and sluggish from overeating. It is no coincidence that when monks have wanted to immerse themselves in prayer--and when religious people have sought forgiveness and repentance-- they have fasted.

As the quote at the top of the page suggests, silence can be another powerful change of environment.  Indeed, I know many portfolio managers who will leave the trading floor and go into a quiet office when they need to think deeply about ideas.  Silence doesn't just turn down the volume on the world around us.  It can also amplify the volume on our own internal processing.  Many great intuitive hunches emerge from stillness, as we step back and perceive patterns in what we've been observing.

These considerations raise an important question:  What is your trading environment?  Does it put you in touch with the best parts of yourself or the worst?  Is your trading environment renewing or does it help keep you locked in fruitless routine?  Some of the best ways of accessing and enhancing our insides involves changing the outside.  Often, we do the wrong things because we're in the wrong environments.
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It is not by coincidence that many spiritual retreats are held in the beauty of nature.  Immersion in such settings stimulates thoughts and feelings about the Creator of such grandeur.  The smallness we feel can be part of a connection to a greater reality.  Absorbing that larger reality fuels a sense of meaning and purpose that inspires and energizes us.

Ari was a trader I worked with who found himself losing interest in his career.  He was making money, but the daily grind, following markets in Asia and Europe and trading U.S. hours, were taking a toll.  He expressed particular unhappiness over the time he was not spending with his  young son.  "I'll never have these years back," he lamented.  His worry was that he would miss his son's childhood.  He seriously entertained the possibility of retiring from managing money and finding a career with more normal hours that would allow him quality time with his family.

The problem was:  there was nothing that appealed to Ari as finance did.  He loved investing and the quest for opportunity.

His solution to this dilemma was a radical one.  He reviewed his trading and discovered that a large proportion of his profits occurred in equities and a large percentage of those profits came from trades in which he traded market reactions to events (such as Federal Reserve meetings; earnings announcements; data releases).  He radically shifted his strategy to event trading and ignored opportunities outside U.S. hours.  Instead, he sized up his best event opportunities from 9:30 AM to 4 PM EST.  He engaged a data analyst and worked out strategies for optimally entering into event trades and scaling in/out of them.

This move ensured that Ari could control his trading hours and efforts, so that the demands of trading could not control him.  In focusing his trading on what he did best, he literally recreated his trading environment.  This gave him not only greater control, but also the opportunity for greater personal fulfillment.  In an important sense, Ari already had the environment that spoke to his soul.  He simply needed the modification of his work routines that could enable him to tap into what was there all the time.

Renewal of the spirit requires transcending the self--and very often that means transcending your usual trading processes.  This is an important dynamic.  If you're working solely on self-improvement, you'll never move beyond your self.  To expand the self, we must move beyond the small self that is ego and find the larger self that is soul.  To access our greatest strengths, competencies, and values, we need to exit all that is routine.  Immersion in the ordinary can never grant us access to the extraordinary.  Ari found his fulfillment by redefining his trading routines and honing in on his true edge in markets.

The Power of the Work Environment

For some people--consider Gina in Chapter 3--the work environment generates experiences of inspiration and renewal.  Consider the entrepreneurial startup, where there is a common cause to build something meaningful.  What makes startups special is not just their financial potential, but their potential to achieve great new things.  A while back I spoke with the principals of a money management fund that was pioneering methods for investing in markets.  There was a tangible excitement to the conversations.  Partly this was because of the innovations in managing capital, but also because the founders recognized that they were performing a social good.  If people could achieve superior returns from their retirement dollars through these new methods, everyone could be a winner.  The promise of doing well by doing good energized everyone; work there spoke to the soul, not just the head and heart.

Contrast this entrepreneurial enthusiasm with the all-too-frequent lack of engagement experienced by employees in established companies.  The sense of being a replaceable cog in a wheel among sales, clerical, and service employees, for example, creates a workplace distinctly lacking in spirit.  I have encountered a shocking number of medical professionals who are considering leaving their professions because of burnout.  One physician, pointing to schedules that had him rotating among four exam rooms throughout the day, lamented that what brought him to medicine--the opportunity to get to know patients and provide them with continuity of care--was diminished by the new healthcare system and its economics. 

Work that alienates us from our deepest values drains us of energy.  Work that speaks to our deepest values invigorates us.  We radically renew the spirit when we act upon our most treasured beliefs and priorities.  That inspires; it provides a momentum stronger than any superficial attempt at "motivation".

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Can We Renew Our Spirits When We Are Losing Money?

Perhaps nothing is more essential to the spiritual renewal of traders than dealing with losses in ways that are empowering.  It's not just the usual thing of controlling emotions and sticking to trading processes.  Yes, those things are important, but, in and of themselves, those will not renew us.

As this article suggests, what stifles much of our creativity and initiative is a fear of failure.  I see it with portfolio managers at hedge funds; traders at prop firms; and independent traders.  They focus so much on not losing money that they fail to take proper advantage of opportunity.  Nothing is more soul-killing than trading to not lose.  And yet that is what happens when we place stop loss points artificially close to our entries; when we quickly exit trades that go our way; and when we trade such small size that winning trades end up feeling unsatisfying.

What ignites our spirits is the ability to perceive opportunity.  When we draw down, we need to find the opportunity in the mistakes we made and the things we failed to do.  That means turning every losing period into a learning period.  Our losing trades may teach us how to manage positions differently, or they may point to the need to manage ourselves differently.  The key is to change win-lose to win-learn.  When losses can make us better, they also can energize and provide us with optimism.

A good manager in a company motivates employees by giving them realistic goals to hit and by rewarding and acknowledging them for their progress.  That is how we want to manage ourselves as traders.  We want losing trades to make us better:  that can be exciting!

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As we've seen, not just our relationships, but our environments themselves are mirrors.  How we experience ourselves is partly shaped by how we experience our settings.  If we are surrounded by beauty and inspiration, we absorb that spirit and bring it to our work and relationships.  If we are surrounded by routine and indifference, this too helps shape our emotional context.  Placing ourselves in the right settings and recrafting our existing settings is a powerful strategy for sustaining and renewing the spirit.  The right settings might be ones we travel to, or they might be vibrant workplaces, meaningful houses of worship, or inspiring social organizations.  Everything in life, from our settings to our social networks, is a mirror:  a gateway to experiencing--and ultimately transcending--ourselves.

As we saw in the last chapter, the transition from solo, isolated work to teamwork can be a powerful environmental shift.  For those of us with strong social needs and interests, being stuck in a cubicle is the surest path to stagnation.  Once we change the social environment of our work and approach tasks and goals as teams, we tap into new motivations and fresh sources of gratification.  So often, when work feels humdrum, boring, and routine, it's because we're not working the right way:  we're not in an environment that brings out the best in us.  How we structure our trading hours defines how we will experience them.  Working closely with others allows for mentoring and enhanced learning and development.  This greatly enhances the odds of trading success.  When we work within trading teams or adopt trading partners, we create new roles and fresh sources of fulfillment.  For traders, this can be an important component of spiritual renewal.   

Finding Renewal of the Spirit in Rest

Suppose you are reading a sheet of music and come to a symbol that looks like this:   


That is known as a "rest".  It is a pause between notes.

Pauses occur in speech as well.  When a speaker talks about a topic, or a singer raises his or her voice--and then suddenly pauses--we take note.  The pause accentuates the music or the words that follow.

Such pauses are not mere empty spaces.  They punctuate experience.  They are a context in which meaning occurs.

Suppose we were to speak without ever pausing.  Our speech would become incoherent, a ramble of words.  Imagine music with no rests.  It would be a jumble of sounds.

So it is with life.  Our rests, the time we take for not-doing, punctuate our lives.  The right kinds of rest provide a context for experiencing life's meaning and purpose.

Many people find that they immerse themselves at work, but they achieve their most creative insights away from their desks:  during walks, vacations, or perhaps even while taking a shower.  The active mind analyzes, but the mind at rest synthesizes.  It is only when we step back from collecting and joining puzzle pieces that we can gain a sense for the picture being assembled.

Years ago, as a graduate student in psychology, I decided to enter therapy and see what it was like to be "on the couch."  The problem was, I couldn't figure out what to talk about!  On the surface, everything in life was going fine.  Still, I felt I was missing something; that there should be more.

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The Meaning of Restlessness

The need to renew spirit often shows up as a kind of restlessness...a nagging sense that something is missing or not quite right.  One need not be anxious, depressed, or frustrated to yearn for a radical renewal.  Many years ago, when I was dating, I got to the point where I had a free weekend and just couldn't bring myself to ask anyone out.  Options were there, but just didn't seem worth the effort.  One date was like another:  it was repeating the same experience many times over, not creating a deeper experience.  The restless feeling of wanting to go out but not wanting to do the same old dating was my body's cue that I needed something more.  I needed a relationship.

Similarly, boredom can be a powerful indication that we need something more from our ordinary experience.  After all, boredom is a kind of intellectual and emotional restlessness--a sense of lacking, not just stimulation, but also fulfillment.  I have worked with experienced traders who find themselves going through the same routines day after day, with little fresh stimulation.  One trader I worked with taught himself a new market to trade simply because he wanted an invigorating challenge.  He was bored looking at the same information, the same ways.  The new market reawakened his interest in trading, but also created an unexpected synergy.  Patterns he saw setting up in the one market helped him anticipate patterns in his core market.  This re-energized his bread and butter trading and helped his results.  For him, boredom and restlessness were cues to shake things up and transcend his normal doing.  

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After thinking long and hard about my upcoming therapy session, I went to bed and had an odd dream.  I was in a playground and climbed the stairs of a very tall slide.  Once I reached the top, I noticed a dial.  I realized that I could set the dial between 1 and 10 and that would determine the speed going down the slide.  I thought this was interesting:  you could determine your own "coefficient of experience."  I set the dial for 5 and went down the slide comfortably.

When I awakened, I knew exactly what I needed to talk about.  I was living life at a "5".  Everything, from my studies to my social life, was comfortable.  I needed a higher "coefficient of experience."  That insight, achieved while at rest, crystallized everything I had been thinking about--but hit with particular emotional impact.  From that time forward, I vowed to push beyond my comfort zones:  in the gym, in relationships, in my learning, and most particularly in my therapy.

On the surface, it would seem that we could be most productive if we never slept.  Of course, we know that would be a disaster.  Sleep deprivation leads to a loss of focus and ultimately disrupts normal thought and action.  Abraham Maslow was absolutely correct when he posited a hierarchy of needs:  we must satisfy more basic needs before addressing higher ones.  If we don't rest body, we devastate the mind.  Without the energy of mind and body, can we truly revitalize the spirit?

It is not by accident that research finds power naps to be helpful in both productivity and creativity.  I consistently find that breaks during stretches of work time allow me to return to the work with a fresh perspective and renewed motivation.  As in music, the pause of the rest focuses us on what is to come.  It provides a rhythm and coherence to our experience.

The Principle of Alternation

An observation I've made of very productive, happy, successful people is that they very effectively alternate activities.  For example, they might work hard in the morning, go to the gym midday, and then engage in different work in the afternoon before engaging in evening social activity.  They are active--most of the time they are doing something--but there is always a break between activities, and each activity exercises a different life function.  Thus they let their minds rest while they exercise; they leave work behind when they socialize.  Every new activity rests some older one.  They are highly productive, because--in a sense--they are always fresh.

This idea of alternation as a sequential resting of functions is particularly important.  We find alternation when we break our days into workdays and evenings, into work weeks and weekends, into work time and vacation time.  We alternate between effort and rest with waking and sleep; we alternate days of weekly effort with days of sabbath worship.  It is the punctuation of the time of our lives that provides us with the rhythm that ultimately renews us.  When we exercise one set of functions at a given time, we allow others to be at rest.  Activity and rest thus occur in tandem, creating unusually high levels of productivity and fulfillment.

The key to achieving effective alternation is to think of the functions that are being exercised during each activity and to give those a rest during subsequent activities.  In trading this might mean devoting morning market hours to executing trades and following the market and then midday hours to a team meeting over lunch, performance review at the end of the day, exercise and family time in the evening, and research and idea generation in the premarket morning hours the next day.  

Without such alternation, we excessively exercise our capacities.  It would be as if we spent our entire gym time exercising a single set of muscles.  Eventually, we would become sore and, beyond that, we could do damage.  Similarly, when we do not rest our cognitive, social, and emotional capacities, we tax them and eventually burn out.  Traders like to think of themselves as possessing "a process".  The reality is that the effective trader alternates processes to keep each one at peak performance levels.  Burnout is the ultimate result of the failure to renew ourselves.  

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The Spiritual Meaning of Sabbath

Many of the world's great spiritual traditions--Christianity, Islam, Judaism--consider one day of the week to be a Sabbath--a non-work period.  In many religious traditions, the Sabbath is linked to the creation of the world and the day of rest in which the Creator beheld all that had been created.  Sabbath is therefore a refrain from creation, a day of rest.

The idea is that we punctuate our time by working and creating and then by resting.  It is during our rest time that we celebrate all that we've accomplished.  Sabbath time is also a time for attending a church, mosque, or synagogue and connecting to the Divine.  It is an opportunity to escape worldly routine and contemplate larger meanings in life.  Similarly, periods of prayer or meditation during the day can punctuate our experience and connect us to feelings of gratitude and purpose.

Sabbath is much more than not-doing.  It is a celebration of what has been and an immersion in the joy of the present.  Each week we engage in creation and re-creation, and each week, like the Creator, we step back and behold the world we've helped make.  A treadmill is a wonderful tool for exercise and fitness, but only if we get off the machine and recover.  Life's treadmill can increase our fitness and push us to new levels of health and well-being, but only if we rest, recuperate, and regenerate between workouts.  Just as important as exercise is recovery.

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This is the key to living life with a higher "coefficient of experience."  We can operate at full throttle and zip down life's slides in one area of life if other areas are simultaneously at rest.  Imagine firing on all cylinders, where life consists of meaningful and challenging work, vigorous and energizing physical activity, stimulating social contacts, and close experiences of love.  In this mode, our world becomes a special place.  That speaks to more than happiness or even satisfaction.  It provides us with an ever-renewed spirit, for we continuously encounter powerful sources of stimulation, joy, and meaning.

What in your trading generates stimulation for you?  Joy?  Meaning?  An effective trading process is not so unlike an effective life process.  We need meaningful, challenging activities, regular rotation among these, and periods of rest and renewal.  A trader who is bored, who is uninspired, who (over)trades merely for stimulation doesn't just lack discipline.  They lack a vitalizing set of trading processes and alternation among these.  If your trading doesn't challenge and inspire you, it will drain you...and eventually your account.

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Resources

How we treat the body shapes our access to spirit.  As mentioned earlier in the book, a useful perspective is offered by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy regarding the importance of managing our energy, not just our time.  In the same vein, see the book by Loehr and Schwartz on The Power of Full Engagement.  

Here's a valuable perspective on using the body to renew the spirit, summarizing the research on intermittent fasting and its benefits.  See also this article.  Note that meditation is a kind of fasting as well, when we restrict outside stimuli and internal chatter.  When we refrain from the material, we discover the spiritual.  Fasting is a great example of renewing the spirit by not-doing.     

An important aspect of spiritual renewal is the experience of awe.  See the excellent research summary on awe from the Greater Good Science Center.  See also perspectives on the benefits of awe and on the "moral elevation" that accompanies awe and other self-transcendent emotions, according to Jonathan Haidt's research.  Finally, a TED talk from Neil Pasricha offers a personal perspective on the awe behind awesome.

Our personal lives can become important catalysts for spiritual renewal.  Here is an account of the cross-cultural journey Margie and I took when we adopted little Macrae.

Experiencing our work as a calling, not just as a job or even a career, is an important aspect of ongoing renewal.  See the work of David Bryce Yaden and colleagues regarding "being called" for higher purposes.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS - Burnout occurs when we fail to renew ourselves spiritually.  Alternating periods of activity with periods of rest enables us to continually renew ourselves and avoid burnout.  Very successful people structure their time so that they are always activating areas of strength at the same time that they are resting other functions.  This brings unusual energy and productivity.  Our trading routines can renew us if we move from one set of activities to others, always resting some functions while activating others.  A good trading process alternates rest and recovery with intensive efforts.

PRACTICAL EXERCISE - Construct your daily and weekly calendars so as to maximize energy and productivity.  You can do this by scheduling your most effortful activities during your highest energy periods and your most routine activities when you are most depleted.  When constructing your schedule, make sure you alternate activities through the day so that you create maximum variety, resting one set of functions (such as analysis) while engaging in others (consulting with colleagues).  Rate each day in terms of energy level, focus, and productivity, so that you can identify the most renewing ways of structuring your time.
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