Chapter Three: Discovering Yourself by Uncovering Your Self

An important implication of Chapter Two is that radical renewal is not about becoming a different person.  It is about uncovering the person that has been there all along.  Naomi was a playful kitten, but her neglect suppressed that facet of her personality.  She learned to respond to her environment with fear and self protection, stifling her affection and curiosity.  Given the opportunity to play as a little huntress, she became a loving family member.

We become stuck in life when the roles we occupy stifle the strengths we possess.  

We become unstuck when we find fresh roles that tap into underutilized strengths.

This has important implications for what we do in financial markets.  A radical renewal of trading--and life--occurs, not when we become someone different, but when we uncover who we have been all along.  Let's do a deep dive and see how that happens.

The Roots of Self Sabotage

For years, as I worked as a psychologist, I also found myself drawn to the challenge of trading financial markets.  As I mentioned in the previous chapter, I loved the research, the challenge, the ever-changing puzzles of markets.  To master that complexity struck me as rewarding in more than a monetary sense.

When I stepped down from my full-time work at the medical school, I finally took the opportunity to pursue trading on a full-time basis.

To my great surprise, I hated it.  Yes, I liked the intellectual challenge, and overall I made money.  But sitting in front of a screen all day, interacting with no one else, felt like death.  Even when I was profitable, I felt unfulfilled.

So I began to interact online with other traders, sharing what I saw in markets and helping them with the emotional roller coasters that inevitably accompany risk and uncertainty.  That I enjoyed--and indeed indulged in so much that I missed one trading opportunity after another!  I was so busy assisting other traders that I failed to act on my well-honed plans to make money.

From all appearances, I was sabotaging my trading career.  A friend even suggested that perhaps I was fleeing the uncertainty of markets by retreating to the more familiar role of being a helper.

That wasn't it, however.  

Sitting in front of computer screens and focusing all day on making money stifled the very strengths and passions that brought me to psychology.  I didn't feel afraid of losing money in markets.  I felt empty even when making money.  The role I had assumed in markets diminished my experience of myself.  It was altogether the wrong life mirror.

This was the exact opposite of my experience of becoming a parent.  The smallest interactions in those early years were alive and special.  When our youngest son Macrae became frustrated as a toddler, I picked him up, ran my fingers over him, and told him that the "evil spiders" were going to get him.  He became wrapped up in the game and soon was a hugging, giggling ball of love.  It was the Naomi transformation: the role of playing overcame the momentary frustration, creating a renewed opportunity to experience our bond.  Before long, whenever he felt frustrated, he called out, "Let's play evil spiders!"

When we are in the wrong roles, our strengths still seek expression.  This is the great irony:  what often sabotages us are not our weaknesses but our strengths.  Focusing on the needs of people was completely counterproductive to being absorbed in financial markets, but that was precisely where my focus needed to be!  My career renewal only came when I recognized the strengths suppressed in the trading role and used those to craft a truly fulfilling role as a performance psychologist in the world of finance.

What if your problem patterns are triggered by strengths seeking expression?  What if the answer to your stuck-ness isn't to discover anything new, but uncover--and be!--who you actually are?  For years, I engaged in dating relationships that we less than fulfilling.  I had it in my head that I should have a partner who was career-oriented, intellectually challenging, and fiercely independent.  None of those people made me happy, however, and I never fully invested myself in those relationships.  It was only when I met someone incredibly loving and caring toward her children and cats (and who just happened to be smart and career focused) that I was able to pour myself into the relationship that has been special for the past 36 years.

Sometimes renewal comes from becoming the fullest version of ourselves, not the person we think we should be.

Identifying Our Paths

It's difficult to uncover our strengths if we're not aware of their existence.

This is why so many change processes occur within relationships:  parenting, teaching, marriage, counseling, interactions with clergy, and self-help groups.  Others perceive what we are blind to, and our interactions with them mirror what we have missed.

Gina sought my coaching help after she seemingly sabotaged her new job at a firm, scattering her efforts among multiple projects.  As a result, she missed several key deadlines.  She was viewed by her supervisor as lacking discipline and, by the time she came to me, she felt like a failure.  

When I spoke with her, it became clear that she found her side projects to be fascinating.  She described efforts to help her team and long hours spent delving into possible solutions to team challenges.  It was clear that this was anything but an unmotivated, undisciplined employee.  With that in mind, I shared with her creative outlets that grabbed my interest--and that sometimes interfered with getting pressing work done!

At the mention of creativity, Gina's eyes lit up and she talked about art projects she was working on and how she loved to solve problems while listening to favorite music.  The day to day work of the office was important, she explained, but involved little originality.  It was problem solving that excited her.  How did I manage to get routine work done, she wondered.  

I explained that I try to find creative ways to do routine things.  For example, in one work setting I was required to keep notes of my meetings with people, but I dislike paperwork.  So I figured out a format for the notes that allowed me to build a database and identify what was most helpful for different people.  I love research and learning new things, and that made the paperwork meaningful.

With that example, Gina excitedly mentioned an idea to turn one of her work responsibilities into a team effort.  She also talked about joining other team efforts to help colleagues with their duties and to learn how they approached tasks.  I encouraged her to pursue this and she took the initiative to reach out to several co-workers.  The resulting arrangement led to greater efficiency (and happier supervisors!), ultimately improving everyone's work.

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Spirituality and Our Strengths

The ego seeks fun and stimulation.  The ego wants gratification-- and it wants it now.  What speaks to the soul is not so much fun and excitement, but fulfillment.  Our strengths are found in what we experience as meaningful and fulfilling.  Those things may not always be fun.  Indeed, it is often the pursuit of short-term comfort and pleasure that derails our path toward ongoing fulfillment.

For better and for worse, we are wired to pursue pleasure and avoid pain and discomfort.  Our spiritual challenge is to craft a life path in which we derive enjoyment from the activities that are fulfilling over the long haul.  We might derive stimulation from navigating the ups and downs of financial markets, but our greatest fulfillment might come from refining our sources of edge in markets--and discovering new ones.  As in Gina's situation, connecting with others to conduct research and review performance can add social, interactive dimensions to aspects of trading that might otherwise feel dry and dull. 

The spiritual path is not one that disengages from the world, but instead engages on the basis of strengths that make life meaningful and fulfilling.  A powerful formula for success is to find fun ways of doing the right things--in life and in markets.  If trading grounds us in who we are and what we do best, then our pursuit of the material can fuel our development of the spiritual:  our development as a trader becomes one and the same with our personal development.

Please note closely:  If you look back on your life, you'll see certain themes recur.  In different ways and in different situations, we encounter the same challenges.  These themes define our path.  Our spiritual mission is to develop by traversing that path.  When trading is successful, it is a way of fulfilling that mission.  When it is unsuccessful, it diverts us from our path.  Successful trading comes from the soul because it is part of our path, part of what we're meant to be doing with our lives.  Joseph Campbell, drawing on the power of myth, points out that all of us face a heroic journey.  A life lived well is one that navigates that journey meaningfully, in a way that enriches ourselves and others.  All great work is accomplished in sacred space.

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Had I addressed Gina as a lazy or undisciplined worker, I would have simply perpetuated the role definition that was stifling her.  By shifting gears and exploring creativity in her work and mine, we opened the door to an energized conversation in which she could fashion her own solution.  Gina's work was renewed because it was redefined--and it was redefined because it tapped into what she did well and found most meaningful.  

New Roles, New Life Paths

This wasn't the end of Gina's story.  Working well with others on team projects brought her to the attention of management.  Less than a year after being identified as an employee lacking focus, she was promoted and hailed as a rising star.  Her new responsibilities took her away from the work she found dull and allowed her to lead her own team.  

As a team leader, Gina knew all too well what it was liked to get bogged down in tasks as a junior member.  That led her to reach out to teammates and include them in the most interesting and challenging parts of her work.  This brought unusual loyalty and productivity from those teammates and a deep fulfillment for Gina.  Just as the process of writing and getting feedback from editors about my writing helped me internalize the identity of a writer, Gina's work with her team led her to experience herself as a successful leader.

What started as a new role snowballed and created a fresh life path.  In the right roles, we discover and exercise our strengths.  That enables us to find a radically new directions--in life and in trading.  In the wrong roles, our strengths are stifled--and that can create conflict and poor performance.

    
The key idea is that we find our path by focusing on what truly grabs us.  What grabs us is what provides us with well-being:  positive and affirming experiences of ourselves.

Research in what is known as positive psychology finds that well-being has multiple components:

*  Happiness and having fun;
*  Meaningfulness and fulfillment;
*  Energy and stimulation;
*  Relationships and closeness to others.

When experiences fill us with happiness, fulfillment, energy, and affection, we enter a qualitatively different state.  We feel more alive.  We become more creative, more productive, more passionately engaged in what we're doing.  Conversely, when we are bogged down in roles that stifle who we are, even basic tasks become effortful and drain us of energy and enthusiasm.

Well-being stems from what taps into our souls, not just our egos.  

The presence of well-being--the soul-quality of our experience--is the best guide to finding our paths of renewal.  This is because well-being comes from the exercise of our most fundamental competencies, interests, and values.  When new roles tap hidden parts of our identity, paths to renewal are revealed--and those can lead to new, exciting directions.

This has immense implications for trading.  Often, often we fail at trading because we do not leverage our strengths in generating ideas and managing positions.  We follow the trading methods and frameworks of others and never blaze our own paths.  If the process of trading does not lead you to feel fulfilled--not just happy over the latest profits--you know you are not on a path of renewal, not on your hero's path.

Tapping Into Our Solutions

So how do we figure out the strengths that can place our lives and trading on new and exciting trajectories?

One short-term approach to counseling and therapy stands tradition on its head.  Most of the time, therapy begins with an assessment of a person's problems and a plan for working on those.  In solution-focused brief therapy, the emphasis is on exceptions to problem patterns.  The idea is to explore what we are doing right when our problems are not occurring.

Marlon was a student who came to my student counseling office describing problems with negative thinking and depressed mood.  This interfered with his studies and social life.  He decided to reach out for help when a girlfriend broke up with him, citing his "negativity."

It turns out that we experience plenty of occasions when we are not dominated by our problems.  Those exceptions often are the result of things we are doing well without recognizing it.  Exceptions frequently occur at times when we manage to tap into our (hidden) strengths.  

When I asked Marlon when he felt at his best, he told me about his involvement in martial arts, where he had recently advanced in tournament competition.  In his lessons and tournaments, he explained, he felt strong and effective.  He loved the competitive aspect of martial arts, the emphasis on self-discipline, and the energy he felt when practicing.

Did Marlon experience himself as a "warrior" at school or when he was at home?  Not at all, he explained.  He felt that his parents didn't understand him and that he would never utilize most of what he was learning in school.  Most of the time he was unhappy.  He worried that his negativity would prevent him from ever having successful romantic relationships.

"So we have Marlon the warrior," I pointed out, "and Marlon the worrier.  When else does the warrior Marlon come out?"  

Notice what's happening here.  Marlon has entered a new relationship--and a new role--by coming to counseling.  If I use our time together to explore all the ways in which he feels negative and inadequate, I will only reinforce that experience of himself.  On the other hand, if we can turn the conversation from worrier to warrior, our relationship can provide a very different mirror.

Thus we explored other activities that lead to strong and effective feelings, from helping friends and working out to meeting new people.  It turned out that Marlon often felt like the warrior, only to see those feeling dissipate when he was engaged in classwork or homework.  I proposed constructing a "warrior schedule" by which he could organize his time.  Every morning and evening, he had to engage in activities that energized him:  workout activities, martial arts activities, social activities, activities with friends.  School, we decided, was his "day job".  It was outside of academic hours that he would maximize his warrior self.

This particular solution approach drew upon a method known as behavioral activation, which alters negative experience through ongoing positive activity.  Doing more of what makes us feel happy, fulfilled, energized, and close to others intensifies the mirroring impact of these activities--a great example of how doing impacts viewing.  Research finds that this is a powerful treatment for depression, as the energy from activating positive experiences creates a positive feedback loop, fueling further positive activities and undercutting negative mood states.

Marlon's breakthrough came in two phases.  First he invited a couple of friends to his dojo and showed them his practice session.  They were fascinated and ended up joining a beginner's class.  He helped mentor them, which cemented the friendships even further.  Second, out of the blue during a final exam, he found himself using a centering technique that he had learned for his martial arts tournament competition.  He found that the fixing of his vision, repetition of a phrase, and regulation of his breathing helped him see his opponent better and feel his opponent's vulnerabilities.  The same technique helped him focus on difficult items for the test and recall information he had studied.

This latter experience was a game changer for Marlon.  It was the first time he had the opportunity to approach his academic work as a warrior.  We explored ways in which his competitive skills could help him in learning from lectures, preparing for tests, and recalling information during exams.  For the first time, he began to enjoy the classroom, as he found a way to turn it into a competitive challenge of self- mastery.  His grades improved, his experience of himself was enhanced, his social circle widened--all by tapping into who he already was at his best.

It bears repeating:  Marlon did not need to change who he was.  In uncovering who he was at his best, he discovered a better life path.

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Meditation as a Path to Our Strengths

A practice that we find across the world's spiritual traditions is meditation.  There are many methods of meditative practice, but all involve several elements:  1) withdrawal from the day-to-day world; 2) self-regulation of activity, including movement and breathing; and 3) increased cognitive focus.  The net impact of meditation is to remove us from ego concerns and the usual distractions of daily life.  This allows us to access other aspects of our selves and, indeed, provides a powerful path to connecting with our hidden capacities.

In his book describing religious experience, William James describes "mystical states of consciousness" as a common element in the world's spiritual traditions.  Such states are experienced as ones of deep understanding and appreciation: ones of meaning and significance.  We do not create these experiences; rather, they come to us when we are in a receptive mode.  In that sense, the mystical experience is not so different from the creative insight.

Many religions define the Divine as both transcendent (creating and supporting the world) and imminent (a sacred part of our selves).  The Bible describes a process in which we were created from Divine breath, in the image of the Divine.  From this perspective, the mystical state is perhaps not so mystical.  It is our contact with a higher part of our selves: one that can find beauty, meaning, and purpose in the everyday, material world.  Meditation can be much more than a tool for relaxation and focus.  Emma Seppala notes a number of evidence-based benefits to loving-kindness meditation, for example.  When we meditate with loving, generous images and thoughts, we expand our own capacities for empathy and connection to others.  I have found that meditation with a focus on the warmth I feel when holding and playing with our rescue cats has enabled me to be much more accepting of my own trading (and life) foibles.

As we shall see when we explore the path of radical peace, meditation--and its close relative, prayer--is one effective tool for shifting our state of consciousness, tapping into, and expanding our strengths.  In pulling back from the world, whether on long walks in nature, trips to breathtaking destinations, or sitting cross-legged and breathing mindfully--we can tap into our life's themes and discover/uncover who we really are.  As Shunryu Suzuki points out, the Zen mind is a beginner's mind:  one that approaches self and world with humility.  He points out that the first step in finding "the marrow of Zen" is sitting perfectly, with complete stillness of mind and body.  In this state of radical openness, we can perceive ourselves, others, and markets in new ways.  Somewhere, in what we do with meaning and passion, there is a masterpiece.

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There is an important lesson here:  At some moments in our lives, we are already free of the routines and patterns that hold us back.  The odds are good that, as for Marlon, those are occasions when we are doing what we love, what speaks to us.  Those exceptions to being stuck--our experiences of happiness, fulfillment, energy, and closeness--are worth reverse-engineering.  They are powerful gateways to renewal.

What if, underneath all the poor, reactive, and random trading, there is a foundation of talent and ability?  Suppose you could study, study, study your best trades and uncover what you do when you win?  Suppose, like Marlon, you study yourself in the areas of life where you are passionate and successful and learn to apply those strengths to trading?

It's great to correct your mistakes, but it's in your shining successes that you can find your path to fulfillment--and your future in markets.  Hidden in your winning trades may be the key to your development as a trader.  So many developing traders look for one edge after another, one market after another, one trading style after another--all in a frantic search for success.  The reality is that our best trading is hiding in plain sight, when we explore what we're trading and how we're trading it when we're most fulfilled and successful.  

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Resources

*  The VIA Institute on Character offers a free questionnaire that assesses such character strengths as wisdom; courage; temperance; and transcendence.  The Positive Psychology Program offers this larger list of 92 strengths that might kick-start your reflection on what gives you energy that you can tap into in your trading.  One way to approach the list is to think of the three most fulfilling activities you've experienced in life and check the strengths that were directly expressed in those activities.  That will tell you a lot about what you need to tap into to do your best trading.  Research suggests that the degree to which we access our strengths impacts our quality of life and our work performance.

*  Here's a post on emotional intelligence and its relationship to trading results.  This post lists 24 key strengths and relates them to trading success. See also this post on solution-focused trading.  It's very important to identify what has made you successful in your life up to the point you started trading.  Very often those success factors are what we need to incorporate into our trading processes.

*  This important article points out that our energy level is a major determinant of whether we sustain access to our strengths.  So often, we focus on managing our time rather than managing our energy.  See this useful Harvard Business Review article from Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy.  As we will see a little later in this book, a different way of uncovering our greatest capacities is to review the life events--the peak experiences--that have most inspired us and given us energy.  

*  Traders tend to focus on personality strengths--and those are important--but equally important to trading success are cognitive strengths.  How we process information is key to our success in generating ideas and identifying profitable market patterns; see this post for a helpful explanation.  Think about your greatest successes and how you accomplished those during your schooling, in your work, and in your relationships.  The odds are good that carefully reviewing your greatest achievements will illuminate your strengths in processing information.  It is those information processing strengths that you want to incorporate into your trading process.  A great frontier in trading is exercising the brain functions most closely associated with our trading successes.

*  Here are worthwhile posts on four ingredients of trading success; three process elements associated with success; three questions to ask of any market; and three best practices of successful traders.  Suppose you rewrote those articles to describe the specifics of what you do when you trade at your best.  From those articles, you could create a report card to grade your trading each day or week.  That would be uncovering your best self and using it to inspire improvements in your future trading.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS - Many times we fail in our undertakings when what we're doing and how we're doing it does not ultimately play to our greatest strengths:  our values, talents, skills, and interests.  Successful trading lies at the intersection of market opportunity and our particular strengths.  That sweet spot will accelerate our development by energizing our learning and sustaining our focus.  What provides us with our greatest well-being points the way toward our optimal development.  In our successes can be found a blueprint for our ongoing success.

PRACTICAL EXERCISE -  Revise your trading journal to include peak experiences that you encounter:  experiences of happiness/joy; meaningfulness/fulfillment; energy/enthusiasm; and connections to others.  Clearly identify what you were doing to achieve those peaks and look for common threads.  The idea is to make the activities that yield well-being an ongoing part of your trading process.

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