Conclusion: Renewing Life, Renewing Trading

In the preceding chapters, we've explored many facets of renewal and ways in which we can revitalize our work, our bodies, our relationships, and our experiences of life.  We have seen that renewal is self-sustaining when it becomes a lifestyle.  We cannot directly manufacture meaning, purpose, and joy as we would flip a light switch, but we can water the ground from which these grow.  The lives we lead can be more or less fertile, more or less revitalizing.

This takes us back to the previous chapter.  Very often, renewal begins with discontent.  We survey our lives and find something missing.  Yes, we're getting our work done; yes, we have friends, family, and fun.  But, at times, a nagging sense intrudes:  Is that all there is?  Isn't life supposed to be something more?  Am I truly living up to my potential?

Spirituality begins with the intuition that there is, indeed, something more:  something above and beyond day-to-day needs and activities.

A major thesis of this book is that, when we don't have that "something more"--when our lives do not yield joy, peace, and fulfillment--those unmet needs intrude upon our trading (as well as onto other areas of life).  We overtrade and take imprudent risks, not because we necessarily have ongoing psychological problems, but because something is missing in our lives and we're trying to compensate for that with the making of money.  Too often, unmet emotional and spiritual needs translate into a need to make money.  Driven by those attachments, we make buying and selling decisions that are not wholly in our control.

The first step in renewal is the recognition that trading by itself cannot substitute for a broader connectedness and purpose in life.  When that nagging sense that there must be something more to life reaches a crescendo, we come to the realization that we simply cannot continue life as usual.  Good enough is not good enough when we have had a taste of so much more.  It is discontent that prods us to explore the world beyond the ordinary.  That search opens the door to what is meaningful, providing paths to those peak experiences that reorganize and rejuvenate the self.

So how, specifically, can we build a life of renewal and renew what we do in financial markets?  Drawing upon positive psychology and the world's great spiritual traditions, let's explore a few building blocks and practical steps forward.  

Finding a Teacher/Mentor

If we examine how people grow within the traditions of the world's religions and spiritual disciplines, we invariably find teacher/student relationships.  This can be study with a guru; a spiritual relationship with a priest, pastor, imam, or rabbi; or it can be structured in practice undertaken with a master, as in the martial arts. 

The relationship with an advanced practitioner serves several roles.  First, it teaches skills and encourages their practice and internalization.  Second, it provides role modeling, inspiring those who are developing.  Third, as noted earlier in the book, it serves a mirroring function, creating the opportunity to experience ourselves in new and powerful ways.

An effective strategy for finding mentors is to seek out people who possess the qualities you most admire and wish to cultivate for yourself.  It is important that the teacher be someone you like, but also someone you respect.  We give our best efforts when we are living up to an ideal, when we are inspired.  If a teacher embodies our deepest vision for what we can become, we have a sturdy foundation for renewal.

Many times, teachers mentor groups of people, which creates opportunities to join a community dedicated to mutual development.  Through relationships within the community, we're able to find multiple role models and a wide range of mirroring experiences.  A great test of the merit of a teacher and community is the degree to which you find diverse role models within the group.  If the teacher demands strict uniformity and attracts "true believers" to the community, then the odds are increased that this is a cult, not a group truly devoted to self-transcendence.  The goal is to find your own path, not to become a means toward the ends of others.

If you look at training programs at graduate institutions--programs of education, psychology, nursing, medicine--you'll typically find that these expose students to multiple mentors and varied methods of practice.  That diversity allows each trainee to find the right role models and identify the areas of practice that best capture their skills, talents, and interests.  In pursuing my spiritual and religious development, I have joined several congregations and attend a variety of programs and services.  I begin with the premise that each of the traditions has something positive to offer.  My job is to identify and connect with the mentors and practices that are most deeply inspiring.  They are there to teach and guide me.

There is an important role of intuition in identifying the mentors that most speak to us.  Intuition is a form of pattern recognition where our insight is first experienced and only later consciously identified.  When we respond to a mentor or a teaching with curiosity, fascination, and inspiration, that is our intuition speaking to us.  Those are situations worth exploring.

If you want to cultivate a facet of your life, construct a "gym" that will allow you to exercise that facet.  Learning relationships with mentors, sustained day by day, week by week, become a kind of gym.  We will never develop our spirituality unless we exercise our spirit.  The goal is to build our capacity for the meaningful, purposeful, connected, and joyful life.  When we are living meaningfully, purposefully, closely, and joyfully, our minds expand.  We see things that remain hidden to our cluttered minds.  Our ultimate edge in markets is not a particular setup or algorithm.  Our edge springs from our capacity to perceive markets creatively and uniquely.

The breadth of our vision is intimately connected to the depth of our soul.

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The True Meaning of Our Trading Edges

In my first book, The Psychology of Trading, I described my college experience playing pinball machines as an analogy for my trading.  Over the subsequent years, that analogy has proven more accurate than I could have imagined.

Overall, playing pinball on various machines at various locations, I was a so-so player.  Sometimes I would win, often not.  What I found, however, was that individual machines had their idiosyncracies.  If you played one machine long enough and tried different strategies, you could exploit those idiosyncracies and consistently win.

With my favorite machine, the key was shooting the ball and capturing the ball on the right flipper.  Once captured, I could aim the ball through a chute and score points.  The ball would then come down the table and I could capture it on the right flipper again and send it through the chute.  Rinse and repeat.  The key was shooting the ball just hard enough to ensure it would come to a flipper and not drain down the center between the flippers.

The challenge occurred when the ball came to the left flipper rather than the right.  It wasn't possible to shoot the ball through the chute from the left flipper.  Passing the ball from left to right was hazardous, leading to many balls drained down the center.

(This is a great analogy for learning trading.  It takes many attempts and "drained balls" to figure out what works.)

The breakthrough occurred when the ball would come down to the left flipper and I would simply let the ball hit the flipper without trying to flip the ball.  I have no idea how I hit upon that idea.  You would think that passively letting the ball hit the flipper and not actively keeping it in play would result in losing the ball down the center.  But that's not what happened.

When I let the ball hit the left flipper, it bounced over to the right flipper!  I couldn't believe it.  So my strategy consisted of either capturing the ball on the right flipper or letting it hit the left flipper so that I could then capture it with the right flipper.  Either way, the goal was to flip the ball through the chute, accumulate points, keep doing that, and earn lots of free games.

Now here's the thing.  If I tried other strategies, I did not win.  If I played other tables, I did not win consistently.  I had found a way to beat that particular table by not doing what everyone does.  Everyone hits the ball with their flipper.  I refrained from using the left flipper and that allowed me to score points consistently with the right one.

Success as a pinball player required that I accept what I was good at.  I found an anomaly and I exploited it.  I wasn't really a good pinball player in any absolute sense.  I was good on that machine.

So it's been with my trading.  

Overall, I'm a so-so trader.  Across markets and time frames, I sometimes make money, often don't.  After printing out one minute charts and data for years, I discovered patterns involving buying and selling pressure organized as market cycles.  When those cycles peaked at lower price highs, I sold.  When they bottomed at higher price lows, I bought.  Rinse and repeat.  The hit rate has been favorable, particularly during times of day with the greatest liquidity.  Basically the pattern exploits the trapping of buyers and sellers, profiting from their need to cover positions.

When I've tried trading other markets or strategies, I lose that edge.  I have found one set of patterns to exploit.  I'm good at that.  Accepting that frees me to explore fresh edges, the various quirks of different pinball machines.

So what does that have to do with spirituality?

Every edge in markets--and in life--is finite.  Staying grounded in opportunity means accepting our limitations.  If we need to trade, we invariably will move beyond our edges and create losses.  When we find something we're good at, whether in pinball or trading, we've received a precious gift.  Appreciating that gift can keep us grounded.  We're less likely to part from it if we deeply appreciate its value.

My spiritual mentors have taught me to double down on the good of who I am and the strengths of what I do.  In cultivating my life outside of trading, I've come to a greater appreciation of what I do well in markets and also what I don't.  None of us are good at everything in life or markets; that's why it's critically important for us to truly live the things we are good at.

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Finding Your Quiet

One of the key ideas of this book is that all change--and most specifically change related to the renewal of our lives--is mediated by shifts in our states of consciousness.  When we are in our usual states of mind, we do the usual things and experience the usual results.  Nothing changes.  It is when we alter the modes with which we process experience that we become able to tap into latent strengths.

As I surveyed texts on comparative religion and spirituality in preparation for this book, one finding popped out:

Every major spiritual tradition incorporates procedures for quieting the mind, focusing attention, stilling the body, and engaging in new behaviors while in this altered state.  

Whether it's meditation and yoga in Eastern traditions, contemplation and prayer in Western religions, or the disciplines found in various martial arts, development is preceded by the cultivation of new levels of consciousness.  

This makes sense because, as we saw in the previous chapter, what we call "ego" is more of a process than a thing.  Ego is the sum of our self-talk.  It is our never-ending stream of wants, needs, and daily concerns.  To tap into higher functions of gratitude, creative insight, and connectedness, we need to remove our selves from our moment to moment attachments.  That means turning off the internal chatter and broadening our awareness of who we are outside of our desires and demands.  Turning renewal into a lifestyle means that the stilling of our egos becomes a regular part of our daily experience, not just an occasional exercise conducted before the market open.

Quiet is one of the most challenging shifts we can undertake because it requires that we remove the clutter from our lives.  Recall the analogy in the first chapter about the cluttered house:  too often that is our daily experience.  When life becomes a series of to-do lists, tasks, projects, and fires to extinguish, there is little time and opportunity to perceive and pursue broader vistas--in markets, in relationships, in life.  The greatest obstacle we face in cultivating the spirit is the structure of the lives we lead.

As many have noted, this problem has only become more acute in recent years.  Go into any waiting room, air terminal, or train station and you'll see crowds of people absorbed in their smart phones, together but not together, alone but never all-one.  The problem with social media is precisely the fact that it is social.  It adds to that ego stream; it stimulates the wants, needs, and desires that get us going emotionally.  We read and listen to polarized political messages, celebrity controversies, and endless chat.  It's rare indeed to find solitude in "smart" media.

This is precisely the wrong kind of training.  When we jump from activity to activity, website to website, chat to chat, we train the function of distract-ability.  If all of life is "use it or lose it", we lose the capacity for focus and quiet when we turn daily routine into a frantic jump from activity to activity, stimulus to stimulus.

Unfortunately, that means that we lose the capacity to access the soul.  Much of daily life trains us in the reverse of spirituality: the feeding of ego and self-talk.

Is it any wonder that developing traders cite their main problems as overtrading, straying from their plans and intentions, and getting caught up in the emotionality of market gyrations?  If a large proportion of the hours in our week is spent on activities that promote distraction, why should we suddenly find the capacity for focus?  Good trading comes from the soul, not the ego, because it's only in that soul-full state of quiet attention that we are truly self-determining, not buffeted about by moment-to-moment stimuli.

With that as background, we can appreciate the limitations of much that passes for trading psychology:  motivational exhortations to tame emotions, stick to plans, and implement discipline.  People training themselves in distraction for hours and hours each day will never find the ability to suddenly summon focus and quiet when the market bell rings.  No self-help techniques or soundbite advice to listen to your feelings, think positively, or institute the right kind of self-talk can achieve what is possible for each of us in states of stillness, joy, and repentance. 

Why is this important?  

It is in quiet that we find creativity.

It is in quiet that we become capable of superior pattern recognition.

The receptive mind receives the messages that markets (and people) send.  The distracted mind sees the screens, but misses the messages.

The implications are profound.  If you are not balancing your distraction time with solitude and focus time, you are not building your spiritual muscles.  Creativity is the consummate experience of renewal; it's where we truly see and capture the world in new ways.  How else can a trader escape from consensus thinking and herd-like behavior?  More chats, more screen time, more trading, more clutter: none of that renews us.  None of it builds our capacity to detect subtle patterns that evolve in real time.

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Minimizing Distraction During Trading

If we want to train our capacity for quiet focus during the day, what better place to start than during our trading?  That may seem difficult.  After all, aren't we connected to news sources, chats, multiple screens, and flashing charts throughout the trading day?  How can we possibly not experience distraction?

One thing that has proven helpful to my trading is to greatly limit the number of screens I look at.  I've taken that to an extreme by trading only from my laptop and its screen.  That has created a kind of creativity-through-constraints.  By limiting my screen real estate, I force myself to include only the most important information on that screen.  That in turn has pushed me to organize the charts to include the greatest amount of relevant information possible.  The screen is really a template that shows when we are overbought/oversold, whether buyers or sellers are in control, whether volume is expanding/contracting, etc.  With a single click I can see the information for multiple indexes and sectors, and I can see all that across multiple time frames.

What this accomplishes is a use of the screen that keeps me actively focused rather than distracted.  I only pull up the information that is relevant to what I'm thinking at the time.  There is no email, no chat, no other people in my trading area.  Organized and utilized in this fashion, trading itself becomes an exercise in focus.  Interestingly, I feel much the same after a good trading session as after a biofeedback workout, where I am exercising a high degree of sustained cognitive control.  There is a certain feeling that accompanies both activities:  a quiet feeling in the head and a bit of tightness across my forehead.  Neither sensation is present when I'm distracted or even just in my usual everyday state of mind.

I recently needed to perform some errands during trading hours and so brought my laptop with me and followed the market while I was in a waiting room.  As I placed a trade, I recognized that I wasn't in my usual state of quiet focus.  I entered a long position which went my way and then suddenly reversed.  As on so many past occasions, I recognized that the reversal was itself an important signal.  If we're not able to sustain an upside break of a trading range, we may well test the lower end of that range.  I was late flipping the trade, however, and entered more toward the middle of the range.  The resulting short position moved my way, only to again reverse.

By that time, I was frustrated.  That is unusual for me.  I'm normally not frustrated by losing trades, largely because I size positions in such a way that I always leave room to get positive on the day or week.  Without my focus, however, my frustration was distracting.  I no longer had a feel for the market.  Simply changing my environment and adding the errands to my routine was enough to disrupt me--and that was enough to turn good trading into poor trading.

A quiet, focused mind is what connects us to broadened perception, whether in meditation, prayer, or study.  How we approach our trading either builds our capacity for quiet or destroys it.

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To repeat:  we cannot build spirituality unless we develop daily periods of tapping into the spirit.  We either use it or lose it:  we cultivate our capacity for quiet or we lose the ability to reach our soul:  the part of us that connects to meaning .  We renew life, renew trading, when we turn spirituality into a lifestyle.

Fueling The Soul, Daily

A practice I have found especially helpful is to wake up early--most often between 4 and 5 AM--and begin the day with reading on spiritual topics, meditation/prayer, and physical exercise.  These activities create a centered state which permeates the rest of the day.  It also starts each day on a note of intentionality and self-direction, rather than in the reactive mode of trying to catch up with accumulated emails and to-do items.  How we start our day very often sets the tone for that day.  If we start with clutter, we are most likely to live that day in clutter.  Starting the day by being the person we most want to become provides us with energy and inspiration.  If we have a priority, it's worth hardwiring into our calendars.

The three paths that we've encountered in recent chapters--the paths of joy, quiet, and repentance--are promising directions for the start of our day.  If we do not experience those--individually and in a community--on a regular basis, we inevitably find ourselves in auto-pilot mode.

There are many forms of meditation that help us find our access to soul.  As we've seen, undertaken properly, prayer itself becomes a form of meditation, where we can voice our deepest yearnings and repentance and connect to these in a profound, meaningful way.  Mindfulness meditation enables us to detach from the buzz of daily activities and open ourselves to broader perspectives and priorities.  Loving-kindness meditation involves generating positive emotional states and immersing ourselves in those as a way of cultivating our depth of experience.  Common to all of these is a shift in our states of body and awareness, combined with an enhancement of focus.  With sufficient practice, we become better and better at achieving that quiet focus, and the states we generate in meditation begin to appear throughout the day.  A spiritual lifestyle is one that exercises and expands our access to the soul.

We don't normally think of physical exercise as a source of quiet, but we've seen that our immersion in body can be a great way of switching gears, turning off our inner chatter, and experiencing life afresh.  One gateway to quiet is reaching the point of second wind, in which we strive past our initial point of tiredness and find new access to stores of energy.  An important implication of the second wind phenomenon is that we have more access to energy and focus than we recognize.  We just need to push past our customary limits of effort to access those.  Once we find our second wind, we readily enter the "zone":  that flow state that enables us to be fully absorbed in what we are doing.  Physical exercise, because it naturally pushes our boundaries, becomes a powerful means for transforming consciousness.

One of my favorite morning practices is sustaining an elevated heart rate in a treadmill routine while listening to inspiring spiritual music.  Often I will jog to the beat of the music, turning the session into an exercise of body and spirit.  When I've had a great workout, it's rare that I won't have the quiet focus and sense of joy for the rest of the day.

Finding Your Calling

Imagine that you've entered a contest and find out that you've won.  Your prize is two weeks on a remote beach at a resort on a beautiful island.  It's just you, the sun, the water, and the flora and fauna--no TV, no online connections, and no other family members or friends.  

What would you do with your time?

What would you most miss doing?

The odds are good that your answers to these two questions tell you something about your calling.  It's when we don't have to do anything--and we can't perform our normal activities--that we gravitate toward what we're meant to be doing.

Callings are activities and roles that speak to our deepest values and competencies.  We may have a calling as an artist, a parent, or athlete.  Something about those activities captures not just what we like doing, but the essence of who we are.  One never has a calling on a 9-to-5 basis.  Jobs?  Careers?  Yes, those can be picked up and put down.  Callings are intrinsic to who we are.  A religious leader lives his or her beliefs; an artist always experiences life aesthetically.  They would be doing what they usually do whether they are on a remote island or in their homes. 

Here is a most important principle:  It is through our callings that we work out the issues that provide the path to our development.  Our callings develop us in ways that move us forward:  personally, emotionally, socially, spiritually.  In pursuing what we find most stimulating and meaningful we tackle our demons and realize our deepest values.  Callings call to us because they are our primary pathways of renewal.

Consider:

Each of us has gifts:  talents, skills, passions 

Each of us has a purpose in life that can only be fulfilled through making use of our gifts.

Each of us faces challenges in finding and channeling those gifts.

The meaningful life is one in which we find our path, our way of utilizing our gifts in realizing our deepest goals, values, and purposes.  

Life is one great school that provides us with one lesson after another to develop ourselves in ways that will fulfill our purpose.  Challenges we face in pursuing our calling are not "problems".  They point the way to our development, fulfillment, and renewal.

This is one of the greatest prices we pay for the clutter in our lives:  we lose sight of what calls to us and become alienated from our deepest sense of purpose and meaning.  As a result we never find the forums for working out our personal challenges and reaching our full potential. 

In this way, our callings provide both our paths to joy and our paths of forgiveness and repentance.  Immersed in who we are and what we do best, we experience deep, enduring levels of fulfillment and meaning.  When we lose that immersion, we stray from our callings. That's when we fall short of what we're meant to do and who we're meant to be.  Repentance flows from the inevitable gaps between the real and ideal that we face as fallible beings:  what we do here and now and what we are capable of doing.  There is an important relationship between the depth of our repentance and the degree of our subsequent inspiration.

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Our Problems Are the Result of Frustrated Renewal

Many times, the problems we face--in trading and in life--are the  result of frustrated needs for meaning, purpose, and renewal.

Imagine living in a small cage.  You see the world around you and you long to be part of it.  Over time, you despair that you'll ever get to experience all that life has to offer.  You become frustrated, angry that you are stuck in your small space.  You worry that life is passing you by.  So what is your problem?  Is it despair, frustration, or worry?  No.

Your problem is that you're trapped in your narrow place.  To be sure, there are problems of anxiety, depression, hyperactivity, and mood swings that require formal treatment.  If, however, our basic issue is a lack of meaning, purpose, and direction in life, no amount of therapy to reduce negative symptoms will be sufficient to build the needed positives.

In other words, it's the absence of positives and not the presence of negatives that often holds us back.  We aren't necessarily depressed, but we're not living joyfully.  We aren't highly conflicted, but neither are we powerfully inspired.

We're trapped in our narrow place.

In this book, we've seen that trading is a double-edged sword.  It can mire people in the desire to make money and the ups and downs of profits and losses, taking them further and further from a truly meaningful life.  Pursued the wrong way, trading so reinforces the ego that we lose our souls.  Sadly, we can also lose our money and our relationships if our ego-driven trading goes too far.

On the other hand, trading can become a significant path toward growth and development.  In learning to open our mind, master the tugs of ego, and build our creative capacities, we make trading meaningful, not just profitable.

So we're back to that fundamental question:  How do you determine if trading is truly your calling?

Very simple:  Trading is your calling when it brings out the best in you.  If trading brings out the worst in you, the answer is not psychological coaching or tweaking your "setups".  The answer is finding your true path in life:  the one that most deeply taps into your talents, skills, and values.  Very often, the presence of unhappiness and a lack of fulfillment are useful pieces of information, telling us we're on the wrong life path.

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For many years I have experienced a pull to be involved in financial markets.  As I mentioned earlier, when I attempted to make this my full time activity, I hated it.  I deeply missed my work as a psychologist and the gratification of being a constructive part of people's lives.  Still, I felt myself drawn to markets:  analyzing them, learning about them, finding opportunity within them.

Over time, I came to appreciate that market involvement was a powerful path of personal development, pushing me to think both deeply and quickly and overcome my biases.  More than any other activity I have encountered, the trading of financial markets has challenged me toward greater and greater levels of focus and open-mindedness.  That in turn has developed me in ways that have helped my work with people--as a psychologist, parent, spouse, and community member.  To no small degree, markets have served as my cognitive and emotional gym, providing me with workouts for the capacities I've most needed to develop.  Some of those capacities have been surprisingly spiritual, including the openness to inspiration and insight and the cultivation of gratitude.

So what is your calling?  Your calling is not just something you like to do, but something no one can keep you from doing.  It might be parenting; it might be starting businesses; it might be sports; it might be artwork, writing, worship, or growing things.  It doesn't have to be your career, but it does have to be something you can never really give up.  It's a central part of who you are, because--at the end of the day--it is your spiritual gym:  your path toward developing, transcending, and renewing your self.

Putting It All Together

Finding a mentor; finding your quiet; and finding your calling:  these are steps toward radical joy, peace, and renewal.

You may be asking, however:  How can I possibly do it all?  That is a question most of us have encountered, as we try to keep up with our careers and still make time for our families, our relationships, our selves.  As responsible people, we keep up with the demands of life, but all too often that means placing life's greatest priorities--our most promising paths to fulfillment--on a back burner.

In the last chapter, we saw that the Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, also means "return".  When we stray from our life's path, we find a way to learn from our situation, forgive ourselves, and return to who we truly are.  In that sense, every trading journal and life journal should include a summary of what has brought us joy and what needs forgiveness.  When we are on the path of quiet, we can view what we've done that is meaningful and find the path of joy.  In our times of quiet, we can also look at when we fallen short and find our path of return and repentance.

Renewal is radical when it takes us outside our normal routines and grounds us in activities that give energy and inspiration.

One exercise I have found helpful with the traders I work with is to have them write down their daily schedules one day after the fact.  In other words, they are to simply chronicle how they spent each hour of their day for the previous day.  Invariably they are shocked--and embarrassed--at how much time they have wasted in non-activity and in low priority activities.

What we find with this exercise is that how we spend our time often does not actually reflect our stated life priorities.  That is what allows us to go from month to month, year to year, never getting closer to fulfillment.

If the time you need for renewal can't be found in your daily calendar, then you know that it hasn't been prioritized.  Every day, our goals can sit on that proverbial back burner, never finding actualization.  Then, some day, we open our eyes, regret the wasteland that we have created, and find the determination to live life differently, to return to who we actually are.

What would happen if your most renewing activities were the ones that went first into your calendar?  Suppose life had to fit around your priorities and not the reverse.  Let's go back to the perspective described earlier:  if you suddenly learned that you had only months to live, you would have no trouble focusing your attention--and your time--on your most important priorities.  Every day would become precious; you would be determined to make the most of it.

Your daily calendar is not just a to-do list and a schedule of activities.  It is a statement of priorities.  It is your way of structuring your commitment to yourself and ensuring that you are doing the things that bring the greatest value to you and those you care about.   

Mastering our time means that we reject operating on auto-pilot and instead become the active director of our lives.  We can always earn more money, gain more recognition, and reach further achievements.  Our one dwindling resource is time.  It is our true wealth, our scarcest commodity.  When we devote time to an activity, we deserve a return on that investment!  Our lives are too precious to throw away on non-priorities.

We cannot live a life of renewal unless we find ways to live each day in ways that nourish us.  Renewal becomes truly radical when it becomes a lifestyle:  when it is self-sustaining.  That takes much more than tweaks to our current lives.  It requires genuine creativity.  Each activity becomes an opportunity to move life forward, to push our boundaries and extend our capacities.  When we master our time, we live life in ways that give us energy--and that energy fuels our best efforts in all spheres of life.

Spending time with family, exercising in a gym, trading, taking a vacation:  all of these can be performed in relatively routine ways or in ways that speak to our souls: that challenge and expand us. In short, renewal is not just something we experience at random occasions of peak experience; it is found both in what we do and how we do it.  What would happen if we were to schedule time each day for joy, quiet, and spiritual learning and development?  Suppose each day became a workout in our virtual spiritual gym.  How would that impact our moods, our energy levels, our performance--and ultimately our trading?

We achieve radical renewal from the ground up, one day at a time, one activity at a time.  That's also how we achieve renewal of our trading.

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While my music is playing at full volume and I'm on my seventh consecutive hour of writing, I will finish this book on a very personal note.  My goal has been to help readers open the door to an area of development that too often goes neglected.  I am making the case that developing ourselves spiritually, moving beyond our routine concerns, is one of the most powerful things we can do to renew our trading.

I do believe, however, that cultivating the spiritual is no different from cultivating any capacity, whether it is artistry or athleticism.  It requires guidance and mentoring.  It requires practice.  Look at any spiritual tradition and you'll find teachers, schools, and structured programs of development.

It's not enough to simply append meditation exercises to your trading or write journal entries about overcoming the ego.  If we're to truly, radically, renew our selves, we need to commit to a process, just as we would if we joined a martial arts program or an art or music school.

To return to an earlier theme, the world's great spiritual traditions are one of the greatest crowdsourcing experiments in history.  Millions of people over multiple centuries have found value in religious and spiritual teachings and practices.  I encourage you to find the spiritual framework that speaks to you, identify a mentor within that framework, and join a community that supports one another in development.  Somewhere, there is a house of worship or a school of spiritual development that can help you develop into your best self.  I encourage you to draw upon such resources as a powerful way to turn spirituality into an active lifestyle and ongoing, renewing life influence.

A little while ago, Margie and I climbed Masada and spent time in the Holy Land.  We traversed the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sections of Jerusalem.  We re-experienced the Holocaust at Yad Vashem, where I had my strange experience:  a deeply emotional awakening to the desire to rediscover "my people."

Since that time, I have participated in services at many congregations, read many books, consulted multiple mentors, and taken multiple courses.  Most important of all, I've discovered myself spiritually and seen how that enhances my work as a psychologist, my relationships, and, yes, my appreciation for markets.

There is a complex order underlying financial markets.  When we tap into our souls, we sharpen our antennae to detect that order and act upon it.  In life, as in trading markets, we can be ego filled or we can be fulfilled.  The choice is ours.

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