[Excerpt from FA Magazine article] “You just have to control your emotions and you’ll be a much better investor” is terrible advice.
Emotions contain information, and if you try to override that information by controlling it or ignoring it, you miss out on interpreting your lifetime’s worth of accumulated wisdom.
Three Strategies
Now, brain science is complicated and we don’t—and probably never will—have a complete picture of how it works. But based on the best knowledge today, here are three things you can do—and help your clients do—to better deal with your emotions so you can function at a higher level.
1. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling and why am I feeling it?”
2. Get granular on defining the emotion you are feeling.
3. Learn to distinguish between intuition and impulse.