A fascinating book by Henri Hypponen, entitled Why We Fear, makes the case that fear has a double-edged character: it ensures our survival by enabling us to respond to threats but keeps us from achieving our goals when life's desirable challenges feel too threatening. When I reflect upon the traders and portfolio managers I work with and the performance problems they encounter, a common denominator is fear. Whether it's the trader who fears missing market moves and overtrades or the manager who is afraid of losing money and fails to seize opportunity, fear ends up driving many poor investment and trading decisions.
Emilia Lahti, writing about Hypponen's text, argues that facing what we most fear builds our character and gives us strength. In so doing, we expand our mental and emotional reserves and find a second wind of motivation. A great example of the power of facing fear was offered by Kyle Maynard, the extreme athlete who was born without arms and legs. In an enlightening interview, Hypponen asked about mental strategies for dealing with the anxiety before a mixed martial arts (MMA) fight. Maynard explained that he mentally rehearsed all of his anxieties--everything he would think and feel--ahead of the fight. After reliving the event's fears many times, he was at peace when the actual match began.
There's an important principle at work here: facing our fears gives us energy. In moving beyond fear, we move outside our comfort zones and expand our boundaries. That expansion of boundaries provides an expansion of drive, enabling us to persist under adverse conditions. In a summary of Lahti's work on sisu, the Finnish notion of determination in the face of adversity, Gio Rodriguez notes how we can build strength in advance of possible traumatic stresses, much as Maynard prepares for his matches. By rehearsing our responses under adversity, we not only make fear familiar and rob it of its control over our behavior: we turn fear's energy into our own sisu.
This is where traditional approaches to stress management have it wrong. The goal is not to learn relaxation and dampen fear. Fear lies at the edges of our boundaries, just beyond our comfort zones. The goal is to tap into the energy of that fear to extend the realm of the possible. That is what turns normal perseverance into extraordinary sisu.
It's important to recognize that fear does not only manifest itself as heart-pounding, sweat-producing anxiety. There is a quiet fear that can equally dominate our lives. That quiet fear manifests itself as procrastination. Behind every procrastination is an excuse and behind every excuse is a fear we're not facing. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that procrastination is our defense against fear, our way of keeping discomfort at bay. When we procrastinate, we remain rooted to our comfort zones. We avoid failure and frustration, but we also lose the energy that comes from expanding our boundaries and finding our sisu.
In his book Crisis? Let's Beat It!, Michael Virardi discusses the results of a study he conducted with 101 successful business people. He found that the vast majority (over 90%) engaged in two behaviors: 1) they made lists to prioritize their work and 2) they spent time each day and week preparing for the next day and week. In other words, the successful businesspeople were anti-procrastinators. They developed routines for facing the future, much as Maynard used routines to face his fights. In so doing, they turn fear and uncertainty into catalysts for mastery, and avoid the energy drain of excuse-making and procrastination.
The great irony is that the consistently comfortable life is probably as fear-driven as the traumatized life. When we are consistently comfortable, we're consistently in our comfort zones. We never tackle the uncertainties associated with pushing ourselves to our limits. Fear drives us, but is heavily buffered by procrastination and excuses. We never face the agony of defeat, but we also never experience the thrills and energy expansions of extending our limits and moving closer to our ideals.
What if, like Virardi's businesspeople, we started each day with a list and detailed preparation? Each day would become an exercise in mastery, an expansion of our energy, an extension of our sisu. If Kyle Maynard can face his limitations and literally climb mountains without arms and legs, how far could we climb by refusing to yield to our self-imposed limits?
Outside life's comfort is the person we're meant to be.
