Grant Williams:
Before we get going, here’s the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. And now, on with the show.
Welcome everybody to another edition of The Grant Williams Podcast. Joining me this time out is Kim Ann Curtin, who is a phenomenal coach. You can find out more about her at her website, The Wall Street Coach. She was on Wall Street for a considerable amount of time and then chose a different path to go down, a road of coaching and helping people manage their emotions and understand just why they react to certain things a certain way. She’s worked with all sorts of legends in the finance business and she’s very kindly agreed to come and talk to me about some of the things she does, some of the lessons she’s learned and some of the common problems that she’s encountered in terms of investors and traders self-sabotaging. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I absolutely reveled in every second of it. So without any further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Kim Ann Curtin.
Well, Kim, welcome to the podcast. I’m so happy that we finally got a chance to do this.
Kim Ann Curtin:
I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Grant.
Grant Williams:
Now this is going to be a very different conversation and it’s one I’ve looked forward to for quite some time now because you and I have spoken a couple of times over the last, what? Eight months or so I guess. I came on your podcast and we talked about life and all kinds of fascinating things and we’ve talked about the coaching and what you do and it’s just such interesting stuff and it feels as though this is a point in time now where there are a lot of people out there who probably don’t even realize it yet, but they are going to need some help getting through what’s happening now and what comes next because we live in very different times and I think we’re about to go into even more different times. And so I think this conversation is absolutely happening at the right time.
What I want to talk about to begin with, and I have no idea where this conversation’s going to go, which makes it so fascinating for me, but we’re going to talk about fear, greed, and need. Fear and greed are the two things that everybody associates with stock markets and investing and those twin impostors, to bastardize Rudyard Kipling. But there is a third one, which is need. And I’ve talked about this often. So if we can, let’s start with need because what you teach and what you’ve written about in your book and you’ve talked about in presentations, is this idea of need. So let’s begin with need and I’ll turn it over to you to explain why it’s so important and what those needs are and how they factor into so many parts of what we do in this business.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yeah. Thank you because it’s one of my favorite topics to talk about. And I find that when people learn this, just as I learned it roughly 20 years ago, I found my ability to navigate life, the markets, people, volatility completely transformed. Let me also give a shout out to the man who taught me about this Marshall Rosenberg. He is the creator of a language called nonviolent communication, also known as NVC. He is the teacher that I’ve had through so much study for really 20, 25 years now.
Universal needs are something that inform everybody’s action. There’s really nobody who isn’t informed by their needs, motivating them, if you will. I just want to give a distinction. A lot of people identify with what they want, but they don’t have the distinction for what the need is underneath it. So even with the trifecta you spoke to before, at the end of the day, underneath fear, what is that? That would be a need for security, that would be a need for safety, that would be a need for perhaps connection. And part of what I feel our culture speaks to all the time is it speaks to our wants. And even the social media challenge we all have, that comparing, what we’re seeing with people is that they have a tendency to focus on what they want.
And most people think, “Oh, if I just get what I want, I’ll finally have peace or equanimity.” But what they discover, the clients that I’ve worked with through the years, because they have the financial ability to potentially buy what they want, they don’t find that it scratches the itch because the want isn’t actually what is at hand for them. It’s the need under the want that they don’t seem to identify and therefore it eludes them.
Grant Williams:
Well, let’s talk about those universal needs because we think of things in almost concrete terms like food and shelter and what become basic human needs. But when we talk about the emotional component of that, the list that you have, and hopefully we can share with the listeners this, there are all kinds of words and concepts on there that when you read them, make perfect sense, but I don’t think we tend to think of them as needs.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yeah, well, completely agree with you that things like air, food, rest, sleep, environment, exercise, water, those are needs for the most part. Those probably listening to this podcast, they have secured that. We both know globally there are people who don’t have really clean air or really clean water. But the challenge is there are other needs. And so here are a couple that I’ll speak to that I can presume most people aren’t having met. And remember, to not have them met or to not have them met enough counts as well.
So right now, I think a lot of people in the West were not having our need for community. We’re not having our need for peace and equanimity. We don’t have a need right now met for harmony or a sense of security or safety or a sense of inclusion or self-expression perhaps. This needs list is quite robust- or acceptance let’s say, or a sense of independence or spontaneity because of the volatility of the markets. So when these needs don’t get met, just those handful, there are so many more, but just those handful. Here are the feelings we have when those needs are not met. Apathy, depression, anger, frustration, sadness. Those are a natural extension of when needs are not met. When needs are met, here are the feelings we have. Peace, joy, equanimity, ease.
So part of what I suggest when people are first hearing about this is get a look at that basic universal needs list, which I’m happy to supply you and your listeners with. Start to identify for yourself what are those basic needs that you have that are not getting met enough? And find a way to start to make a request of yourself to become a steward, a better steward of those needs. And that could be by making a request to yourself and those around you.
It’s simple as walking at the end of let’s say a long day to your partner and perhaps that partner has been doing something else challenging and that partner just wants to talk to you about their day. You might need 15 minutes to just decompress. That would be a request. “I hear you want to talk, I have a need for 10 minutes of silence. Would you be willing?” That is the most magical phrase Rosenberg taught me, the phrase, “Would you be willing?” Because it elicits choice. People like choice. We all want freedom. So learning how to make a request even to yourself or who’s around you puts you on track to start to get needs met.
Grant Williams:
It’s fascinating to me, going through that list of universal needs. There are things on there that if you sit and think about them for a second, you see those words and you think, “Wow, I don’t realize that was a need. I thought that was kind of a desire.” I think something like, let’s choose an obvious one, respect, right? I grew up understanding that respect is something that you earn, it’s not something you are given. But when you come to think of respect as a need, then it potentially forces change in your own behavior. Because if you need it, then to get it, you’re going to have to act a certain way. It doesn’t just come. So let’s talk about some of those needs that perhaps would take people by surprise because I think there are things on that list that we don’t really recognize or realize we need, you know?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yes, I would agree with you. Most people are shocked when they look at this list for the first time. And additionally, most people, men and women have a tendency to think when they see that they have these needs, potentially, are what all humans feel. They think, “Oh, well, aren’t I being too needy by having them?” Like, “Aren’t I being too needy?” And that is what’s like a shock. Let me say this, respect, because of what I’ve learned through Rosenberg’s work, this is the most fascinating thing to say, especially in regards to what you just said about earning respect. Rosenberg says the most dangerous word in the English language is the word “deserve”. Because deserve means some are worthy and some are not. And only those who earn their worthiness are allowed to receive certain things. And that would play a part to that concept of somebody has to earn respect.
It’s an inherent birthright. We all are worthy of love and belonging. That’s the phrase Brené Brown uses even in her talks. Each of us have an inherent worth. It’s ironic because there was something floating out there on Twitter last week about the demands that all those at Twitter were putting in front of Elon Musk and he listed, “We demand X, we demand Y.” And I thought straight out of the gate, you have just completely alienated anybody at the leadership level, especially Musk, because everybody has a need for freedom. So as soon as you open a conversation with “I demand,” you have a person who’s now just shut down. If it had been worded differently such as, “We request,” just hear the difference.
If I said to you, “Grant, I demand you do this,” your back goes up, my back go up, our arms cross. But if somebody says, “I have a request,” it’s a whole different energy. And that’s the most pivotal piece I feel Rosenberg has taught me is that inherent sense of worthiness, that sense, we don’t have to earn these things. We have a right to them at birthright. Are there potential costs to ourselves and society when we do things in a way that’s costly? At the end of the day, people, if they don’t realize they have a right to these needs, I promise you they’re going to do costly things to get them met. And they may not even realize that, that’s costly because they’re just…
I liken needs to oxygen. And the story I usually tell is the story of why are two lifeguards ideally the ones who would approach a drowning person? Why not just one? Because that first lifeguard that gets to that person is going down. When you are desperate for oxygen, you’re pushing down to get oxygen. Would we call that man who’s drowning a jerk? Would we call him selfish? Would we call him a sociopath? No. We’d be like, he needs oxygen. Well, guess what? All of these needs are our oxygen. And if we don’t get the met at all, then we are going to behave in ways like that drowning man and pull down anybody we can just because we’re so starved for nourishment.
Grant Williams:
Well, it’s so interesting because I literally pulled the word respects out of any one of those words in that list with no real specific desire to go down that particular road. But hearing you respond to that, it strikes me with something like respect and there may be others and perhaps we can talk about, that there’s two kinds of respect. There is the respect, as you say, you deserve as a basic human being, there’s the respect you deserve from your fellow man, and I totally agree with that. But when we get into the workplace, when we get into a professional environment or we get into investing or trading, look, the markets don’t respect you, right?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Right.
Grant Williams:
You’re not going to get any respect from the markets.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Correct, correct.
Grant Williams:
And in amongst your peers, feel free to correct me please, I feel that that respect amongst a peer group, professional peer group is very much earned. I look at my career and the various places along the way. So you have this kind of dichotomy of needs there. You’ve got a basic human need. And can we separate those feelings? Can we separate those feelings that I want to be respected as a person but I don’t feel respected as a professional? And how do we deal with the fact that the market will not only show us no respect, but will actually, most of the times, show us disrespect.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Disrespect. So this is even more critical. Why? If you as an investor don’t have a sense of internal respect or respect let’s say from a small cohort or community of people, then you are going to be more likely to try to get that respect met in a place like the market where it’s not going to be forthcoming. So part of what I say to investors and traders is, if you don’t get crystal clear on what needs are not getting met personally or professionally in your life, you potentially take them in, to try to get the met invisibly, into the market.
I would 100% agree with you. To be successful as an investor is a skillset that has to be earned. Being a successful investor is a skillset that has to be earned. Your capability as a leader potentially running a organization or country for that matter is a skillset that has to be earned. I’m not saying that there isn’t items that do have to be earned, but that fundamental sense of having a right to respect, let’s just say from a barista or a car that passes you on the road, that’s the sense of respect, a sense of us all being worthy of that.
But then the thing about the market is I see often, most people, they are trying to get their wants met when they approach their investing or their trading. They’re coming from a place of, “If I can check these boxes, then I will finally have respect perhaps from myself and my peers.” But what I say to them is, if that intrinsic, internal respect doesn’t exist in the first place, you’re sure as hell not going to find it in the marketplace even if you do well, even if your strategy works because you’re going to have this internal sense of it never being enough. And the metaphor I use because I’m a former New Yorker is, if you get your wants met and not your needs met, it’s like Chinese takeout, you’re hungry an hour later.
Grant Williams:
But listen, I hate to be the one to break it to you. You can’t once be a New Yorker. You’re a New Yorker whether you like or not. You may be in Hawaii now, but there’s no shaking that yoke off you, I’m afraid.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Once you’re born in Brooklyn…
Grant Williams:
Yeah, right.
Kim Ann Curtin:
… you’re forever marked.
Grant Williams:
That’s it. But let’s talk about the kind of unconscious needs that we have and how we as investors, and we’ll stick to that road of it rather than the human being side of it as investors. But how do we go about understanding the stuff that we don’t know? How do you teach people to recognize their needs and try and find ways to meet them in a professional capacity?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Well, the thing about needs is that, first of all, most people aren’t even fluent in this concept. So first thing I say is once you have this list of needs, start to identify what ones you are not getting met. What I usually do is ask them to kind of work backwards. What are the predominant feelings you’re having? If you’re consistently… Let’s say you spot check yourself out. I’ll suggest that to clients. Before you sit down and make your decisions perhaps for your investment account, first, connect to yourself internally. Are you feeling frustrated that day? Are you feeling sad that day? Are you feeling angry and furious? Are you grieving? What’s the state of the internal state for you? If those feelings are the feelings that are in place before you’re about to make some decisions that are going to have an impact on you, that is an important place to just get connected to, to begin with.
If you have those let’s say, unpleasant feelings, anger, overwhelmed, disappointed, impatient, frustrated, confused, then that’s telling you sort of like lights on the dashboard of you that you aren’t possibly at an optimal place to make some critical decisions. Just like you wouldn’t take your car on a road trip if the check engine light was on for a three-hour road trip. No, you’d probably wait until you get the car checked.
So what I’m saying to people is, if those are the predominant feelings you keep finding yourself having, then you undoubtedly do have needs that are not being met. Start to identify what those are and see if there’s ways you can start to begin to get nourished by them. Perhaps it’s a conversation with your close friends or a partner or a small group of people to check in with them. But you have to identify what is going on.
Usually, what I’ll do. I have a needs list here. I’ll have people just go through it and circle what are the words that they identify they wish they had or they had more of. Here’s one example of a gal who was taking unreasonable risk in her accounts and she had been involved in investing, in trading for over 10 years. And she was like, “I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve never taken this crazy kind of risk, but it’s happened for four months and I have to do something about it.” We got into the conversation. Lo and behold, what was revealed was that she was a weekend warrior kind of person. She was somebody who jumped out of planes. She did really intense hikes without being belayed in. Guess what we were in the midst of? COVID. So all of her adventure stuff, warrior stuff had not happened. What we identified for her was that one of her non-negotiable needs was adventure. So she wasn’t getting adventure met anymore. And guess where she was trying to get it met?
Grant Williams:
Right.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Once she saw that and had that light bulb, now there was a consciousness that she brought into her choices when she sat down at her desk, “Oh, right, this itch isn’t scratched because COVID’s still going on, but I have to really watch for myself to not try to get that need for adventure met in what I’m doing with my investment accounts, in my trading.
Grant Williams:
She understands that the behavior is dangerous to her account. She understands it’s not something she wants to do. What is it about understanding the root cause of that that gives us the ability to deal with it? Because we know it’s a bad idea and yet we can’t deal with it because we don’t understand the root cause. What is it about knowing the root cause that makes us go, “Oh, okay, now I can handle it because I have a reason”?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yeah, it’s not so much that we can always 100% handle it, but what happens is just like… What do they say? When you throw the lights on in the kitchen, in the darkness, you see the roaches, you’re like, “Oh, that’s what’s hidden.” Whenever light is thrown on darkness, there’s something that’s revealed.
One of the books I recommend often to clients is a book called Taming Your Gremlin, which talks about inner saboteurs, inner critics, and how they often drive our bus and we don’t even know they are driving our bus. One of the catch phrases in that book is, “Simply notice.” And this one client of mine who was so inspired by that phrase actually got it tattooed on his arm, “Simply notice.” And what he said is just being able to notice that something is afoot in the background allows me now to be consciously choosing a different direction.
So I think it’s truly just self-awareness, being conscious to what motivators are afoot, even if you’re doing something that potentially is how you numb. We all have our ways of numbing, but even if you’re beginning to want to move away from that, just identify, “Oh, I’m eating a donut right now because I’m stressed, this didn’t happen today.” “Oh, I’m having a scotch because I’m mad at so and so.” Don’t make yourself wrong, don’t go into self-judgment, but just notice, I’m numbing because I am overwhelmed or angry or sad. Just admit it to yourself instead of just sugarcoating it and pretending like it’s not happening.
Grant Williams:
We find ourselves in positions, if you are an investor investing your own money for example, or you are a salaried employee at hedge fund, you wake up in the morning, you’ve got these feelings in your head and you’re not sure and you’re unsettled and you’re not feeling right. If you are the hedge fund trader, you don’t have a choice to call in sick. You’ve got to go and do your job no matter what.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Absolutely. Yep.
Grant Williams:
But on the other hand, if it’s your own money, technically speaking, you could say, “You know what? I’m just not going to go in the office. I’m going to sit at home.” But of course, the market doesn’t allow you to do that.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Of course not.
Grant Williams:
You can remove yourself from the game, but the game goes on and you’re still exposed to it because you have risk in the market. So how do we deal with that situation?
Kim Ann Curtin:
A huge step would be at least expressing empathy to yourself. Having compassion for yourself. Let’s just say that person who wakes up in the morning, who doesn’t want to have to face the day, what would it take for you to just offer yourself empathy and compassion that in spite of how you feel, in spite of what you would rather do, you are going to have to move forward.
This is the other thing that is across the board I would say with all high-driving people, is they literally have no self-compassion. They have not been taught how to have empathy for themselves. They judge themselves not only perhaps that morning or they not feeling up to it, but then they feel shitty. Is it okay to curse? Then they feel shitty for not feeling up to it. It’s like it’s not bad enough that you feel like crap, but now you’re making yourself feel worse because you’re making yourself feel wrong for not feeling up to it.
And that is also part of what frustrates me a bit about this culture. Of course, nobody’s… We’re putting out this image on social media like we got it all together, but there are people crying on their bathroom-tiled floor with a mascara running. We’re not putting that on Instagram, and yet that’s happening too. So there is this kind of cultural expectation of if you’re upset you must not have your shit together. No, it’s called, I’m just a human being who’s maybe having a bad day.
So could that person that morning say, “Wow, this sucks. I have a need for rest today. I’m not going to get it met, but perhaps this weekend or perhaps in the next month, I’ll do what I can to try to get my need for rest or my need for community or my need for celebration or a sense of security.” It’s not like once you understand what these needs are, you’re going to be able to just get them all met instantaneously. But at least being conscious of them and meeting yourself with some empathy, that you’re operating on an empty tank can go a long way.
Grant Williams:
So where does something like imposter syndrome fit into all this? Because we all suffer, I know I do, I always have done, and I know very good mutual friends of ours, and particularly Jawad Mian, and he and I have spent hours talking about this together. If anyone tells me they don’t suffer from it or haven’t suffered it at some point, I’m incredibly skeptical about it. I give them the benefit of the doubt. But where does something like that fit into this and how does one deal with that particular problem, which I believe is quite a widespread problem?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yeah, imposter syndrome almost derailed me writing my book, to be quite honest because…
Grant Williams:
Right.
Kim Ann Curtin:
And part of what allowed me to move past that was stepping into the space of, what if I just spoke what I wanted to say without imagining or comparing myself to other writers or what other people might think of me? I think on one hand, imposter syndrome is informed by our need to survive. A lot of the way our brain is formed, it has gotten us to where we are today. We are at the top of the food chain. So that kind of negative bias has served us many times to question ourselves, to make sure we have it all figured out. So it’s not like I want to make that wrong, but when it doesn’t stop is where it gets dangerous. And I think the culture too, we do have this emphasis of comparing ourselves to other people.
Again, probably part of what’s helped us survive. But one of my spiritual teachers taught me, compare equals despair. So for me to step out of that comparison is what allowed me to step into, “Okay, I have this opinion, maybe nobody will like it. Maybe people will be upset if I speak this truth, but it’s mine and I don’t have another one to share.” It took a while, it took almost eight months of me having a house sitting opportunity, the clock tick on me. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m going to not get this book done because I have this writer’s block,” which was imposter syndrome. But then luckily, one of the most incredible writers in my life is… When I called him, he was in his 90s and he just talked me out of it and he was like, “Look, you have an opinion, you have a right to that opinion, say it and maybe nobody will like it, but it’s yours and nobody can take that from you.”
So the concept with imposter syndrome, what I say to people is, well, what is it you are afraid of? I had to face my fears. I was afraid of being embarrassed, looking like a fool, being made fun of, maybe being disrespected. And again, what does that all boiled down to? Our needs, right? My need for respect, my need to be part of a community, my need to be seen. We all have a need to see and be seen, to understand and be understood. That is what I feel ultimately informs imposter syndrome is just the human desire for those needs to be met.
So again, don’t make yourself wrong for it. Just recognize, oh yeah, you do have a need for respect. You do have a need to be seen, so does every human being. How can you understand that again, perhaps extend some compassion to yourself and then be able to step into, “Wow, maybe I… “ And again, it comes down to being enough. All of us think we aren’t enough unless we either drive this car, have this degree, have a New York Times Bestseller, blah, blah blah. And yet if we don’t intuitively internally feel that we are worthy of that love and belonging and that we can’t earn it, then it’s going to always be climbing that ladder always to the top thinking, “This will make me feel that way.” And I have talked to people who get off those degrees, get off the cars, get off the houses, and they’re up there and they’re like, “But I still don’t have peace. What the hell?”
Grant Williams:
Yeah. Is it enough to try and manage these feelings or do we have to learn to conquer them? I think about from a personal level, I’ve given more speeches than I care to remember, for example, and I still look for a way to get out of it right before I go on stage to give a speech in front of a whole bunch of people. I still every single time. And I kind of hope I never lose that. But it’s something that you have to manage. That fear is something you have to manage. And like I said, I don’t feel I’ll ever conquer it, but I’m more confident now that I can get past that stage of you’re not going to die out there, you’re not going to die out there, you’re going to walk off, it’s going to be okay. Now, push through and do it. And of course, it is, I have not walked off a stage yet. We’ll see. So is it enough to work out ways of managing this stuff or do we have to set out to try and conquer these issues?
Kim Ann Curtin:
I don’t think we can conquer them because we’re humans, human beings who are fallible, who are vulnerable. In a way, we have vulnerabilities. And I don’t know that we have to conquer all of that. I think we need to learn how to embrace it. We need to get comfortable with the discomfort of being human. We have to get comfortable with sometimes being scared. We have to get comfortable with even let’s say doing a talk that isn’t our best. How do we walk off that stage and say, “Wow, that wasn’t my best, but it’s okay, I did what I could today”? It doesn’t mean you don’t strive to still be the best you can be, but is there a way to find ourselves face to face with our fears, with our concerns, with our doubts, and not make them wrong, but realize that is part of the tapestry of our humanity. That is the tapestry of our desire to strive for greatness, but to not maybe beat ourselves up if we come a little bit short of that.
Grant Williams:
Let’s change subject a little bit. I know you have a checklist for traders and investors to sit down and check in with themselves. So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what’s on that and why it’s on there and how people can, at the beginning of the trading day, settle themselves and go through something like this as an exercise to try and make sure they’re in the best frame of mind possible. It may not be perfect, but is the best frame of mind they can be it.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yeah. Well, as simplistic as it may sound, just checking in around like, have you got enough sleep last night? Are you fully nourished? Are you perhaps holding onto a fight you had with somebody that has nothing to do with the markets? These sounds so simplistic. Hydration, there are studies even if you’re at a certain level of dehydration, it’s almost as if you’re drunk or unable to fully be cognitive. There are some simple things that I think… Look, the market is the most competitive game in the world, yet we all agreed that Olympians should be nourished properly, having proper rests, working out with trainers, making sure that coaches… right? And yet we’re walking into something that’s so complex with the most brilliant minds on the planet, with machines that are completely crafted to be brilliant. And we come in there, hung over, pissed off at our kids, frustrated that Joe got the fancy car, our neighbor and we didn’t, and a fight with somebody else and we expect to be in our best operating system? No, it’s not going to happen.
And John Coates talks about this as well, just about the importance of hormones. Coates’ book, one of the great books called, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf. He talks about two studies that he did on a London trading floor where he measured traders’ testosterone in the morning and was able to predict what their success would be that day. So these are things that I don’t think traders or investors are paying close enough attention to. And these are things that you need to, at a bare minimum, realize that is impacting you, certainly your state of mind, certainly your health. And start to regard it as seriously… You wouldn’t let a 10 year old drive your brand new car and yet there’s times when there’s a 10-year-old in you, driving your decisions.
Grant Williams:
So how do we deal with that? Let’s say we sit down and we identify that our kids are driving us mad and we had one too many beers last night and we probably need a bacon sandwich and a glass of water. Apart from the physical things that we can go and buy in the deli downstairs, how do we go about… Because I think in my experience, I’ve often been aware of the thing that’s in the back of my mind. And it’s one thing to say, “Right, just forget about that. We’ll deal with that later on. We’ll deal with that at lunchtime or whatever it may be.” But what happens is, of course, it’s there and you find yourself when your focus can drift, I mean, most of us have to be able to focus in the moment, but as soon as that necessity to focus wanes, it all comes back in. What can we do to deal with that?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Well, let’s just take that example you gave about a moment where focus is required and we put that hard-to-be-with emotion perhaps up on the shelf. Well, here’s the question. You say, “I’ll come back to it later.” Do you? If you don’t, then it’s going to just fester and build. So part of what I say to people is, “Look, being in tune to what’s happening for you emotionally, it doesn’t mean you can stop in the middle of a day and go process it, put it up on the shelf, but you cannot just keep putting it up on the shelf and never return to it. When you have downtime, perhaps in the evening, perhaps on the weekend, perhaps you have to make a concerted effort to have time where you do process that stuff you don’t want to be with because those are the hard to be with feelings that you are going to have to process for you to not have them keep repeating on you.”
Usually, there are hard to be with emotions that you don’t want to be with. Most of us have not been given the tools about how to surf those internal hard-to-be-with feelings. For my own journey, one of the things I had to come to terms with was that I had years worth of hard-to-be-with feelings that I had never let myself feel. In my household when I grew up, they were not going to be welcomed. It was not a place where it was going to be appropriate for me to process hard-to-be-with emotions. So I learned how to numb myself to them. And over time, that became my default setting.
What I’ve noticed with my clients now and even from my own journey was I had to learn how to surf these hard-to-be-with feelings. I had to process them. I learned this through Dr. Peter Levine’s work. One of his books that was life changing for me is called Waking the Tiger. He specifically talks about just for example, if a gazelle is escaping from the chase of a lion, if it gets away, it will tremor and tremble out that life and death situation in a bush before it returns to the herd. What do humans do? We don’t process. We don’t shake it off. Animals are in a life and death situation multiple times a day, but they don’t have trauma. Humans do have trauma because we’ve never been taught how to process physiologically, emotionally, and shake off those hard-to-be-with emotions.
So that journey I’ve taken taught me and also Raphael Cushnir, his book, The One Thing Holding You Back was also life changing for me. And what it taught me was, wow, those emotions I put up on the shelf for the past 30 years, well, piece by piece I’m going to have to process them because if I don’t, they are invisibly operating behind the scenes. And so what happens over time is if you learn how to surf those hard-to-be-with feelings, just like working out in the gym, you don’t go into the gym and do 1,000 crunches, you start with 10. That process of being with the hard-to-be-with feelings, over time, it becomes easier to do.
And once you do feel those hard-to-be-with feelings again, when you’re at your desk perhaps, you will find just like a pot of boiling water, the steam vent starts to let that over-build-up, dissipate, and that’s when people can see, “Okay, I’m sitting down today, I’m really angry about X, Y, Z, but I know today I can’t feel that, put it up on the shelf and get myself back to center. And then maybe that night or that weekend, I’ll try to process what it is that has me so upset or angry or disappointed.”
Grant Williams:
Let’s talk about how you begin to do that because obviously the first step in all these things is the hardest. I’ll tell you what, let’s pick a purely hypothetical example. Let’s say you were a 55-year-old Englishman who grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s. Let’s use that hypothetical example. Some random person that we know. Your hair’s gone gray and you’re wearing glasses now and you’re feeling older than you probably should, but how do you make those first steps? Because it’s not something you can just charge into. And I think it’s been interesting to me with all the travel I’ve done, the people I’ve met all around the world, there are people and cultures that are far more predisposed to this kind of thing.
And I joke about being English and growing up in England, but therapy is a swear word in England, certainly was when I was growing up. And even in parts of America, you can go to different cities in America and in one city everyone’s got a therapist. I’m talking to you, Santa Monica. And another city, if you go to a therapist, you’re basically Tony Soprano. Nobody better find out about it. So how do you go about making those first steps in understanding how do I take the first bite of this dead hyena I’ve got lying here?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yeah, I think the first step is to just, first of all, realize you’re a human being who’s doing the best they can in multiple cultures that perhaps advocate self-awareness or discourage it. And so once you identify, okay, my culture probably has discouraged it and there’s probably some judgements my culture has made about becoming more self-aware. And even just the negativity that’s out there now about that word “woke,” right? People get really tricked by that on both sides of the aisle. The concept is, just I say, it’s about being aware of how you tick who you are.
Look at what we go into to plan a vacation, what we go into before we buy a car. Those are just the basics of understanding perhaps what kind of vehicle you want, what kind of gas mileage you’re going to get, perhaps how beautiful it might look. A convertible would be fun. That is just bringing consciousness to a car purchase. If you’re going on a vacation, what do you want to do? Sit at the beach or do you want to be active? That is just the consciousness of what kind of holiday you’re going to have. How much time do we spend at just being conscious of how we’re living our life, how we’re working.
In the beginning of a coaching process with a client, I’ll give them something called a Discovery Packet and the first question is, what do you truly want? That’s a big question. How many people think about that before they really dive deep into perhaps their careers or relationships? It’s just that sense of, we’re so busy doing that a lot of us have kind of forgotten the being part. And I just have found for my own journey, I hired a coach over 20 years ago, 17 years ago. That’s why I became a coach. I worked in a hedge fund, I thought… I had heard in my 20s about Joseph Campbell talking about bliss. He said, “Find your bliss.” And I was like, “What is that? I want that. I want bliss.” And I looked for it for a long time and I had not been able to find it.
And when I started to experience coaching for myself, because I hired a coach, I started to realize, “Wow! This experience, what this coach is doing for me, this feels like bliss.” And because I was so committed to finding what my bliss was, I was able to get myself on that path. But I had to turnover for a lot of stones. All I say to people is, “Look, even if it isn’t bliss, are you happy doing what you’re doing every day? Are you getting the majority of your needs met? And if you’re not, are you willing to consider that perhaps there are some pivots, perhaps there are some shifts that you could make that could open up a vista that has previously not been available to you?”.
It doesn’t have to get all complicated and ethereal. It’s just like on a day to day basis, do you feel fulfilled? And if you don’t, don’t make yourself wrong about it. Just get curious. Just get curious about what might be missing that you’d like to have. And that’s when I would say you begin to start to get connected to what those basic needs are. And if you start to get them and you feel a little better, well guess what? We’re on the right path.
Grant Williams:
Let’s talk about now because the world is changing rapidly and it has been for a few years now. We’ve had COVID come along out the clear blue sky, which has obviously shaken an awful lot of people’s belief in an awful lot of things. It’s changed the way we live our lives. It’s wrought mental havoc on just about everybody in the entire world. I don’t remember anything like this in my lifetime. So how has the reaction to all this change manifested itself from what you see in the cross section of people you talk to? What are the big things that we need to be on the lookout for as to how these last few years have changed us?
Kim Ann Curtin:
I think all of our collective need for security has not been met. We’re all having to be face to face with how unstable life is. Even with all the best wise efforts, everything can go pear-shaped in a heartbeat.
Just last week, at 1:15 in the morning, we had 3.9 earthquake. My whole house shook, my bed shook, and I was just like, “Hmm, just like that.” No matter how many ducks I have in a row, that… Luckily, it was 3.9 so I didn’t have to run out of the house. But the point is this is the world we live in now and because of our exposure, it’s hard to get away from it. So I would recommend at a minimum, be gentle with yourself with the amount of exposure.
Yes, as an investor you have to be ahead of the curve, but you also are a human being. Our ability to cognitively process information maxes out at a certain point. You’re not going to do any of your accounts any service by you going to tilt. Check on yourself. If you feel like you’re hitting tilt, stop scrolling, stop checking all the time. You can’t be constantly stimulated and expect yourself to get and make decisions from a place of neutrality. Recognize that it’s been a hell of a three-year, four-year process. How are there ways that you can give yourself TLC, just a little tender, loving kindness. Maybe it’s a hot bath at the end of every day. Maybe it’s simply a conversation with that one friend who gets you. Find small ways and maybe big ways to put some nourishment back into your life and realize that that sense of feeling overwhelmed is human. Of course, you’re overwhelmed, frustrated, maybe scared. It’s part of what we’re all going through now.
So it’s not like all of that stuff goes away overnight. But what you want to do is realize everything so far that you thought you couldn’t handle, you have survived. That gives me confidence that you’ll be able to handle whatever this is now. Also, for the first time, we all are in it together. And if we could look at that as like, wow, maybe let that guy get a break because maybe he’s having a rough day just like you are. It perhaps allows us to have some common sense of community that as a planet we just all endured something pretty incredible, pretty difficult. And if we’re still six feet above ground, we survived it.
It doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, but if you start to get comfortable with your own strengths and start to perhaps get yourself nourished in the ways you can, like with understanding some more of your needs, then your ability to tolerate the discomfort perhaps improves. And that’s, I think right now more than anything, we need to just give ourselves the little bit of TLC and find ways to get that little bit of nourishment so we can handle the volatility that may be here for a while.
Grant Williams:
Let me ask you this then, because what’s happening now, if you are an investor or a trader and you have been for some considerable amount of time, you may have mastered all this stuff, you may be in control of your emotions, you may have your, if not all your needs met, but your understanding of them and you know where you’re deficient and you can manage those deficiencies. But the world around us is changing and the trading environment is altered. And after 40 years of being able to trade in one direction, because we’ve had a certain scaffolding around this, for want of a better word, that’s been ripped down now and everyone is now facing tremendous uncertainty. And the longer you’ve been doing this for, the bigger that uncertainty gets, the harder it’s going to be to adapt and change the way you function, the way you deal with things on a daily basis.
Like me for example, I’ve doing this for best part of 40 years, it’s tough to unlearn those habits. If you’ve been doing it for a year, I guess you just go, “It’s different now, fine.” So how should we go about managing the personal side of changing circumstance that in many cases can completely wipe out everything you’ve learned?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yeah. Change is really hard, especially when you’ve been practicing something for 40 years and it’s going to take you more than five minutes to adapt. And if you’ve been in the market for 40 years, you know damn well that the only certainty is that uncertainty. So if that’s something you’ve already learned, just because the market constantly forces you to learn that, then here it is again. Oh it’s another upleveling, it’s another request for you to take all that you thought you knew and pause it and be open. Be open with that curiosity. It’s understandable to initially have panic. It’s understandable to initially be operating out of fear, but that is never a place that leads us down the right path. If you can allow those emotions to process through, find a way to discharge them, journal it out, talk to another colleague who’s perhaps in the same situation, then find your way back to a place of neutrality and start to look at that big picture.
This is also just something in coaching that we constantly try to suggest to people. You’re in the weeds. And in a lot of ways being in the weeds really allows you to see things up close and personal. But there are times when you need to step big, all the way up to the big picture, all the way to the top of that mountain. Just like the generals did in a war. They had to look over the landscape, they had to start to find, to wait, to come into neutrality, to see what is happening from the big picture. If you can do that for yourself and start to become more strategic and big picture orientated, it’s possible that there is data before all of us that we’re not paying attention to because we’re just in the panic and in the weeds.
So I would say process the emotions, don’t make them wrong, find a way to get yourself back to center and see if you could go to the top of that mountain and look down on the planes. What is here that perhaps you’ve missed because you’re in a panic? What is here that perhaps has shown up in the past, even if it was different that you could potentially learn from? That’s what I would say. There have been so many corrections, I get this as a different sort of one, but there are… History if rife with things crumbling and things being rebuilt. Lean into perhaps history, lean into perhaps your own. If you’ve been in this market for 40 years, you have a deep intuitive knowing. Have you listened to that? Have you been paying attention to that? Or are you’re just being filled with all the negativity?
And there is something to be said. Appreciative inquiry is something I find fascinating, which is a technique that’s used when going into an organization or with individuals to start to focus on what is working, to start to put your eyes on what does work. Are you collecting those? It is easy to be negative. It is our bias to be negative as human beings. Have you started to spend time on what does work, on what has helped you in the past or perhaps what people have done in the past when there’s great volatility? See if you can find all of the things of what you could do instead of only focusing on what you shouldn’t do or can’t do anymore.
Grant Williams:
You used a word there a couple of times. I’m so used to hearing that, centered. It’s something that I hear an awful lot. People say, “Oh, you know, I felt need to get centered or I was centered.” Can you describe to people what centered means and what it feels like? Because it’s a concept. I think we all kind of get the concept of vaguely what it means, but what does that feel like and what should we be looking for to try and find that feeling of centeredness?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yeah. I would say centeredness ultimately is a place of grounded neutrality. Not being pulled back and forth by the fears, the worries, or even the excitements and being excited about an opportunity. I have found that that lives sort of in the middle of those two extremes of emotions. And because I’m such an advocate of surfing your internal emotions, I knew at some point I was going to have to take real surf lessons out on the ocean because I used the metaphor so much. So I was like, “Hmm, I use this metaphor so much, I better get myself on a real surfboard and see if I’m accurate with this use of this metaphor.” And one of the things that I noticed in my surf lessons and the surfing experience that I had was that if you are at all not in that present moment on the board, you fall off.
If you are like, “Oh wow, I just survived that wave back there. I’m so proud of myself, that was so cool.” Boom! You fall into the ocean. If you’re on the board and you’re thinking too much about what’s coming up down ahead and you’re so future focused and not in the now, boom, you fall up the board. So there is this moment on a surfboard where it forces you to be just in this moment. And that is all any of us have. There is no future, there is no past. It’s just the constant sense of now. Infrequently do we find ourselves in this moment. We’re either living in the future or the past and that doesn’t exist. It’s all made up, so to speak. So how do we get ourselves to this moment?
You always have what you need and have always had need in the crises you’ve lived through. But in this moment, we think, “Oh, what’s going to happen if this happens?” Well, guess what? You’ll figure it out when you get there. I’m not telling you not to have some plans, but are you living in this moment or are you constantly in the future?
Another spiritual teacher of mine has a great phrase, God I hope I can remember it, but he says, “Fear is false evidence appearing real.” And I really love that. So I think at the end of the day, that centeredness is coming back to yourself, coming back to a place within you that in spite of all the upheaval you have already endured, in spite of all the pain and trauma you have endured, because we’ve all endured our version of it, you have somehow continued. And that is the internal lighthouse that we each can hold onto. The storms come, they can throw us off, criticisms can come, judgements can come from ourself or other people, but within us is that centeredness. But we’ve infrequently spent any time there. So it’s hard to kind of find in the darkness.
That’s what I feel meditation offers to all of us. Again, meditation could come in lots of forms, but it’s just that concept of everybody has an experience of when they’ve been in nature. Maybe it was when they were kids, maybe it’s when they take a hike in the woods. There’s just a centeredness in that space I think, because nature itself never loses sight of it, but we all have it. It’s like it’s always available to us, but we aren’t always available to it.
Grant Williams:
Perfect. What a great answer. Listen, it’s been a fascinating hour and I have a funny feeling we’re going to come back and chat more about this at some point in the future. But in the meantime, look, please do let everybody know how they can out more about your work and read more of this stuff and perhaps give a copy of the basic needs list and checklist and that kind of stuff. Because I just feel this stuff will be invaluable to so many people.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yeah, Well, investorpractices.com, we created that site this morning for your listeners to go and get the checklist. And while we don’t have the universal needs list up on it yet, we’re going to have that there later today. So if they go to investorpractices.com, they can sign up and we’ll get them all of the things I spoke about. And then the Wall Street Coach is my website, thewallstreetcoach.com.
Grant Williams:
So I can reach you through that.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yes.
Grant Williams:
And you’re on Twitter as well?
Kim Ann Curtin:
Yes, @kimanncurtin. And Curtin is spelled, C-U-R-T-I-N, like Jane Curtin of old Saturday Night Live days.
Grant Williams:
There you go. There you go. Kim, it’s been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this. We’ve been trying to get this together for a long time now and I’m so delighted we’ve managed to do it and let’s do it again soon because I’ve really enjoyed this hour. Thank you.
Kim Ann Curtin:
Thank you so much.
Grant Williams:
Well, there you go folks. As I said at the top, this was just such an enjoyable conversation. Very different to a lot of the conversations I’ve had in these podcast, but I think are very important, particularly given the amount of change around us. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Kim. We’ve spoken a few times over the last year or so and each one of them has been hugely enlightening for me. So I would urge you all to check out her website. You’ll find her at thewallstreetcoach.com. And as she very kindly said, investorpractices.com. She set up a website specifically for listeners of this podcast where you can download that list of basic human needs, which I guarantee you’ll find some words on there that will really surprise you and make you think, and hopefully an investor checklist that you can start using before you sit down to get involved in these crazy markets. And again, I can’t recommend Kim Ann’s work highly enough. She’s a wonderful person and the stuff she does and the way she does it is phenomenal given her background in the industry.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this, as I said, as much as I have. It’s always a pleasure for me. My thanks to you for listening and I will back again soon with another conversation.
Nothing we discussed should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets.
