MAGGIE LAKE

We’re going to take kind of a deep dive with one of the early conversations with Hugh Hendry. But before we do that, why don’t you sort of tell us about your approach and some of the ways you deal with clients, particularly the way you think about using the science of the brain to try to help people with their performance. Just give us a little idea of your approach.

DENISE SHULL 

In short, it would be called neuro psychoanalysis, but it’s not like anybody knows what that means. So that’s, it’s really a combination of the latest neuroscience of how a human actually makes a decision. And a number of principles that honestly, psychoanalysts have known forever, which is: most of our perception and judgment is unconscious. So I apply this to like risk decisions. I mean, all decisions are risk decisions, but market decisions are a particular type of risk decision. But what the latest science has shown is all decisions come from an emotion, they’re like, “Okay, you know, don’t stop listening right now, because it’s true.” And particularly an expected emotion. But the vast majority of this is unconscious to the vast majority of us. So what I do is help people make that conscious, so they understand what factors are really driving their decision. And when they become conscious of it, they have a wider set of choices.

MAGGIE LAKE 

I think we’ve taped 16 conversations now, and at some point, almost everyone says, “Well, you have to take the emotion out of it.” “You have to separate the emotion.” Or the bad trades, the worst trades they’ve had, “I let my emotions get the best of me.”

DENISE SHULL

Yeah.

MAGGIE LAKE

And I know we’ve talked about this, and I’ve done a session with you on stage and this. It’s almost exactly the opposite of what you just described, which I think is so fascinating.

DENISE SHULL 

Yeah, there’s this centuries old misunderstanding that feeling something and doing something are the same thing. So it’s been merged and people haven’t looked at it logically. I mean, an emotion alone has never lost or made a dime. But you have to do something, right? You have to put the order in. And people don’t separate that. So you know, since at least the 1600s there’s been this Descartes “I think, therefore I am,” and it’s literally the exact opposite of how the brain actually works. So the wrong perception of it, if you will, actually just makes the whole thing worse. It makes it more likely that any given individual merges their emotion and their action, as opposed to analyzing what information is in the emotion, and then assigning that information to the trade, or to their life, or to their history. They don’t do that. Because they don’t know that they should. And I mean, I always think it’s like a flatter, rounder thing. You know, when the Earth was flat, no one thought they could sail around it. But when people think that emotions are supposed to be separate, they literally don’t have the whole wide world of their mind that they can sail through. And they go the wrong places.

MAGGIE LAKE 

And we’re talking about traders, a lot of the work you do is just traders, but it’s also with athletes. I mean, it’s with anyone that’s facing decision risk.

DENISE SHULL 

So every decision is a risk decision, just some are more complex than others. I mean, I yeah, I have lots of people besides investors and traders; art gallery owners, music producers, Broadway directors.

MAGGIE LAKE 

Yeah. We all get stuck. Well, that makes me feel so slightly better. So Hugh was really interesting. Hugh Hendry, always provocative, longtime has a lot of experience and is someone that struck me as really very self reflective. And of course, you’ve had a conversation with Hugh, we have permission to talk about him in this way. And one of the things that came up with him, and I laughed, when he said it, I thought, “Gosh, this, this could be a T-shirt, or like a tagline for something.” But one of the things that he surfaces has come up in every conversation that we’ve had so far, in addition to you know, them talking about emotion. And this is the idea or the frustration around getting so married to a trader idea that they stayed in it too long, they stayed with it even if it was something that was obviously not working or turning against them and just stewing about this. I mean, some of these trades are 20 years later and they remember the exact circumstances of the trade and why they got so stuck in it. Let’s listen to a clip of how Hugh describes that experience himself.

HUGH HENDRY

I’ve always chartered this profound and disturbing episode in my life. I’ve ordained it as the arrogance and the conceit of a well formed argument that I was blinkered to the reality that the thing was going down. It’s more important that you keep an inventory, a reserve of fantastically good ideas, but you keep them on the top shelf. That’s only, I don’t even know if that’s half of the business. The real value added is knowing when to put that arm up and bring it down and plug it into the portfolio. You know, it’s just the combination of the two. Never fall in love with these things. Never fall in love with the intellectual basis of what you’re proposing.

MAGGIE LAKE

First of all, I love anyone who says “I was blinkered to the idea,” I’m totally stealing that phrase. But the “arrogance and conceit of a well formed argument.” What do you think he’s getting out there?

DENISE SHULL 

So when I first heard, I was like, “so what is arrogance really?” Like, “I know more?” Conceit like, “I’m better than.” But I think two things. First, that’s an intellectual defense, actually. It makes sense because we live in a world that interprets everything through cognition. So he’s sort of describing how he behaved but he doesn’t really realize that’s not why he behaved the way that he did. And this is true, basically, for anyone who stays in any losing trade. When you look at the idea that underneath the surface, you are predicting some future emotion. So if you hear the whole story, he was in kind of a difficult situation, he felt it was absolutely necessary to prove himself to do something dramatic for the firm to notice him and like him. So he essentially had to prove how smart he was. And this was really important to him at the time. And when he says that he broke up with his girlfriend, you know, that he was in a difficult situation… sounded like they’ve kind of ostracized him, so he had to get it right. So what was really going on was he was afraid of what would happen if he didn’t get it right. Ironically, he thinks he was arrogant, that he’s so sure he was right. But what was driving him and made him unable to see that he was incorrect, was the fear of what would happen if he actually was incorrect? You know, it’s what behavioral finance would call confirmation bias. Yeah, it is confirmation bias, but it’s this underlying prediction of what you’re going to feel if you have to admit you were wrong. And that’s more powerful than, like anything else.

MAGGIE LAKE 

That’s wild. So it’s almost like the inability to face the fear, the possibility that you’re going to fail marries you to the idea, because you’re just like, “I’m just going to stay with this because it has to work because I’m so afraid of what’s behind door two.”

DENISE SHULL 

Yeah. Like you can’t face the potential. It’s oftentimes regret or humiliation or embarrassment. You don’t want to imagine how embarrassed you’re going to be, or humiliated you’re going to be or what the consequences are. And the consequences, meaning how unhappy you’re going to be by making the people who care about this disappointed in you.

MAGGIE LAKE 

So it’s interesting. Someone I just taped with, and tell me if this is, maybe they were doing it the right way, who said it was risky? And they were scared about doing the trade, but then thought to themselves, “Is this a trade that would be worth getting fired for?” And the answer was “Yes.” And they did it. And so that to me seems like kind of the opposite, where they recognize the fear, recognize that it could be career ending, and then made a decision sort of cuddled up to that. “Am I still okay with it?” That sounds like someone who actually was a little bit more cognizant of their emotions.

DENISE SHULL 

Totally, totally. They actually use that. They actually said, “the worst possible case is something I’d be willing to risk.” Ie – the worst possible case isn’t that threatening to me compared to the possible reward. And if someone does that honestly – because you know, someone could sort of talk themselves into that when it’s not really true – but assuming they’re doing it honestly, chances are that jig works really well.

MAGGIE LAKE 

So it’s interesting to me, the other thing he said is, “don’t fall in love with the intellectual idea.” So he used a really strong emotion to describe the connection to the intellectual. Except you’re saying it wasn’t intellectual at all. It was fear based, really. I mean, not the trade, not why he took the trade, but the fact he stayed in it.

DENISE SHULL

Yeah.

MAGGIE LAKE

Because he kept doubling down. For those of you listening, this is Hugh’s Reader’s Digest trade that went spectacular. They finally had to sort of, you know, tap him on the shoulder.

DENISE SHULL 

Yeah. Well, that’s one of the things about cognition and intellect analysis versus emotion. There’s all kinds of phrases that are reflective of emotions like ‘never fall in love.’ I mean, what does it mean to be in love with someone? You’re obsessed with them. Like, they’re wonderful, they’re perfect, this is great. You don’t see reality, right? And so it is not an irrelevant phrase. And you don’t want to lose them! I mean, really, that’s the essence of life and falling in love. It’s because when you’re in love, you don’t want to lose the person. So you really don’t want the trade to go bad. Because why? In either case, it’s gonna be really darn painful.

MAGGIE LAKE 

The other reason this was really interesting to me is that there seems to be, for people who are successful, who do these trades – many of them have had sort of stories where there was a lot of doubt, a lot of doubters around them, a lot of people who didn’t see what they saw –  some of them hugely successful. What is the difference between conviction and stubbornness of staying in a trade for too long?

DENISE SHULL

Well, I’m gonna go to Hugh’s case in one sense. At that time when he was 27, he didn’t understand that the market really is a social game. Like you have your analysis, but basically, other people in the market need to get on board with your analysis or they’re never going to buy or sell whatever you need them to do. Like you’re in it and you need other people to see it. Otherwise, the price isn’t going to change, right. So as people grow and experience the market, they start to realize it’s not the analysis. They’re confident in other people seeing this over time so they support the direction of the position. So he didn’t get that. The other thing that happens when you go through some of these serious losses, and you survive them is you start to believe you can have a prediction and that it will be alright. Like the person who just said, “I’ll get fired over this.” Because whoever said that, realized that if they got fired, they would still be okay, for whatever reason.

MAGGIE LAKE 

So that comes with experience. Actually, I think Hugh did talk about it being a social game. But I don’t know that he exactly used that language and I think it was when I was asking him about being a contrarian. So I mean, even starting then, you know, he thought he found that idea that no one else saw. But he does have a reputation as being somebody who is contrarian, who will go against the flow. And when I asked him that, he sort of redefined it and was like, “No, I’m not really being a contrarian.” Let’s play a clip of him talking about that, and about his reputation as being a contrarian.

HUGH HENDRY

So why would I seek to outsmart the smartest minds on the planet? That kind of sounds like a pure risk-return trade off. Instead, what I sought to do was, I sought to understand why even being super, super intelligent, you aren’t guaranteed to make money in the crazy upside world of risk taking. And so when all these smart people were throwing their hands up, because arguably, they’ve consumed too much of the insanity molecules, and they said, “Who would have guessed that this could happen?” I was like, “Me.”

MAGGIE LAKE 

So that was really interesting to me. When you’re talking about the market as a social game, is that what you’re talking about? That he at some point, was able to sort of see something else going on, or really key into that social part of it?

DENISE SHULL 

Well, it really is just that you need other market players to come to your perception, or some perception that causes them to trade in the same way. But you need them to do that. And he can basically see that the predictions people were making were incomplete. So that while they may be moving, you know, an assets price in a certain direction based on some idea, that idea was missing things that were right in front of them. And he was basically predicting that other market participants would come to see those things that he could see right in front of himself. And they should be able to see, but they weren’t seeing it. So what does that mean? He can get into a trade early at a good price. It’s called theory of mind, by the way in psychology, that you have a theory of the other person’s mind. So he was operating out of a theory of like, “look, they’re using group think. They’re not seeing it. Maybe they’re just all fundamentals as opposed to any global macro influences or any technical influences.”

MAGGIE LAKE 

It’s funny, because herd mentalities are a really powerful thing in markets. I mean, we do tend to see – why are we so susceptible to that? Because I’m assuming even the best traders fall victim to that. Hugh talked about the hedge funds, the most highly paid fund managers in the world, are supposed to be the smartest people out there, sometimes drink too many ‘insanity molecules’, he called them.

DENISE SHULL

You know, at its core we always have an emotion that’s about a future emotion. We feel confident that this will work and we’ll be happy and safe. Like, that’s really what it’s about. So, and happy and safe has a social component, right? “I won’t be ostracized from my community.” My spouse won’t divorce me.” So there’s safety in numbers. And you need numbers to support your position. It’s like a timing thing. You know, you need to be different from the crowd at the beginning, but then you need the crowd to come along with you. But you can’t confuse those two. And I’ve had clients, I mean, hedge fund managers, who had such a need to be recognized by their peers or to feel like they were in the trade their peers were in, that they’d literally take major positions where they’ve just threw out whatever their process was.

MAGGIE LAKE 

Yeah. It’s funny the need for belonging, it always comes up in sort of, HR speak. Belonging and inclusion is a big trend now in human resources, and people sometimes don’t like it, but it is. So it sounds like you’re saying it’s so primitive we all feel that?

DENISE SHULL 

Yeah, yeah, I think you know, Denise Shull’s theory of like human beings, is – we have two competing needs: one is to be fully ourselves and reach our potential, and the other is to be part of a group and accepted and loved. And they’re in conflict. And so we’re always navigating those two, and the market honestly, is the perfect place to navigate those two. Well, because it is an authority figure. Nobody can change the price, really. George Soros and the silver trade or whatever notwithstanding. So you can’t do anything to influence it. And so what you do, you project onto it authority figures from your life. You project onto it, your storylines from when you were a little kid and you had no influence over what happened to you, or very little influence over whatever situations your parents put you in, and you interpret it through that. You can do what Hugh does and step out and look at the factors that are influencing price in one day and say, “these are really wrong, and these are really going to change. And when everybody else realizes they’re gonna change, they’re gonna come along with me.” So he’s gotten to be himself and then he’s gotten the support. Like, in theory, he’s met both of those needs. I mean, it’s a tick by tick assault on your ego that you can apply any interpretation to you that you want, or that’s embedded in you because of your life history.

MAGGIE LAKE 

So I mean, that feeling – that even with all that experience, that we gravitate to being in that group with others to get that sense of belonging – I think it must affect everyone.

DENISE SHULL

It does. I mean, you end up getting back to this fear of future regret, and like, will you be humiliated or embarrassed or really unsafe? It’s like, we’re always predicting, “are we safe or unsafe?” Our body’s always doing that, our psyches are always doing that. Everything is like at it’s very core, “Does it feel good or bad? Will it feel good or bad?” So you know, if you really are outside the group at any one point, you might be at really great risk.

MAGGIE LAKE

Yeah.

DENISE SHULL

And so you get nervous about really being outside the group at any one point.

MAGGIE LAKE

You mentioned something a moment ago about the authority figure of the market, and we sort of layer on that whatever, you know, issues we had when we were growing up with authority, our thoughts about that. And the issue of childhood came up when we were talking to Hugh and I really appreciated his honesty and willing to talk about his past, because I think he does recognize that it played a role. He talked about his childhood growing up poor – by the way, a lot of the people we’ve talked to came from nothing, which is very interesting to me – but he talked about growing up poor and the kind of impact it had on him. Let’s listen to what he said.

HUGH HENDRY 

My parents were given the opportunity to buy hosting stock from the government at below market, because they couldn’t afford market. And so we moved from the housing project to another hosting project, which had more green space. And my parents purchased a house and they were already showing ominous signs of worrying at the most minute things. And taking on debt just sent him over the edge. And you pick all that tension up as a child, and so I channeled their tension. And if you fast forward into the person I became – I made a career of sorts around hedge fund management – I was a worrier, and I chose an occupation where you worry a lot but you get remunerated for worrying. So childhood, like everyone, childhood features very, very prominently in the hardwiring of who I became.

MAGGIE LAKE 

It’s all about our childhood, isn’t it? I mean, it is the stereotypical therapy issue, but it was really fascinating. I was wondering at the time if you could swap out worry for anxiety, because everybody worries, but it sounded like it was pretty persistent. Just that concern over money and finance, it is kind of interesting that he ended up going into that field as opposed to something else.

DENISE SHULL 

You know, he talked earlier about being before he was seven years old, and this essentially dangerous environment, that his parents had been rejected. And so I think a couple of things go on there when you’re an outsider growing up, and also I think, in his case, you can imagine that his parents were working all the time. So he was probably more or less on his own. And obviously, he’s a brilliant person who was born with an intellect. Well, you’re like your little kid, it’s kind of dangerous, you just kind of got to figure it out, and you’re not part of any group that’s going to save you. So what does that enable you to do? It enables you to see things more realistically and see things that other people don’t see. It gives you a confidence in yourself, because you have to do it over and over and over again. You don’t have a mother or father or a big social family structure that’s saying, “Do this, do that, do this, do that,” and you’re just walking through the steps. You’re navigating risk as a little kid. So I think that ends up playing into why the market was so attractive because that’s just the most extreme version of that. Like, figure out the forces that are causing people to do what they’re doing and “oh, by the way, you can make a bunch of money doing that.” And the rejection, that being rejected, like not part of a group led to his being able to be contrarian to see it differently than other people. But if I were talking to him, I would propose that his ability to see the world and navigate risk in a more objective way, if you will, then the masses, actually outweighs his worrying.

MAGGIE LAKE 

So it’s kind of a superpower.

DENISE SHULL 

Yeah, so he might perceive himself as always worrying, but clearly he couldn’t have done some of the trades he’s done if he was consumed with anxiety.

MAGGIE LAKE

One of the questions I ask all the time is “How did you get into this field? Did you know about markets and was money important in your household? Did you know there was a thing such as investing? Was it talked about in your house?” And so often the answer – I mean, there are some exceptions – but so often the answer is “No. No financial literacy. No idea. No money.” I mean financial insecurities,I wonder if that was it deficit, or is that something that not only sort of propelled them and was a motivator, but also gave them some sort of vision or some ability to understand things outside, that other people don’t.

DENISE SHULL 

I think, when you feel unsafe growing up, I mean, there’s obviously a point maybe that this tips into too much trauma, but generally you don’t necessarily feel like you have a place in the world. You’re sort of on the outside, and you can’t fully participate in the world because you don’t have the money, or parents don’t have the money. It tends to give you a perspective on the world that you otherwise don’t get if you grow up in an environment where you’re given everything. I think it can be a plus in terms of ultimately navigating markets.

MAGGIE LAKE

I think that’s probably a relief for some people to hear. Because I think that a lot of people consider a difficult childhood a deficit, a problem to paper over.

DENISE SHULL 

In most cases, I mean, this is a gross generalization. But still, there are a lot of cases, let’s put it that way, where within a certain boundary, you have to think for yourself, but you’re not too, too, too unsafe, you develop confidence in yourself.

MAGGIE LAKE 

It’s so true. We hear about, there’s a whole sort of generation, a group of people who were very young in World War in Europe, and obviously, the society was pulled apart. And many of them were on their own or pretty close to being on their own. And many of them went on to be very, very successful CEOs and run companies, because at a young age, they were having to fend for themselves, basically.

DENISE SHULL

When you have really attentive parents – again, a gross generalization – but the kids tend to not get as much credit for what they’re capable of. You can say to an eight year old, like, “you know, some people believe one thing about God and some people believe another thing about God” and eight year olds say, “okay.” Like, they won’t get all caught up in it, “Like yeah, okay, that makes sense. We don’t really know what some people think. Ok fine.” And they’ll go back off doing what they’re doing. But the adults will have to be like, “No, you have to believe the way I…” They just look at the world kind of more the way it is. They’re slurred.

MAGGIE LAKE 

Yeah, cause they haven’t been indoctrinated into our bullshit yet.

DENISE SHULL 

Exactly. That lack of indoctrination allows you to then navigate the market in a way that if you were really indoctrinated, you have to unlearn that.

MAGGIE LAKE

So it’s interesting. We have this insight about his background, but I was thinking about it and struck by it when he talked about making a trade around the great financial crisis – the housing bust. And he was right. This was one of his better trades. But with Hugh, the good and bad, were all mixed together. Because even if he made a boatload of money, there was sometimes things he pulled out of it that he thought were lessons to learn things that were wrong, and vice versa. On a bad trade, things that he pulled out that he thought were great. But in this even though he was right and made the right call in terms of money, he talked about the aftermath about being so pious, outspoken and just so angry after that. Let’s listen to what he said.

HUGH HENDRY

I became a very pious, outspoken commentator on what had come to pass. And I was trading outside the reach of my engagement for my clients. I became social – an angry, which is anger is emotion – and I became an emotional commentator on Social Mood and Trent. And I was trying to provide transparency to what happened. But also I wanted more retribution. There had been malfeasance and I didn’t want this nonsense to happen again. And I lost myself, and even  worse, I lost you at least two years of what should have been a great performance.

MAGGIE LAKE

So when I was listening to him say that, first of all, when he said he lost himself, I was thinking he meant control of his ability to keep his emotions in check. But he at the same time talks about just the fury and anger and the need for retribution, which I thought was very honest of him, But then also saying, “I wanted transparency. There was something wrong. I wanted justice and I wanted to warn people.” That there seemed like two slightly different things to me.

DENISE SHULL 

Yeah, it’s a really interesting reaction on his part. The truth is, I’d love the three of us to chat more about it, because there’s something I can see entangled with his own experience of being in that violent environment and then being given a house and there’s parents worrying so much. Where I feel like you know, he used the word time traveling in the markets, but he was doing his time traveling of his own emotions. Like “what would have happened if my parents lost the house?”  You know, “what would happen if this were my childhood now and they would have lost the house?” And I don’t think he was so worried about himself. I think he was protective of them. And probably the feelings he had when he was a little kid where he wanted to make it okay, because kids do that, they want the problem to be their fault so that they can make it okay. And it helps them. It’s like a narcissistic thing, but it makes them feel like they have some control. I think that got merged into that in some way, shape or form. And he was sort of angry about what happened to other people, but as a reflection of what his parents were worried about.

MAGGIE LAKE 

This comes up over and over again, episodes from when people are young or experiences that are carrying through because they bring them up, like they make the connection. But then there’s something that’s not complete about that connection, that is eluding them from really understanding what happened. And I keep going back to what you said at the beginning that we conflate emotion and the emotion is tied up in the action, but we’re not really separating them out and sort of fully understanding what’s happening and if there was a direct react– something is blurred in all of that, I think.

DENISE SHULL

When you really sit down with someone and figure out, why they feel the way that they do, you trace what their storyline and what the feelings would have been like at important moments in their first 15-20 years. Usually when you really trace that, objectively, you can see how it matches to the experience they’ve had. And so there’s something in this and how it made Hugh so angry – there’s like a missing puzzle piece in that.

MAGGIE LAKE

Do we understand? Or do we try to avoid how those early experiences influence us? Why does that seemed to be a wall that we put up?

DENISE SHULL

It depends on the person. You know, some people  really want to know, because they really want to know why they do what they do. And they want to do more of, you know, what helps them be whoever they are. But a lot of people are afraid of it. First of all, they’re afraid to just feel the feeling. Like if I actually let myself feel the fear or frustration or disappointment from when I grew up, they’re afraid they’ll like, you know, evaporate. That somehow that feeling will overtake them. It’s not that way.

MAGGIE LAKE

That’s powerful. That’s really powerful.

DENISE SHULL

Yeah, it’s really a fear of feeling the feeling, never mind analyzing it.

MAGGIE LAKE

Is that because we shut it off when we were young, because it was too much to bear then and we just never let ourselves fully experience it?

DENISE SHULL

For a variety of reasons, but oftentimes, you were told to shut it off, right? But also, children can have feelings that they are scared of. Like, if a child gets really angry, they might just shut it off, because they’re actually afraid of what they’ll do. It’s like often that you were told you couldn’t feel it. And as a kid, you were afraid of what would happen if you didn’t feel it, so you just stop feeling it and then you retain about those things – afraid to feel it and afraid of what you’ll have to do if you realize it – and it stopped you. But that really limits growth. Like just to be clear, the neuroscience now says our perception and judgment is all predictive. Meaning we’re constantly predicting what’s going to happen happened, and we’re doing it based on our past experience. And the past experience in the formative years are the most important pieces if  the perception and judgment has anything to do with who we are and how safe we are, and how successful we are self image. Which most things do, I mean, what you’re gonna order for lunch doesn’t, but any sort of trade does.

MAGGIE LAKE 

When you’re talking about being predictive, it’s still like, in the next five minutes, something’s gonna happen and it’s gonna be good or gonna be bad, kind of thing. It’s always trying to look around the corner. Your brain is sometimes somehow trying to predict what’s ahead, so that you’re well, or you do well, or you move through life well.,

DENISE SHULL

At its core, yes; safe or unsafe. But literally, the latest perception and judgment research is that it’s not stimulus response. That right now, you and I are predicting the next word each other is going to say – we’re anticipating… our eyesight is looking to work that way, like everything that we thought was, you know, get some sort of input and react – it’s looking like that’s completely wrong.

MAGGIE LAKE

Wild. That’s wild.

DENISE SHULL

I mean, it’s literally ‘the sunrises in the east’ of human perception. Once you accept that, it changes how you interpret everything that humans do, and how you interpret what the problems are and how you solve them. It’s like a flat earth rounder, now you can sail around the world of your mind.

MAGGIE LAKE 

So if we take all of these themes, I think, tie back into this bombshell that you just dropped – flat Earth round earth, that everything’s predictive and most of its unconscious – how do we start to, I mean I know that Hugh spends hours and hours and hours working with people to try to uncover this, but what should be the takeaway from this conversation in terms of what we need to think about in terms of recognizing that within ourselves?

DENISE SHULL 

Yeah, I tell people this simple question, “what am I feeling and why am I feeling it?” Which simple question to say, it is not an easy question for most people to answer. And it’s harder to get both sides even, right. The real what and the real why. But you’re also going with the flow. So if you commit to trying to do it, chances are you’re gonna get further down that river of that, if you will, then if you don’t. But basically, when you get both sides right – what and why – first of all, whatever agitation of the feelings there are, doesn’t matter and second of all, you have a world’s worth of information that you didn’t have. Which what then opens up your choices in any realm of life, but it enables you at the very core to separate the feelings that are urging you to do something like an impulsive trade – the ones are supposed to control your emotions – from the ones that are in intuition. Expertise – which comes education and experience – is delivered to your consciousness through a feeling, not a thought. You sense something is right because you’re having a pattern recognition experience based on like your past experience saying, “This is what’s going to happen. These are how these factors are going to play out.” Because you’ve seen this movie before. But that information is delivered below the neck – in a sense of feeling – it’s not delivered up here. When you feel intuitive or recognize something – you know Hugh talked about voices in his head – it doesn’t come up here it comes here.

MAGGIE LAKE

We’re going to sort of end where we started, which is “don’t say you need to take the emotion out of it.” Strike that from the vocabulary because that’s the core of everything.

DENISE SHULL

I had a CIO of a $50 billion fund say to me last year, “you know what I think you’re teaching me and what I now realize, I have tried so hard to take the emotion out of it, that I lost my access to my intuition.” And I was like, “bingo.”