People Pleasing On The Trading Desk

Hey everybody. Happy Thursday. Hope you’re doing well. Please like and subscribe if you care to. I was talking with another client on the consulting side, and it occurred to me that the person was actually holding themselves back. They were doing very, very, very well. But check this out. When you are with a peer group or on a trading desk, just by the natural order of things, there kind of becomes a hierarchy. There’s someone always competing to be the dominant primate, right? Which is such a snooze, what a waste of time. But at any rate, when we talked about complacency and not setting goals and getting comfortable, so much so that when you try to take some actions, it can evoke anxiety or fear. You might also, look, I’m not a psychologist, but you might be comfortable also in your peer group. And if you go out and achieve too much, even if you have natural ability that you know, kind of know that you’re not tapping into, you can be deliberately holding yourself back because you’re comfortable with the natural order of stuff in and around your peer group and the pecking order, right?
So when you invite that change, the person that everyone is used to you being is going to change and it isn’t going to exist anymore. It’s almost a new person coming into the group. Now, if you’ve witnessed new people coming into the group and you’re already there, doesn’t matter where you are in the hierarchy, you hear the chatter, you hear the gossip, right? And it’s really toxic for an entity to have that. But it, it’s, it’s seems like it’s almost human nature to make fun of the new guy or kid aunties on them, either in front of them or certainly behind their back. And so since you can witness that now, and that’s a definable data point, you don’t want to put yourself, this is deep. This is subconscious stuff. You don’t want to put yourself in the spot of being the new guy, and that’s exactly who you would be, man or woman.
If you attempt to make any change, you open yourself up to that type of teasing. You open yourself up to that type of ridicule. You’re opening yourself up to making a statement, not verbally, but you’re a different person. You’re going through some type of metamorphosis that you endeavor to do. So not only do you have the fear of the change in yourself, the fear of failure, you could have a deep subconscious understanding of what’s going on and within the dynamic of the group that you’re with. Could be the trading desk, could be the firm at large, could be where your firm ranks on hedge. I mean, it all adds up. I’m not saying one is more material than the other. It’s all important, right? I care for everybody listening here. But don’t be afraid of striving for greatness, your own personal greatness, because you’re afraid of how everyone’s going to be reacting to you around the lunch table or on the trading desk. You are effectively going to, and you kind of have to do this too, whether you
Like or not. You kind of have to kill off the old versions of yourself because the markets evolve and you’ll have to evolve your trading style. But if you have other types of goals in your personal life, you can keep ’em close to the vest. But don’t be afraid to endeavor to do them because there’s just a certain group of people who are going to be, not necessarily Schaden Freud, where they’re happy that you fail, but they themselves can become very comfortable in where you are in the group. And if you go and try to assert yourself and try to change or maybe become more of a leader, there are people who might have very, very strong reaction to that, even though you’re supposed to be on the same team. So this kind of stuff comes up when we have some very frank discussions at the team level.
When I work with groups or folks who are on a trading desk and how can you help your peer or the person sitting next to you? And I put this question out there, how can you help them be better than you? How can you help that person become the best person on the desk? Again, it goes back to think and grow rich and having abundance that’s at least one source of it. There’s there’s many, but because when you give of yourself, then you can expect to get some type of reciprocity. It might not necessarily come from the desk itself, but it’s going to come from somewhere, and that’s what you need to trust in. But be bold. This is your life, and we don’t have as much time on planet earth. We don’t have as much time together as we would hope. Life is very, very precious, and it’s remarkable.
Every year I learned something along these lines that we kind of live like we’re supposed to live forever, but oftentimes we don’t take the chances that we need to in life. I lost a good friend of mine who died tragically in Italy. He was a famous Jiro, and I’m not ready to talk about it now, but I will be in the future. You see that marvelous effect on me, not just on the mats, but just in life with his outlook and stuff. So I’ll leave it there, and I’ll be back tomorrow with some more. Thanks for being here, folks. I appreciate everybody. Love yourself, love your neighbors, and just do the best that you can. All right, I’ll see you tomorrow.

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