Denise Shull - Founder of The Rethink Group | How to Use Psychology for Trading, Investing & Risk

Welcome to success story the most useful podcasts in the world. I'm your host Scott D. Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network The HubSpot podcast network has other great podcasts like marketing made simple hosted by dr. J. J. Petersen Marketing made simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly make it work now If any of these topics sound interesting to you, you're going to love his show How to write and deliver captivating speeches, how to market yourself into a new job, how design can help and potentially hurt your revenue and How to create a social media ad strategy that works if these topics hit home and their things that you want to learn about Go listen to marketing made simple wherever you get your podcasts Today my guest is Denise Shul she is the founder and CEO of rethink she leverages her background in neuroscience and modern psychoanalysis To solve the mental mysteries of successful investing trading competing and leading teams She is known for her uncanny effectiveness in resolving mental blocks and decision conundrums often called the real-life Wendy Rhodes from billions She has an ma in neuro psychoanalysis from the University of Chicago and she authored the best selling book market mind games She is a celebrated performance coach. She specializes in working with hedge funds pro athletes and other high octane professionals at the top of their respective fields She recently coached snowboarder Lindsay Yakabelis to a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics earlier this year She has been featured in outlets including CNBC Fox Business Bloomberg TV Yahoo Finance Forbes Wall Street Journal Bloomberg Markets and more She is key noted for UBS credit Swiss MIT Sloan Fellows the US ski and snowboard association and Harvard Business School as the founder of rethink group Which is a team of risk performance and strategy advisors she focuses on the positive contribution of feelings and emotions in high pressure situations and how to make optimal decisions So we spoke about all things decision making improving your performance mind game overcoming biases real versus personal feelings Radicalizing your approach to human achievement the true psychology of risk in any situation the secret to better performance and why you should address your fears, frustrations and disappointments The rethink group and the kind of performance consulting we do right now started really I'm going to put two moments together One I was sitting in a class in New York City a class in something called modern psychoanalysis and a person in the class admitted to being formally paranoid schizophrenic and in that of Bellevue And saying oh yeah the instructor cured me and I was like what but then I was like well if she could do that like you can help these crazy traders I work with so where's that and then that same instructor asked to publish my master's thesis in her small little academic journal of modern psychoanalysis When I was like it's old you can't do that like she's like well how about you updated I'm like that's a lot of work but I'm like okay it will be cool to be publishing a map and you know academic channels help do it And Antonio Damasio had written a book called Descartes error and what he was referring to is Descartes the philosopher said I think therefore I am and Damasio and his colleagues were like you know that's actually wrong it's I feel therefore I am And so they were showing that you cannot make any decision without emotion and I was like well well well that changes everything about trading the best in psychology So between those two things I just started talking about people in the next thing I knew someone asked me to write an article and then someone asked me to give a talk and then it took my life at the time Now a question is is the understand like I think that there is Understanding that psychology and the human condition definitely affects trading so that's not unknown I'm assuming for more experienced traders But what is what is the thing that you're highlighting when you work with traders that perhaps is a huge detriment or a huge asset to their to their success what is the What is the the mental or the the neuro thing or item that maybe isn't explored enough that you really have brought out and brought to the forefront of trading through rethink through your work through your research through your papers through your writing Yeah that helps traders and helps all performance And again I'm gonna there's two parts to the answer the first is everyone But the the vast majority of people think you know take the emotion out Number one and if they can tolerate in the emotion it's take the negative emotion out always be positive they're both wrong So like literally I say the thing I want people to do is change their opinion of their feelings and emotions Number one to how imperative they are i.e. the people think they make decisions based on some analysis and it doesn't matter what realm it is right like it doesn't matter where What restaurant you want to go to or you know what you want to put 20% of your portfolio you think you make a decision based on some analysis you don't you make the decision on how you feel about the analysis Your confidence in the outcome that you're predicting so and that outcome believe it or not subconscious so you understand as a feeling it's called anticipatory affect So I basically like ask people to change their opinion change their thoughts about their feelings and emotions And when they do they find there's like a whole different world in which they can accomplish more what they want to accomplish it doesn't matter what realm It takes a specific sort of form in trading and investing because of the complexity of the mental game in trading and investing and there's no other game like it But the underlying principle is the same like tree I really say census feelings and emotions because those are just degrees of intensity of like information your body's getting you know Treat them differently like and you open up this whole new world That's the corner of everything So what we're trying to do for just general human performance is we're trying to remove and I'm just trying to simplify and understand it and if I butcher that's please like correct me So we're trying to remove the emotions tied so we analyze something and then based on that analysis then that's we have an emotional attachment to what we feel is the analysis that we've done on that thing And that's what that's what screws us all up because we actually we actually aren't just analyzing an outcome and then acting on the true logic or the data behind that analysis it's really our confidence in our own ability to analyze which is inherently flawed I'm assuming Well it boils down to this so let's the human brain is trying to keep the human beings safe that's like it's only job and it does that by pretty constantly predicting how something's going to turn out what's going to actually happen But more specifically how that's going to heal to you So you know do this analysis whatever it is in that the data gives you some conclusion Well you have a feeling about like if that conclusion plays out how safe will I be but essentially like how what how happy will I be how well would work out You know will I feel good so if it's the restaurant tonight and you have a taste for steak and like you're okay that's the best place to go there you know I'm going to get a meal that makes me feel good I'm going to be satisfied and I'm going to be happy with it If it's an investment it's like use that the price that invests we're going to change in a way that I'm going to make money so therefore I'll feel good about it But also be safer because I would make more money so but people don't know this they don't know that they are always predicting how something's going to make them feel The future like people who are listening to this are right now predicting whether they should continue to listen to me because either I'm crazy or this is super interesting And like are they going to go like they wasted their time or are they going to learn something like but if you listen to yourself you can you can hear that Well that's the cornerstone of what makes you do something or not do something So like a common you know theme let's say in human performance is like why would I do that again like I don't understand I said I wasn't going to do that again Like or why didn't I do you know why did I do that or why didn't I do that you know I don't care exercise you know finish the proposal whatever pick the thing Well you did or didn't because underneath your consciousness with some prediction of a feeling about how it was going to turn out It like it's working this way like this is the sun rises in the east of human behavior but next to no one knows What happens is when you know it like then you really understand the problem And your chances of navigating a challenge you know the challenge of human life whether it's a business or anything is understanding it better If you want to do a thing better you have to understand the factors So I mean the reason you know the reason I rethink have gotten reputation for being effective is literally this And it's not that I'm such a genius I just happen to be interested in it And I also happen to have been raised in a way that it was maybe easier for me to not accept the status quo It was a little bit easier for me to look for a system so to speak So I could read the research and I could put two into together and I could talk about it and what ended up happening is literally when I first started talking about it which was way back 2005 the reason it took on a life of its own is because people would come to me and say oh my god that makes so much sense to me It's like it's like eye opening really it's very eye opening when you think about it And so then the feedback you know propelled me to do more right or I got me more invitation to speak or more invitation to coach or to write And so like again it wasn't I mean it wasn't that I was like such a genius I was sort of in the right place the right time And the right thing I had the courage to talk about it and then I got to be back and then that made it take on a life of its own But a lot of people probably were were so odd by the work that you're doing because most people don't even know where to begin looking Like with almost the decision making process is sort of taken for granted I think that in our day to day we don't try and we don't try and delve into why we make the decisions that we make It's a scary concept because when you unpack that then all of a sudden if you unpack the first bit of it and you understand that maybe why your decision making process is flawed then that leads to the question well then how do I make a good decision And that's a question I have for you so what do you recommend people after you if after you sort of show them the light so to speak and they start to understand that every decision that they make has all these biases attached to that decision then how do they go through life Yeah so the question to learn to ask yourself and the answer accurately those are two separate tasks but is what am I feeling and why am I feeling it And you want the answers to be the truth now that's easier said and done a lot of my coaching is like helping people get the accurate answer because what they think they're feeling or why they think they're feeling this generally not what this This will by the way certain event but cognitive biases so a thing into behavioral findings cognitive bias you know confirmation bias recency bias So it's not true it's based on the wrong model of the brain it's called behavioral finance or cognitive behavior because it's like thinking and doing you know thinking and behaving you know like the juices in the feeling So the cognitive behavior world doesn't get that so like confirmation bias when you see the thing you want to see well everyone talks about how difficult it is to circumvent that or to a burden Well all you do is like realize like what's that feeling and what that feeling is usually like if you and this happens all the time with hedge fund managers I mean I had a relatively new client yesterday talking about like he went to his investment committee and he stated like his viewpoint and he's in commodity you know and so this is my viewpoint and how commodities are going to play out and then he said you know if he starts to look like he's wrong you know he doesn't really want to go back to the investment committee and say you know I'm second thought never mind I was wrong because why because it's embarrassing you know he's afraid he'll react negatively so people behave in what looks like confirmation bias IE they only see the data that supports whatever their viewpoint over years not because they're just programmed to do that because at the moments that they're seeing conflicting data they're predicting this future emotion that you know that's unsafe right they're going to be embarrassed their boss is going to be mad at them they're basically trying to avoid that scenario well the truth is if you face that scenario earlier in your process whatever the chances that you end up with the embarrassment go down because like when you you stated some you know prediction to your firm whatever it is I don't care sales investment I don't care whatever it is and you start to get information that's not working out the way it's a lot well the sooner you get that and sooner you change course and address you know the better the odds of a better outcome right but if you delay because you don't really realize you're predicting this future embarrassment that comes probably worse but like people have no cognitive ability to override that underlying prediction of embarrassment except to use their thinking to address wait a minute I'm really worried you know I don't want to try to be wrong I have sounded like an idiot it's going to be embarrassing and they've really been doing this my job because people have tested it has to test it but the truth is the earlier and incidentally you can face you know alternative data that shows your prediction may not be turning out like chances are you can course correct earlier but it requires knowing that you're feeling like you're predicting this future problem that's going to give you it gives you the spades to navigate that you don't have if you're just like torturing the data to prove that your original prediction is correct while you're crossing your fingers and hoping and experiencing all the same anxiety when you say when you when you lay it out it actually makes a lot of sense but you I guess so the issue that we're sort of uncovering is a little bit of like you mentioned like we have biases but after a certain point there's ego involved like you just don't want to be embarrassed so when when you speak to people that operate at this level the things that are fears are they valid fears like in my opinion they would be valid fears like if I make a sales prediction and it's totally off at any point when I bring that up with my board they're probably going to have some level of there's going to be some thought like as to whether or not I'm competent that's it that's something that I feel like if you walk through the scenario it's like completely logical right so this is the thing like an emotion which like fear has a totally bad rap right like you're not supposed to feel feel fear or give into fear or whatever and it's not true like if it weren't for fear there's a lot of accomplishments we all have we wouldn't accomplish like who would really graduate from college if it weren't for fear hey you do all this other stuff you know but you're afraid of the outcome of only partying and not getting the actual degree like so you do the work and you know you really do the work just because you wanted the work right but you do the work because you're afraid of what will happen like in their pure form fear frustration disappointment have information for us so we've got two problems we've been told not to recognize any of them and we've certainly been told not to focus on this so called negative ones when they're in their pure form they're actually trying to help us they're trying to keep us safe trying to help us get what we want like frustration is something's going wrong take extreme form of frustration well the extreme form would be like rage but let's take an interim anger why do people get angry because they feel as if something's wrong so at sometimes it is and sometimes it's their own personal expectation and that's like the next layer of this what part is real and what part is your own personality but we can come back to that like at its core like if you're angry about something your psyche is telling you that something isn't the way you think it should be and maybe you should try to research yourself and find out what that is as opposed to saying I shouldn't be in because what the research actually shows is you suppress those emotions particularly the negative ones the voice in your psyche gets louder so they become more disruptive not less disruptive and research actually shows us if you suppress it that this will I mean there's you know I mean the truth is you know in psychology research you can probably find research to show whatever you want that's fair but yes but there's a good body of research that shows that understanding your negative emotions acknowledging them leads to better outcomes particularly but matters to you like there was when I first heard of this research it was probably 2008 and I met this woman who at that time was like a postdoc PhD and she had done this research project to show that reframing you know situations was a net positive and to her credit her research showed that wasn't true that if you reframed in other words you know took a positive viewpoint or something on something that didn't matter that much to you it worked but if you did it on something that really mattered to you your anxiety levels went up and it didn't work why because your psyches like your psyche really is trying to keep you safe and that kind of includes more than safe like it includes thrive so if you have some unpleasant feeling it's like like you know all of a sudden you like feel this horrible pain in your leg and you look down and you know you've got to gash in your chin for whatever reason you know like what's the point the point of the physical pain is like so that you do something why is it any different with emotional pain and you made now this is an interesting you're making interesting points because originally we almost when we first started speaking about all these emotions that we feel your first point was almost what we have to know when to not listen to these emotions because they're clouding our analysis and we're making incorrect assumptions based on emotional feedback and maybe maybe historical insight and feedback but obviously emotions do have a place where they keep us safe and they allow us to thrive so how do we how do we understand which emotions are valid and which emotions will steer us in the right direction and maybe this is what you're alluding to before like the real emotions versus emotions tied to your personality or to your past experiences so how do we how do we understand when to include those in our decision making process versus when to exclude them so we make smarter less emotionally charged or driven decisions first of all just laughs I laugh because I don't I actually think you might have asserted and I think it might be in sample of like it's hard to hear something that's so different yeah I personally really I probably did I don't I totally screwed something up I don't tell you but all of my work is based on the fact that emotions are the absolute best asset you have okay okay every rail at every moment but more than that you actually can't avoid them so like give it up like I'm not speaking to you specifically but like I honestly think the analogy is is rounder flatter like it looks like emotions really get in your way it just like it looks like there is black but it's a misunderstanding of how it's really working it's the lack of awareness of that emotions are impacting you is what is actually the detriment it's almost like yeah it's a lack I've under it's I mean because here's here's a fact no one ever thinks about you know it's always like control your emotions so you don't do this thing in terms of we just started right you know just scream at your boss or you know smack your kid or whatever like control your emotions wait until you control your mind you can feel whatever you want or whatever you do it's only way you do so the actual piece of advice is you know control or I might slightly make that positive choose your actions now how do you choose your best action by understanding what you're feeling and why you're feeling it now that's a layered thing where we all have expectations of how something will turn out because this is really just not what you're feeling about now it's what you're feeling about the future but it's like confidence is what confidence is a prediction that something is going to work out it is my snowboarder client winning gold medal this finally this year or an investment doesn't matter what what is confidence me I'm going to choose the right state place because I'm confident that they'll deliver me a good deal and I know you know so I talk about things sometimes I talk about the future and sometimes I make it sound like it's here and now but it's always about the future but that's a matter of oops I just dropped part of my headset when I'm out of here you're good you're good there's a personal these emotions are layered so there's the obvious like fear missing out that people feel in all sorts of rounds well fear missing out is really fear future regret if you like you say okay what happens if I miss out well I won't have gotten something well how would I feel if I won't have gotten it well and might regret that I didn't do the thing that would have gotten me bad and so people try to avoid future regret because they're like regrets really like really like wishing you would have done something differently yeah really not fun so understanding that when you're you know dying to go to a party or dying to stay in a losing trade like in think it's fear missing out but it's really fear of future regret because you're going to feel bad in the future when you understand that you actually feel more empowered with a wider range of choices that having said and you can do that for anything where there's kind of a very common thread of feelings that basically all human beings feel pretty much all circumstances whether they know it or not then underneath that is a personal you know when we would call kind of ego driven prediction so some people will be afraid of being rejected some people will be afraid of being wrong you know that is based on their own personal experience when you have something that really tweets you right and you get this really strong emotion and everybody will say control the emotion I say no analyzing emotions before you act choose your actions and the best way to do that is to understand what you're feeling accurately and why you're really feeling and why might be you know I'm worried that my sales prediction is going to be off now for someone that might be you know they were always criticized in school whatever for whatever you know and so they can know that the here and now part is how is my board going to react to sales prediction but also like I'm personally more worried about that so I have a client in London manager and he was criticized for everything he grew up in the United States on a farm and like he made a winning against grandpa that criticized him for the wood not being stacked right or whatever and so this morning I was just talking to him right before you it was like okay you know he's worried he has a thesis about the market he's well positioned he's not as large position as he should be right now and I'm like it's the wood you know it's the you must have stacked the wood I said but it's actually not the wood like you're really good at this and you can trust yourself right now and you know grandpa is not going to be criticizing you about the wood being not stacked means you're right it's not the wood so there's a common layer and then there's a personal layer and when I say what am I feeling and why your own why is going to be different than mine but if you know that some portion of that is your own past it can dilute the intensity of it in the moment and your ability to see your wider range of choices it's larger you're making a ton of sense and I'm curious when people operate at such a high level how comments how like when you look at the top hedge fund managers in the world and that would probably be the best example because there's a ton of risks associated with that but also in venture capital and private equity and day trading and all these different individuals that they try and remove emotion from situations well actually I would ask you the top performing individuals in the world do they have the best mastery of this of what you teach in terms of understanding your emotions thinking through actions is that what separates them yes and no I mean first of all I have to okay you know Denise's clients have called her and the usual reason in the hedge fund world is to follow their intuition more which is sort of ironic given the bag of finances you should use your intuition but I mean honestly client after client after client who manages you know something you know ranging in billions of dollars will say I really want to listen to my intuition well why because of by the way intuition is unconscious pattern recognition based on your education your experience and if you have expertise you have intuition for instance but it's trained out of you right like doing according to math really according to the probability don't get me started because it's actually subjective probability it's not really you can't even know it in the market but explain explain that though explain why I'm actually curious because that's actually an interesting point because I'm sure that somebody who actually operates in that world this particular situation will resonate with them they've never worked with you before so intuition is trained out of these individuals that operate and they will use a billion dollar hedge fund and they look at data analysis forecasting why is that an issue at the end of the day there's only one thing you want to do in financial markets and everybody is trying to do this and that is predict what other people are going to pay for something in the future whatever time frame your future is that's called theory of mind by the way that be theory of their mind and there's brain research that shows that the people who are relying most on their theory of mind skills make better price predictions and by the way in that state they're not doing math at all so first of all the markets are a social game and it's really about other market participants that's a human question it's not a math question all of them probabilities are just cleans like what are the probabilities based on? in the past the price action behaved like this in response to these factors so we would expect in the future the other human beings playing in the market will behave similarly now it's not notable it's not dice it's not blackjack it's not poker it's like poker in that you know you win a poker by predicting how the people are betting but in the markets it's kind of like oh yeah and the value of the cards changes too and you have to sort of know this when the value of cards will change so people who learn to play the game of markets you know little by little they start to sense how the waves move if you want to use a surfing analogy and that becomes not something they really think about but something they sense well that sense is intuition it's unconscious pattern recognition based on what they learned about the market and then they're experienced with how the prices move and I mean you know all of these people you know most of them have graduate degrees most of them have been in the market for 20, 30, 40 years so they have a lot of interaction with how the prices have undergiven such circumstances they have a lot of assumptions about what will make the price move but we're back to we don't make decisions on data we make decisions on how we feel about the data that create a certain analysis and a certain prediction in markets that's called subjective probability like you have probably been really subjective right it's the result of your own analysis navigating that is navigating the feelings your body is giving like this happens all the time I like literally I talk to people for 55 minutes once or twice a week and I have people that I've talked to for years and years and like they call me up and they have a particular position and they think they should do this or that or that and I just ask questions and I listen for the feeling they're giving me and I'll realize they actually their intuition is telling them the exact opposite of what they're telling me verbally like they're saying maybe I should get out of this you're actually going more with the flow of human perception and judgment so there's an aspect where it actually just gets easier like because you're not fighting yourself you're not fighting like their site is trying to give you information through your feelings and emotions and you're trying to fight it like that makes me and I thought right I think it didn't even have a jar I just want to take a second to thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now they don't call it the sales destination it's a sales journey and on that journey you want the best tools and support to keep you and your customers connected every step of the way HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that is impossible to outgrow and ridiculously easy to use meaning you never have to worry about slowing you down that's because HubSpot is purpose-built for real sales people with real customers and real problems to solve with customizable hubs and tools that you can add and subtract as you grow and an interface that's just as easy to use if you're a team of one or one thousand HubSpot is built for you and your customers to grow together wherever the journey takes you learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com so okay so then the follow-up for somebody who's listening and everything you're saying resonates and they're just wondering okay I know that I need to better listen to my intuition my feeling what's an exercise like how do you recommend when you work with the people that you work with how do you get them to better tap into into themselves it kind of like apps like like it like the questions I ask what's the worst it can happen what do you really think is going to happen not you don't have to be right in this conversation right like you you create a space for yourself when you're completely non-judgmental you simultaneously want to know that what that future emotion you're predicting is I can't really overstate how powerful it can be to realize that you're thinking something and about to do something literally just because you're trying to avoid future aggressive and when you shine like a light on that you know the light in this case is your consciousness often times people will go the end that's not actually really good like is is the by the way a question you can ask there because is this feeling about the situation but is this feeling telling me something about the problem I'm trying to solve or is this feeling about me because if the feelings about you changes already has nothing to do a Jennifer learner Harvard called it integral emotions and incidental emotions I call them informational emotions or irrelevant emotions or in the market intuition and impulse like you know maybe there are times when you know you would be embarrassed that it matters enough but generally that's not a good data point if you're trying to analyze some some business situation in the world you know so there's a skill it's called emotion differentiation and motion granular but it basically means you can press your feelings into words so you can tell the difference between fear of frustration disappointment and you can tell the difference between gradations of fear or gradations of frustration so like with my investment clients I still happen to have two new clients in September and both of them like one person saying do is write down every word for every emotion that they feel in the process of managing you know a book it's called a book in a hedge fund because I want them to start to be able to be more granular because the research shows that the more granular a portfolio manager can be particularly in negative emotions the more money they make well how accurate are they at identifying these emotions the first time they do that so I've only reviewed one of them so far the other one in September is not working this morning but I had a chance to look at it excuse me it was interesting with the one that I reviewed he the positive emotions were that they were like happy, you know, joyful, pleased the negative emotions were behavior they were let me see if I can even remember stubborn that will just use stubborn like I'm like what is stubborn me I mean stubborn means you do you know like you refuse to change right that's actually you don't feel stubborn you know I feel stubborn I mean maybe once in a while you're joking with your wife or something but I mean you don't walk around saying I feel stubborn what he really felt was like afraid of being wrong so therefore like it was a confirmation bias thing you know I won't see the disconfirming data because I'm afraid of having to say I was wrong I'm afraid of being embarrassed I'm afraid of looking bad it might be fun because you just started at this place that ends up being a stubborn behavior so and that happens a lot when you first ask the person to do this they give you a lot of either my palms are sweaty my heart is racing you know some physical thing that's happening or a behavior I think they're doing but not the actual emotion I know this is I really do know that I am speaking to an audience and forgive the analogy but the ocean looks flat but you're here but that's what's so fascinating you're teaching me as you're teaching the audience it's all about listen there's a lot of topics that I know a lot about this is definitely not one of them because it's a very difficult topic to wrap your mind around and then I think the whole point of this conversation is to understand this is the gateway in this is the first pass at getting people to to self-examine and to understand how their emotions are affecting or hindering their performance it's wild to think this because we get so caught up in the day to day and there's so much noise and so much activity that it really takes a special kind of mindset to be able to calm down remove all the noise remove all the activity and actually look at how you're feeling and how you're operating and I think that's actually what separates mediocre from exemplary performance in trading and business and sports and anything right what I'm going to say I'm going to add to that how someone handles the negative, the so-called negative because I don't really think they're negative they're just unpleasant emotions is the difference you know what you do with your fear what you do with your frustration what you do with your disappointment do you unpack them saying find the lesson or do you act them out which is really the two choices like because if you don't know what you're feeling or you're trying to suppress an emotion you act it out and if you act it out randomly i.e. like not making a choice because you can make a choice to act them fear and you can make a choice to act them fear but it's better if you've used your cognition that's where you use your cognition but that's the difference like and my clients you know take Lindsey Jacob Ellis who for those of you don't know just one two gold medals who snowboard cross and in her fifth Olympics at 36 years old after in the first Olympics where she basically gave up gold with the last second and it's kind of a classic sports story and she could win everywhere but the Olympics like can I tell you that Lindsey completely managed her you know like surpassed her or roomed through her fears and frustrations and told them in light no can I tell you that she learned to handle and that's what makes her a completely different way yes and that's what a lot of her win and that's so when you work through this process with her with hedge fund managers with business leaders that's one use case for a high-performance athlete maybe give over one more just paint a story or a picture of how this actually impacts when somebody works with you for a period of time how does this impact a business performance or a portfolio performance even like in terms of numbers without naming names if you're under NDA most likely but like what does that actually translate to when somebody dives into this and starts to understand it well I mean the rate is all poor right but I mean I mean I'm giving you a chance to brag you're most impressive stories I tend I mean in some ways I can brag like like totally brag no no like like I said that I believe this I can solve any performance problem with anyone anywhere on the planet it doesn't matter that's pretty good that's pretty wild that's amazing well I feel a bit like you know I basically just noticed that the earth is round and I think it's really hard to solve it and that makes it harder and that's what I can learn exactly what's going on exactly what needs to happen but I have to work with them longer to break through the results I have a private equity guy who's upset that he has never gotten the same title as the other people that he works with but he doesn't want to see that he has his history and so that's influencing how he's acting and influencing him not getting it but he doesn't want to go there because like what's my childhood have to do with anything well the human brain is constantly predicting based on the past experience and the most important past experiences the first 10 years of life in terms of who you are now you're ego but I mean I mean my portfolio matter is not like 100% or but pretty much you know to significant like pretty much every one of them has had well they say crazy things like you're the other person ever that's made this make sense and help me to avoid that thing you know I shouldn't know this but I mean people call me like they go to performance coaches so like all their study and all their years like I found the sense but again it goes back to I literally I was interested in my own emotions and my own decision making and my own you know sometimes getting in my own way and both personally and professionally and I just refuse to accept you know what I stand up straight and smile like I think that's the truth no you're well that's the thing I think that what you're highlighting is is an issue with most individuals that operate at a high level like that like that private equity guy that didn't want to address his childhood there's an ego involved and I think that that's why when you break down that ego and you accept that help and understand that you don't have everything figured out yeah it's hard because go back to the brain as always predicting your future safety like all of our safety is at least partially dependent on our reputation is partially dependent on other people so and that's just a fact and so we're you know we're such a program to think about how we're going to see and some of us more than others you know like I said earlier like I had less of that just because of the environment that I grew up in as opposed to even to my husband who grew up in a big proper southern family you know we love like expectations and I should be hey I didn't have any of that I will say this though on the blog I talked about this it's like a psychoanalyst you could kick that for you for me so because you thought too things you didn't have to be a medical doctor but you didn't necessarily have to interpret exactly what happened to you but you did have to understand when you were angry you could get anything you wanted and that is true for my clients. So it's how his theory was that it's really unconscious rage that makes someone who becomes schizophrenic, split off part of their personality and it was this widely controversial and you know there's people like that look and it's crazy but if you can understand like your own anger and not judge it both in the moment and as it relates to what happens here in the past it isn't. Can I swear? You can totally swear. I love that. It is. Like but what you have to do is better. You know I say what am I feeling why? It's like what are we angry about? And really why? Like what's the prediction in that and like okay how much of that is in the moment and how much is fueled by whatever happened to you in the past but like then finding the thing that's pure that's like I'm angry because there's this situation in the moment and it shouldn't be that way. Like that's fuel for action that fixes it but the process is not it's you're told to control it and suppress it and set it aside and it's bad for you and blah blah blah. No you have to understand it. You have to like I'm not that big of a meditation person but I think I have a very meditative way about it because I'm basically always sort of saying what am I feeling and why? Like that's a mindful thing right? Like I'm trying to understand these signals my thought is giving me through my intellect like through the way you know I've learned the meetings of words and I've learned you know I've experienced a lot of situations like that I didn't have if I was a little kid. It's not like the intellect said relevant and it's a tool. Anyway I can go on. No that's that's that's for no no no you're good you're good I find this fascinating and I and I hope that for the listeners like I said this is a rabbit hole that they can definitely go down like you said it's it's akin to you thinking the earth is flat and then you're discovering for the first time that it's not flat which means that there's a lot of work that you have to do on yourself to get you to the point where you can't identify the things that that now come very naturally to you and probably a lot of the people that you work with but I want to so I want to give people the opportunity to connect with you outside of the podcast but before we we close this out where or I guess like last piece of advice that you give the audience something they can take away and action on or think about tomorrow. Just don't judge yourself. Like stop it. Stop being self-critical. Stop being self-dadding like just try to understand why what you're feeling why you're feeling it and look for the information. Where can people connect with you website social where do you want to send people? Yeah so my company and my website is the rethink group and it's the rethink group. I am moderately active on Twitter. I used to be more active. I've gotten so busy that that's much. It's a good problem to have. No one needs more. I tweeted like if I'm tweeting I'm not doing something I should do. But I'm Denise my middle initial K. She'll I say to you at all. I'm the same thing on Instagram and I do have a company Instagram and a company LinkedIn and I think a company Twitter that might really have 20-year-old former intern but now director of something you're another right? Yeah. That's perfect. Okay and I ask this question I ask this question and I'll put all this all the links in the show notes as well and I ask this question of everyone. Obviously you've had an incredible career at this point in your career and also just based on your on your life experience what does success mean to you? Real success means more people understand this message. Like that's real success. You know I've managed some monetary success in building a consulting firm that's got five people or six people working for it. That's nice and getting to live like dream and living in ski town. But real success. Like I'm now working on a second book and actually the reason the reason I'll start to cry. It's like I literally don't want people to suffer so much by having the wrong view of their machines and their own hair. So the more people that I can help alleviate their suffering and then what I think is become more of who they want to be that's actually success.