Part 2: Perspective or How to think about investing in a way that ensures success?
2.2 Enrolling your emotional self is critical for success
Investing is a marathon of making decisions and living the consequences of it. You feel the pain and almost always experience discomfort after you take these decisions. But you are still required to take more decisions; just like a marathon runner. The difference is that in investing the decision making and the pain is all happening only in your mind. And this makes it differently challenging.
Decision making has a rational side to it, requires you to think, analyze and conclude. This is your Thinking Self. However, this is not happening in isolation. As you think about something, emotions arise, you start feeling something even without having taken any action. This is your Feeling Self. They are part of the same one Decision-making System. How this plays out in your brain, mind, body leads to you making a decision. It is a pretty complicated combination of your memory, imagination, beliefs, identity etc. But we don’t need to know the how, we need to know how to make better decisions.
To manage your investing effectively, to make good decisions and make it work you need to manage both the Thinking Self and the Feeling Self. This sounds as if there is a third entity that manages these two and there probably is; let’s call it the Decision-Making Self. It’s almost as if the Thinking and the Feeling Selves make a representation to the Decision-making Self who eventually decides. But they are both listening to each other make the representation and are impacted by it.
Let’s imagine a conversation that happens internally when you are making a travel related decision
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