I listened to my gut today. It told me not to buy into a stock I had my eye on. Wait. Better prices are coming.
It was right. I got positioned later in the day at much better levels.
Feels relevant, because I'm continuing the application of Mark Douglas' (expanded) Fundamental Truths about trading applied to life, and today's truth touches on exactly this.
Truth #7: Trading Well Means Accepting Risk Completely
According to Douglas, if you have not truly accepted the risk, you will flinch, move stops, cut winners short, hold losers, over-manage trades, and hesitate on entries. When risk is genuinely accepted, the mind becomes calmer and more objective.
According to Dr. Julius Torelli, here's how this same principle applies to life:
To live at all is to risk rejection, grief, embarrassment, loss, aging, death, misunderstanding, and failure.
If you don't accept that risk, you'll live defensively. Guarded in love. Hesitant in action. Controlling in relationships. Rigid in thought. Fearful of change.
There's a critical distinction here: intellectual acceptance vs. physiological acceptance. You can say "I accept that people leave" and still build your entire relational strategy around preventing abandonment. Intellectual acceptance is a thought. Physiological acceptance is a state. They are not the same event. The work is not a decision you make once. It's a capacity you build through repeated exposure to uncertainty without reaching for your usual mechanism of relief.
There is no possible way for me to count the number of times I've believed I was completely comfortable with the risks, only to discover I was lying to myself. Not just in trading.
But if I was willing to pay attention, it didn't require a deep mental excavation or complicated risk analysis to know whether I'd fully accepted the risk. I simply had to notice the sensations appearing somewhere in my body. My body never lies. Neither does yours.
If you're facing a big decision, try sitting with it. Meditate on it and notice if your body talks to you. Exercise can stir things up. Good music often allows me to float around inside my mind and body, discovering my true feeling about things.
