Successful Investing Requires Mastering the Inner Game

“When you learn how to control your emotions, you can derive more positive, productive meanings, even from seemingly negative events.” Tony Robbins

Inner game helps you improve yourself as you learn from your past life experiences. Learning to work on your inner game helps you develop a better outlook in life and this helps you develop your confidence as well. This new sense of self worth allows you be more successful personally and professionally, and with your over all interaction with other people.

To find your inner game, you have to know who you truly are, what you really want and how you want things to be done. This step is not easy. It takes a lot of self-reflection and looking back to your past mistakes and learning from them. It requires you to open your eyes and see yourself for who you really are now. Then try to look to the future and visualize how you want to see yourself after a couple of years.

It may take a lot of self-reflection, emotional intelligence and psychological understanding of your personal issues and how to deal with them. But the bottom line to becoming confident being the real you, is that you will have to overcome your insecurities, angsts, worries, and fears. If you fail to do so, these negative factors will reveal themselves in your personal and professional life and can cause problems.

When you get the real picture of who you truly are, you also have to learn to appreciate the traits that you have. Don’t focus on the things that you dislike about yourself. Real attractiveness come from within. Before anyone else appreciates your looks, you should be the one to appreciate it first. Know your strongest feature and use it to your advantage. If you believe that you look good then you will feel good about yourself too. Your self confidence will improve and this makes you more.

Inner Personal Scorecard

Warren Buffett frequently relates an interesting way to frame this topic:

Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover? 

Or. If the world couldn’t see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world’s greatest investor but in reality have the world’s worst record? Or be thought of as the world’s worst investor when you were actually the best?

Buffett’s getting at a rather fundamental model he’s used most of his life: The Inner Scorecard. When you have an internal scorecard, no one can define success for you but you.

What Buffett and a lot of other people who have been successful in life — true success, not measured by money — have in common is that they’re able to remember what we all set out to do: live a fulfilling life! Not get rich. Not get famous. Not even get admiration, necessarily. But to live a satisfying existence and help others around them do the same.

It’s not that getting rich or famous or admired can’t be deeply satisfying. It can be! I’m positive Buffett deeply enjoys his wealth and status. He’s got more “admiration tokens” than almost anyone in the world.

But all of that can be ruined very, very easily along the way by making too many compromises, by living according to an external scorecard rather than an internal one.

Controlling your emotions

According to James J. Gross, a psychologist and professor at Stanford University and best known for his research in emotion and emotion regulation, the inability to control, or regulate, your emotions is at the root of some psychological disorders including depression, social anxiety and borderline personality. And, no matter how psychologically healthy you think you are, you can benefit from learning how to better manage your emotions in investing and everyday life.


References:

  1. https://www.tonyrobbins.com/ask-tony/cycle-of-meaning/
  2. https://www.essentiallifeskills.net/5-effective-ways-to-control-your-emotions.html
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