Your heart has a mind, and your mind has a heart. In trading we need to bring heart and mind together. We need to feel intelligently and think with informed emotion. The mind has intellectual emotion and the heart has emotional intellect.
It has been proven through heart transplants that the heart really does have a mind. Heart transplant recipients take on many characteristics, connections, habits, and hobbies of their donors. One woman who had never cared about dancing began to take ballroom dance lessons six weeks after her transplant. She became fascinated with ballroom dancing and became quite good at it. It turned out the donor of her heart had been a ballroom dancer. One child who had received the heart of another child upon seeing the dead child’s mother cried out, “Mommy, I’ve missed you!” And there are many other such reported instances.
It could even be assumed for the sake of this column, that the entire body, cell structure, and so forth are informed by both mind and heart. This is a column about trading, so let’s look at how mind and heart impact trading. We can start with the metaphors of mind and heart.
What is the heart of your trading? Is it analysis? Is it intuition? Is it thought corrected by feeling or feeling balanced by analysis? Is it an outside system created by you or someone else that you employ with emotional or thoughtful action?
Do you trade with heart? Do you put your whole self into it? And does that work for you?
Do you trade with an intellectual detachment? And does that support your chosen results?
What would happen if you brought the two together? What if you traded committed to your heart’s desire but also retained an intellectual remove from immediate results? What if you committed yourself to replicating a verified and trusted method in the market and retained an optimistic view of the final results even while you observed with curiosity the current unfolding of the market?
We need balance in life and in trading. By bringing heart and mind and even body into the trading, we can seek to bring all of ourselves into the equation. We can do it mindfully with heart and clear purpose.
Recently I’ve been listening to The Teaching Company CD’s while I work out. I was particularly intrigued by a discussion of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor who had always wanted instead to be a philosopher. His philosophy could be summarized in this way: Get out of bed, do your duty, and appreciate things along the way. Not bad.