Tag: Behavior

Why can’t we change?

I have been overweight since I was 15. I have never had difficulty knowing what to do about it. It was simply never a big enough problem to motivate me to solve it.

That is where most of us live with our investing. We plod along wishing for things to be different. The more we try to change, the more things seem to stay the same.

My roommate recently asked me the right questions about my weight:

“What are your goals for this year?” I listed them off until I got to loosing weight.

“How are you planning to do that?” Now I could no longer ignore the problem. And the conversation that I should have been having with myself for the past decade was finally taking place.

“May I help you with that?” This was comforting and empowering.

If no one has ever asked you the right questions around investing, you may feel like I have been feeling about my diet and activity: failing, powerless to change, can’t talk about it. That is why I love the Investor Inventory. It is a tool that opens the door on this conversation. I get to ask you the right questions and you get to stop being trapped the way you always have been. It takes an hour. Schedule below.

Click to Register for Coaching

Simon Joshua is a licensed investment advisor representative at Cornerstone Wealth Partners in Michigan. He has structured his practice around investor coaching and committed himself to leading communities in establishing a legacy of fulfillment.

How does this occur to you?

When I talk to friends and family about being an Investor Coach, they often ask what that means. My short answer is that behavior affects returns. They often follow up by asking what that means.

Investing behavior is the result of three things: your perceptions, your instincts, and your emotions. A longer answer is that you take investing action based on your interpretations of what you observe, your reactions to those observations, and the way you feel about those observations and those reactions. Your investing actions can differ greatly based on history (other people’s investing and your own), your character, personality, fears, and hopes. All of this sits on the foundation of how the world occurs to you and how you occur to yourself.

Ironically, I do not need to take note of any of that information in order to coach you. Most of it is very personal, and all of it is unique to you as an individual. What I do as a coach is to cause you to be uncomfortable with your life as you are living it now—not in a covetous way (comparing your possessions, relationships, etc.), but in a grateful way (making the best of your life). I cause you to think that there is a better way to live the life you have been given.

I do that by teaching you to unearth those places in your life that cause you pain: your past mistakes, other’s reactions to those mistakes, ongoing struggles, broken relationships. Once you do, you can change the way the world occurs to you and the way you occur to yourself. Then, and only then, your behavior begins to change. In the right context, it changes to your advantage.

I only know this because I have been through it before. I have been coached. And my life will never be the same. All it takes is an investor who is coachable.

Market returns wait for no one. Are you ready?

Coaching happens here.

Simon Joshua is a licensed investment advisor representative at Cornerstone Wealth Partners in Michigan. He has structured his practice around investor coaching and committed himself to leading communities in establishing a legacy of fulfillment.