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Risk Decision-Making: The Courage to Feel Badly While it may seem counterintuitive (and frankly scary), ironically, the most helpful thing to do when you have blown it is to feel bad! It’s not about wallowing in the failure, but understanding + acknowledging what happened to put your body in sync with your mind and your mind in sync with reality. It seems that if you let yourself feel something bad, that you will end up in the abyss of that feeling. Most of us don’t. We allow the feeling and it passes. While it is passing, it points our minds and yes, even our intellects to areas where we can improve or learn. In other words, most of the time, if you have the courage to feel badly, get to the root of the feeling, and realize that x-y-z feeling or fractal-emotional context crept up on you without you knowing it, the feeling “pops” like a balloon. Even if it doesn’t pop, it begins losing air like a tire going flat. One way to explore what’s going on/ what happened is through writing. Expressively writing about a failed position can help an individual recover from the loss, be more attentive, and most importantly, less anxious over the next market decision. In Chicago, they used to say, “Your first loss is your best loss.” If you manage to a strategy of psychological capital and leverage, oftentimes you will have your signal to take a break before you even get a chance for the second loss. If you take the time to analyze what happened, you’ll learn what to look out for next time. Take responsibility for your mistakes-- actually feel the loss-- don't try to avoid it. Feel badly and understand why it happened. Then, you can reduce the odds of it creeping into future decisions and more effectively prevent the mistake from repeating.