Who Is Denise Shull?
Denise Shull is the internationally recognized leader in market, investing and trading psychology. A renowned author, speaker, and frequent media contributor, Denise is a celebrated performance coach who specializes in working with hedge funds, Olympic athletes, and other high-octane professionals at the top of their respective fields. Denise earned a Master of Arts (1995) in neuropsychoanalysis from the University of Chicago. Her master’s thesis was cited in 2013 as one of the first papers ever written about the neuroscience of psychoanalytic theory. She is also a 2009 alumna of Harvard’s Kennedy School Executive Education program, Investment Decisions and Behavioral Finance. You can follow Denise on Twitter @DeniseKShull
1) What’s a piece of conventional wisdom that is often applied to investing, saving, or decision making that you’ve observed that is plain wrong?
Control your emotions. It’s literally and logically just “control your actions”. An emotion alone never made or lost a dime – it’s the acting out of emotions that are suppressed or misunderstood that causes decisions to turn out badly.
In fact, you can’t make a decision without emotion so in the extreme, if you could control all, you also couldn’t make a single decision. You need confidence in your analyses to act. You don’t act on the understanding, you act on the confidence of how the decision will turn out.
2) What is the “Shull Method”?
Coaching a person while prioritizing what they are consciously and unconsciously feeling. Helping someone to understand that all of their thoughts and feelings are valid – and the best path forward is to understand what they are telling us about what – the situation at hand or some contextual aspect about ourselves or our circumstances.
3) Clients for your business typically come from finance, sports or entertainment. Are there common traits that you’ve seen from the best (and worst) performers you dealt with across these spaces?
No – except maybe for attention to detail which also tends to include hard work in order to account for the details. The best performers also play the long game.
4) From your experience, are there gender proclivities when it comes to making decisions around subjects such as saving, investing and trading?
No
5) What is the best advice you’d give to someone trying to better manage risk and uncertainties in financial markets, and in life in general?
Learn to accurately answer ‘what am I feeling and why?’ – without any judgment.
Seek to understand yourself instead of criticizing yourself. Learn to know which feelings, which are only bodily sensations with information about things outside of your body, are information about the decision at hand and which are about you. You generally want to make market decisions on feelings about the market as opposed to feelings about yourself.