When you’re angry, anxious or frustrated, it’s not the time to make decisions.
It’s not the time to think things over.
No matter how amazing your intellect is—and you and I know it is.
Why?
Because your thoughts are biased by the emotion at that moment.
And when you get caught up in your thoughts, you intensify the negative emotion.
What should you do?
Let the emotional wave wash through first.
How? By focusing on sensations in your body.
Neuroscience has shown that the part of your brain that allows you to identify bodily sensations is NEVER compromised—even in the most extreme emotional situations.
Are you feeling angry? Where in your body are you feeling the anger? What is that sensation like?
Focus on the sensations.
Are thoughts hitting you? Welcome them—and shift your attention back to those sensations in your body.
There will be occasions when you won’t be able to get 8 hours of sleep no matter how efficient or productive you are.
And it’s always good to have that in mind because it will happen.
BUT…
This is what most analysts and juniors often fail to see:
It’s not your associate or your MD who says, “This week you’re going to work 90 hours and get max 5 hours of sleep”.
In the vast majority of the cases (especially when WFH), you DO have control over your schedule, working hours, breaks, and sleep.
If you worked 90 hours this week, it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have produced the same output by working fewer hours.
If some people do consistently 90 hour weeks with less than 8 hours of sleep DOESN’T MEAN that you have to do the same to be as successful as they are.
There are INFINITE clever ways to optimise your work and earn more time for sleep or anything else that matters to you.
That’s the art of self-awareness, managing and leading yourself—or to put it bluntly—the art of not BSing yourself.
A lot of people brag about or romanticise the hours they put in. That’s crazy! The goal should be the opposite: to optimise output and work fewer hours.
Some people will say, “This is not possible. I can’t do much about that. Everyone in my team does crazy hours”.
Why? Because they don’t want to face the truth and admit to themselves that they suck at managing their time.
A career in investment banking is NOT a 100m race; it’s a marathon. You don’t want to burn yourself out. You want to look good, crisp, healthy, vibrant, and attractive. And not just look all that—but BE all that.
Never assume “reality”. Don’t take things for granted. Play smart. Develop self-awareness, remain curious, observe how you do things, measure stuff, and optimise.
Look at the week that has just passed. In what ways could you have optimised?
You like to sleep, you need sleep and you can definitely have it. Sleep is the best ally of creativity. And for an analyst who wants to become an elite banker, creativity is necessary in order to synthesise information and see the bigger picture of their spreadsheets and powerpoints.
I often ask analysts… if Michael Jordan was an analyst, how would he play the game? How would he optimise? Would he do 90 hr weeks with 4-5 hrs of sleep consistently?
That’s why some people become pros and Micheal Jordans whereas others don’t.
An investment banking career gives you unique opportunities to achieve self-mastery and become a pro. Not everyone wants that and is ready for that—and that’s okay.
PPS: A caveat here: In some cases, the issue can be poor communication (bottom-up or top-down). Some analysts find it hard to say no, set boundaries and communicate to their team that what they’ve been asked to do is impossible and probably not a good use of their time particularly when the deadlines are tight. There should be optimisation on a team level too and it’s the responsibility of both senior and junior people to communicate effectively and address such issues. This leads to a win-win-win-win scenario for juniors, seniors, team and business.
So do my mentors, Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts.
This is what they confessed about themselves in a recent event with 200 people:
RD: “I want you and the world to see my amazing creativity. However, I often get stuck in some very critical and dark places”.
Yes, this is was what one of the developers of neuro-linguistic programming, Robert Dilts said about himself.
SG: “I want you and the world to see my connection to all life, love and kindness. However, there is a presence inside me that often feels so lonely and unlovable.”.
Yes, this is what Dr. Stephen Gilligan, a student of Milton Erickson, said about himself.
—
You can’t move forward unless you accept your bad self.
The resources for the change you so ardently desire are often hidden in those unwanted expressions of yourself.
The deepest part of your spirit is often hidden in those dark places from which you’re running away.
I would call in sick in my IT support job every other week just to fail at another interview!
Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail…
Until the dream came true.
Investment banking, here I am!
The view of the Thames from my desk at 1 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London.
A lot of learning, a fast-paced environment, a new world!
Finally, I replaced my Nokia phone for an iPhone.
And I got my mum an iPad.
Exciting times.
The first three years were exciting but slowly I realised that I had invested in the wrong dream.
My life was just work, work, work.
Time shrank.
Monday to Friday flashed in front of me. Whoooooosh!
That was probably the scariest feeling I ever experienced.
I wanted to explore what life had to offer other than banking but I had no idea what to do next.
And quitting often felt like suicide.
I was constantly frustrated.
Because of the long hours I didn’t have much time to explore new avenues.
I lacked clarity.
And every time I mentioned to my parents or friends that I was planning to quit, they thought I was crazy.
“Look what’s going on back in Greece”.
“You make in a day as much as someone makes in a month”.
“You haven’t got that far to blow everything up”.
“You can retire in 10 years”.
I would often go strong: “What do you mean? Waste the best years of my life to save for retirement?”
And sometimes I would question myself.
And there you go… more frustration and anger.
Hello, back pain, my old friend.
That was when severe back pain hit me.
I used to live a healthy life.
I swam every day for an hour with my Italian colleague Roberto in the Credit Suisse building in Canary Wharf.
And, believe it or not, I ended up incapacitated.
I was hardly able to walk.
Old people would walk faster than me.
It was not the first time I experienced back pain but it was the worst and lasted longer than ever before.
Doctors found a slipped disc and degenerative disc disease in my spine.
I tried everything: physiotherapy, massage, acupuncture, yoga, pilates, special diets, medication.
Nothing touched my pain.
One day the guys from the employee health and wellness department brought to my desk the most anatomically correct, ergonomic and expensive chair in the world.
They sent consultants to teach me how to sit. I’m laughing now but I was serious about my back, back then!
I took serious notes on how to sit properly.
The pain wouldn’t go away.
Back Pain and Repressed Emotions
Last option was surgery. Every surgeon was willing to fillet me for a few thousand pounds.
I was thinking of going with the NHS but the waiting list was long at the time.
In the end, I said no to surgery although I wanted to get my life back.
The reason was that I wasn’t convinced that surgery would fix my pain.
Doctors wouldn’t seem to agree on whether the slipped disc was the real cause of the pain.
One of the doctors said that his MRI looked worse than mine but he never experienced any pain.
Strange…
So I decided to do my own research.
I came across a book called Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno and I started making the link between physical pain, anxiety and repressed emotions.
How can emotions create this sort of debilitating pain?
Well, it turned out that they can.
One interviewer at Threadneedle Asset Management once asked me, “Do you get angry?”
I said, no. I’m a chilled guy and I manage my emotions.
He didn’t give me the job. And he did the right thing.
Because my anger was so huge: I repressed it for a long time before I became consciously aware of it.
I was often furious inside.
Why?
Because I had to demolish my dream: the investment banking dream.
I felt ungrateful when I was thinking of quitting banking when everyone said that I had a brilliant career.
I didn’t want to disappoint my parents, my girlfriend, my friends.
It was easier for me to repress my anger and suffer from back pain than to be called crazy!
This is how repression works.
When you deny your anger and other negative emotions, when you run away from them, that energy has to go somewhere.
For some people, it manifests itself as back pain, for others as heartburn, hiatus hernia, skin rashes, or other symptoms (on how to get rid of chronic pain).
Besides anger, I felt anxious, fearful, uncertain about the future.
I experienced panic attacks.
I will never forget the panic attack I had in the swimming pool shower. My heart pounded like crazy. My head felt ready to explode. I could feel my high blood pressure.
I still remember kneeling for 10 minutes, water falling on my head.
Roberto had already dressed and waited for me outside, “Man, what’s wrong with you? We’re late! I thought you’d stay in the shower forever!”.
Also, I had more panic attacks. A few times I visited the University College Hospital to check my heart.
I once called 999 from Canary Wharf because I thought I was having a heart attack.
I got really angry because the ambulance was taking so long. I was waiting and waiting… I saw some friends, I said hello! Then I called again and started shouting at the operator.
Until I thought… hold on a second, you’re saying hello to all these people, maybe you’re not having a heart attack? 🙂
Of course, it was not a heart attack. It was just anxiety.
Negative emotions are more than enough to cause pain in different areas of our body.
And it’s easier for people to complain about their physical symptoms such as back pain rather than their negative emotions and mental health struggles—a process called somatisation.
Pain can be a way to escape from asking for what we need, doing what we want to do, and becoming who we want to become.
It’s often easier to be in pain than to “disappoint” our parents, friends, or partners.
We often prefer to be in pain rather than live the true life that we are meant to live.
My chronic pain became a blessing
My physical and emotional pain helped me to become more self-aware, to understand how emotions work and get clarity as to how I wanted to live my life.
And that’s why I can now help others to become more self-aware and live their true lives in my coaching business.
The uncomfortable experiences, the setbacks, the suffering, the quest for meaning all became teachings and wisdom.
Your uncomfortable emotions are messengers—Don’t kill them!
Your emotions or physical symptoms are messengers.
When you take a pill, you kill the messenger.
Anxiety showed me that I was not sitting in the driver’s seat when I was in investment banking.
It was a force that made me jump on the boat and sail away.
When you fight your feelings, you fail to understand yourself, your values, and what you truly care most about in life.
There is information in your anxiety and all your discomfort.
Always ask, “What is that I am feeling and what is trying to communicate to me?”
It’s a message from your unconscious mind.
What is it? Explore it with curiosity and wonder.
A chronic mental condition often comes with benefits.
It may sound weird—but it does.
You may unconsciously—and I’m repeating: unconsciously—use your mental health story in order to receive love from others.
Mental suffering often gives you the attention, sympathy, and love of others.
That’s why there are so many online groups and communities where chronic pain sufferers hang out and spend hours every day.
Being part of a community satisfies one’s emotional needs.
The need for belonging, acceptance and love.
And that’s okay and I totally respect that.
But is chronic pain the only path to belonging and love that every human being deserves?
Of course not. There are more empowering routes.
Your mental health story can often become an identity.
That’s why it’s often difficult to let go of it.
It can be scary to leave all those mental health groups, to stop talking about your pain and symptoms, to go back to living a normal life when you’ve built a life around your mental health story.
Will I be OK if I go back to living a normal life?
Your mental health story can become an adaptation.
From an evolutionary perspective, human beings have managed to survive because they can adapt easily.
But mind that you can adapt in many different ways.
The question is… Who do you want to be?
Do you want to be your mental health story?
Do you want to receive love from talking about your mental health struggles with the world or talking about hiking, reading, an entrepreneurial project or anything else that brings you to life?
When someone comes down with an infection or a cold, they don’t call themselves “the person who came down with a cold”.
Why would you call yourself “the person who became anxious, depressed or the person who suffered from back pain?”
You can let go of your story and move on.
There is a wonderful world out there and others ways to get love, fulfilment and anything else your soul desires.
