3 NLP Presuppositions Which Are Useful In Investing

For the past 2 days, attended the 2-days NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) For Professional course at SIM. This kind of course is more experiential i.e. you need to be there and be part of it to really appreciate the new skills/tools. 

There are plenty of games, role plays and interaction. Overall, I am very happy with what I've learnt and it does provide me with different perspective in seeing the world. In gist, we all have our own "map of world" and most of the time it doesn't represent the real world, just our own version of seeing/interpreting it.

Among many skills/tools that I've learnt, one of the most powerful one (in my view) is the NLP Presuppositions. Basically, NLP Presuppositions are assumptions, attitudes, beliefs that are useful for creating/facing with change. It allows us to stay in control of our choices. They might not be true for all situation but it sure will help us act in a way that gets the result we want. Out of the 20+ stack of cards (NLP Presuppositions), I've hand picked 3 which I think will be useful in Investing context.

Here we go :

1. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback : I am pretty sure that most of us, retail investors, will try many different approach/methods of investing when are are starting out. Being a green horn at the initial stage, we do make mistakes and experienced loss trades, which are quite common. Just like this presupposition said, there is no such thing as failure (loss trade), just feedback that the way to trade is not working, it's time to learn from the feedback and move on. I also believe another similar quote "we fail only when we stop trying".  

2. If what you are doing is not working, do something else : On first sight, this might seems to be contradict with number 1 (this is what I debated with one of the participants when we are trying to dish out the NLP presuppositions card in of the the exercise). However, when you dig deeper, this presuppositions is looking at another perspective. For example, we are talking about investing here, initially you are investing through Technical Analysis (TA) and somehow doesn't yield the returns that you are expected or worst, constantly at a loss. Instead of totally give up investing, you can learn/choose another approach like Fundamental Analysis (FA). Or to be more extreme, investing in other vehicles like Property, Cryptocurrencies etc... As the saying goes, all roads lead to Rome.

3. When people know better, they can do better : I think this is quite clear among the retail investors, whom are mostly avid readers too.  

Of course, these presuppositions might seem like common sense, which I kind of agree too, but many a time, things work out best when we apply sufficient common sense. Don't you agree? 

Cheers!