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my life, and it was out of the deep emotional recognition of personal, social, and career limitations that I became ready for wholly new commitments.

      Once you grasp the Kuhnian dynamic, you can appreciate why sine-wave life charts with few valleys are not necessarily good ones. Mastering the moderate challenges of childhood and adolescence is what gives us the resources to meet the challenges of life's greater valleys. University of North Carolina researcher Angela Duckworth calls this resilience “grit.” It's the ability to get off the canvas after being knocked down and still have a shot at winning the fight. Learning to master the small setbacks gives us the tools and confidence to weather the much larger ones. Without experiences of grit to draw on, there is no bridge-building to the future: Change becomes a threat, not a challenge.

      And the peaks? Those provide the energy and inspiration that carries us through life's valleys. Often, peaks come from fresh experience: traveling a new career path, giving birth to a child, taking a very special trip. Those new experiences help us see ourselves and our world in novel ways: They open up new possibilities and bring fresh perspectives. One of my recent peak experiences was a trip with Margie to the Alaskan wilderness. It was beautiful beyond words. More than that, however, the trip cemented our desire to see more of the world and to make that a shared experience. In a very important way, a small boat ride to the base of a glacier helped us reorder life's priorities. That is the power of peak experiences.

      So what does it mean when, like Chris and Gina, there are few peaks and few valleys? Between the ups and downs of life, all that remains is routine. The incident in my office was a perfect example. Chris was trying to capture in words what was missing from the marriage and Gina quickly shifted the topic to a child-centered routine. At other times, it was Chris doing the shifting. On one occasion, when Gina voiced a strong desire to keep the family together, Chris moved uncomfortably in his seat, pulled out his phone, and checked his market position. Gina stopped talking, Chris obtained his quotes, and the topic quickly changed to their mutual concern for the children. Nice, safe terrain – and more of the avoidance of change that was strangling the marriage.

      The reality for Gina and Chris was that their children no longer needed to occupy dominant mindshare. Their kids were mature, growing up, and increasingly self-sufficient. Leaving home for college was soon to come. Many of the couple's routines, once glue for the relationship, no longer had a purpose. Without anything to take the place of those routines – without a bridge to the future – the couple foundered. The family had changed and they had not. They had a commitment to each other, but that wasn't enough. They needed a flexible commitment.

      Flexibility and Trading

      Ironically, no one should be able to do flexible commitment better than traders. We've all been in situations we're long and suddenly a tape bomb hits the headlines and inspires a bout of selling. What do you do? If the headline is credible and institutions are acting on the news, you very well might hedge your position, lighten it, or get out altogether. You're willing to entertain the possibility that this is a game-changer. The upward trend that you counted on is no longer a certainty. Great traders are not married to the long or the short side. They follow the market's cue – and that requires particular open-mindedness.

      If we were to examine the thought process and preparation of those successful traders, we'd see that flexibility is built into their trading plans from the outset. Let's say a trader has built a model of the various fundamental drivers that impact currency prices – from trend/momentum to interest rate differentials to economic surprises – and receives a strong buy signal from his USD model. Our trader initiates long USD positions versus a basket of other currencies and knows that the Federal Reserve is scheduled to finish its meeting and make an announcement in the afternoon. Plan A for the trader is to follow the Fed announcement closely and, if monetary policy is unchanged and language is hawkish as expected, add to the positions on dips in dollar strength. Plan B, however, is to exit the positions and even reverse them should the Fed express unexpected support for monetary ease. At that point, historical odds from the model would take a backseat to the idiosyncratic risk of the present, as a dovish tilt in monetary policy would likely bring in a fresh class of dollar sellers.

      So let's say, after moving higher early in the session, the dollar sells off sharply when the Fed notes weakening economic indications and expresses renewed support for a policy of restrained rates. Quickly our trader hits bids and exits the long positions. The dollar sells off sharply and then bounces feebly as stocks stay weak and bonds rally. The intermarket action tells our trader that markets are repricing growth prospects based on the Fed statement. Quickly exiting the positions has given the trader time – and mental clarity – to look for markets slow in repricing, so that what started as a losing day can yet become a winner.

      The key to our trader's morning success is not just planning the trade, but flexibly planning the trade. It is the active construction and rehearsal of a Plan B that enables the trader to adapt to the unexpected message from the Fed. If the trader had held an unshakable conviction that the dollar had to move higher because of momentum or interest rate movement in his macro model, such flexibility would have been impossible.

      But that is flexibility in a single trade. What if we as traders lack flexibility in our basic approach to trading? What if we are like pharmaceutical firms that fail to develop pipelines of new drugs as existing ones approach the end of their patents? What if our entire careers lack a Plan B? Caught in trading routines, we – like Gina and Chris – can fail to create our bridges to the future. Like the chef-owner who sold to Emil, we keep cooking the meals we love, until we wake up to the fact that people are no longer coming to the table.

      The key finding from the sine wave exercise with Chris and Gina was the near-absence of peak experiences in recent years. It wasn't the presence of great negatives but the absence of positives that eroded their marriage. They were so busy climbing the family ladder that they couldn't see they were leaning against the wrong building.

      So how does a psychologist help a couple like Chris and Gina? The one thing that isn't helpful is focusing on their problems. Both husband and wife already feel as though something is wrong with their marriage. They secretly – and sometimes not so secretly – harbor concerns that something is wrong with them. They know something is broken; more talk of breakage only confirms the negative identity that they have internalized in recent years as a couple. As a rule, by the time people come to a psychologist, they have gotten to the point of experiencing themselves as troubled. Feeling beset with problems and unable to control or change those problems, couples come to counseling in a disempowered state. Spending hour after hour with a therapist, delving into problems, subtly reinforces the notion of “troubled” and often unwittingly contributes to the initial disempowerment.

      Empowering people through a focus on strengths is a cardinal tenet of the solution-focused approach to change described in The Psychology of Trading. When we are focused on problems and overwhelmed by them, we typically fail to appreciate the fact that there are numerous occasions in which the problems don't play out. These exceptions to problem patterns typically hold the kernel of solution: It's what we are doing when problems don't occur that can point the way out.

      Key Takeaway

      We cannot improve our functioning if we experience ourselves as dysfunctional.

      Notice the subtle shift: The troubled person tells the psychologist about overwhelming problems and the psychologist responds by asking about exceptions to those problems – and then by pointing out that the kernel of solution has resided within the person all along! You see, if the solution came from the psychologist, troubled individuals would feel that they have a powerful therapist, not that they are powerful. Solution-focused work succeeds in large part because it reconnects people with their adaptive capacities: the parts of themselves that are not troubled and dysfunctional.

      So the last thing we'd want to do with Chris and Gina is spend the majority of our time talking about what has been going wrong. But we don't have peak experiences on the sine-wave chart to serve as exceptions to their problem patterns. Indeed, their very problem – their deadly immersion in routine – is the absence of peak experience. How to proceed?

      The

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