Trading Derivatives and the Shame-Based Fear of Being Ordinary

It is November 2010 on the Goldman Sachs trading floor in New York City. It is just two years removed from the depths of the Global Financial Crisis, but you would never know it. The stock market has nearly doubled in the last 18 months, the Federal Reserve has just announced its second round of Quantitative Easing, and it feels like one big party on Wall Street.

It’s 9:31am on this November morning, and the stock market has been open for exactly 60 seconds. There are lots of green numbers flashing across my five computer screens, indicating that today is yet another positive day for the market.

“Sloy-Dog pick up line 1,” John shouts over the trading floor’s loudspeaker system (John has added the word “Dog” to the first syllable of my last name as a term of endearment; the extent of the endearment is debatable).

I reach for the blinking button flashing for line 1 on my giant phone dashboard system. “Yea,” I say into my phone in as terse a way as I could possibly manage. A two syllable word, such as “hello,” would be unthinkable on the trading floor.

“I need an offer on 2000 S&P March 1300 calls,” John shouts into the phone. “And I need it A-S-A-P.” John is an equity derivatives salesperson at Goldman, and he is asking me (the trader) to show him a price at which his hedge fund client can buy 2000 units of a derivative linked to the price of the S&P 500 index. The tone of his voice makes me think he hasn’t had his morning coffee yet. Or maybe he’s had three, and he is just about ready for his fourth. Either way, his sense of urgency gives me a feeling of energy and power. Adrenaline shoots through my system. It’s my first hit of validation for the day.

I do a quick scan of my five screens in an attempt to make sense of what happened during the overnight session in Asia. The market has been very volatile in the last 24 hours, which makes this trade even riskier than it normally would be. I start to contemplate the risk/reward of the different prices I might show. If I show him too good (i.e., too low) of an offer, I might lose a lot of money before I have had a chance to neutralize my risk. If I show him too high of an offer, John’s client would likely trade with a competitor instead and possibly put John in the penalty box for a week. The “penalty box” is Wall Street lingo meaning that a client has decided not to do business with you for a certain period of time. John and his team won’t be happy with me if we get put in the penalty box.

Twenty-two seconds have now passed since John originally called for me. I do one last calculation in my head. As I reach for line 1 to give John his price, Julie’s voice bellows over the loudspeaker. “Sloyer, pick up line 2.” Julie is also a salesperson. She is John’s boss and covers some of the most important clients for the firm. She is not into the use of the word “Dog” as a term of endearment.

I reach for line 2 and get connected to Julie through my second phone. I now have phones to both my ears. During my two years on the job, I have become quite dextrous with the phone’s mute buttons. I can seamlessly carry on two different conversations with two different phones at the same time without confusion.

“Give me 15 seconds, Jules, I’m just finishing up with John.”

“No,” she barks back. “This is super important.”

“Too bad,” I say, feeling a rush of validation from knowing that everyone around me just heard me tell one of the most important people on our floor that she needs to wait.

“Sloy-Dog I need that price,” I hear John shout over the loudspeaker. We are still connected 1:1 through the internal phone system on line 1, but John wants to make sure that all 600 people on the trading floor, which covers the size of a football field, don’t forget how important his client (and thus he) is for the firm. I secretly appreciate that John has done this. Now 600 people know how important I am. This is my third rush of validation.

I push the button for line 1, “I am $36 offer, John.” This means that I would be willing to sell this derivative to John’s client for $36.

Without waiting for a response, I hit line 2. “Jules, what do ya need?”

“I need an offer on 4000 S&P March 1300 calls. It’s for Joe.” Joe is Julie’s biggest client.

I scan the screens again. Julie’s trade is the same as John’s, except it is even bigger. And thus riskier.

“You’re done!” I hear John scream (“you’re done” is Wall Street lingo meaning that the client has agreed to the price and the trade is now completed). Another rush comes over me. Doing a trade means more risk, but more impactfully for me in that moment, it means more validation and a greater sense of transient importance.

“Sloyer, don’t forget about me,” Julie’s voice echoes again over the loudspeaker. More adrenaline for the system.

How could I forget about Julie? She practically owns this place.

I do a quick scan of my five screens followed by more calculations as I contemplate what price to show Julie.

It’s now 9:36am.

The day will continue on like this for 6.5 more hours…

I am exhausted, but I would never know it. I feel alive. I feel energized. I feel validated. I feel like I could do this for another 10 years.

The Seduction of Validation

Despite the risk, all the stress, and all the overstimulation, according to my 24-year old self, this was the perfect job for me. For those of you familiar with the Enneagram personality framework, I am a Type 3 (“The Achiever”) with a 2 Wing (“The Helper”). My dominant need is to be seen as successful. My secondary need is to be needed. Being a trader at an investment bank, where salespeople relied on me to make prices for their clients and my bosses relied on me to generate revenue by trading (during a time when you didn’t need a PhD in rocket science to be a successful trader), allowed me to get both. Validation is a seductive drug. And my addiction was not only socially acceptable, it was actually societally encouraged.

To say that I suffered from a lack of humility during this time would be an understatement. Brené Brown defines narcissism as “the shame-based fear of being ordinary.” With that definition, I was a textbook case.

Part I: The Shame-Based Fear…

Despite being very confident on the outside, I was carrying around bucket loads of shame. Well, it was more like truckloads. Some of the shame I was aware of. Most of it I wasn’t really aware of. The thing about shame is regardless of how aware you are of it, it’s a really unpleasant emotion to feel. In my own experience, the consequences of shame have been anger (so I don’t have to feel the shame), a withdrawal from self-expression and vulnerability (so I don’t get “found out” for not being who I say I am), and hypocritical judgment of others (so my ego can see itself as different from people who have the same undesirable characteristics that it possesses).

Here are a few specific examples of where I felt shame during my time working at the bank…

• I walked onto the trading floor almost everyday fearing that I would get “found out” for not being worthy of the job. My role required quantitative knowledge, and despite doing it for 11 years, there was one particular mathematical formula that is essential to understanding equity derivatives (the Black Scholes formula) that I never understood. Regardless of any positive feedback or promotions I received over the years, I felt like an imposter. I felt like I had tricked my bosses and co-workers into thinking that I was a lot more competent than I was. The effect was that I was constantly and inauthentically trying to prove myself, which was exhausting for me and everyone else around me.
• In addition to the part of me that told me that I did not deserve to be there, there was another part of me that felt shame when others didn’t recognize me for my value. It was like my internal voice was saying: “you don’t deserve this” and my external voice was like “hey, why can’t you see how much I deserve this?” It was a very painful paradox.
• Just like in many work environments, there was a certain amount of greed, materialism, and self-promotion that existed in the culture. I judged others for being this way, and yet deep down, I knew that many of my actions and ways of thinking were right up there with the worst of them.
• I carried around shame because of anxiety with respect to money. Again, there was a paradox. I feared that not having enough would lead to less peace of mind, and even when I had enough, I still worried about it and thus never really had that peace of mind that the money was supposed to solve in the first place.
• I felt shame for my hypocrisy. There was one particular example when I remember getting upset with interns because they didn’t understand the same important formula that I didn’t understand.
• I was carrying around shame for my anger, which was ironically often a by-product of the shame from not feeling like I was enough. At the time, I had been studying Buddhism and some of the other Eastern religious philosophies which clearly warn against the dangers of anger. I saw myself as a pretty self-aware guy, and despite this knowledge, I would sometimes lose my sh*t when things didn’t go my way. The Buddha said anger has a “honeyed tip” and a “poisoned root.” And I was a sucker for the honey one too many times.

Part II: …Fear of Being Ordinary

I wanted to be anything but ordinary. Ordinary was perhaps the biggest insult you could have thrown at me. Although I never would have admitted it, I think I probably would have preferred to have failed because at least I would have a good comeback story to write about in my memoir one day. But deep down, more than just wanting the negation of ordinary, I feared I would never be enough. I feared I would never be extraordinary enough.

When we think of humility at Upbuild, we think of it as both the intellectual and deeply emotional understanding that:

1. Nothing that I have is really mine

2. Anything that I am is mostly due to my teachers

3. I can’t figure it out on my own, and

4. It’s not about me.

It’s crazy how little humility there was in my desire to be extraordinary. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back on it, I can see how my very loosely held definition of extraordinary was ungrounded. It was not based on a true desire to serve or be in meaningful connection with others. It was based on flimsy notions like getting recognition and being liked by others. And so the desire to be extraordinary ran in direct opposition to having humility because:

1. I believed most everything that I had was mine

2. I believed I was where I was mostly because of my hard work

3. I believed I could figure out pretty much anything on my own, and

4. I was at the center of my universe.

10 Years Later

So now that I work for Upbuild, has all of this “shame-based fear of being ordinary” gone away? Unfortunately, that has not been my journey of personal development.

Many of these behaviors and tendencies have been with me since childhood, and even though I am now more clear on why they don’t serve me, they are also what I have been relying on to keep me safe, get me praise (and thus feel accepted), and push me towards my potential. They have been my armor and taking them off feels ridiculously scary and vulnerable.

In my current life, the external circumstances surrounding the shame are different: there is no longer a PA system, I have three co-workers instead of 30,000, we use Zoom instead of the Bloomberg Application, I have one screen instead of five, and no one calls me Sloy-Dog. But many of the same flavors of shame are still there. I still fear being “found out” for not being empathetic and competent enough as a coach. I still wake up most days hoping someone will see value in me that they didn’t see yesterday. And I feel hypocritical when I get angry with my own loved ones even as I am working with my coaching clients to help them work through their anger.

Real Humility

I was having a conversation with Rasanath a few months back. We were discussing how humility was a key point of focus for me this year in terms of my own psychological and spiritual growth. I told him how I was committed to reducing my need for validation in order to more beneficially serve the needs of others. While my heart was very much in the right place, I was still a little off in my approach. With one of his classic “wisdom bombs,” he reminded me of something he had picked up from his reading of the American Trappist monk and theologian Thomas Merton: real humility comes when we actually realize how much validation we need. It comes when we can truly experience our own shame and suffering that results from looking externally for our sense of self-worth. And real humility is a paradox because as soon as we start thinking “hey I’m getting good at this humility thing,” by definition, we are no longer humble.

For me, the last few years and in particular the last few months, including the writing of the reflection that you are reading right now, have been very much about seeing how much validation I need. They have also been about the sitting with the discomfort that has come from the shame of being so dependent on the validation. And while it might be nostalgic to relive my trading floor experiences from a decade ago, it was not an enjoyable experience to relive the tucked away shame that was present in those experiences.

As our team members at Upbuild often remind one another, the work of personal growth is not supposed to be fun. And it’s certainly not supposed to be easy. And if it ever does feel pleasant for an extended period of time, it is likely a clue that it has become an intellectual exercise meant to provide us with temporary relief from our pain, rather than a sincere effort to make progress. So, for now, I am sitting with my discomfort. I am sitting with the suffering. I am doing my best to resist the typical numbing mechanisms. And I am constantly reminding myself of the pillars of humility: nothing that I have is really mine, anything that I am is mostly due to my teachers, I can’t figure it out on my own, and it’s not about me. I am just a vessel for love, wisdom, and hope to flow through.

*the names of the people from the scene on the trading floor are not the names of real people

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