Wall Street financial professionals are starting to commit suicide again. Yesterday it was reported that Thomas Hughes, who worked for the investment bank, Moelis & Company, jumped to his death from the 24th floor. A month earlier, Sarvshreshth Gupta, 22, who worked for investment bank Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, committed suicide. Fortune Magazine reported about four other suicides among financial professionals between January and February in 2014.
In a landmark study reported in 2000, it was determined that 38% of stockbrokers surveyed were suffering from major symptoms of job burnout, anxiety and depression. Nearly a fourth of the participants actually met the criteria for major depression. And this was prior to the 2008 economic disaster!
It’s critically important to understand that none of the potential stressors inherent in the advisor’s job necessarily lead to stress. Stress only results from toxic self-talk reactions to the challenging events that take place on the job. For example, balancing work and family, prospecting for clients, fulfilling supervisors’ expectations, dealing with demanding clients, keeping up with ever changing fiduciary and compliance changes are all potential stressors, but they don’t have to result in stress.
Stress is minimized if the advisor uses healthy self-talk patterns to deal with these challenges. Events that take place in our lives, such as the typical events (above) that advisors face regularly, only lead to stress if your self-talk about those events is stress-producing; so, it’s your self-talk reaction to the event, not the event itself, that determines if stress will result.
Lets consider a sports metaphor. Several years ago a professional football quarterback asked me for help shortly before his team played in the Super Bowl. You might think that anticipating playing in the Super Bowl is an event that would automatically cause stress/anxiety. But this event has little to do with whether or not the quarterback would suffer from stress/anxiety.
A major anxiety/stress reaction could occur if he said something toxic, like this to himself:
“I am feeling butterflies in my stomach. That’s because I know that If I screw up, millions and millions of viewers around the world will watch me make a fool of myself! I don’t know how I will be able to face my family and friends. These butterflies prove that I’m too nervous to play well.”
On the other hand, if he said something healthy, like this, the anxiety/stress would be minimized:
“I am feeling butterflies in my stomach. That’s because I know we will prevail in the Super Bowl. I am playing my best football of the season, our team is primed and ready to go and these butterflies represent my excited anticipation of the game. I can’t wait!
The learning point here is that YOU are ultimately in control of the amount of stress that results from any event you face in your advisor’s role. You are in control, because you can choose to interpret and speak to yourself about the event in a very positive way…the way that athletic champions speak to themselves about the challenges that are inevitable in their careers.