When I first began my investment journey a few years ago, I was curious about all things investments. In fact, I learned most of the things from googling and investing by myself. When things are going well, I tried to refine ways to maximize profits but when times are bad, that’s when the anxiety and fear start to build up. During those moments, I distinctly recall myself trying to find support from family, friends, and colleagues to seek for advice. However, due to the nature of the topic, many people are uncomfortable giving me any advice. Some even offered the most “wise” option such as cutting losses and going for “risk-free” methods instead. Fortunately, I stuck to my guns and pressed on.

While I did not have a physical mentor who I can turn to when in doubt, I did benefit from those periods of forced independence. Essentially, I was left with the desire to continue investing in stocks and shares while bearing all the losses, fear and anxiety while coping with all other responsibilities I had. It was only during bad times when I began to realize that I had an investment mentor all along and in this post, I would like to share with you what I have learned from my mentor to help some of you who are doing this on your own.

Willing to take risks

My mentor is an average person without any experience in buying stocks and shares. So how can someone like that be my mentor in investments? Well, my mentor showed me examples of how he took risks and faced it bravely. When I was younger, my mentor made decisions that eventually become a long term financial torture. Consequences aside, the thing that I learned from his experience was how he was able to live with his mistakes and carry on doing his best for his family. This form of perseverance was valuable and has supported me during the downturns and bad decisions I have made when investing.

Compartmentalizing fear and anxiety

Fear and Anxiety are the main ingredients for making mistakes when investing. However, it does not only affect us when investing but also in our daily lives. My mentor did not have to see the numbers on the screen and contemplate paper losses but he had to carry on with his duties as a father and an employee. That required extraordinary skills in terms of staying calm and more importantly the ability to compartmentalizing his emotions while at work. That taught me the importance of focusing on the right things at the right time instead of lumping all my worries together. Such skills are more than essential when investing especially when you can see the value of your holdings fluctuate in real-time.

Focusing on what can be done

The last point that I learn from my mentor is to focus on matters which can be helped. Contrary to running away from our fears, sometimes it is important to live with our mistakes and divert our attention to aspects of life which can be improved on. I suppose that this aspect of prioritizing is the most important out of the three mentioned in this post. When investing, we will come across making decisions out of impulse and fear at times and it might lead to negative outcomes. From that experience, I learned a valuable lesson of being realistic and objective in every decision I make, which includes investment decisions.

Closing thoughts

I hope that my sharing helped us to realize that we all have people around us who are “mentoring” us along the way. Fortunately, I have my dad or rather parents to have gone through tough times to demonstrate their bravery, perseverance, and determination. Incidentally, those dreadful experience has become the foundation of my investing traits and the desire to be a mentor for others, such as through this blog to help others who are also looking for genuine support in times of self-doubt and anxiety.

If there is one thing to take away from this post, that will be to never think that you are totally alone when investing. There will always be many people out there who have had or are experiencing what you are going through in your investment journey. On my part, I dedicate this blog to helping more people realize the joy of “investment hardships” and hopefully, we will all brave through every downturn and emerge as mentors for others around us.