Money: Fall Down and Get Up

By Russell Wasendorf, Sr.

“So,” you say, “what does this lovely young woman have to do with the markets?” And to that I say, “Nothing specific, but you’ll get the point.” The thing that Bonnie St. John possesses is the ability to fall down and get up when life doesn’t go exactly as planned, and that’s something that market participants need to be reminded of from time to time."So,” you say, “what does this lovely young woman have to do with the markets?” And to that I say, “Nothing specific, but you’ll get the point.” The thing that Bonnie St. John possesses is the ability to fall down and get up when life doesn’t go exactly as planned, and that’s something that market participants need to be reminded of from time to time.

In the ensuing interview, Bonnie ties the challenge of athletics to tests that investors and traders face in the markets. And she offers some simple mental exercises that will be helpful not only for market participants but for anyone who is stumbling in a particularly knotty life situation.

From a handful of people SFO considered who could inspire greatness and achievement, Bonnie stood out. With a plan, hard work and the right attitude, she proved that dreams can be realized. With a few strikes against her – an African-American from a family of very modest means, amputee daughter of an amazing schoolteacher mother raising three children virtually alone – she rose up to become a ski racer and Paralympics medal winner, Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, member of the Clinton White House’s National Economic Council, accomplished author, and it seems logical, a motivational coach and speaker.

On top of that, she believes that no one needs to make apologies for wanting to achieve and make money. Her book, Money: Fall Down? Get Up! makes it clear that you’ve got to have the right mindset to achieve what you want.

Indeed this interview is a departure from many we’ve done. While tremendously thoughtful and motivating, it takes a different path than other interviews – a few more choice bits of wisdom that will help you be the best you can be in the markets. There are things to be learned from this inspirational, spiritual woman.

RW: Bonnie, it’s a real pleasure to interview you. You have a different focus than most of the people we interview, since typically we have been talking with people that have been heavily involved in the markets. But we were attracted to your dynamic background both athletically and professionally…and, of course, because of your writings on money – and felt that your self-motivation and achievement would offer something useful for our readership. There is something special about an athlete in terms of a work ethic. The fact is that athletes have to strive to be their best, and they don’t achieve anything overnight. Proficiency and confidence grow with time. The same is true for investors and traders. You were born in Detroit, grew up poor in San Diego and became an accomplished skier, despite having what many would consider to be an insurmountable physical limitation. Many would consider your rise to fame against some very tough odds to be amazing.

BSJ: I think it’s amazing that my friend, Barbara Warmath, would turn to me – her one-legged, African-American friend from the wrong side of the tracks – and say, “Let’s go skiing!”

RW: That had to be a defining point in your life. You won bronze and silver medals in skiing at the 1984 Paralympics in Innsbruck. We’ll touch on that a little later. I suspect we’ll go in and out of topics throughout this interview, because some of the things you learned as an athlete inevitably will bear on other topics. So let’s jump ahead for a moment and touch on one of your books, Money: Fall Down? Get Up!, because our readers are interested in success in that category, and I think your workbook approach is quite unique. Then we’ll go back and explore your quite colorful life journey along the way.

BSJ: Tell me what in the book stood out for you.

RW: Two things. First, there are no apologies necessary for making money and achieving wealth, and second, no one is entitled to be wealthy — it’s something you have to work for. One of the things that really stuck was when you said that you can make money by being lucky, but you can’t keep it or grow it. Those are the lessons that some people learn very slowly or not at all. What got you thinking in those terms?

BSJ: I’ve been in so many different circles. I grew up in a poor part of San Diego, and my mother was a schoolteacher raising three kids pretty much on her own. We didn’t have a lot. But later when I was skiing and when I went to Harvard, I was surrounded by affluent people. At Harvard, people put you down if you said you wanted to go to Wall Street or wanted to make money. What was acceptable at Harvard was to say you wanted to make a difference in the world. I found that hypocritical because many of the people who looked down on you already had money. I don’t think we should apologize for wanting to do well and wanting to make money. You can have the very best things for yourself and still make a difference in the world.

RW: One of the quotes in your book is, “You cannot be a millionaire unless you’re willing to feel your feelings about money.”

BSJ: I truly believe that. People have so many pent-up emotions about money. Whether rich or poor, most people have had traumatic experiences that involve money at one time or another. We don’t want to feel it. People avoid the pain by being vague about how much money they have, how much they spend, and how much they want. If you really want to be wealthy, you have to look at the gap between where you are and where you’d like to be – but the gap is uncomfortable.

RW: Very well put.

BSJ: Another thing we do to keep ourselves comfortable and to keep from feeling pain around money is to associate only with people who have about the same amount that we have. To hang out with people that have more money than we do is uncomfortable, and we tend not to do it. I think it is important to have people who you can talk to that have more money than you do – or are better investors – or have something else that you’re striving to emulate – because they will keep you on your toes. I interviewed someone a few years back who had learned that his investment advisor wasn’t doing as well for him as some other people who had advisors at the same firm. To have mentors who are doing better than we are will help show us where we are going wrong. It’s worth risking the awkwardness to do this.

RW: On that note about risk, let’s digress for a moment and go back to San Diego when your friend takes you skiing for the first time.

BSJ: The first ski trip was horrible! Here is this handicapped kid who is exempt from PE and can’t be on competitive teams in school. But the thought of gliding gracefully down a ski hill was great. If you had two legs you could get a lesson, but if you had one leg, you had to struggle on your own. So I just kept falling down. It was three days before I learned how to turn well enough to stop without crashing. Finally when I learned how to turn to the right and the left, I skied on intermediate slopes and was perfect at parallel skiing because my tips never crossed. Suddenly it became an advantage.

Investors have to go through tough times, too. I went through so much just to start skiing and then to become a ski racer. You have to have something that motivates you through the ups and downs. I could have easily said “I’m bruised, I’m bleeding, I’m beat up, and I wasn’t meant to ski.” In the market you may feel beat up and want to quit, too. Pushing through the difficulty, taking your lessons, taking your medicine and then going back and trying again: that’s what it takes to be successful. I guess I’ve been taking risks pretty much all of my life.

RW: Many people consider risk a four-letter word.

BSJ: Yes, and here’s a good example. I was doing a seminar with the Money book, and there’s one exercise where I ask people to think of what is stopping them from having the abundance they want. They write it down. Next they write down the opposite of whatever is stopping them. Many people are so committed to their obstacle that they can’t comprehend an opposite idea. One woman said, “I don’t like to gamble my money, and I invest so conservatively that I don’t get very high returns. I can never get ahead.” When she tried to state the opposite, she said, “I’ll gamble all my money away and lose it!” That was the only way she could see it. Whatever her experiences in life had been, she couldn’t see anything between conservative and high-risk. I had to work with her to set goals for educating herself on risk and taking calculated risks.

Try this exercise yourself with a limitation of your own. Taking a limitation and restating it in the opposite way can help you eliminate mental blocks and help you seek more creative solutions. It can do magic.

RW: A lot of people in the investment community put down risk or want a risk-free investment. It’s the willingness to take risks that possibly gives the greatest achievement. It’s hard for me to put myself in the position of the kinds of physical risks you were taking. You went to a school in Vermont and broke your leg?

BSJ: Yes, I decided to become a ski racer, taking a calculated risk that I could take it to the next level. I went to Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, about as far away as you can get from San Diego. On the first day of school I broke my only leg. After six weeks, the cast finally came off, and I was out on the soccer field starting to train with the other kids when my artificial leg broke in half! We express-mailed the artificial leg to L.A. so they could fix it in a day and send it back, but the newly repaired leg was lost in the mail for three weeks. The feeling of losing use of both of my legs is probably what people felt like in the market over the last several years.

RW: We’ve gone through those experiences in the markets and many people simply say, “That’s it. I’m going to put my money in some kind no-brainer fund and not try to learn it on my own.”

BSJ: But the kind of people who are only going to jump into markets in the good times and be terrified and jump out again when things look a little rough are going to lose more money that way. If you only get in at the top of the markets and then when it goes down you say, “Oh, no! I’ve got to get out,” you’re in trouble. You’ve got to have a stronger constitution to stick with investing and diversifying in good times and bad.

RW: It’s having faith that we can get through ups and downs, and as you say, there is abundance out there to be had.

BSJ: My mother got that sense of abundance from a family she worked for as a teenager – she was able to see their emphasis on education and on family values, and she was able to see their wealth. She then knew that abundance was possible and could say, “You know what? That’s what I want to be able to do.”

RW: Your mother obviously had an effect on you. You clearly were very good with book learning, went to Harvard, ended up being a Rhodes Scholar, and you were an award-winning sales person for IBM. She must be quite inspiring!

BSJ: Charles Kuralt did a story on our family, and he called it “No Handicaps, No Excuses.” That’s my mother. I don’t understand how she did it because she didn’t have any strong people rooting for her when she was growing up – no support for going to school and getting into college. Her father left her mother before she was born, and her mother was an alcoholic. She grew up in Queens, getting herself into Hunter College High School even when people said she shouldn’t try. By the time she was in college, my mother had three kids and was struggling. She had split up with my father, and they told her to drop out of college in order to collect welfare. She ended up getting a loan from the Jewish Free Loan Society that helped her stay in college and finish. By the time I was 12, she got her PhD and went on to become a principal. Growing up with a woman like that, it is hard to make excuses. Sure, I have one leg, but I didn’t grow up in the ghetto. I grew up in a house filled with books and a mother who encouraged us to read and learn.

RW: Her example, then, moved you in directions you might not have gone.

BSJ: Yes, and I’ve been able to do so many different things. I’ve competed at world-class levels. Not only in sports, but on Wall Street, working on the White House economic team and being a Rhodes Scholar, so I’ve gotten work with the best of the best in a variety of arenas. Few people get that chance. I’ve been able to do so many diverse things because I keep a portfolio of goals. And so many people say, well, to succeed you have to focus on one thing and do nothing but that one thing and never give up. I don’t think you can afford to have that type of mentality if you don’t come from a secure, middle class background. From where I came from, you had to have a plan B or a plan C. You had to have some flexibility. I looked at my goals as a “portfolio,” with high-risk goals and low-risk goals and everything in between. You put your energy into different places depending on where the return is. I was always “investing” in multiple opportunities. I started to become a ski racer, but that didn’t mean I didn’t fill out my applications for Harvard University when I was at the ski academy in Vermont. Once I went to Harvard, I had to make a portfolio decision about whether I would take time off and try out for the Olympics. I am always managing my options.

RW: You worked in the Clinton Administration for the National Economic Council (NEC) as the director of human capital issues for former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. What did that entail?

BSJ: Basically investing in people. The NEC was formed during the Clinton Administration as a new body to cut across a lot of the silos and the organizational differences in the administration. We were there to facilitate cooperation across the Council of Economic Advisors, the Labor Department, Education Department, Health and Human Services, etc. – and to bring them together on various issues. For example, when China was up for most-favored-nation (MFN) status, the traditional way to analyze that was through the National Security Council. However, that analysis would cover national security issues and human rights issues, but it’s not part of their expertise to put American jobs into the equation.

RW: So part of the National Economic Counsel was formed to give the President a different picture of the situation.

BSJ: Yes, so the MFN for China became not just an international issue but a domestic-jobs issue. Within the context of my job, I was working on different issues relating to education, training and a lot of job issues. We did one study over a period of eight months where we brought together all the brightest people from across the administration to look at the future of jobs in the American economy. For me, it was like having a front row seat at the economics olympics – fabulous minds gathered in one room able to say whatever they wanted to say because the tape recorders weren’t running. I learned more about economics working at the White House then I ever did at Oxford or Harvard.

RW: Turning to a different subject, do you invest, and how successful have you been?

BSJ: Well, like many other Americans a few years ago, I got knocked down.

RW: What did it take to get back up?

BSJ: Getting through tough markets and not giving up takes faith in yourself and in the abundance of the world and our resourcefulness. You must be able to reassess your strategy. Everything will not fall apart.

When you see all of the leaves fall off of the trees, you don’t think, “Oh, no! No more trees.” You know that the leaves are coming back. Similarly people get upset about the possibility of losing their jobs overseas, the country running out of jobs or not having enough jobs. It’s a lack of faith in the abundance of the economy. When this country was founded, 75 percent of the population worked in farming. In about 1900, 60 percent worked in manufacturing. Now we are down to two percent working in agriculture and less than 30 percent in manufacturing. We are not running out of jobs, but creating new industries. We can create entirely new jobs, but for that we need to invest in people. Whole new industries, whole new jobs, and that’s how the economy works. Taking that back to the markets, we’re not running out of good markets; there will be abundance again. People need to learn how to pick themselves up after a rough haul.

RW: In the book, you also discussed Inner-Wealth Hypnosis. Let’s get into that.

BSJ: There are a number of reasons why this is important for investors (and even non-investors). Here’s one example, but there are many, many more. I once heard a story about a trader who made $100,000 a year. He was stuck there and didn’t know why. Once he changed his attitude about himself and felt like he deserved more than $100,000, his performance improved dramatically. Our inner wealth is our own inner standard of what we think we deserve or are entitled to – sometimes even what we are comfortable with. So the technique in the book is a way of getting into your subconscious and just giving yourself the suggestion that you are entitled to whatever it is that you would really like to have.

RW: I thought the actual steps for Inner-Wealth Hypnosis were very interesting.

BSJ: Self-hypnosis is surprisingly easy. I used these same techniques to improve my performance as a ski racer and now as a speaker in front of thousands of people. First you close your eyes and imagine yourself walking down a set of stairs. Count down backwards from 50 to one as you are going down the stairs. It’s a way of distracting your conscious mind and getting yourself into a relaxed state, into the sub-conscious. When you get to the bottom of the stairs, imagine two doors. The first door leads to a beautiful place. You can imagine being with friends and family, being on a beach with an attractive person next to you or just being relaxed. Imagine all the wealth and abundance you’re going to have. Enjoy that for a few minutes. What that does is relax your mind and get you into a very positive place. Next you imagine leaving the first door and going into the second door, which is your inner self. There you can give yourself some a hypnotic suggestion…what would be a good suggestion for a trader or an investor?

RW: The biggest trap for most investors in high-risk investments is that they get too involved in the emotional feelings that the markets bring out. A good suggestion would be “I will ignore the emotions of the market and stick to my guns.”

BSJ: That’s great – with one caveat. If you hypnotize yourself and then say “ignore emotions,” all your brain hears is “emotions.” So you would have hypnotized yourself to be more emotional, whether you realize it or not. Instead, try “I’m going to be objective about my decisions today.”

RW: I see that. If people get themselves very relaxed and in a positive state and they give themselves a negative suggestion, they end up with the opposite of what they are really after. So when you are preparing yourself to ski down a slope, you’re not going to say I’m going to avoid running into that gate?

BSJ: Absolutely not! It’s fascinating when you think about it because sometimes people don’t know what the opposite is. They are so focused on what they don’t want to do that they don’t actually know what they do want.

RW: And many people feel that they learn more by failing then by succeeding. I don’t know if I can go along with that.

BSJ: You’re right. We learn from both failure and success. I coach many executives in my current role, helping them improve as leaders. I assess their strengths and reinforce them. But I do spend time also helping them to see their natural limitations of skill and temperament so that they can compensate or stretch themselves beyond their limits. If you are going to shoot for the top, you’re probably going to spend some time at the bottom. I remember one CEO whose company was going through a hard time. We talked a lot about failure and being in that valley where you are focused and more open to reassess where you are going. You must pick yourself up and get back in the game. He said, “Your message about falling down and getting back up was so important to me because I’ve always done well in everything I did. I inherited the company. I’ve always won. This is the first time that I really feel like I’m falling down, and I felt so guilty about it. You helped me understand that it is just part of the process. It’s a growing experience.” I helped him to get rid of the guilt, reassess the situation and get on with it.

RW: That’s a spectacular point on which to end the interview, Bonnie. I am glad we hooked up with you, because I think your fresh view on money and your attitude will be useful to readers who are facing challenges in these markets.

BSJ: I hope so. Thanks for the opportunity, Russ.

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