Let’s face it! Change is personal. Yet, we often hear that we should divorce emotions from business. It sounds something like this… “Leave the personal stuff at the door” or “Leave the emotion out of it” or “Let’s focus on the facts, not the individual” or some other statement like that.

But people are not machines. Research has shown that unlike Descartes suggested, emotion does drive behavior and decisions (A. Damasio, A. Bechara, L. Sayegh). This is evident in financial market fluctuations. Markets don’t react. People (investors, traders, etc.) react. People make emotional and irrationally decisions. Most of our purchases are biased by our emotions (ask a professional sales person!).