Authentic Connection & Trust!

The trading floor, where I spent the first decade of my career, is a battleground. Most standard societal norms cease to exist when one finds herself working on a trading floor. In my first job as an interest rate sales analyst at Lehman Brothers, my boss told me that I was not allowed to use articles (i.e., couldn’t say the words “the”, “a”, “an”) because “it wasted time and time is money.” My role was to execute multi-million-dollar transactions on behalf of clients (banks, hedge funds, pension funds.) If I made even one mistake, it could cost the firm and my traders millions of dollars within seconds. Speed, precision, and excellence were nonnegotiable. My days could consist of up to 100 transitions within an eight-hour period, considerable market fluctuations, and a range of emotions wide enough to put a Shakespearean play to shame.