Article June 1, 2020 Issue

Manage your mental portfolio

Mark Raffles

For many years I was part of a team managing the investment portfolio for a large institution. Each day we would be presented with many opportunities to trade securities. When we thought a particular security would benefit our portfolio, we would buy—invest in—it. When a security we owned looked as if it no longer would be beneficial, we would sell—divest of—it. The suggestion to buy or sell would come sometimes from Wall Street brokers and sometimes from our internal staff of security analysts, portfolio managers, and traders. We would continually review what we took into, or sold out of, our portfolio.

In a similar way, all of us make decisions all day long on the thoughts that present themselves to us. We can either accept these thoughts into consciousness or deny them a place in our thinking. The thoughts we hold on to—our mental portfolio—have a very marked effect on our lives, including our physical well-being. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, explained it this way: “Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 392).

Definitions of invest include to commit capital to and “devote time, effort, and energy to.” Our investment team would never buy a security that we expected to have a negative effect on our portfolio’s return. In similar fashion, none of us should ever accept into our consciousness any thoughts that could produce undesired effects.

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