In 1995, I was riding high on Wall Street. Clients were enjoying double-digit growths and I was making a handsome six-figure income. I was winning sales trips to exotic places like Mexico and Bermuda, interviewed on national television and accumulating one sales award after another. But little did I know all hell was about to break loose. I had no clue it was coming.

One of my clients was a woman I affectionately labeled “the grandmotherly client.” Always reeking of cheap perfume, she was rail-thin with bushels of snow white hair and a kind face that was overshadowed by gigantic red framed glasses. She was quite fond of me.

All was well until the market took a sharp nosedive in late 1995.  Like everyone else, this frightened her. I took great pains to remind her that this was only temporary. After extensive hand holding, I thought we came to an understanding and had everything squared away.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

One morning, the legal compliance officer handed me a 3 page letter.  It was full of harsh-sounding legalese from the grandmotherly client, accusing me of gross incompetence!

“How could this happen?” I thought.  The paper shook in my hands. 

When I was first hired at Merrill Lynch, I knew had to work a thousand times harder to earn the trust of potential clients. I vowed that I would not steer them wrong.  The intention was to have not one complaint lodged against me.

Until I was handed that letter, I had almost succeeded.

The rest of the week blurred by. I walked around in a daze, losing all interest in the stock market. A million debilitating thoughts ran through my head:

“You’re going to be fired!”

“You will be hauled to court!”

In the days that followed, I kept re-reading her letter like
a shell shocked zombie, not believing it. 
Eventually the compliance officer called me in to discuss how we were going to handle the complaint. Swallowing hard, I knocked on the door of the compliance officer.

He motioned for me to come in and sit down while finishing up a call. As he was talking on the phone, he was both smiling and winking at me. I thought that was strange. Maybe it was one of those “calm before the storm” type of things.

Putting the phone into the cradle, he took a deep breath and smiled some more. Did I want coffee or tea?

I didn’t.

Either he was going to fire me or I was going to have to quit.

But no one was more surprised than I when he calmly folded his hands and proceeded to tell me that the next step was to write a memo, describing how and why this woman’s portfolio was constructed the way it was.

“Hand it in a week from today,” he advised.

That’s all there was to it. No drama, no threats, no nothing. For the first time in weeks, I saw a glimmer of hope on the horizon. A week later I handed it in.  

What followed taught me the first of many lessons on how to banish worry when in the midst of a major crisis:
  1. Get busy obtaining the facts.  Gather all pertinent information and show exactly what happened from Point A to Point B. Getting busy makes it difficult to worry about the future.
  2. Analyze the information.
  3. Make a decision on a course of action to take. Sometimes a course of action becomes clear to you and you just do it. Other times you have to let it go. In this situation, I had done my part. I handed in the memo. I had to trust that it would work out.
It did. She eventually transferred somewhere else. Two years later, I had a spiritual revelation and quit Wall Street to become a motivational speaker, author and pilot.

Food for thought: Trust that if you did everything with integrity, the universe will do justice for you.