🗡Your first line of defense against committing an error🛡

20 янв. 2023 г.

If producing consistent results is your primary objective as a trader, then creating a belief (a conscious, energized concept that resists change and demands expression) that "I am a consistently successful trader" will act as a primaiy source of energy that will manage your perceptions, interpretations, expectations, and actions in ways that satisfy the belief and, consequently, the objective.

The first step in the process of creating consistency is to start noticing what you're thinking, saying, and doing. Why? Because everything we think, say, or do as a trader contributes to and, therefore, reinforces some belief in our mental system. Because the process of becoming consistent is psychological in nature, it shouldn't come as a surprise that you'll have to start paying attention to your various psychological processes. The idea is eventually to learn to become an objective observer of your own thoughts, words, and deeds. Your first line of defense against committing a trading error is to catch yourself thinking about it. Of course, the last line of defense is to catch yourself in the act. If you don't commit yourself to becoming an observer to these processes, your realizations will always come after the experience, usually when you are in a state of deep regret and frustration.

Observing yourself objectively implies doing it without judging about yourself. This might not be so easy for some of you to do considering the harsh, judgmental treatment you may have received from other people throughout your life. As a result, one quickly learns to associate any mistake with emotional pain. No one likes to be in a state of emotional pain, so we typically avoid acknowledging what we have learned to define as a mistake for as long as possible.

Is it possible that, for the great athletes, their past positive experiences with respect to mistakes caused them to acquire a belief that mistakes simply point the way to where they need to focus their efforts to grow and improve themselves? With a belief like that, there's no source of negatively charged energy and consequently no source for self-denigrating thoughts.

However, the rest of us, who did grow up experiencing a plethora of negative reactions to our actions, would naturally acquire beliefs about mistakes: "Mistakes must be avoided at all costs," "There must be something wrong with me if I make a mistake," "I must be a screw-up," or "I must be a bad person if I make a mistake." Remember that every thought, word, and deed reinforces some belief we have about ourselves. If, by repeated negative self-criticism, we acquire a belief that we're "screw-ups," that belief will find a way to express itself in our thoughts, causing us to become distracted and to screw up; on our words, causing us to say things about ourselves or about others (if we notice the same characteristics in them) that reflect our belief; and on our actions, causing us to behave in ways that are overtly self-sabotaging. If you're going to become a consistent winner, mistakes can't exist in the kind of negatively charged context in which they are held by most people. You have to be able to monitor yourself to some degree, and that will be difficult to do if you have the potential to experience emotional pain if and when you find yourself in the process of making an error. If this potential exists, you have two choices: 1. You can work on acquiring a new set of positively charged beliefs about what it means to make a mistake, along with de-activating any negatively charged beliefs that would argue otherwise or cause you to think less of yourself for making a mistake. 2. If you find this first choice undesirable, you can compensate for the potential to make errors by the way you set up your trading regime.

I define self-discipline as a mental technique to redirect (as best we can) our focus of attention to the object of our goal or desire, when that goal or desire conflicts with some other component (belief) of our mental environment. The first thing you should notice about this definition is that self-discipline is a technique to create a new mental framework. It is not a personality trait; people aren't born with self-discipline. In fact, when you consider how I define it, being born with discipline isn't even possible.

Each time I experienced a conflicting thought and was able to successfully refocus on my objective, with enough conviction to get me into my running shoes and out the door, I added energy to the belief that "I am a runner." And, just as important, I inadvertently drew energy away from all of the beliefs that would argue otherwise

Beliefs can be changed, and if it's possible to change one belief, then it's possible to change any belief, if you understand that you really aren't changing them, but are only transferring energy from one concept to another. (The form of the belief targeted for change remains intact.) Therefore, two completely contradictory beliefs can exist in your mental system, side by side. But if you've drawn the energy out of one belief and completely energized the other, no contradiction exists from a functional perspective; only the belief that the energy will have the capacity to act as a force on your state of mind, on your perception and interpretation of information, and your behavior.