Procrastination, and in particular trading hesitation, over your trade set-ups is very frustrating and detrimental to the health of your trading account and your emotional and physical well being. Whenever we observe behavior patterns that prevent us from trading profitably value conflicts born out of incorrect assumptions about your reality are always at the root of the issue.
In a world that is changing in all areas faster than is comfortable for the conditioned limited mind, hesitation is a common coping mechanism that is designed to slow down the information intake in an attempt to gain time to make sense of events and harmonize the value conflicts which run deep in the subconscious part of the brain.
The conditioned, conscious part of your mind functions in a linear fashion. It always seeks out existing reference points to make decisions. Naturally, those reference points stem from the past beliefs and conditioning and are mostly of no use in your trading.
Trading asks you to operate in a fast changing environment with little or no reference points. I might also say that everything you have learned until you started trading has no or at best very little value in making consistently good trading calls.
While the conditioned mind is checking for reference points in an attempt to make sense of the charts and provide you with valid assessments for your next trade, your subconscious mind, which accesses larger amounts of information much quicker in a non-linear, lateral manner will be in conflict with the slower part of your conditioned brain. The conditioned part of your brain from which you predominantly are operating is slow, it cannot access any kind of information for which it has no reference points.
This conflict between the conditioned side of you and the higher self part of you creates many a state of disharmony and friction. Two sides are fighting inside of you for dominance. You will experience inner battle as anxiety, stress and other trading fears. Fear, stress and anxiety point to value conflicts which in turn make you doubt yourself causing you to hesitate and procrastinate.
The stagnation of the energy feels most uncomfortable and needs to be resolved, alas not in the way you have been used to. The big issue is this —you cannot will yourself, or discipline yourself out of hesitation and procrastination. Therefore, a new way of looking at yourself is required and this is something most traders don’t like because it challenges what they have come to believe in as their identity.
Resolving the dilemma of the mind requires moving beyond it.
While you are stuck in a rut, as the saying goes, using the same old mental processes to get out of hesitation, you are in a no win situation: After all, it is your conditioned mind which is causing the problem. In order to free yourself from the shackles of hesitation you have to expand into other areas of your mind.
I am talking about accessing that creative, intuitive side of your mind that observes free from conditioning and free from judgement. It therefore has the ability to notice things the linear mind simply cannot see.
Moving beyond the constraints of the linear mind feels uncomfortable. You are not used to operating from a whole brain perspective; rather you are favouring one part of your brain over the other parts. This skews your reality and obviously affects the way you trade, creating tension, as already discussed.
Getting Out Of Immersion
While one is still fully immersed in a behavior one cannot change it. Alas, the very moment you notice a habitual pattern you are beginning to free yourself from the grips of immersion.
At this point you can take positive action and start making changes.
In order to lift procrastination and hesitation you have to let go of old belief structures and learn to operate from a holistic perspective. This means learning new techniques that assist you to make change.
Your willingness to embrace new ways of thinking is more important today than ever before. The world is changing, and so is the world of trading. Paradigms in all areas of our existence are being challenged and examined for their usefulness and value to our lives today. The findings in quantum physics are bringing us many new insights and are changing the way we see our world.
This shift is cyclical and you are an integral part of it. As the old value conflicts are brought into our consciousness our job is to embrace the uncomfortable feelings and emotions that may arise as a result of our expanding awareness, instead of fighting them.
Learning to use tools to help you establish and maintain equanimity, self confidence and eliminating self doubt should be high on the agenda for every trader.
Your true self is the only asset you possess that is timeless and everlasting, it is not your trading account, or your trading strategy, or your conditioned self. All mastery is about uncovering that true self that resides behind the false perceptions and conditioning of the conscious mind.
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