Has this ever happened to you? You look over your trades at the end of your session and notice a landscape that caused you to wonder who stole your mouse. In fact, it seemed as though you were in a fog or a trance; a dream-like state that left you tripping over bad habits and old patterns that acted like a deep rut from whence you couldn’t escape. In other words you were barreling ahead oblivious to plans, rules or trading commitments where your behavior was driven by fear and/or greed. You felt dejected, defeated and depressed; and most of all out-of-control because you had done this over and over after having promised yourself that you would change. This is default trading, meaning that you defaulted to negative patterns of thinking, emotions and doing that proved to be far away from what was in your best interest.
Another way of describing the above is you were caught in a “negative trader trance” a pattern of behavior that had become so deeply entrenched that you had been on auto-pilot as if in a plane whose controls were broken. This negative trader trance plagues thousands of traders every day. You find yourself – despite your best effort to stop- driven by bad habits that have been motivated by errant emotions, which are prompted by unconscious conversations. Unfortunately, most of this process is out of your awareness until it is too late, and even if you become aware of the issue, it is as though you are trying to walk forward in a 200 mile per hour headwind; it feels impossible.
One thing that you must come to grips with is that the change you seek is nearly impossible, until and unless you become aware of your issues. Yes, you are certainly aware of the fact that you are getting results that you don’t want, but that is not enough. You must become aware of your underlying self-sabotaging thoughts, emotions and limiting beliefs that drive what you do. If you don’t become aware of this “internal data” you will continue to do the same thing and you’ll get the same… Continue Reading
