Understanding Self-Sabotage In Trading

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Hi, Brian McAvoy here with Inside Out Trading. And I've got an unusual topic today. Well, not an unusual topic, but an unusual perspective to share with you. I have a lot of people ask me about self sabotage when it comes to trading. And I know from personal experience, yeah, it can happen a lot. And what's interesting about it is a lot of people are worried about it because they're experiencing self sabotage. But what I wanted to share with you today is a whole different perspective. You see, usually self sabotage is what comes to mind when a person's doing things that they kind of know hurts them or subconsciously they're doing. It seems driven by their subconscious that hurts them, stuff that they wind up regretting later and they're like, oh God, why did I do that? But the thing is, usually it's associated with when somebody. Self sabotage is usually associated with a situation when somebody is doing too well, like a lottery winner, somebody who is used to making 40, $50,000 a year. All of a sudden they got 20 million dollars in the bank. Well, they self sabotage themselves back to bankrupt. Or you jump into trading and all of a sudden you triple your income, what you're used to. And then you would be self sabotaging. So people look at self sabotage as kind of a corrective measure to get your circumstances back in alignment with your self image. And that makes a lot of sense. Now what I wanted to share with you today though, is shedding some light on why a person might be sabotaging themselves even when they're not in a circumstance where they're swimming in money or they've tripled their income and stuff like that. Because it's very common for traders to experience self sabotage even when they're struggling to break even or maybe even losing money, they still sabotage themselves. And this might help shed some light on why that happens and what you can do about it. Here's what I'm talking about. This really kind of came to mind because I've experienced it before. You probably have too. But a friend of mine who lives up in Tennessee, I won't share his real name just out of courtesy to him. We'll call him Bill. Bill is an avid trader, very well read, does all sorts of fun stuff. I mean, he's kind of a tech geek anyway. I mean, he works for a software company, but he loves playing around, running experiments and this kind of stuff. And what he did a few weeks ago, several weeks ago, was he decided to run a stress test on himself and basically just do his trading really at the edge of what he could handle. He changed the system he was trading with to one where it was really high risk, very active, very involved, and he just wanted to see what that effect would be on him and his trading. Because he'd already reached the point of being pretty comfortable with his trading and profiting on a consistent basis. He had his trading where he wanted it to be. He just did this for fun. Now what he found out was. Well, a couple of things before I jump into that. First of all, he did not set a time limit for it. He only set a drawdown limit for when he was going to call it quits. That plays into this because what happened was for the first couple weeks, everything was kind of going okay. He wasn't making a lot of money, he wasn't losing much money, and generally he felt okay. The third week though, he noticed that the stress really started taking a toll on him and it was wearing him out. It was interfering with his ability to function and concentrate and do his job. And of course, in his trading now, he still wasn't losing a lot of money, still wasn't hitting his draw down. Now what happened in the fourth week though, and this is where it got interesting, was he noticed the. That the stress was just really, really hitting him hard personally. And he noticed that he started placing trades that he knew he was probably going to lose money on. He just knew it was a bad thing to do and he was well aware of it and he knew he was probably going to lose money and he was placing the trades anyway. And that continued for about another week until he hit his drawdown point and he stopped. And that was just really wild. And so he and I were talking about it, he said, yeah, here I am sabotaging the heck out of myself. I was keeping my head above water as far as my trading goes. But what was wild about it was all this stuff was happening to me and I was aware of it and I knew it and I'm doing it anyway. What we figured out in discussing it was that really the self sabotage was a survival mechanism kicking in for him. Because not financially, that wasn't the problem. The problem was all the stress. And the survival mechanism of self sabotage was kicking in to end the stress. It was driving him to the point that he would quit and the stress would end. The more I thought about it, it's like, wow. Because yeah, that actually happens a lot. And that also explains why a lot of people will. Will sabotage themselves clear to the point of blowing out their account. You're all caught up in your trading and maybe you're staying afloat, but man, the stress is just really taking a toll on you. It's just wearing you out. At some point your survival mechanism kicks in and says we've got to end the stress. So we're going to drive you to a stopping point and end the stress. Now. The reason I bring all this up for you is for new traders, stress and anxiety are usually very high. You're in a new activity, you got your money at risk, you're doing something you've never done before. There's a whole lot of things that come into play if you find yourself going through self sabotage. Even though you haven't hit the lottery, you haven't tripled your income with your trading and it's not that scenario that's coming in play, but you find yourself sabotage being self sabotaged anyway. This might shed some light on that if you are staying afloat or you haven't hit that point of blowout yet. But you just find that you're having to deal with a ton of anxiety and stress in your trading and you're concerned that this same thing that happened to Bitcoin might happen to you. There is a way for you to change what you're doing to dramatically reduce the stress and lower the anxiety. If you're interested, then I invite you to click on the link that I'll show you here in just a minute. You'll find this very interesting. You'll discover some things that I can almost guarantee you didn't know before. But as far as reducing the stress and anxiety in your trading, you'll find this very, very helpful. So this is Brian McAvoy with Inside Out Trading. On YouTube, I'm known as Trader Brian. I wish you the best and I'm here to help cheer.

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