Achieving Your Potential in Trading

Well, we all want to achieve as much success as we can to our potential as traders. But how do you actually achieve that? What are the steps to do that? Our guest is Randy Howell. He's a trading psychologist. He's here to talk to us about that. Randy, thanks for being here.

Thank you.

Well, you talk about having fear, limiting your potential as a trader. What do you mean by that?

Oh, wow. First of all, your brain is organized around fear. And what your brain does is once it figures out a way to avoid fear, it locks it into pattern. And that pattern literally becomes the way you see. You don't even have to think. It actually creates the kind of thinking that you do. And what it does, it has no interest at all in your thriving. It has every interest in your surviving, and it has every interest in your surviving in a particular circumstance that you were born into that it adapted you to. And what happens then? Fear goes on automatic, and it automatically limits the possibility that you are. It creates a comfort zone that the moment that you try to get outside of that comfort zone, it will pull you back in. In psychology, we call that a perceptual map.

So all of us have been kind of hardwired growing up and through years, before we even began trading, where this has kind of been done in our brains. So how do we get past that as quickly as possible when it's been this way for years?

First of all, you have to quit being mindless about it. And you start going, what is this actually happening? What's going on within me? And again, you go back to what I would say is mindfulness and breathing, where you slow things down by breathing. And in mindfulness, you become observer to all these things going on inside you, rather than avoidant to them. And as you do that, first of all, you realize that they are not you. This fear is not you. It is one potentiality of who you could be. And you recognize by just simply pushing through the fear, but by emotionally regulating your system and then your mind, you can push through the fear. And what you do is you develop the faith that there is going to be resources on the other side of that fear door that you're going to be able to develop and you're going to be able to become a different human being. And I've seen it enough with traders to know it is absolutely possible for anybody.

So for traders that maybe need some help for this, we've not discussed this, but should a trader see a counselor? I mean, should good traders be having therapy to help them along with this?

I wouldn't necessarily call it therapy. I am a licensed professional therapist, and at the same time, most of my work does not involve that. It has more to do with developing potential than trying to put a band aid on something. What you're doing is you're looking for something that already exists within you, and you're developing skills of regulation, emotional regulation, that allow you to get out of the problem that you started with. Then you can open up to a new way of thinking. But reading a good coach? I haven't found therapists to be particularly effective in this area, so maybe a.

Mentor who's kind of been through all of this before can help as well.

A well grounded, emotionally literate mentor would be great.

When you say emotionally literate, what do you mean?

They're stable. They handle pressure well. They have a very good sense of who they are under pressure. And when you're around them, you just see that they're calm, they're impartial, they have a sense of discipline that is unshakable. And they have a courageous ability to confront the self and to create new possibilities for themselves.

Some of this should probably inspire you.

At the same time. Yeah.

Randy, thanks for your time.

Oh, you're so welcome. Thank you.

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