Dealing with Your Trading Demons

Foreign.

Have you ever found yourself falling into self doubt or getting too overconfident and all of a sudden something in you, some voice in your head says, yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of a sudden you lose contact with reason and something else takes over. It may be just the enthusiasm, the greed, the lust of pursuing an opportunity, or it could be the fear of self doubt, of going, oh, but are you sure? This, my friends.

Is what a trading demon is and you're going to have to learn how to deal with them. Now I have another name for that trading demon called the inner critic. You will know the inner critic by a couple really important things. One, when you find yourself hesitating because you have self doubt, you don't know, well, what if, what if? And all of a sudden you hear that voice. A lot of people have tuned out the ability of hearing that voice, but it doesn't mean it's not there. If you've ever been in a trade, particularly if you're an alpha and you're sitting there and you're going, you know something, I'm a little bored. I'm ready to make things happen. I'm just going to go check my email, I'm going to go check some other stuff. And before you know it, you see an opportunity, jump into it.

Yeah. All of a sudden you heard, yeah, yeah, yeah, get in it, get in now, now. And yet all of us tend to push that away. And that's the inner critics. Incredible power. In a Jungian sense. That inner critic is that part of us that is destructive. It's part of us and it would be what we would call the shadow. It's all those things you don't want to know about yourself and all those things that you predict onto other people rather than acknowledging them and owning them yourself. But ultimately in trading we can get away with it outside of trading, we can live that way. We can make excuses, we can create alibis. But one of the first rules is you have to accept responsibility for your results. And when you see losses in your trading account, what you're looking at is the ineffectiveness of the beliefs that you're bringing to manage uncertainty. That's what's happened. If you have a healthy trading account, you're looking at it and you're going, oh, the beliefs I have about my ability to manage uncertainty allow me to pull more cash out of the, the markets than I put back in. That's probability mind. But if you're having trouble or if you're, you're stuck at a level what, what Happens is you're there and you start hearing this voice. And it literally is about, get in, get in, get in. It's about, it's about lust, it's about greed, it's about. And it's easy to take over if you haven't learned to go, you know something, I need to acknowledge my demons. Them running around having absolute freedom is causing havoc in my trading. And you start going, I need to start listening and tuning into this part of the self. Not to get more harassed by it, but to recognize that I have to master that. So you've gotten that and you're going, well, how does this really play out? Well, first of all, the Cherokee Indians had a notion that man's mind was like two wolves. One was a dark, destructive wolf and one was a light, constructive wolf. The Cherokee also believed that there was always an internal struggle going on within man's mind about who was going to win. The competitive struggle between destruction and construction forces that live within all of us. It just so happens that he believed that the wolf that won was the wolf that you fed. In trading, it's really easy to see self doubt. You don't get into trades and when you finally do get into a point where you've got a little tiny profit, you take it before it's going to be taken away from you. Scarcity, thinking. But what I want you to do is start listening to that conversation because it is a conversation going on in your mind. What I also want you to do is to expand your notion of mind on the level of brain.

You are this incredible community of rival emotional programs that are highly competitive and are duking it out to take charge of the construction of the self, that thing you call you. Okay, understand your brain's creating this thing that's not you, that's a creation of your brain for survival. Now let's take it one step further though. When that brain produces mind, that mind becomes a space, a governing room, a governing committee that's composed of of all sorts of different forces. Some like the dark wolf, destructive. That would be the inner critic. That would be your demons. Others are empowered. They're the ones that you want to learn to start bringing forward. Because ultimately this is all about an internal struggle that goes on within everybody's mind. In trading, it becomes inescapable. There's uncertainty everywhere. And what you have to do is you have to follow your rules. And even though they may be, you can interpret it in different ways depending on who's in control of the mind. In my work, we're looking to access and build the discipline of ruler, that ability to maintain order under pressure, the courage of a warrior, the ability to turn toward your fears, not to conquer them, but to master them. Also the self soothing, the self compassion of a caregiver. Because ultimately, if you want to change the organicness of a belief that's holding you back, it is compassion that's the antidote to the fear lurking back there, the antidote to that inner critic. So you're going to go, wow, you mean I need to really have be compassionate toward myself? Yeah, it's a lot different beating yourself up, having the inner critic having its day. I haven't heard anybody say, oh yeah, it's made me a much better trader. However, compassion, understand compassion. Knowing that you're going to be taking losses, okay, a lot of them. You need to be compassionate with yourself. You need to be able to calm yourself down. Because if you don't calm yourself down, you can't bring the wisdom, the impartiality, the clear thinking of the sage. And that's the one you want. Making decisions on probability, there will always be wiggle room. The only thing you have are your rules and sticking to them. The inner critic is there to stop you from adhering to your rules. Because if you don't adhere to your rules, you're gambling you have an edge with your rules. If you keep your mind straight, if you keep your mind away from the inner critic or at least stopping it and building this ruler, this discipline, this courage, this self soothing and this clear thinking, that's ultimately it, that's how you deal. But you understand, is the internal conflicts going to be there, Your job in dealing with your demons, what you're doing is you're realizing you have to bring the empowered mind to the game. Okay? Otherwise there will always be the seeds of self doubt, there will always be the seeds of lust, there will always be the seeds of greed sitting there. And if you do not maintain the mind.

You'Re feeding the dark wolf, the destructive wolf. So in trading, you can't get away with not acknowledging it's there. You can't project it on other people. You can't blame something. What you have to do is you realize is, oh my God, I am responsible for the one thing that can make a difference in my trading. The mind that I bring into trading. You need an empowered mind rooted in discipline, courage, self soothing and that impartiality not rooted in the self doubt or the grandiosity of the inner critic. Friends, that's your job. It can be done.

It can be done. You can build a mind because ultimately you as a human being exists as potential. Now that potential is shaped.

Okay, one way or the other. And what I'm asking you to do is wake up and recognize who's shaping your mind. You bring to trading. Most likely you haven't trained yourself. The inner critic's there now. That inner critic may only show up once you started doing really well and stuff like that. And you think, oh, everything's great, I've got this. No, the inner critic strikes in. In any opportune time. So the deal is you have to build this sense of like, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. You have to recognize the minds required to produce trading excellence. And you have to work with it and maintain it because it will come unglued, it will go back, and the inner critic will show up. Inner critic is never going to go away. It's part of the ruling committee. But the deal is you, as the CEO, as a chairman of this committee, you have to decide if you're going to rule and organize the team of empowered voices within you to create the mind that engages the realities of trading. The inner critic will do it. If you don't, I want you to learn more, come to Mind's website, and that's Trader State of Mind. And also continue the YouTube work. I have tons of these things out there and they're educational. People watch them all the time. But the main thing.

It'S responsibility, yours about what mind shows up. Okay, easy for the inner critic. If you don't take control of what the mind you bring, it will. It will be there. So I wish you well and if we can help, contact us.