The Secret to Breaking the Code for Successful Trading Under Pressure

Have you ever thought what is it really for you as a trader who really knows how to trade, that when you get into the heat of trading, when all that indecision is there, when all that self doubt shows up, when you don't know, or when you think you know so much that you make mistakes, how is it happening over and over and over again? Well, I'm going to let you know on a secret. And it's something that traders find out in trading versus other areas. You know, ultimately in trading you can't hide from what we would call your psychological demons. And yet what happens is in other forms of life you can.

You can get really, really good at hiding. Yet in trading, whatever your beliefs are that you're bringing to the management of uncertainty, you're going to find face up right in front of you all the time. That's what you experience as uncertainty, the link between uncertainty and your vulnerability. That's the trick. That's the difference between saying, yes, I understand intellectually that this is uncertainty and that I'm managing uncertainty and risk. And over here, where really what it amounts to is your biological system and your psychological system are merged and it's trying to do everything it can to avoid vulnerability. You will develop Personas of being tough and strong and manly, or you will develop Personas of being right, having to be a perfect person, just everything you can to avoid the vulnerability you experience and uncertainty. That's the power of all this.

It's inescapable in trading. So really when it comes down to it, vulnerability is what happens when you are exposed to uncertainty beyond your control.

That's the difference between really great traders and traders who just hang around.

In this vulnerability. What you're really being experiencing is you're experiencing literally your sense of being good enough, strong enough.

In control enough and adequate enough in order to trade. And ultimately in trading, completely different than other endeavors. No matter how right you are, no matter how everything lines up and how sure you are, you can still be wrong and you can still lose. That's the vulnerability. That's the piece where literally the traitor has to come to a moment where they are comfortable with their vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities are literally about inadequacy, mattering worth and power. And when you do really honestly let go of the illusion of control, of outcome, you come face to face with this. That is trading. That is where whatever you know about trading, all that knowledge that you have in your left brain becomes paralyzed by the right brain, by the amygdala and Its need for certainty. We're, we're wired to try to produce certainty. Yet in trading we're in a dilemma because the whole biological evolutionary predisposition for control is lost and we have to come face to face with our uncertainty about outcome. This is the problem that traders face who know how to trade but can't perform. In trading in the heat zone, when the uncertainty is there, when you're really going to see what's going to happen and you know that all you can control is you. Okay, that's the ticket. So ultimately in really good traders, what you find is emotional regulation. They're able to manage the intensity of the emotion. The second is they become mindful. Instead of avoiding and not looking at the vulnerability, they turn toward it because the vulnerability is showing them where they need to learn.

Once they do that, once they see that they have to start self soothing, they have to start self nurturing and calming that part down. Only then when you calm that fear down, that fear of uncertainty, that fear of, oh my God, what could happen? Vulnerability. Am I going to lose my house? Am I going to lose this? Am I going to lose that? What's going to happen to me? When you do that, then the mind opens up to you and you begin no longer being swept away by your historical conditioning about managing your vulnerability. You turn toward it and say, you know something? I know I can't manage vulnerability like as a control unit, but what I can do is I can control the mind that I'm bringing to the management. Uncertainty. Suddenly all the emotional programs in your brain, those are the ones I call archetypes. A lot become available to you and you learn how to pull them up. So the uncertainty, the vulnerability to uncertainty never changes. What changes is the mindset that you bring to the management of that uncertainty and you no longer experience the vulnerability. That's the power of plan.