Using Fear of Failure to Create a Successful Trading Psychology

You know, after all this work that you go through, become really a competent trader, then you find out that there's something more. You find out that you know something. I know how to trade. But when I actually sit and attempt to trade with real money on the line, something happens and we start beginning to recognize that we actually have a fear of losing. That fear of losing may take the shape of not getting into trades, or it may take the shape of getting out of trades too early. But what we notice is that that fear of loss grabs us. Or the exact opposite. When you experience the fear, what you're doing is you're not acknowledging fear. What you're doing is you're sitting there saying, you know, I am going to build this alter ego that doesn't fear. I'm going to be the man or the woman, but I'm going to be the alpha. And what you do is you discover very quickly that gets you into much trouble, but in the opposite direction. You become aggressive, you over trade and you think you're large and in charge. And it just so happens you can't convince the trading gods that you're large and in charge at the bottom of it. Whether or not it's a fear response or an aggression response, at the very core of this, behind the fear of loss, are the need to be right. Okay, I want you to hear those two. The need to be right. I've got to be right. The fear of loss. At the very bottom of that is the fear of failure. The tough part in trading is there's going to be a lot of failure in trading. You're really taking a random event and you're finding patterns that sometimes and sometimes not show up within that randomness. And so you're kind of in. It's partially, maybe, who knows? But that's why you have your rules, that's why you have your stops. That's why you have your targets. You have all this there to be able to help you manage that risk. If only you could follow your rules when they're there. It goes back to this fear of failure. I have a great story. A couple weeks ago, Shaq o' Neal was in the today's show and what he did is he was talking about his fear of failure. Shaq o'. Neal, how could he possibly have a fear of failure? And yet he's in the championship with the Bulls. He and Michael Jordan are really right on top of each other, and he does not have a good game. And at the end of the process, Shaq's really. He's just depleted. You know, he didn't stand to the test. And Michael Jordan comes up to him and says, shaq, you're going to have to learn how to fail if you're going to be successful in this league. Think about that. The whole notion of us failing or not failing is what's at front center in trading. All the knowledge disappears when you come to that one big piece about, do I have fear of failure? Do I have to win to prove myself, to be a man, to be the winner? Yet you know the failures there. And until you learn to fail, fail well and to learn from those mistakes and to accept the mistakes as part of the process of trading, you're never going to be the kind of successful trader that you're seeking. How do you do that though? At the bottom of it, it's core in your belief, it's literally that fear of failure is worked into the beliefs that an emotion is attached to. And what you're doing is every time you hit uncertainty, you're triggering underneath that the belief about failure. Oh my God, what if I fail? And the belief you have about failure is about you as a human being, not you as a performance. Yet when you start going, you know something, I see that if I accept this as a performance.

That some fail, some not. I realize that the only thing I can really control is the mind that I bring into the moment of performance. You can't control the outcome. That's where a lot of this failure craziness happens in trading. And yet at the same time, it's something that's impossible. You cannot never have been able to control outcome. Remember, this is about managing randomness and finding patterns within the randomness that may or may not happen and being ready to either say, oh, that didn't work and get out failure, or oh, this is working. I stay in and I hit my target. Success.

Understand this though, at the bottom of it, it's all about your ability to be able to fail and fail well.

Or to accept that this is just simply the way it is.

I can fail and it doesn't represent who I am as a human being. It represents that randomness just simply wasn't on my side this time. Imagine coming to that moment where failure is not about you as a person.

Failure is just simply a failure of the randomness, the failure of a system that can be corrected. Friends, that's where the big news is. That's where the edge, that's where the psychological edge in trading is. And until you find that edge, until you develop that psychology to be able to transform the way you understand failure. Okay. You don't tough through it. You learn from what failure has to say. You reinvent the person that you take trading.

That's when the psychology of trading starts matching up with your rules, your methodology and your system. This can be done and it's the final piece that most traders just simply never get to. And the question is, what do you want to do?

My invitation Go to website. Go to our Website My Trader StateOfMind. Start looking, get the free book, get the free ebook for goodness sake and then start reading and start looking and start noticing that this is really about performance mind, not winning or losing. Then start looking at the books about all the free stuff all the more the videos and then take a look at the courses, come back and say you know something, I'm ready to develop the probability mind and I'm going to look at failure as a way to do that. Yeah, that's the ticket. Thank you. I appreciate your time and it's been a lot of fun.