When I talk to most traders about Discipline and the importance of following their Trading Method and sticking to their Trading Plan, everyone knows it is the obvious and right thing to do. however why is that most traders never stick to this Conscious agreement that they have made with themselves? The simple answer is:
“Conscious Effort alone is never going to be enough!”
When I tell people this they even agree, or say “I know that trading is more than 90% Mindset” however not many traders are aware of the Importance of this and never really take any steps to Master themselves and their own Mindset to take their Trading to the next level. Again, Why is this? If you know that Success in Trading is determined mostly by focusing on yourself, why do traders never explore this in any depth?
My personal belief through working with many traders over the years has come down to one simple answer, and that is their EGO gets in the way!
Most traders will never be honest enough with themselves to admit that the reason that their Trading Performance may decline is because of something deep down within themselves. This is a huge problem for some, and unfortunately if you cannot be honest with yourself about your own trading Performance, then how do you honestly expect to improve?
My Number One Tip for Traders is, “Be Honest with yourself and be Open, If you are Closed, you may as well consider your trading business Closed!”. As harsh as that may seem it’s the Reality of this Business.
What I see is that Traders continuously try to Master themselves and their Trading with purely Conscious Effort and reading Traders Psychology Books. this will never, never work!! Because here in lies the problem: The conscious mind can only process about forty bits of data per second but the unconscious\subconscious mind can process forty million bits of data in the same second. The relevance is simple. The unconscious mind is one million times more powerful as an information processor than the conscious mind. We all believe that we run our lives with a conscious mind. This is what I want from life. I want to do all these wonderful things. Yet your life doesn’t match your intentions; as a result there is a tendency to say, “I can’t get the things that I want, the world is not providing them to me.” We take on the role of victim! Man this is Wrong! Totally Wrong! Please wake up Traders, stop kidding yourselves!
Insights from the field if NLP (Neuro linguistic Programming) and through my work in this field on myself and other traders, have completely revolutionized this idea. We now recognize that 95% to 99% of our cognitive activity comes from the unconscious mind; less than 5%t is influenced or controlled by the conscious mind.
When we are doing affirmations or positive thinking, we are using the tiny processor that has less than 5% influence, which means that we have to depend on willpower to overpower the unconscious mind. That is a nearly impossible job because the moment we take our eye off the ball, we automatically go back to the preset programs that are in our unconscious mind. Positive thinking is a good idea, much better than negative thinking, but while you are engaged in positive thoughts using the conscious mind, the unconscious mind with its limiting and self-sabotaging programs is running the show! Consequently, positive thinking does not improve the situation for most people.
It is not that the conscious mind is not powerful, for it can run anything in the human body. We used to think it could only run the voluntary system–the skeletal muscles, arms and legs. But yogis have revealed that the conscious mind can change body temperature, blood pressure and heartbeat.
The conscious mind, if it focuses on any part of the body or any function, can control it, through processes that raise your Awareness, such as meditation. But the conscious mind, being a small (40 bit/sec) processor, doesn’t have the capability of controlling as many things at the same time as the unconscious mind can, operating at 40 million bits/sec.
Most people hardly use the conscious mind. They run their day-to-day existence from programs stored in their unconscious mind, Without actually realising how their Mind is working! Probably 99.99% of the world functions this way!
Basically the way i see it is that most people are Unconscious and asleep even when awake! Crazy is n’t it!
What programs will that unconscious mind run? The answer is the exact programs that were downloaded into it! No variations on a theme. What it has learned it will play for its entire life unless we go into the unconscious mind and rewrite the program!
The conscious mind is frequently oblivious of the programs running from the unconscious mind because the conscious and unconscious minds operate in tandem: one does not observe the other. So if the things in my life are not what I’m looking for, is it because the universe isn’t offering me the opportunity or is it because I’m sabotaging myself? Almost inevitably we are sabotaging ourselves with limiting programs stored in our unconscious mind!
Must we go back and identify how the unconscious programming occurred? Absolutely not. The subconscious mind does not have a future or a past. It is handling the present moment all the time. A signal from the environment comes up, pushes the receptor that engages the effector that then coordinates the response. That is the unconscious mind. There is nobody in there. There is nobody to talk with or negotiate with in the subconscious mind. We must find other ways of influencing and impacting the subconscious mind’s programming.
That is exactly what i have been working on for the past 5 years, I have been developing Practical methods and learning Practical Methods from the field on NLP to help Traders with the Negative forces that may lie deep within the unconscious mind. Some examples of what we have found that lies deep within the unconscious that will effect all your Trading Behaviours (For that fact all Behaviours in Life!) is your Self Limiting Beliefs, Attitudes, Values that are not in line with your Intentions, Negative Emotions such as Fear, Anger and Anxiety that sit their ready to react to Outside influences and Perceptions that you may have, Negative Self Talk (AKA Monkey Mind!) etc.
Now Most people are aware that all these Unconscious Forces may have a massive effect on their Trading , However knowing this, Why is still that Most Traders will never look to Master themselves and will continue to Focus on Mastering their Trading with Charts for the rest of their lives, rather than Mastering themselves first which is what ultimately leads to Mastery within their Trading?
My advise:
“Start to look within for your Answers, not on your Charts!”