Developing the Mind to Become a Successful Trader

As a trader, do you ever wonder why you can’t achieve the results that you want to achieve? Do you find yourself constantly making the same mistakes? Are you controlled by your emotions? These are mistakes that all traders make, but the successful traders have learned how to manage their inner game. In this section, we are going to learn how to overcome the eight road blocks to successful trading.
Without integration of each component, you are an incomplete
trader - risk is stacked against you.
First you need to have a trading platform, trading methodology and a trading state of mind. There are multiple trading platforms and numerous trading methodologies you can use, so it’s important that you choose risk management strategy and trading platform you’re most comfortable using. But it’s also critically important to have the right trading psychology. If you don’t have the right mindset, it really doesn’t matter about your trading platform or methodology. You need to have balanced integration of these three critical trading components. It doesn’t matter how good you are at knowing how to trade if you can’t hold your wits together.
Let’s face it, most traders early on are looking for the magical secret, or the “Holy Grail” of successful trading. They chase the best charting software, newest indicators, data and news services, mentoring programs, you name it. What they are looking for is the magic solution to trading, when they don’t recognize that they themselves are the problem. There is no magical “Holy Grail” for trading success “out there”. The secret to trading success lies within yourself, just waiting to be discovered. Remember this adage:
“80 percent of trading is in your head”.
What separates the elite golfers from the rest of the field? They all have the best equipment in the industry. They have spent countless hours practicing and perfecting their craft. They know how to drive, chip and putt. So what separates the elite golfers from the rest of the crowd? They know how to do it in the clutch, when the money is on the line. This article is about learning how to develop the mindset of a peak performance trader – to separate yourself from the sea of traders who are inconsistent and bleed out their accounts.

What the Untrained Brain Sees when the UntrainedMind Experiences Uncertainty

Since the beginning of time, our brains have been trained to see uncertainty and fear as one in the same thing. How many times have you had your finger on the trigger, but you just couldn’t bring yourself to execute the trade? How many times have you bailed out early on a trade, only to watch it run in the direction you thought it would? That is your brain perceiving psychological discomfort as a biological threat. Unless you can untangle that association, and re-train your mind, you are likely to repeat these behaviors over and over again.
The markets don’t care about you. You can trade them as long as you have capital, but sooner or later, usually after drawing down your accounts, you come to the realization that you need to work on yourself if you are going to be successful at trading.
Recognizing that we have historically been wired to associate psychological discomfort (fear) with a biological threat, let’s break down the components of emotions. An emotion is how the body/brain/mind gets triggered to any disruption of a familiar status. It’s a common buzzword in trading to talk about simply taking the emotion out of trading. The reality is that the only time humans can do anything without emotion is if they’re dead. Emotions are biological and they take over our psychology. We need to accept that we are emotional creatures and that our psychology is governed by our emotions. So the key is - how do you manage your emotions? We don’t have freedom from emotions, but we can have freedom of emotions. You can become the designer of the emotions that you respond to.

Emotions can be broken down into five major components:

1.- Arousal
That’s the revving-up of an emotion. Think about yourself when you are in the midst of engaging in a trade. Your body starts tensing. You stop breathing, or your breathing may be “high” and “low”. Your heart accelerates. Your eyes are fixated on the screen. That’s arousal, and it’s the first aspect of your emotions that you must learn to manage. If you can’t, then you will lose control of your emotions.

2.- Feeling
This is where the biological chemistry creates a subjective experience of the emotion. If cortisol is pulsing through your body, it can produce a sense of fear. If testosterone levels become elevated, it produces a sense of grandeur. Both of these responses can lead to costly trading mistakes. You can be afraid to pull the trigger on a trade, exit a trade early or double-down on a risky trade.

3.- Motivation
Once the chemistry is released into your system, your body will usually pointed into a “fight or flight” response. You perceive a threat, and you are either going to attack it or avoid it. If you hesitate on a trade, you are in avoidance. If you revenge-trade after a losing trade, you are in attack mode. It’s important to have a trained mind to regulate these responses to a perceived threat. Developing a curious mind allows you to act with patience and discipline, keeping your long-term interests in mind.

4.- Meaning
These are the beliefs you have developed to manage uncertainty. We need to rationalize our behaviors so they make sense to us.

5.- Temperament
Quite simply, this is genetics. How is your body genetically predisposed to handling emotion?

Separating Uncertainty, Worry and Fear

Understanding that we are emotional creatures, the first task in re-training your mind is to separate uncertainty, worry and fear.

Uncertainty
You can’t control the markets. The markets do what they want to do. Nothing can be predicted with absolute certainty, only varying degrees of probability. We have been trained as we grew up not to make mistakes. We have conditioned ourselves and our brains are biased to predict with certainty.

Worry
If you feel that you can’t control the outcome of a trade, then worry sets in. Your brain starts to project into the future and it’s seeing bad things on the horizon. So your brain becomes a negative assessment machine, and you continually traumatize yourself by worrying.

Fear
Fear is wear all thought becomes hijacked, and you panic or freeze.
The mind that you bring into trading isn’t necessarily a mind that is conducive to successful trading. Remember that the brain associates psychological discomfort with biological threat, and we need to learn to avoid fight or flight behaviors. Ninety percent of traders lose money because they are making fear-based trades or impulse-based trades. On the fear side, they are afraid to pull the trigger at the right time, or they get out of trades too early. The impulse-based trader gets involved in revenge trading, throwing good money after bad. What you’re looking for is mindful trading where you make well-reasoned decisions with your emotions under control.
So the question then becomes,
“How do I organize my mind for higher function in trading?”

The Impact of Emotions on Your Trading

Fear, until mastered, blocks the development of your potential. To develop as a trader, you need to be able to confront fear to change your pattern of reacting to an uncertain world. Your brain is a negative assessment machine that does not distinguish uncertainty from fear. It’s organized for avoidance, and trying to keep you in your comfort zone, which is the familiar. It forms self-fulfilling patterns based on the avoidance of fear and uncertainty. These patterns are set on “cruise-control” and dominate your state of mind, forcing you to trade from avoidance and greed rather than calm impartiality.

The best way to get started in gaining control of your emotions
is to label your fears:

1. Fear of uncertainty (hesitation)
2. Fear of loss (pulling the trigger at the wrong time)
3. Fear of missing out (impulse trades and exits)
4. Fear based urgency to make up for prior losses (revenge trading)
5. Fear of not being right (making a mistake)
6. Fear of inadequacy (not feeling that you’re good enough to trade)
7. Fear of self-sabotage (blowing yourself up)
8. Fear of success or failure
9. Fear of growth and change (moving out of your comfort zone)

Which one of these fears drives your trading? If you’re honest with yourself,
you may have experienced most or all of these fears at some point in your trading

Everything starts with your emotional state. That feeds your state of mind, which forms a decision, and triggers a trade which ultimately has a profit or loss. The results of that trade feed into your emotional state prior to your next trade. Trading without emotion is not possible, but it is possible to design the mindset you need to trade with calm impartiality. Your trading account is the scorecard if your emotions are under control.

Manage the Biology of Your Emotions First

Emotions have biological components that you can control on your own to alter the emotion. Once you realize that fear or anger affects your breathing, whether you stop breathing, or breathe in “high” or “low” patterns, you can change that. If you regulate breathing with steady diaphragmatic breathing, you lower your heart rate and alter the emotion. This in itself doesn’t solve the problem you are experiencing, but it makes it much easier to prepare the mind when you face uncertainty.

Becoming Mindful of Your Thoughts: Who is doing “YOUR” Trading?

There comes a time when you start noticing your thoughts, and you start thinking “Where are these thoughts coming from?” Pink Floyd had a lyric “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.” So who is this person in your head? Our thoughts and our beliefs are not us, we are separate from them. Knowing that, you can step outside of yourself and question your thoughts and beliefs. You can use powers of observation and curiosity, and dissect the voices in your head that are governing your trading decisions.
Observation is a strong mindfulness tool. Once you observe your fear-based emotions, confront them and question them, then you can start becoming mindful. If you ignore the voices and patterns you have developed in your head, then a perfectly good trading plan can become wasted. Since you can’t escape your internal dialog, you must learn to manage the fear-based aspect of it. Once you do that, you can develop the foundation of a strong psychological trading plan. You learn to become the author

Beneath our fears are beliefs.

Some of the self-limiting beliefs we need to master are:

1.-A sense of inadequacy
“I’ll never be good enough, smart enough. I can’t make mistakes. Mistakes are proof of my inadequacy.”

2.-A sense of not mattering
“I only matter based on what I do, not who I am.” Self-loathing or arrogance.

3.-A sense of being unworthy
“I have to prove myself by my performance to have value.”

4.-Powerlessness
“Nothing I do seems to make a difference.” Victimhood.
This fear-based thinking shows up in our minds as thoughts, and our avoidance of them is what keeps us fused to them.

Other internal voices that can make up the “Trading Committee of your Mind” include:

The Inner Critic
The voice that judges you
The voice that criticizes
Never measuring up
Never good enough
Tempts (You need more)
Predicts doom
The Doubter (I never win)
Chicken Little (negative appraisal)
Gambler (leave no money on the table)
Perfectionist (must win every time)
Entitled One (greed)
Con (lying to yourself)
Fraud (pretending to look good)
Orphan (missing out)
Saboteur (blowing things up)
Alpha (have to win to prove worth)
The Adapted Voice

You are born into self-limiting beliefs, but that’s no reason to stay stuck in them. It’s important to identify and be aware our fears and self-limiting beliefs before we can become mindful.

Developing the Mind to Become a Successful Trader

If the members at the “Trading Committee Table of Your Mind” are fear-based, self-limiting beliefs, then you are doomed to repeat the same trading mistakes over and over again. What you need to do is clean house and invite some new guests to the table.
Changing self-limiting beliefs requires recognizing what they are, and addressing them for long-term re-organization of self. Compassion is the emotion that reorganizes the self for internal validation rather than external validation. Think about this for a minute – whenever you “beat yourself up” after making a mistake, does it every really do you any good? No it doesn’t. All it does is continue to feed self-limiting beliefs of inadequacy or powerlessness. Re-building the “Committee of the Mind” will help you create a new playing field for trading.
Just as we have built-in programs for fear, we also have programs for courage, patience and impartiality. As a trader, you need to build a mind for the management of probability. There are four major programs, hard-coded in your DNA that you need to invite to the “Trading Committee of the Mind:
From time to time, each of these programs has been called into service, and you can remember instances when you faced a challenge head-on, showed extraordinary discipline, exercised impartiality and demonstrated compassion. These traits are inside you, and they need to be called to the surface. They are your friends in the trading world.

1.- The Courage of a Warrior
To be able to push through fear and face adversity head-on

2.- The Discipline of a Ruler
To keep your act together under pressure

3.- The Impartiality of a Sage
Once fears are put to rest, you can exercise impartiality

4.Self-Compassion of a Caregiver
Recognizing you are valuable and important

If you really want long-term change, you start with emotional regulation

Stage1. That gets you to mindfulness

Stage 2. Next you disrupt the self-limiting beliefs that have been developed without your knowledge

Stage 3. Now you can engage the Warrior, the Ruler, the Caregiver and the Sage ‘

Stage 4. When you can trigger the emotions of courage, discipline, compassion, patience and impartiality, then you have re-organized the trading mind

Stage 5. You are developing a calmer mind that thinks and processes information, rather than knee-jerking to perceived threats. With an empowered mindset, you approach uncertainty from a position of Discipline, Courage, Patience and Impartiality rather than fear.
Over 90 percent of traders may have the best trading platform and trading methodology, but they are controlled by self-limiting or self-destructive emotions. The 10 percent are “mindful traders” who govern their trading activities with a calm, focused mindset. Their emotions are under control and they face uncertainty with courage, discipline, patience and impartiality.

Conclusion

When you look at some of the top traders in the industry, or leaders of successful corporations, you will notice that many of themselves carry themselves with a calm sense of confidence. They are almost Zen-like. They seem to process information effortlessly, and make well-reasoned decisions. These people are not operating from a fear-based mind. None of that noise is cluttering up their minds.
Successful trading requires a good trading platform, a good methodology and a trader’s state of mind. You need to recognize and identify your fears, and the self-limiting belief systems you have patterned based on fear. Find out who is sitting at the table in “Trading Committee of You Mind”, and replace the fear-based members with members that represent Discipline, Courage, Patience and Impartiality. When you get to this place, your trading account will look much better.