Bringing your “A” Game to your platform and maintaining it during your entire trading session, through preparation as well as execution is job 1 for your trading in order to get the results that you desire.  And, in order to bring your “A” Game, you’ve got to have and use mental/emotional tools.  One of the most powerful tools that you can have in your tool belt to manage emotions and greatly reduce the pain associated with “bone-headed” rule violations that ravage your trading account is self-hypnosis.

Hypnosis is an extremely powerful process for accessing the subconscious to influence a long list of behaviors, emotions, somatic complaints, beliefs and pain issues.  Hypnosis is a particular form of trance or altered state of consciousness, relying on a specific set of instructions, which may or may not be provided in an induction.  Hypnosis dates back to the 18^th Century, when Franz Anton Mezmer induced a phenomenon he termed ‘animal magnetism’. Soon the term ‘mesmerism’ was coined, where Mezmer would use suggestion to cure illnesses.  Hypnosis did not come to be known by this name until Scottish physician James Braid used the Greek root for sleep, hypnos, to create the term.  Hypnosis has been successfully used in surgery, dentistry, pain abatement, psychotherapy, weight loss, accelerated learning, and many other applications.  

Hypnosis may be the quickest method known whereby you or someone (an operator) working with you can bypass the conscious mind while initiating a sleeplike state to:

1. Exploit the programmed paradigms of the subconscious mind,
2. Encode new desirable programs or erase old, undesirable ones through suggestion, 
3. Accelerate or ameliorate the natural mental process.  

In other words, hypnosis is a choice technique for exploiting the subconscious, by circumventing the conscious mind.  In hetero-hypnosis, the operator is another person.  In self-hypnosis, the operator is your own conscious mind.  However, hypnosis and self-hypnosis is virtually the same thing.  If you have an “operator,” then you have chosen and have given permission to yourself to listen to the suggestions of another and permission to yourself to follow them.  Actually, it can be said that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis; the hypnotist is only a guide and a supporter of a process going on in the mind of the subject.

It is important to note that hypnosis, although associated quite often with sleep, is only a deeply relaxed trance state and not sleep-related.  This state provides the internal environment for receptivity to suggestions.  The trance state is not unconscious or unaware.  It can be quite aware as an observer of what is in the surroundings and still be deeply in trance.  Essentially, most people go into a state of trance or altered state of consciousness many times per day, and in fact there are those for whom “trance” state is their normal waking state.  This is easily illustrated through the individual who, while trading, executes a series of disastrous decisions and later feels like it was a dream, wondering what happened – and if you’re anything like me it has happened to you!

When beginning the process, it is best to be in a comfortable environment, free of distractions with soothing, quiet, and soft music (music is not necessary but can be helpful with the induction).  With practice, your suggestions will become stronger and more effective.  The induction can center around something similar to “with every breath my focus is keen.”  Countdown from 10 to 0, then close your eyes.

Suggestions should be simple, short and totally positive.  Also, moving toward what you want is more successful than moving away from that goal; i.e.,   “I follow my rules easily and effortlessly”, not “I don’t make mistakes or I don’t have problems with following my rules”.  Leave a gap in the recording to add other suggestions about every 2 minutes is helpful and limit suggestions to 1 or 2 at a time, so as not to dilute the process.  Here are some additional pointers:

• Be clear in your speech: no uhms, ahhs or vague language.
• If your mind wanders, once you catch it, immediately go back to the suggestions.
• Form a clear mental image of each suggestion.  The image should be sensory-rich (what the end result looks, sounds and feels like) in order to galvanize all the brain’s centers.
  • See profitable entries and exits, see yourself with a very profitable portfolio, see yourself getting an award for a trading competition you won;
  • Feel the mouse, feel the texture of paper as you read data, feel the congratulatory handshake;
  • Hear the click of the mouse, hear yourself or someone else say “good job;”

The Attitude: The right motive is important.  Know why you want what you want.  This can’t be emphasized enough.  The best motive has a deeper purpose, one that is positive, healthy, and outside yourself.  For example, in the scheme of things, money for money’s sake is a less-than powerful motivator to trade.  Research has shown that even though most people think of money as a great motivator, it is in fact a poor one when follow-through and commitment sustainability are at stake; and keeping commitments and follow-through are on the “what-matters-most” list with trading.  However, when your purpose is tied to family and community, that is, one higher in aspiration and value, we then are motivated by the passion of our lives.  

You must want and expect to attain the hypnotic state and, above all, let yourself go into it.  This intention around the state is a salient point.  It is best to be relaxed and confident to achieve a state that is results- oriented.  The keywords are “want” to be in the state of trance, “expect” to be in the state of trance and “let” the state of trance descend upon you.  

The setting, especially in the first session is a noteworthy point.  A warm comfortable room, free of drafts, with low light that is very, very quiet is conducive to a successful trance.  If you are very uncomfortable, the critical internal censor will make it virtually impossible for you to be hypnotized. Also, a great aid would be to use earphones to quiet noise and focus attention.  

Sit in a comfortable chair, lean back with headphones and listen to the recorded induction.  If necessary, find a place void of distractions like an office after hours or some other place.  With ample practice, you’ll find you don’t need the recording and the setting is unimportant. You’ll find your own technique, for example 3 deep breaths and a count down from 10, followed by a few suggestions of relaxation coursing through your body, perhaps combined with an affirmation/suggestion related to the issue that you’d like to work with.  For instance: I am able to pull the trigger at the appropriate time and my executions follow my plans easily and effortlessly.  While repeating the affirmation you might visualize a sensory-rich image of yourself at the computer executing a well planned and appropriately sized trade.     

Success comes with constant practice.  Integration of self-hypnosis into your daily routine will make a successful formula.  Listen to your recording twice per day, for best results.  The more you practice forming a mental image of your recorded suggestions, the sooner you’ll achieve your aims.  A deep trance is not critical to success; the right suggestion pattern is what does it.  Be cautious about trying too hard—”the harder you try the harder it becomes”. Tension happens, both psychic and physical.  The internal critic says, “See?  You can’t do it.”  If this happens immediately go back to suggestions for relaxing and breathing.  You can’t force your mind to accept suggestion; it will be engaged and gently invited to make progress.  You must adopt a detached attitude, wanting, then letting.  Finally, the fear of letting go haunts some folks.  This is a helpful suggestion: “You are safe and secure.  If the doorbell rings or someone happens to come in, you will open your eyes, arise, and feel totally refreshed, totally alert and capable of handling any situation.  To awaken from the state all you have to do is say, “I will wake up on the count of three, 1, 2, 3, and you will be wide awake and back to normal.”  

Self-hypnosis if practiced diligently will yield massive benefits in your trading and your life.  If you have any questions you can email me at DrWoody@WoodruffJohnson.com. The important thing to remember is that this and other powerful, highly effective and easy-to-use tools are what brings your “A” Game to the trading platform.  Also, you can order my book, “From Pain to Profit: Secrets of the Peak Performance Trader” from Amazon.com.   

In any important effort where you are up against other individuals that are as motivated, as intelligent, as competent and as prepared if not better than you, then it is crucial that you identify an edge in your game in order to come out ahead of the pack and get the win.  Trading is a good example of this due to the solitary nature of the game.  You are in there alone in most cases and ultimately the only person that you can rely upon is you when the ride gets bumpy.  By having and using an edge you are employing an approach, a strategy, a belief, a mindset, or a tool that will support you in bringing your absolute best to the platform and keeping it there.  Surely you have experienced times where you found yourself at a crossroads in a trade; a fork-in-the-road where you had to make a choice to either go to the left and violate your rules, break your promises to yourself and go over the cliff to crash and burn; or, you chose to go to the right, kept your highest and best trader engaged while trading in your highest and best interests.  When you do-the-right-thing in such an instance, you not only support your ability to follow-through more consistently; but, as well, you have cataloged a peak experience that has the effect of catapulting you forward, bolstering your confidence and strengthening your self-esteem.  One such edge is a tool that aids you in remaining focused intently on what-matters-most in the trade by interrupting disruptive patters of thinking, feeling and doing that can and do cause you to take the left turn at the fork in the road resulting in catastrophic results.  This tool is called Stop, Challenge and Choose.

One of the most common rule violations that novices and some experienced traders make is inappropriately moving a hard stop when the price-action is inching toward it.  The first signal that you normally become aware of is an emotion that is other than positive or neutral; such as in this instance fear or anxiety as you watch the price-action.  That emotional signal is not the first thing that happens however.  The first response in you is an internal dialogue that for the most part is out of your awareness, which is why you must attend to the emotional signal as the first stimulus that comes to your attention.  When the fear/anxiety is felt immediately “stop” what you are doing in order to interrupt the emerging pattern, which would culminate in moving the hard-stop, increasing your risk and in most cases end in a greater loss than you would have experienced had you maintained the hard-stop.  By stopping you take a deep breath which will initiate a relaxation response in you; then change your physical posture and assume a position of power, for example, standing up straight and unclenching fists or teeth.  By doing this you are not only interrupting the emerging bad pattern, you are also exchanging a forthright intention for what a moment ago was frustration, frazzlement and fragmentation.  Then you “challenge” yourself by asking 3 important questions: 1) What must I be thinking or believing to feel this fear or anxiety?  The answer in this instance might be, “…That price-action is going to hit my hard-stop and that means I’ll lose, and that means I’m a poor trader, and that means I’m stupid…” You get the picture.  2) What is the objective reality?  In this example the reality is that the price-action may or may not hit your hard-stop; and in actuality it doesn’t matter because your initial plan calculated the best hard-stop placement according to the risk assessment.  3) Is there an alternative interpretation?  For our example, the alternative interpretation would be that the hard-stop is there to protect your capital and therefore if it is activated by the price-action then it has done its job and you are more not less intelligent for allowing the plan to go forth without interference or second guessing from you.  After asking the three questions then it’s time to “choose” a response that is in keeping with your highest and best goals for the trade and that would be in this instance to be patient and allow the process to play itself out.  You’ll not only maintain your A-Game at the platform, you will have gathered more mechanical and internal data; and trading is all about the data.  

Stop, Challenge and Choose is simple and highly effective “edge” for interrupting emerging bad patterns and placing yourself in a position to not only follow rules and keep commitments, but to maintain a position of increasing your skill levels.  Additionally, it works quite well with your journal to memorialize the process in order to track the instances of emotional turmoil so that you can identify the bad patterns of thinking, feeling a doing as they take place.  In this way you are poised to anticipate the occurrence and become proactive and pre-emptive in the process thereby greatly enhancing your ability to sustain your highest and best trader at the platform. 

Tracy had been losing now for what seemed to be forever, and he felt it.  Not just in his emotions, where he experienced anger, fear, anxiety, heavy self-doubt and constant worry; but he also felt it in his body.  He had developed one digestive ailment after another.  Additionally, he was living with constant pain in his back.  Then one day after a particularly destructive loss, and literally becoming sick to his stomach; he decided upon self-reflection that he had been suppressing feelings of desperation caused by the stress of living in a city that he didn’t like and going to a job that he hated.  For over 10 years he had been frustrated and angry with his employer, coworkers, friends and family.  Furthermore, people had complained about his short temper.  Tracy was consumed by thoughts of helplessness, hopelessness and worthlessness.  This mental cocktail virtually ensured Tracy that he would continue to roll down the pathway of destruction.  He was caught in a vicious cycle of thoughts…emotions…behavior…results.

Thought are things and the way you think affects your body, your trading and your life.  The relationship between thoughts and the physical body have been researched well.  The growing field of psychoneuroimmunology has demonstrated the connection between mind and body.  Simply put, the way that it works is that whenever you have a thought you produce a biochemical reaction in the brain. The brain then releases chemical signals that are transmitted to the body as messengers of the thought.  Because of the chemicals released by the brain that were produced by the thought activate feelings in the body as a direct result of the thought connected chemicals; you feel in the body exactly how you were thinking a moment ago.  This is why depressed, fatalistic, worrisome, angry and fearful thoughts have a corresponding physical response as in tired, rundown, and compromising the immune system so that your resistance to disease and illness becomes quite low.  

When the body responds to a thought by having a feeling, this initiates a response in the brain.  The brain constantly monitors and evaluates the status of the body and notices that the body is feeling a certain way.  In response to the way the body is feeling the brain generates other thoughts that produce corresponding chemical messengers and you begin to “think” the way you are feeling.  This produces a continuous cycle of thoughts producing feelings/emotions and feelings/emotions producing thoughts.  This cycle creates an overall state that can and does become pervasive.  If this cycle is in a negative state, then it affects everything that you do negatively; that is your communication, your interactions and of course your performance – especially trading.  The more you think the same thoughts, which then produce the same chemicals, which cause the same feelings, the more you physically become modified by your thoughts.   What you think about and the intensity of those thoughts ultimately influences your health, the choices you make and your quality of life.   While in this continuous negative state, it is virtually impossible to get different (positive) results in your trading.  The reason is that in order to get different results you must behave differently.  But, your behavior is a direct byproduct of your thinking.  So, to change your results you must change your thinking … your state. 

You must begin to pay constant attention to what you are thinking, especially automatic thoughts that are tied to limiting beliefs.  What you will find is that many of your limiting beliefs (a limiting belief is just a thought that you think all the time) and automatic thoughts are “not true.”  But, you have come to believe them over time and they have profoundly affected your state or overall attitude.  Actually, one of the questions that you can ask yourself when you are experiencing lack and limited thinking is, “…is this thought true, is it absolutely true?”  In this way you begin to challenge to underlying premise of your state or attitude and gain insight.  You also must fight against the notion that they are uncontrollable.  One of the beautiful aspects of your brain is that it has neuro-plasticity meaning that it has been designed to change.  Once you start to first examine each thought, then purposefully modify or root out the wrong and untrue limiting beliefs then you can begin to change them one thought at a time.  

I’ve often talked about the importance of the Thought Journal for your trading.  I hope this brief explanation helped to shed a little more light on why thoughts are so important and why you must manage your thoughts before you can manage your emotions.  Changing results depend upon dealing with the whole “internal data” equation; Thoughts + Emotions + Behavior = Results.  Each point in the equation is critical and contributes to the results that you are getting.  This is what we are committed to, that is to support you in gaining insight into your negative thoughts in order to begin to manage them and thereby manage your emotions.  We are here to help you to master your mental game to bring your A-Game to your platform and keep it there throughout your trading session.   In this way you will begin to make better choices and decisions, and you are more apt to follow through on those choices and decisions, which means that you are in a better position to get the results that you want and not the results that you’ve been getting.  

Childhood emotional traumas, wounds, and scars create the crux of your mental models of the world.  How you see the world is influenced by the way you bonded with your parents/family in the first 3 to 5 years of life.  A secure bond or attachment means that you experienced a nurturing upbringing, complete with plenty of affection and limits, as well as room to explore.  A secure attachment is one of two main constructs that form the foundation of your mental model of the world.  The remaining types of attachments all fall under the “insecure” type and indicate that your caregivers/parents/family were erratic, inconsistent, withheld love and may have even been abusive.  These two bonding strategies are formed by your earliest relationships.  If those relationships were good, your outlook for life would be mostly positive; if those relationships were painful, then your outlook is likely more negative.  These mental models from early childhood continue to play out over and over again, triggered by associations and reminders of the past or by strong emotions such as anxiety and fear that activate internal states.

When you begin to participate in the market trading time machines can happen at any moment when the relationship with the market goes sour and these time machines can activate feelings of envy, jealousy, betrayal, abandonment, anger, guilt, desperation and depression, to name a few.  At these times, the trader is caught in a time warp where old image tapes begin to play and the trader is seemingly held in the clutches of those old recordings.  To get out of the abyss brought on by these states, the resources of the right brain—where these emotions are lodged and largely held unexpressed to the conscious mind—must be flushed out and purged by shedding light on these dark spaces through mental and emotional tools.  Trading becomes a mirror for life’s relationships.  When money is at stake through immediate pleasure-pain dichotomies of trading, old negative strategies are activated.  State bound negative strategies formed out of old traumas create patterns of coping that work against the trader.  These negative strategies are patterns of thinking and doing that emerge from learned limitations and belief systems.  In order to override these patterns, they must first be interrupted, and the distortions created by the original beliefs must be shown to be the illusions that they are.

When psychological trauma takes place, the system mobilizes to defend against both the event recurring and the thoughts and emotions associated with it.  It’s an attempt to defend against fear, depression, and emotional pain.  Maladaptive coping strategies are designed by the unconscious to help, but this ends up causing immobility, overcompensation and a mixed bag of negative emotions.  In fact, it can get quite complex.  For example, not only can there be fear, but the system can develop fear of the fear.  This fear of the fear can be illustrated by the way “triggers” work.  Triggers are cues in our internal or external environment that trigger a response.  If you had an abusive father who yelled at you and said you were incompetent and would never amount to anything, you might be surprised how these old tapes can affect the trade.  In the heat of a trade, if the price action goes against you significantly, your subconscious might replay those old tapes about being incompetent, prompting a severe anxiety reaction accompanied by the dread and fear of taking risk.  Later, in another similar trade, you may remember the anxiety, fear and self-loathing you felt before and, by just considering the same type of trade, you may experience a fear of having those feelings again.  When you “split” from your calm, normal, focused self to an anxious or agitated state brought on by these tapes, it can cause impulsive and compulsive behavior (rule violations), which are methods used to defend against the emotions elicited by the triggers.

When you get caught in these emotional time machines you’ve got to embrace the anxiety, greed, fear, anger, frustration, guilt, shame, or procrastination.  At this point you can use mental and emotional tools like for example Stop, Challenge and Choose to examine the unconscious faulty beliefs that are motivating the erratic feelings that in turn drive bad behaviors creating results you don’t want.  This is a great opportunity to also use your thought journal and bring yourself closer to awareness of the story that’s on those tapes.  Within those emotions lie the treasures of your growth.  You can’t change what you can’t face.

After using your thought journal to explore what happened in your unconscious thinking and emotions that drove you to break your rules, you can then establish new behavioral strategies to trigger and reframe old mental models that were the cause of the issues.  You can do this by another technique called “reframing,” which is a powerful tool that creates a turnaround for an ineffective mental model.  For instance, you can “reframe” the meaning of failure.  If you change the meaning of a concept that is driving your thoughts, emotions and beliefs you will also change your behavior.  A failure does not mean that you’re incompetent.  Everyone fails.  Rather, it means that you’ve had another opportunity to learn.  Failure is only feedback.  Most successful traders will tell you that they lost many times and blew up several accounts before they acquired the knowledge, experience, and set of effective habits that took them to success.  Through reframing you can get a new set of lenses with which to “see” the issues.  New lenses are ground out through identifying and challenging the mythology of your old mental models and creating new ones; but, you can only do that if you’re willing to do the exploration work by having and using a thought journal to uncover your limited beliefs and faulty thinking.

Mardi Horowitz, a trauma researcher, wrote about what he calls mastery.  He wrote about the importance of “working through” the issue when difficult emotions arise.  This process of “working through” is what we have been discussing.  It involves confronting, increasing awareness, reframing, and establishing behavioral strategies.  Or, you can continue to do what you have been doing and get the same results you have been getting.   Another tool that is quite helpful when you have uncovered an unconscious limiting belief that is driving unwanted results is to use positive self-talk.  Donald Michenbaum’s language of healing works well as a way to positively self-talk when dealing with impulsivity and compulsivity.  It is designed to help you “write yourself a new narrative for effective trading results.”  Positive self-talk is initiating the coach within.  Aside from helping to maintain focus, it also engages the parasympathetic nervous system (which calms and relaxes the body) and redirects attention from the distractions of negative and counterproductive thinking and emotions to those that empower and support goal oriented decisions.  You’ll want to construct affirmative statements on your ability to cope and to demonstrate resilience and courage in the face of trades that have gone against you.  Here are some examples:

• You demonstrate the ability to reframe events from failures to lessons.
• You are able to see your trade and strategy through a new set of lenses.
• You resist the temptation of feeling fear, greed, self-repudiation, self-loathing, and self-hate, anger and wishful thinking that distract you from your plan and strategy.
• You author your plan and keep your rules.
• You demonstrate the ability to maintain proactive and effective routines.
• You make choices based upon reality.
• You realize that you have boundless opportunities to trade.
• You decide to develop a more comfortable relationship with yourself.
• You create and maintain a strong purpose and mission for your trading business.
• You leave behind those things that should be left behind.
• You take initiative to continue to update and follow your rules.
• You take back your power when you feel an urge to violate your rules.
• You get rid of the excess baggage of ineffective programs.
• You liberate your trading from the lack and limited thinking.
• You notice a calmer more patient you
• You catch yourself entering and exiting your trade exactly according to your pre-targeted plan.
• You realized many of your strengths, powers and capacities by keeping your commitment to your rules.
• You develop a winning strategy.
• You recognize that the most important point is not whether or not you made a profit, but whether you kept your rules.

Once you have identified the affirmative statements you can then use self-hypnosis to implant suggestions that are focused on one or two of the positive statements at a time.  This is a very effective and powerful process to engage the subconscious to begin to work for you rather than against you.

Hello everybody! Our new podcast is now out and this week we are talking about visualization and how visualization can bring us closer to our goals. This podcast is a light-hearted but rigorous look at the unlimited resources that we have called our brain/mind. Dr. Woody Johnson, Vega Karlsson and other associates explore these resources through conversations and interviews with thought leaders and innovators that are finding new and fascinating discoveries that help us to get more out of our brain/mind resources.

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