AAA, let me try and give you an example based on the idea about no such thing as a bad outcome. More specifically, what is meant is that in absolute terms, nothing is good or bad; rather merely a result that may or may not bring you closer to that which you desire. I don't mean good or bad in terms of morals, only in a way related to how you respond emotionally to the outcomes you create, for instance a winning or losing trade.
Most traders tend to react positively to profits and negatively to losses. Now at first glance that may be understandable, and some would argue that's the way it should be: the idea being to motivate yourself with the positive reinforcement of profit, and negative reinforcement of loss.
This is related to the notion that in order to be successful at any given endeavor you can't feel good about it until you achieve success.
NLP suggests just the opposite, that in order to be successful, you first must feel good (meaning perhaps, among other things: confident, deserving, etc.). So, instead of feeling bad about a loss (which tends to debilitate you and cause emotional spirals like lack of discipline) NLP techniques are designed to make you realize that a loss is not bad, it just is. If you can completely disconnect from the notion of a loss as being bad you can be freed from the emotional constraints of negativity. Don't you trade differently when you're in different emotional states? NLP lets you choose and fine tune the state you're in to maximize useful behavior, regardless of your current level of success.
Believe me, for most of my adult life (I'm 40) I thought the way to success was to beat the shit out of myself everytime I made a mistake. It was a VERY hard thing to just decide to be alright with whatever happened. Now, that doesn't mean ignoring results, or as Tony Robbins jokes, the gardener with a bunch of weeds repeatedly saying "there are no weed" and the weeds of course are still there. The basic formula for success is: decide what you want, take action, change action until you get it. What I discovered is that you can disconnect the success formula from the idea that you have to feel bad about "failing" (ie, a losing trade) until you're successful.
I realize both ways can work, it's just that I've found (and so many others) that the "NLP way" is easier, more enjoyable, has other side benefits, and is faster. Now, many people that are successful think this way anyway. I sometimes hear, "well yeah, of course, that's what I've always done". The thing is, what we do and the way we do it, we assume everyone does it the same way. But that's not how it is. We're all different. NLP seeks to make these choices available to all.
The hardest thing for me to explain here are the mechanics of NLP, the tools of change if you will. I'll give it a shot, but in a sentence or two it may confuse more that enlighten.
It all has to do with language, experience and meaning. Human being take input (what our 5 senses tell us) and then our brain filters that input through previous experiences and conditioning. We end up with a "library" of references with distinct meanings attached to those references. What most of us don't realize is those meanings are totally an internal construct (and these meanings are often arbitrary, but can be changed). We store these representations in our brains sort of like a map. Which means they are not the experiences themselves, they are representations. NLP has provided a way to code the subjectivity of these representations in such a way that it allows us to manipulate them in useful ways. Such as: completely changing the meaning attached to a horrible event, or reducing or increasing the impact that some event has on you currently.
Even more interesting is that each of us organizes this coding in different ways. There is a syntax to this coding of subjective experience. What this means is that I can extract the exact way in which someone subjectively accomplishes a task and make it repeatable. For instance, supertrader claims he's totally intuitive and doesn't really know how he does what he does but is great at it. With the process I'm referring to I can duplicate supertraders results because I'm able to duplicate all of his internal processes, that he may not even be consciously aware of.
How do you do this? I simply can't explain it here. It's not terribly complicated, but it does take some time. And it's probably not for everybody. You need to have an extremely open mind, have a curious nature, and be willing to try some seemingly silly things. The payoffs though, can be enormous.
Finally, hope there are no hard feelings from my previous response. Certainly none taken.
