Quote from Joe Doaks:
Jack, I find your fight or flee reference emotionally appealing, but I don't intellectually grasp its relevance to trading. If I flee, I don't trade. If I fight, well, we all know where that leads (Don't fight the tape, don't try to get even, etc.).
Okay this is the segway into how an expert uses his mind and, in contrast, how someone works who does not have either skills, a plan, or and approach for trading going for him.
Think of a scalor arrangement of the best to the worst of traders and their trading.
At some point there is a line where on one side people get better and on the other side they get worse.
The line is often crossed either way by some outside happening or support or a failure of some sort.
Say there was a loser and he got some support in trading, if he were not in shape in the mind/body areas his ship still might not come in. That is because of "fight or flee" or what is called "the stress response". The stress response is trying to dissable him and dissconnect him from his failure in trading. his survival system is trying to take him away from trading completely by dissabling him permanently
The ancient physical stimulus to flee a tiger is still with us. I plan on doing a step by step on it to make people conscious of how it works for tigers and for repeated failure.
If you keep screwing up trading, your body is being told to leave the scene.
I will use a snake in my example in a while. The "snake" could be any threat actually. In another thread the snake is the first retrace after an equity BO for a specific person who is freaked out by it.
We need to understand how the stress response works.
We need to understand how various trading tools eliminate the possibility of the stress response and, in contrast, how other trading tools really bring on the stress response.
We need to see how people can get "stuck" because they are trapped in how they try to avoid the stress response.
There are many activities that ameliorate trading problems. Any trading problem can be coupled to stress fairly easily. People in ET often pose Q's on "What to do....after.... this or that. (think of 100 negatives to fill in).
So inherently from our past we have mechanisms that go into effect to help us survive.
By learning about how everything works, we get to change how it works and we get to channel the biochemistry in the better way to actually enhance our performance.
It turns out that, some folks are already requesting help in getting the authoritative basis for what they are learning here and trying to fight about. That will upgrade their challenges they face here to outdo what is on the table. It is a win win for us all . I will do some "fight fair" psychological sessions with them on the side.
The choice you mention about fighting with the market, we handle by another topic. We will be using music related analogies to see two areas. How the mind can engage constructively and harmoniously and also how listening and doing music is an extremely good way to move to higher ground in mental processing.
My overall statment was to bound the topic. That is not done well it turns out since some thought the main topics were OT and they insisted on faulting me for what I said the topics are. We couldn't even "chunk' without a misguided and mistaken response.
The stress response ultimately centers on both mind over matter and matter over mind. We need to arrest the stress response when it is there. Besides good trading, we will get the neocortex to talk sense to the limbic system. And we will be doing the matter over mind work of biochemically manipulating the endocrine system and our brains. If you practice any Native American health practices where you "listen" to your body to see how it is doing, you will find that helpful too.
The neocortex is a 2 1/2 foot square thin membrane over our chemical supply system that supports it's activety and functions.. We will be keeping the tanks full of everything we need to keep things in balance and plentiful. By not draining away stuff unnecessarily we become more efficient as well.
The excitement of trading is somewhat like the stress response. it is great to enjoy the excitement but we need to "waste" the surplus of biochemicals that we generate having successes too. It turns out we can kill two birds with one stone by using the same "warm down" for both the excitement of success as the stress response. Taking a jog and listening to your walkman is an easy solution after trading it turns out. To warm up, among other things, we can have a cup of coffee. The preflight check, you will find, is something that allows you to drop into the zone as well.