Quote from oraclewizard77:
This is very true and a very good post. Now, you need to just follow up on how to develop emotional control.
Emotional control and minimized emotional display - having the demeanor of Mr. Spock for instance - are not the same thing.
Hallmarks of emotional control are being able to calm one's self at will, having a very clear sense of which emotions are disruptive or destructive and which are not, and intuitively knowing the situations in which emotions are dangerous or undesirable.
Emotional control is the ability to be calm in the clutch, or to maintain rational composure even while giving the external appearance of being emotional (though external display is of course optional). Not the same as being largely bloodless and emotionless.
As a general rule, I feel what I want to feel, and cultivating occasionally intense bursts of emotion is an enjoyable aesthetic aspect of my overall life experience. Anger, for example, can be a positive manifestation of competitive drive and can actually be fun to express, in the same way it can be fun to get in a fight.
The key thing is having control of emotional flow. If you are angry when you choose to be angry, or excited when you choose to be excited, that is one thing (and can be a healthy form of blowing off steam).
To lose control, however, is to experience emotions at undesirable times or to undesirable degrees. This is the real problem, not the prima facie presence of emotion itself.
Another emotional control trait is the ability to feel or express a brief blast of emotion and then be 'done" with it. This is the ability to be angry for a moment, or otherwise intense in a controlled burst, and then go immediately back to true neutral / true calm. Conversely, a lack of emotional control is when the level change sticks with you, longer than you want it to, and an inability to "let go."
(There is a scene in the movie
Get Shorty that epitomizes the letting go aspect of emotional control. The gangster Chili Palmer (John Travolta) is in an altercation where he is almost killed. Afterward he is driving with his girlfriend, completely and totally relaxed, as if the danger never happened. She is astonished, asking him, "Aren't you scared?" He looks at her with a half smile and says "I was scared then. It's over. You want me to be scared now?")
A curious byproduct of the above is that you cannot tell whether a trader has emotional control or not simply by the degree of emotion they display during the trading day. A trader who shouts profanity at the screen or even smashes phones may simply be engaging in healthy emotional release, with zero risk of breaking his rules or otherwise disrupting his decision making process, because he knows himself and knows exactly what he is doing and what the boundaries of these steam blowoffs should be.
A trader who gives the outside appearance of a zen monk, on the other hand, might actually be emotionally roiling on the inside, going on "soft tilt" inside his head, using great amounts of energy to preserve a facade of external emotional control, and be very close to seeing his decision making faculties impeded or degraded because internal emotional uproar is sucking up all his energy.
Re, the balanced trader who uses displays of emotion as a constructive aspect of process, a mechanical analogy here is the industrial air conditioner that expels hot air as exhaust in the process of generating cool air. Emotion, when used as fuel by a skilled practitioner, can keep one on the "calm and collected" track in terms of actions, while being visibly expelled as heat exhaust.
This is the kind of thing that happens when critical thinking skills and rational decision making faculties are elevated above emotions, as such that emotions become the servant of the executive function, rather than master or disruptor.
When most traders talk about emotional control, they are actually talking about reducing emotional swings or blunting the feedback impact - reducing the intensity of emotional output. But there is a better way, a more powerful way. Harnessing emotional flow allows one to cultivate the energy and raw power that comes from emotion - like learning to drive a 400 horsepower car.
Emotion is also highly useful in respect to somatic markers and rapid-fire learning experience... but that's another topic.
