Seminar topics are below:
-The 90/10 Rule for Trading
-Improving Your +R Per Trade
-Advanced Tactics for Intra-day Trading
-Re-wire Your Mindset for Successful Trading
-Visualization Techniques for Success
Feedback:
This course is good in learning mindset and rewiring our brain. Most people focus on the negative. He teaches to forus more on the positive.
Most of the attendee are his online trading course student and they have their group. For this course did not have any group form.
http://2ndskiesforex.com/trading-strategies/self-image-determines-successful-forex-trading-psychology/
From the First to Apes
Around 600 million years ago, the very first nervous system was born. It was quite crude in nature as it could only respond and react to basic stimuli in the environment.Another 400 or so million years passed before the first mammals arrived on this earth with primates coming into the planet's history about 60 million years ago.
About 2.5 million years ago from today, some of our early ancestors came about (Homo Habilis) where they could make basic tools out of stone. The very concept of 'leverage' we use today was just being introduced to our early fore-fathers.
Fast forward to about 200K years ago and the clever ape (Homo Sapiens) started to emerge.
Hunter-Gatherers, Small Groups
and the 1 in 8 ratio
Only
10,000 years ago did we shift from hunter-gatherer wandering groups to
create small bands and our first farming collectives. During this shift, on average 1 in 8 men died from protecting their families and communities. Contrast this to the 20th century, and the number is 1 in 100.
Now with that small story of our evolutionary history, why does this matter for me as a trader?
Because even though our brain tripled in volume over the last several million years, most of these experiences have an impact on our brains today.
None of us are generally protecting our families from our neighbors, yet we still have the same wiring in our brain from the last 100 millenia or so.
To translate this, it means we still often act (or react) to threats today as if our life is under constant attack, yet we are rarely under this scenario.
Part of this is reflected in our fight or flight response, but the simplest way to express this is we react far more intensely to negative threats than the positive experiences.
And this has a massive impact on your trading success today (particularly how you relate to losing a trade or losing money).
As the author of Buddha's Brain (Rick Hanson) states, our brains are like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for good ones.
It Was About Survival
To pass on our genes, we had to avoid threats first. Only after we eliminated these could we start to focus on pleasurable things.The rule was 'eat lunch, don't be lunch'.This created a 'negativity bias' in the brain, and it dominates most of your thinking, reactions and trading decisions today.
If we were to map out the real-estate in the brain and the neural networks, we'd notice a disproportionate amount of wiring dedicated towards avoiding these negative threats.
On average, our central nervous system and brain can react to a threat with lightning speed (<.1 secs) while it can take us 5-7+ seconds to respond to a positive stimuli.
Hence our brain is hyper-sensitive to every pip that goes against our trade, but takes time to fully relax and digest a positive one.
Going back to the Teflon - Velcro analogy of the brain, you've already had this experience many times.
Case
in point, have you ever had a day where (for example) you took say 10
trades on a day, and perhaps 8 were winners, one was for breakeven, yet
you made one mistake that took out almost all your gains for the day?
Who hasn't had a day like this?
Not many.
Now ask yourself this - at the end of the day, what do you remember most?
The 8 trades you executed well, or the one big loser which wiped out almost all your gains?
Most likely you remember that big loss, and probably remember big losses more today than your big wins.
You've probably even thought about your big losses far more often than your big wins.
If so, then you are directly experiencing this negativity bias and how the brain is teflon for the positive and velcro fro the negative.
We actually built an entire course on how to re-wire your brain for trading success and get past this bias.
But before we get into ways to correct this, we have to cover one key point about the brain.
Who hasn't had a day like this?
Not many.
Now ask yourself this - at the end of the day, what do you remember most?
The 8 trades you executed well, or the one big loser which wiped out almost all your gains?
Most likely you remember that big loss, and probably remember big losses more today than your big wins.
You've probably even thought about your big losses far more often than your big wins.
If so, then you are directly experiencing this negativity bias and how the brain is teflon for the positive and velcro fro the negative.
We actually built an entire course on how to re-wire your brain for trading success and get past this bias.
But before we get into ways to correct this, we have to cover one key point about the brain.
Experience Dependent Neuroplasticity
EDN, or Experience Dependent Neuroplasticity is a long way to say 'the brain learns, adapts and changes from experience'.It means we can wire new habits in our brain and correct mental errors which affect our trading performance.
There are two key points which underline EDN. They are;
- Neurons that Fire Together, Wire Together
- Consistent Passing Mental States Create Lasting Neural Traits
In regards to the first point, the networks that are strongest will help to
- a) determine how we are most likely to act,
- and
- b) help strengthen the neural networks we build for trading success (or failure).
This as you can imagine will have a negative effect on your trading mindset and performance.
And with point #1, it means if we want to build new neural networks which go beyond this, we have to employ different neural networks to help re-wire our brain for trading success.
So if we want to pull the trigger consistently when our trade setup is right in front of us, we'll need to wire that neural network to become a dominant network.
We'll explore more of this later in the article, but I'd like to venture into...
Everyone Wants to Win the Lottery Right?
Of course you want to win the lottery. It's the golden ticket to getting out of your financial situation. Or is it?Callie Rogers won the UK lottery at the age of 16 snagging a solid 1.9M pounds. Not a bad high school graduation gift eh?
One would think she was set for a great start in life.
What did she do with her winnings?
Partied, went on vacations, gave out gifts, and had 2 children with people she is not with today.
Within 3 years, she completely went through her winnings and was last reported to work as a cleaning lady.
Now it's easy to say (and I'm guessing many of you are) 'she was immature'.
But let's look at an example of a 'mature' person and see how this didn't matter.
A Pentacostal Preacher
Billy Bob Harrell Jr was a pentacostal preacher in the south west of the US. If Billy Bob Harrell Jr isn't a name for a pentacostal preacher, then I don't know what is :-)He was a man of the faith who had simple tastes and was by all means 'mature'.
He worked a side job at Home Depot as a stock laborer.
One day his prayers were answered and he won $31M in a lottery.
He made what many would consider to be 'smart investments' in real estate, a ranch, and a few cars.
Eventually he lost it all with handouts and bad real estate, and yet he was a 'mature' individual who always kept his word according to his friends.
Eventually his wife divorced him and he did a very un-preacher like thing...he took his own life.
So if 'maturity' wasn't the issue here, then what was?
The Self-Image and how it is affecting (and defining) your performance right now.
A Larger Than Life Ego
In my opinion, this person has what may be the largest (and not exactly 'mature') ego on the planet.His stories about success are generally fabricated a tad (IMO) and through some poor business decisions, went from being several $B (billion) in profit to -$1B in debt.
If it weren't for creditors and banks restructuring his debt, you would never know his name today as you do now.
A few years later, he was in the black and now is worth $8.7B.
His name is Donald Trump.
How did he get himself out of this giant hole and climb higher than before?
The Self-Image
The answer comes down to his 'self-image' and it is one of the greatest measures of your performance.It sets the upper and lower boundaries of your success and performance (in trading and life) and it is how you see yourself.
We could define it as 'the sum of your habits, attitudes and beliefs' and it is what you think is 'like you' to do well (or not well).
Do you feel confident you are good at numbers? Then it is in your self-image to be good at numbers and I'm guessing if I threw some number related challenges, you'd do fine.
Do you feel it is not 'like you' to be a good dancer? I'm guessing unless you practice a lot or undergo some dance training/classes, you won't be able to move that well if I asked you to dance right now.
Why?
Because it's in your self-image, and it's how you define what it is 'like you' to do well (or not do well).
