Today we’ll give you 3 steps to the emotional management of trading. So, there is an ideal state of mind from which to trade. A state of flow that allows you to access your resources and express the type of behavior that leads you to consistently achieve results. This is the state of mind you need to develop to trade successfully.
You must remember your achievements as an operator. They do not depend so much on what you know, as on what you do. That specific behavior that allows you to operate consistently is the result of a certain state of mind. The psychological distance is the distance between this ideal mind and your current mind!
Of course, you will have losses, even if you are a consistent trader. The consistency we are referring to is the one that allows you to operate without making mistakes. That operation is the one that produces sustainable results over time! The performance curve of a trader who makes mistakes contains sections that rise over time, followed by sections in which there are sharp falls, which are the product of the errors that the trader has made.
Recognition, regulation, and rationalization are steps of emotional management
The first refers to identifying who is the author of our mistakes. A clue will appear every time you stand in front of a mirror, we must recognize that our mistakes belong to us and that they are not from the system. Those are our mistakes!
We are the ones who have decided to act in our best interest. All these decisions are made by oneself, and we must begin by assuming responsibility. So, recognizing also means carrying out the work of compiling one’s errors and blunders. In this way, you will have a list of errors that will be your own to work on.
Regulate your emotional state
The next step in emotional management is to regulate your emotional state. You must regulate your emotional state when you are under pressure when you do not have the capital committed to the market. A type of analytical mind is usually activated that can be inaccessible due to stress, fear, or another strong emotion.
If we feel threatened, if we feel that we could lose our money, control of the rudder will pass to the most primitive and irrational mind that we have. The one that is in charge of our survival, this mind interferes in our analytical and executive capacity again and again! And, guided by the desire to avoid that suffering will leave out of your consciousness very valid information that the market may be offering. So, the second step is that you regulate your emotions as much as you can.
Rationalization, step 3 to emotional management.
The third step of the model is rationalization. Is what we want to bring to consciousness, the type of ideas that are behind our impulses. Imagine that you feel that you should move the stop away from the initial point because the market could pull back and take that momentum out of you.
This is in your best interest, the market can indeed have a counter and take you out, but for that, you have a rapier in the first place. What sense does it make to delay your stop? That is a scary Sting movement. We must pay attention to our internal dialogue. This is something we can only do if we have not crossed our activation threshold. We can learn to identify the type of irrational beliefs that may be behind our maladaptive behaviors. Our job is to question the validity of those ideas and change them into rational beliefs!
Conclusion
So, if you follow these three steps to manage your emotions, we are 100% sure that you will be able to succeed in trading like a professional. We hope this information is very helpful for your training as a professional trader.