Embracing vulnerability: building a curious, disciplined trading mind.

Vulnerability is key to improving your trading results. Especially when we better understand?the triggering of our emotional brain to fight-flight.

Vulnerability is usually?caused by a lack of outcome control, and this happens when we encounter uncertainty and risk, which is precisely what the markets offer. Uncertainty and risk.

That is the big issue here.

So when we encounter vulnerability in trading, it triggers our emotional biology, that caveman brain that we all possess, to fight-flight.

So let's think about this.

"Our emotional brain finds a short term solution for self preservation and locks it in as a pattern."

This is where our beliefs and neurological pathways evolved and our default auto- response?reactions come from. The brain begins looking for threat, and auto-responds from fight/flight, to the excludion of all other explanations.

Survival is it's only agenda and fighting or fleeing proved to be very efffective survival skills to our ancestors.

And this, my fellow traders, is?why when under stress, your reasoning gets completely hijacked.

The vulnerability of not being in control of uncertainty has to be addressed in order to alter your frame of perception.

It is very clear, and in fact scientifically proven, that fear and uncertainty are inextricably linked.

The key learning is that the emotions of fight-flight must first be managed before changing the meaning of vulnerability from threat to curiosity.

Just to explain that a little bit more.

What happens as a default when vulnerability is encountered is that our emotional brain immediately regards that as a threat.

That is where the work is needed.

"So we need to change the meaning of vulnerability at an auto-response level from threat,?to curiosity. That is the key to moving forward and improving your trading results."

Let’s say we have an event that activates uncertainty. Now in trading, that could be pretty much anything, because we know that no matter how much knowledge and system edge we have and how much homework we've done, we don't know the result of any given trade.

Trading is an inherently uncertain activity. The worst possible nightmare for your brain.

We know that uncertainty triggers vulnerability. For millions of years it has been triggered by a threat to our survival, a sabre tooth cat looking to make you its next meal; which then triggers fight-flight activation.

This is an impulse behaviour, a pattern that got locked in over many millennia because it was very successful back then, and it’s still there today, encoded into our genome.

In trading it can be manifest in things like revenge trading [fight response] or an inability to pull the trigger [flight response]. Essentially it's fight-flight activation.

What we need to do is retrain the way we auto-response to vulnerability; to disciplined curiosity.?

This is the key that needs to be ingrained into your auto response behaviour.

Your methodology is driven by the performance of your psychology under pressure.?

All top performers whether in trading, sports or the corporate world, work on their head game as well as their method.

"Under pressure i can see things quite clearly."

That's a quote from one of the greatest,?if not the greatest,tennis players of all time, Roger Federer, who has been known for a long time for his calm ability to execute his skills at a high level of performance under high pressure.

How many times have we seen him winning close matches because of his ability to execute under pressure? And that has come because he works on his head game

Until you solve this problem, your trading plan is incomplete.

So my question to you is:

Are you willing to do the work to be a top performing trading trader?

Knowledge is never enough.

System is never enough.

We must work on our trading psychology and change the way our emotional brain reacts to vulnerability from fight-flight to disciplined curiosity, approached curiosity.

Summing it up:

Do you struggle with caring too much about your trading decisions? Or perhaps you shake your head after another trade went off the rails and wonder "why did i just do that?"

Share your thoughts in the comments section and please like and share this article. I love learning from you as well.

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About Ash:

Ash Playsted is Founder of The MindsetFit Method, the leading company in the world at helping traders build the right psychology plan to go with their system plan.?Ash has been an active trader himself for the past 25 years and through his own trading, teaching others and intensive study he developed Mindset Reflexology, his proprietary methodology for training traders how to reshape the mind they bring to trading into the mind they need for long term trading success.

Ash is also an author and host of the podcast program The Trading Psychology and Mindset Show.?Reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn or my YouTube channel to learn more about my work.

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