Evaluating your “self talk”

Hope you’re doing well. Hope you have a lot of fun plans for the weekend. Get your mind off the markets. So we talked about mental attitude and then journaling and then using certain language with yourself to try to tap into your subconscious. Because oftentimes you might be compelled to do certain things and you’re like, Why did I do that? You don’t have a really good answer for it. It could be because it’s coming from learned behavior that you picked up in your youth and you’ve learned to have this type of self talk with yourself, which doesn’t actually help you. Sometimes it’s from an overbearing parent, you couldn’t do anything right? I have a friend of mine in the northeast who’s kind of undoing a lot of that now because caused a lot of self doubt because he had a parent who was a little overbearing and always reminded him about how he could be doing things better.

And so when you feel hand pecked like that, you start to do it to yourself. And so be mindful of the self talk. You might even write that down and then investigate like, okay, where did that come from? Why do I speak to myself in a way that I wouldn’t let other people speak to me? Because when you come to the marketplace, and I didn’t certainly invent this, but I’m really good at understanding it. You might be playing things out that have nothing to do with trading, might not have anything even to do with making money, but it could be to try to either heal or to better understand the kind of things that you picked up from your nuclear family in the environment that you grew up in. So that can help a lot in your subconscious because when you go through that, if you have an overbearing parent for example, and you go over it day after day after day for whatever could be up to 18 years before you go to college or something like that, you have so much learned behavior around that that it kind of became in the background.

It just was there all the time. And you stop to notice it. It’s like after you put on a spritz of cologne or perfume after five minutes you’re like, Did I put on perfume? Everyone around you? It’s like, yeah, what did say one application per bottle for the love of God? And you’re like, Yeah, I’ve become kind of immune to it. You’ve become unaware of what everyone else can kind of see. It’s very difficult to do. So at the end of the day, if you write that stuff down, it can be very, very revealing. Maybe not right away, but over time you could say, Okay, I said this to myself today after I got out of a winning trade.

Is that or is that me replicating something that I picked up from my household when I was growing up? Especially a valuable to you if it’s negative talk, it could have been things like, why are you trading? It’s legalized gambling in, that’s like when you’re older, when you can look back to your youth. Did you do well at certain things but always get advice about how you could have done things better, faster, this and that, as opposed to just being loved and understood for who you are. I’m not saying that it’s easy to be a parent. Everyone reads What to expect when you’re expecting, which is the big book, and then after that there is no playbook. It’s completely winging it. You’re flying by the seat of your pants and you kind of have to make it up as you go. You try to be consistent if nothing else, but there’s really not a lot there that can help you.

And then you get into all this kind of political stuff in the family and so has certain opinions about how you should do stuff. And then especially with the in-laws. Both sides of the in-laws have ideas of where you should go, where you should live, how you should live, what you should do for a living, how you should raise the kid, how you should discipline the kid. And it’s like, listen, it’s my kid, I’ll figure it out. Thanks for the input. You have to draw boundaries that you might not have been able to draw when you were younger, but if you had that kind of meddling parent, which to me, look, I’m not saying something, but I am saying those are the worst people cause they think they’re loving you. I teach Jiujitsu class quite a bit and you can see some of the parents walking out with their kids and they’re super competitive parents.

They’re like the notorious baseball dad…” I’m spending all this money on hitting lessons and you can’t get the bat off your shoulder.” That doesn’t help the kid. It just humiliates them and that doesn’t make them want to, you know what I mean? It’s like the leader that want, Do you want the people to love you or to fear you? You’re not going to get the best out of people by intimidating them and brow beating them, so don’t do it to yourself. You are probably perfect just the way you were given everything that you could possibly know growing up.

And so it’s very tricky when that stuff to show shows up in your trading. You might be trying to demonstrate something or teach. Imagine if you were trading because you wanted to prove your parents wrong. Is there another way to do that without putting a lot of capital at risk when you perhaps don’t know what you’re doing? You see this stuff is crazy deep and it’s in your subconscious. So unless you put some time into really thinking about it, especially when you think about what emotional needs are being met here.

Are you trading because you’re giving a loved one or a parent the big middle finger that becomes expensive. It’s an expensive way to do it. But this is the beginning of how you can uncover what’s going on in your subconscious and why you might need that $150 win. Is it because you want to hang it on your refrigerator and get the gold star so that you can get your parents’ attention and their praise, for example? You can fill it in with whatever person and situation is going on in your life, but that’s kind of like the analogy.

This is a computer generated transcript.

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