Psychologists don’t agree with one another over many ideas but one idea they do agree on: that our experiences and natural talents produce beliefs, attitudes, values, and assessments of the future. These in turn produce automatic responses to events, contexts and people that invariably lead to a default future. (These experiences, beliefs, values etc are sometimes called “how a situation occurs to us).
Let me repeat that because it is the key to our success:
Our automatic responses produce a DEFAULT FUTURE because our performances (the results of our behaviour) will always match ‘how situations appear to us’
Like all defaults, we can change the outcome by altering our behaviour; but there’s a problem. Because ‘how a situation appears to us’ is embedded in our subconscious, we are not consciously aware of their influence. As Don Rumsfeld said: they are ‘what we don’t know, we don’t know.”
Different psychologists call these motivators by different names: ‘repetition compulsion’ (Denise Shull), ‘The Dark Side of the Inner Child’ (Steve Wolinsky) etc. But they all agree that these elements are unconscious motivators of our behaviour. In addition, most of these responses are responses that we formulated at a young age and many, if not most, no longer serve us.
In other words: much of the behaviour we rely on to produce our results is driven by unconscious strategies that will not produce the results we want! And yet, these unconscious strategies (”how a situation appears to us”) will lead to a default future UNLESS we creatively change that future.
And, to change our future, we need to know what we don’t know - i.e. we need to make the unconscious, conscious. The two barometers for this are:
- Our feelings. We need to acknowledge feelings we have when we trade and distinguish whether or not they serve us. Often our feelings are providing us with clues of danger. By being aware and acknowledging our emotions, we give light to the unconscious strategies.
- The results of our behaviour. If we say we want to achieve trading success, but persist in behaviour that will lead the other way e.g. refuse to place stops, we have evidence of behaviour governed by the ‘Inner Child’.
So, feelings and behaviour are signposts to awareness. But what do we do with this insight into the fundamental block to success? The answer will form part of the content in a video I’ll put up on a web site next month.
Attachment for Greenfaucet by Ag Moderator:
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