- Evaluate the usefulness of your thoughts
Once you have become aware of your thoughts then ask yourself this question,
‘“how useful are these thoughts for me?”
Evaluate your thinking patterns and the validity of your thoughts. It may be that some of your thoughts you are holding onto are really detrimental to your trading:
“Why do I always lose money?”
“How will I get out of this losing streak?’”
“If only I had let that last trade run to it’s TP.”
Thoughts are invasive, pervasive and managing them can be extremely hard. The reality is that you need to control your thinking before your thinking controls you.
You know if someone said to you, ‘don’t think about a zebra’ for 2 minutes. You know what you would do – think about a zebra.
If someone then said to you, try to not think about a zebra for 5 minutes – you would find it even harder to not think about a zebra!
Suppression is not a great technique for altering your thinking. If you are having to try and suppress your thoughts you will struggle.
Just saying, don’t think about that last losing trade or just get over your losing streak will not be effective in managing your thoughts. They will re-appear. In the same way that just trying to not think about a zebra you will find it popping into your head all the time.
So, let’s look at an alternative approach…