Last night’s post resulted in a bit of chastisement directed at me for calling myself an idiot and this brings up a fundamental difference between? the Trader Psyches/Psych Cap approach and that of cognitive-behavioral psychology, the best selling The Secret and most other popular theories about psychology.

Language DOES NOT make reality. Language DOES NOT change how you feel. You feel how you feel and that influences your language.

Want the absolute quickest way to work through a negative feeling? Verbalize it! Put it out there in full-view – for yourself (and even others if you care to). This works because feelings are the foundation of our existence, we can’t decide what to wear in the morning without them and there is no point in wasting energy on trying to change them using JUST language or the intellect. In other words, if it is NLP – it doesn’t work – and I do not care that Tony Robbins is a gazillionaire for espousing the idea that it does work. Don’t believe me? Check this out -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming#NLP_and_science

Trader Psyches #1 mission is to help traders of all sorts make better decisions. The only way to do that is to help them understand the reciprocal role between acting, feeling and thinking …. and then to help them learn how to deal with, manage and even LEVERAGE their emotions.

At the extreme, how are you ever supposed to recognize gut-feel or what is called experiential knowledge if you cut yourself off from your feelings? In the interim to learning this, you have to feel what you feel, use emotion analytics to understand the message and not waste any energy on trying to change how you feel.? When you handle emotions this way, everything – LITERALLY everything – particularly in trading – will take care of itself.