 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about performance anxiety. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. All right, let's jump into this discussion about performance anxiety. Trading is such a different animal because we all trade because we want to make money. That's the ultimate goal, but the problem is the more you focus on making money, the more it works against you in your trading. We can relate this to things outside of trading as well. Think about if you're playing football. Think about if you're the quarterback, you're playing football, you get up to the line, you're getting ready to take the snap. You are in the game. You need to be focused on what's going around you and making decisions and cognitive perceptions about what's going on around you. But what if you go up to take the snap? And what you're thinking about is what your passing statistics are or how many interceptions you've thrown this year or how many touchdowns you want to throw this year. What do you think is going to happen once that ball is snapped? Well, you haven't been reading the defense because you've been thinking about your own personal statistics. You haven't been thinking about the play and the reads of the different coverages and the receivers that you need to hit and all the different things that you need to be focusing on. You're focusing on performance and the same thing applies to trading. If we are in our zone or supposed to be in our zone, we're actually in the market in our platform taking trades and yet we're thinking about what our profits should be or what our performance should be at the end of the year. What do you think that does to our decision-making process while we are in a trade? Well, of course, it has a negative impact. You're not making the same decisions based on being in the flow of the market and focusing on your process and your discipline of trading. You're focused on your performance and that works against you in your trading. And I've realized this has such an impact on my trading that, for example, when I'm day trading, I don't even watch my P&L. If I'm in a trade, I have my platform set up so that I cannot see what my P&L is in that specific trade. Because what I realized would happen is if I'm up a lot on that trade, I would have this tendency to want to take it off or flip side of that. If I saw how much I was up, I thought, yeah, but if I can just let it go a little bit longer, I can make even more. Or on the losing side, if I see a red P&L when I'm in a trade, it could cause me to make one of two decisions. Maybe I would take off the trade too early because I didn't want to suffer a bigger loss. Or if I was red on the trade, I would want to stay in it too long because I didn't want to book a loss. I thought the trade might just come back and then I could get out for a profit. All of these scenarios take away from what you should be focusing on, which is your process and your discipline of trading, not the performance of your trades. This performance anxiety, it really takes place any time our thinking about performance interferes with our act of performing. Go back to when you were in school. Go back to when if you were taking a big test and think about if you're worrying about your grade that you're going to get on your test, instead of focusing on figuring out the answers while in the test, while in the process of taking the test, more than likely your performance is going to end up suffering because you're focusing on the performance and you're not focusing on figuring out the problems and actually taking the test. This concept, it relates to so many different areas of our life yet when it comes to trading, we always tend to be focused on the performance, focused on the performance and that's what ends up working against us. This performance anxiety, it can attack you at different aspects of your trading. Sometimes it might be that you're doing really well with your trading, but now you start to take on more risk. You start to take on larger positions or other times you might be in a slump. You might be in a drawdown and you start becoming so concerned about losing that you fail to take good trades and then all of a sudden you start to cut your winning trades too short or you start to hold on to your losers too long and you get into this downward spiral of not following your trading rules. It starts to get you out of the flow of the market. It starts to get you to second guess your rules and your strategy and your methodology. What I've seen traders do over and over and this is from personal experience in the past as well is that when you're making money as a trader, you feel energized. You think the future is bright and you feel good about yourself, but when you hit a string of losing trades, you become consumed with that loss, with those losses. Instead of trading for profits, now you start to trade not to lose and naturally your skills start to diminish automatically. So when this starts to happen, what do you do to get back on track? Well, let me ask you a question because I've heard some traders in a lot of people talk about positive thinking. You've got to think positive. You've got to have positive affirmations. You've got to say these positive thoughts to yourselves because sometimes negativity starts to creep in. So my question is this, when you start to go down this road and you catch yourself in a situation like this, what do you think you need to do? Do you need to think positively or do you need to focus on the negatives to fix those things? Well, if you answered positive, that's incorrect. If you answered focus on the negative, that's also incorrect. The answer is you should not be thinking positively or negatively about your trading because think about this. If you're just using positive thinking, then you're not really addressing the issues that you have with your trading. If you are just sweeping those issues under the rug, eventually that pile of dirt is going to start forming and forming more and more dirt until you have a big mountain of dirt under that rug that's never been dealt with. And on the flip side, if you start having negative thoughts and you start beating yourself up and calling yourself names, then that also is going to interfere with your process of trading. So the key is not to have positive thoughts. The key is not to have negative thoughts. The key is to focus on the actual process of trading, not the outcome, not the performance. And when you do that, the performance will start to take care of itself. Think about this. If you go into a surgeon, you have some type of ailment, they have to perform surgery on you, and what if that expert surgeon that you go to is absorbed in the thoughts about the success or failure of the procedure? What if that's their focus? That would not be an expert surgeon, right? That would not be somebody that I would want to perform surgery on me. I want somebody who's going to have their full concentration devoted to executing the process of that surgery. And therefore, that's going to create the outcome that both the surgeon and myself who's getting the surgery done to, it's going to have that positive outcome if the focus is on the process. And we've talked about this a lot in past episodes, but one of the most useful tools for overcoming performance anxiety is to be keeping your journal, to be keeping your trading journal. We talked about in the last episode, keeping a mindset journal, and then keeping track of those and reading over those, keeping those front of mind and evaluating yourself without positive affirmation thinking that's just going to help you sweep it under the rug, nor negative thinking that's going to beat yourself up. If you track your trading results closely over time, you will know that there are situations where you have these slumps or you have these drawdowns. Now, how long they last or how heavy that drawdown is, you know, you'll start to recognize that. And what will happen over time is that instead of letting a drawdown continue and continue, you'll be able to make the necessary course corrections and minimize those and continue to evaluate and get back on track a lot quicker because what you'll realize it's about focusing on the process, not the performance. I hope this was helpful. If you want to be part of a growing, vibrant community of like-minded traders, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. There's hundreds of folks interacting on a daily basis, not only about the mindset, but sharing trade ideas with the sole purpose of helping each other become better traders. Community.navigationtrading.com. I look forward to seeing you on the inside and I'll see you in the next episode.