 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about learning to challenge your defenses. 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, so let's jump into this topic of learning to challenge your defenses. So what do I mean by that? Well, everybody has a defense mechanism built inside it. Every human has that, that's one reason. And it's a good thing. That's one reason that humans have survived as long as they have because they have these natural defense mechanisms. But when it comes to trading, we need to be able to observe those. We need to be able to be aware of those defense mechanisms. And at times we need to be able to challenge those defense mechanisms. So let me give you an example. Let's think about one of the things that is problematic for probably every trader at some point in their trading career and that is revenge trading. Okay, so now what's revenge trading? Well, it's basically if you increase your size or if you trade more aggressively following a loss in an attempt to get that money back all at once or to get that money back much quicker. What happens is that the pain and the frustration of a loss, it leads to kind of an angry defensive response in an effort to get rid of the pain. And what happens is now the trade that you're about to take or the trade that you get in as this revenge trade, it's not about the trading opportunity, right? It's not about the opportunity. It's a defense to keep those feelings of disappointment or loss away from us. Now, for anyone who has found themselves revenge trading before and if you've been trading for any period of time, I'm sure you have revenge traded. Whether you know it or not, you've probably done this. And of course what happens is this often leads to bigger losses, further losses. And it creates a whole new set of consequences. So why is this defense there? Why does that exist inside of us? And really it's because deep down you as a trader, you don't believe that you can tolerate the hurt or the sadness of loss. And as we've talked about in past episodes, it really goes back to your childhood because maybe there was at one point in your life, there was a certain pain that was actually intolerable. But now as an adult, as a trader, you can handle normal losses, but it doesn't necessarily feel that way. The trader, you continue to handle losses in the old kind of childish ways. So the goal is to be able to observe this. The goal is to be able to be aware of this situation when it happens. And this heightened awareness is what will eventually enable you to challenge these defenses and respond to these old column threats, but do it in a new way. When you become aware of these, you wanna kind of think of yourself as standing outside of yourself and looking down on yourself trading. And that's gonna give you a whole new perspective of how to help create changes against these defense mechanisms and how to challenge these defenses. And our goal is to recognize these repetitive negative patterns before they really have an opportunity to infiltrate themselves and play themselves out that create these kind of unhappy or frustrating situations. So what'll happen is you can typically observe a pattern like this starting to emerge and you start to have a feeling that kind of interrupts your trading. You know, if you're in a revenge trade, you might just start feel frustrated or angry or feel tension in some area of your body. So the goal is as soon as you start to notice even a small characteristic of this feeling, you wanna acknowledge it out loud. You wanna say it out loud or you wanna actually write it down is even better. One thing that I have found has really helped me is anytime I have a specific feeling during when I'm trading, I write it down. And that has really helped me become even more and more self-aware about what's going on while I'm trading. And then I can kind of come back in my trade journal and see those different feelings and understand what happened during that trade. And it helps me not do that again during other trades. And this doesn't have to be a revenge trade. It doesn't have to be a frustrating feeling. You know, if you're on a hot streak, if you've won a lot of trades in a row, then you have this, sometimes you get this feeling of euphoria, anything I touch turns to gold kind of feeling. And you have to be aware of that as well because that's a negative when it comes to trading. So as an example, you know, if you find yourself in a revenge trade and you start to get those feelings, you know, one thing you could write down is, you know, I have to get out of the trade. You know, I just took a loss. I feel frustrated or I'm pissed off. I wanna get my money back or whatever it is, just write it down. So we've talked about in past episodes, you know, keeping a trading journal, but the other side of that is keeping a mindset journal. So this is the feelings. These are the things that you think and you feel as you are in or just finishing out trades. The key is to be as detailed as possible. You know, you wanna really dig deep into the feelings and make sure that you are really being honest with yourself. You know, I think even to ourselves sometimes we tend to want to cover up what's really going on. That way we can just kind of sweep it under the rug and not really feel it, not really deal with it. But if you're really honest with yourself and you in detail write down or say out loud these feelings and things that are happening, it's going to bring you that much closer to that awareness that's going to give you the ability to change that in the future. Because what happens is if you don't get that information out of you, what happens is whether you know it or not, you kind of identify with that issue. It's part of you. You know, it's kind of like, what's wrong with me? Why am I doing this? You identify with it. When you say it out loud, when you write it down, what happens is you're describing that pattern. And so that pattern is no longer identified with by you. It's no longer part of you. It's just a pattern. You're getting it out there. It's just a pattern and it's no longer an internal thing. You don't have to identify with that pattern and that's a very powerful thing. And remember, at this point, we're not trying to change the pattern, okay? We're just trying to become aware. We're just trying to become more alert that this pattern is here. But the more you do it, the consistency of you doing it over and over and over again is going to create that situation where now you're just the observer of this pattern, it's not part of you. And then what eventually happens is instead of you going through this and seeing that pattern after the fact or seeing this issue of revenge trading as an example after the fact, you catch yourself before you do it and it never happens. That's where you wanna get to. I think I mentioned in a previous podcast, one of the things that I do is I actually have a timer on my Apple Watch. So it vibrates every 30 minutes. And so every 30 minutes, what I'm doing is I'm reiterating these things in my mind. I have a very specific thing that I had written out and I plan to remind myself. One of them is only trade your rules. My definition of winning is trading my rules. My definition of a trader is not to try to make money. My definition of trading is to follow the rules. And so I repeat that stuff to myself over and over and over and I do it every 30 minutes because what I've found is I did have a day where I was like, yeah, I'm not gonna do the timer thing today. And it's so amazing at the end of the day, I realized, you know what? I just made two trades that were not part of my plan, that I did not follow rules. It was more of a gut feel. And so even after trading for a long time, I've been trading for over 20 years, even at this point, I still have to use mental cues to keep myself from doing things outside of what I know I should be doing. Guys and gals, this trading thing is nothing but a game of self-awareness. So the more that you can be aware of the things that cause you to do what you're doing in your trading, the quicker you're going to become more consistently profitable. Hope this was helpful. If you wanna join our community, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. It's free to join. We've got hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis, not only about the mindset stuff, but sharing trade ideas with the sole purpose of helping each other become better traders. We look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.