A Self-Help Crash Course for Traders
A large number of traders that I work with express the feeling that they are somehow sabotaging themselves: repeating the same mistakes day after day, giving back valuable profits in a fraction of the time it took to earn them. Their intuition is that there is some kind of pattern to what they’re doing; they’re repeating the same mistakes again and again. They realize that they’re not mentally ill and don’t have a history of out-of-control behavior, so they are understandably confused as to why they can’t stop shooting themselves in the foot.
In this article, I will summarize a few ideas central to brief therapy, a discipline which uses very active techniques to accelerate change processes that might otherwise take months or years. Brief therapies have been subjected to considerable research scrutiny, and the consensus is that they are highly effective in changing emotional and behavioral patterns over a period of weeks, especially among people who do not have chronic, diagnosable mental health problems. A summary of this research, as well as a thorough description of the how-to’s of brief therapies, is included in a text for beginning therapists that I recently co-edited. Applications of brief therapy to trading can be found on my free website and in my book The Psychology of Trading. All of those sources are linked below. This article will focus on ways that traders can serve as their own brief therapists.