Jared Tendler's Blog, page 4

Are You Working as Hard as You Need To?

 

It’s a simple question: Yes or No? 

December is a great time to look back at your year and assess how you’ve done against the goals you set for yourself. The key is to be brutally honest about both the results and the effort you put in. 

If you can’t look yourself in the mirror and say you did everything you possibly could, which means you were as organized, prepared, diligent, open, reflective as you could have been, it’s time to take a colder, honest self-assessment. Sometimes you need a bucket of cold water thrown in your face to face facts.

I’m not offering criticism or trying to damage your confidence. Let go of any frustration or pain you have about this. Consider it a sobriety check. 

Hard work is an easy thing to fudge. You can be very, very busy and not working hard, just making it seem that way. Or you could be working hard but not in the right way. These are easy traps to fall into. 

I also recognize it’s not possible to go a whole year and get it right all the time – I’m not holding anyone to that standard. But there are many of you who continue to look for shortcuts, who don’t prioritize preparation and are looking for an easy way out. You are not willing to be a little confused, and seek comfort too easily.

If I ask myself if I’ve worked hard enough this year, I would say no. I’ve absolutely made progress compared to last year, but the gap is still too large – I for sure can do better. For example, there were too many times this year where I sacrificed sleep when I shouldn’t have, chose easier activities over the hard work, and was sloppy with my diet. Why did I make progress in other areas, but not these? That’s what I’m going to be asking myself over the next few weeks. 

I can do better. I’m sure most of you can do better too. The key is to push yourself to do a truly honest assessment, with openness and humility. If you don’t, you are that much more likely to fall off track.

 

Celebration & Evaluation

Now a sobriety check is not a rebuke. It is meant to inspire honesty, not doom and gloom. I’ve also done a number of things this year that I worked my ass off for and that I’m really proud of – put on around 7 lbs of muscle and am the most functionally strong I’ve been in decades, if ever, and I’ve launched a new program The Mental Game of Trading LIVE, which has been a great way to connect with more traders and challenge me to grow. 

My guess is that you have accomplishments that are worthy of celebration. When making your self assessment you want to look closely at your accomplishments, celebrate them and analyze how you did it. Then put that same analysis on where you fell short.  

Celebrating wins is critical because it gives you a chance to truly recognize your accomplishments and skills, which helps stabilize your confidence. It can also be extremely motivating to acknowledge your results and that can help guide goal-setting for the next year.

Evaluating progress helps you identify where you need to focus your energy and it can help you identify roadblocks that have slowed your progress down.

Some of you are naturally going to want to focus on things you are bad at and analyze where you fell short to the exclusion of celebrating wins. Some of you will do the opposite. Whichever way you naturally lean, do the other thing. It’s the classic case of: if it feels good, you’re doing it wrong. Being uncomfortable while making this assessment is a good thing.

I also think there is value in doing some of that work publicly because it boosts both the celebratory aspect and the accountability for completing it. With that in mind, I invite you to send your wins and progress reports to me on X @jaredtendler and I will share some on the next Office Hours.

 

Preparing for What’s Next

With your 2023 honest self-assessment done, it’s time to prepare for 2024. I recommend starting with the Goals Worksheet (instructions for completing it here) and then updating your A-C Game Analysis.

Remember, none of these tools are meant to be one-and-done. Revisit them regularly to reflect on your progress and set new goals – that’s how you continue moving your Inchworm forward.

And when you are done with the assessment and have started the planning, take some time to recharge if you can. I’ll personally be taking off the last two weeks of December for some well-earned time off. I look forward to reconnecting with all of you in January!

 

 

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When Confidence Takes a Beating

 

Confidence is the foundation of your mental game so it’s important to look out for anything that can weaken it. Ironically, this includes you. Being intensely self-critical can create a vicious cycle when it comes to building and sustaining confidence.

In both The Mental Game of Trading and The Mental Game of Poker I covered a concept called “Beaten Dog Syndrome” that is often connected to fear and anger, but can also affect your confidence.

Here’s how the syndrome typically starts: After being intensely self-critical over a long period of time, you develop a fear of making mistakes because you want to avoid the pain of the criticism. This is akin to a dog that’s regularly beaten by its owner and eventually becomes fearful when its owner enters the room. The dog is on edge and nervous that any wrong move may provoke being hit.

In the same way, when you are harshly self-critical after making mistakes or losing, you develop a fear of losing or looking stupid. You eventually become risk averse, second-guess standard decisions, and take extra precaution to prevent mistakes or losses because you want to avoid  another self-inflicted beating.

The solution to Beaten Dog Syndrome, however, doesn’t begin by trying to correct your fear. Your fear is reasonable. It’s protecting you from pain. You can’t correct it until you first reduce the self-criticism to a reasonable and productive level.

 

Beaten Dog Syndrome and Confidence

There’s a very similar version of Beaten Dog Syndrome that I’ve seen happen with confidence.

If, for example, you regularly go through boom and bust cycles that you can’t seem to break out of, continually have blow-up days seemingly out of nowhere, or repeatedly make “dumb” mistakes that you shouldn’t be making, your confidence takes a hit. The problem can be compounded, however, if you also get down on yourself for not knowing how you’re going to get past these recurring problems.

It’s common to be down, pessimistic, or have less confidence when you are stuck and unable to find answers. But for some of you, these emotions linger and hang around so long, you think they are the actual problem – much like my clients who originally thought a fear of losing or a fear of mistakes was the main problem, only to discover that anger and self-criticism were the real culprit. 

Take a page from my story. For those of you not familiar, I got into mental coaching to solve my own problems choking in big golf tournaments. When I looked around at the existing material on sports and golf psychology, I didn’t find the answers I needed to solve that problem, so in the classic entrepreneurial tale of trying to build a better mousetrap, I studied counseling psychology to find my own answers.

But the first time I choked was not what motivated me to look for answers. Choking once didn’t make me think I had a problem. Of course I wasn’t happy about choking in a US Open qualifier, but I was not fearful that it would happen again. That came a few months later after I choked again in the US Amateur qualifier, and played much worse because of it. That confirmed there was a problem and that’s when I began to look for answers.

But as much as I was unhappy with the situation, I wasn’t trying to change how I felt about my performance. I wanted to understand why I was choking. In the same way, you need to look past your negativity, low confidence, and how you feel about the problems you’re facing in trading, poker or golf, and instead, focus firmly on the problems themselves. Use my system to identify and correct the underlying flaw, whether that be fear, FOMO, greed, Tilt, overconfidence, etc. 

There will be ups and downs. Progress and setbacks. So long as you don’t get down, pessimistic, or have less confidence THAT you’re having to face these problems, you’ll find your way through them faster and with less emotional volatility and preserve the confidence needed to work through those problems. 

I know that’s easier to say than do, but that’s the perspective you’re fighting to acquire.

 

After Making Progress

Here’s the funny thing – after you reduce the fear, FOMO, greed, Tilt, overconfidence, etc., you might still reflexively not feel as confident as you should. Here you are actually making real strides to reduce those problems, and yet you’re still worried about a blow-up, and unsure whether you can handle the next drawdown, downswing, or slump. 

That’s reasonable. Think about it like a professional athlete coming back after suffering an ACL injury – they may not immediately trust the injury is healed, despite what doctors and trainers have told them. 

One approach is to throw yourself into the fire, and, if you reflexively have doubts, repeat an Injecting Logic statement such as “This is old. I’m strong enough to handle it, now let’s prove it.” You’re reminding yourself that the reflex is no longer relevant, you’re strong enough now.

Or, if you are not sure how much stronger you are yet, like the injured athlete still early in their physical rehab, consider scaling down the amount of money you’re risking, or degree of pressure you’d feel at the golf course. 

Slowly test yourself, so you can begin to prove whether the progress is actually there or not. With less on the line, less emotion is triggered and progress has a better chance of showing up. If you’re organized and focused, you can create a cycle that can rapidly build trust that your newfound mental strength, or absence of emotional problems, can hold up under the pressure.

Lastly, be patient with the process. A beaten dog who is put in a loving home still needs time to trust their new owner before their reactions change. 

 

The post When Confidence Takes a Beating appeared first on Jared Tendler.

Why Wait For Black Friday Sale: Save 25% Today

 

If you’re a trader who is stuck repeating the same mistakes again and again, it can be hard to dissect those problems on your own. That’s why I created The Mental Game of Trading LIVE, to bring the benefits of my 1:1 coaching to more of you and at a fraction of the cost.

November is a month of deals and sales (in the U.S. anyway) with Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. I love a good deal as much as the next person and wanted to get in on the fun, but I also want to keep it simple.

You can get 25% off all Quarterly or Annual Memberships to The Mental Game of Trading LIVE with code: LIVE25 (Valid now through Cyber Monday.)

Sign-up today and let’s get to work!

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You Can’t Always Be Your Best

 

Well that’s an inspiring title from a performance coach, huh? I stand by it though – you can’t always be at your best. 

That doesn’t mean you should not aspire to be at your best, and it doesn’t mean you can’t reach that level a high percentage of the time.  

A primary reason you can’t always be your best is because as long as you are motivated and focused on improving, your “best” is a moving target. Plus, making progress has ups and downs that can’t be avoided. This can be a tough fact for some people, especially the (ahem) more competitive among us, to accept.  

A sign to watch for is extreme reactions to good or bad circumstances or results. Do you find it really easy to get ahead of yourself or really down about future prospects? Then this might be a problem for you. Even those who intellectually understand the impossibility deep down may harbor a wish that they can and should be at their best all the time. You can’t, and that’s OK. 

There’s one caveat to this rule – if you have reached a level of performance that works well and you have no aspirations to improve, you can be your best every day. Your task at that point is pretty clear: figure out how to make your day-to-day execution so automated that you can practically do it in your sleep. 

I’d be surprised, however, if the audience spending their free time reading blogs from a performance coach was comfortable with the status quo. You, my friend, want your best to get better and you want to hit your best as often as possible. So what do you do?

 

Reaching Your Peak More Often

First, you can understand the factors that produce peak performance and construct routines that will help you get there.

Next, take a more detailed look at your B-game and map your pattern so you can catch a drop in performance from A-game to B-game as quickly as possible. The sooner you spot it, the sooner you can recover. It doesn’t really matter why you fell into B-game – it could be too much emotion, too little emotion, fatigue, anger, etc.

What matters is that if you catch it and recover, you keep closer to performing at your best more of the time. It requires a real commitment to understanding the factors that pull your mental game down. It’s also critical to better understand your C-game and what’s holding you back from making your current best even better. When C-game is more likely, you need to find ways to suck less. 

For some of you, this desire to be at your best all the time can be particularly hard to crack.  That’s when it’s time to turn to a Mental Hand History. Here’s an example from a trader I worked with several years ago:

 

What’s the problem: I want to have superhuman power that will allow me to maximize profit and eliminate loss from every trade. Why does the problem exist: I have had this illusion for a long time that it was possible to have superhuman abilities, and deep down I must think it’s possible. What is flawed: I have 25 years of life experience to prove that it’s not possible to have such power, and if I continue to think this way, I’m basically a seven-year-old. Look at the chaos this one belief is causing in my life – I’m essentially thinking that I can win the lottery. What if I win it? Will I have anything left, other than money? If I don’t win, then I’ll have neither.  What’s the correction: Since I don’t have superhuman power, the only thing I can do is to do the work necessary to become a skilled trader, and accept that no matter how good I become, I can’t always be at my best and that not all trades will be profitable. What logic confirms that correction: This is the only way to achieve financial freedom through trading. Unless I want to be a lucky fish who wins the lottery, I need to correct this illusion or risk ruining my life.

 

This particular Mental Hand History came on the heels of a good amount of work to help the trader understand that he had this desire to have superhuman powers and that it was the reason he kept having such extreme reactions to losses and was prone to bouts of overconfidence when winning large sums of money.

It may be hard for you to connect to the idea that you are expecting or wishing to have superhuman powers, but when you consider the idea that you can’t always be at your best, what comes to mind? What part of you rejects that idea and what does it believe or wish were true? 

These questions will help you do some digging to uncover what’s at the heart of this problem. Is there a part of you that is denying that reality, wishes it wasn’t true, or believes that it doesn’t actually apply to you? If so, try to explain more about what you are thinking and that will help you get more specific. Then go through the remaining steps to uncover and correct why you’re so attached to the idea of always being at your best. 

 

Send Your Mental Hand History

If this blog hits home and you need some help with your Mental Hand History, take a screenshot and tag me on X (twitter) @jaredtendler. I’ll review a handful in the next Office Hours.

And for the traders out there, check out The Mental Game of Trading LIVE, a coaching and accountability program specifically designed to help you correct flaws and be at your best more often, all at a fraction of the cost of private coaching. 

Even though you can’t always be at your best, you sure as sh*t can be at your worst a lot less.

 

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New Program: The Mental Game of Trading LIVE

I’m excited to introduce The Mental Game of Trading LIVE, a coaching and accountability program hosted on a closed, online platform, where you can pay a fraction of the cost of private coaching, and:

Gain insight on what’s holding you back and learn techniques to correct costly problemsGet live coaching and personalized feedbackAccelerate your progress with an on-demand knowledge base of advice, experiences, examples, and analysisCultivate accountability and momentum in a community of like-minded traders

The program has grown out of a successful beta test I ran this spring and summer.

Actionable Insights into Your Trading Psychology

There are two membership tiers available: Essential Membership and Premium Membership, which is limited to just 100 traders. The core components are:

Weekly Strategy Sessions: In these 60-minute coaching sessions offered 5x/month, Premium Members will join me live while I give personalized advice to break through roadblocks, analyze member-submitted worksheets, and answer questions. Every session is recorded for viewing by all members.Knowledge Base: The easily searchable and content-rich Knowledge Base includes step-by-step instructions, video clips of worksheet feedback, examples, templates, and more. New content will be added regularly.Individual Coaching: To quickly accelerate progress and provide a learning opportunity for the group, I will regularly select members for 15 minutes of individual coaching related to a topical theme.Member Forums: Each membership tier has its own Forum where traders can exchange ideas, get motivated, and hold each other accountable. In addition, I will answer selected questions and/or analyze worksheets in a Weekly Mailbag.

While mental game errors clearly cost you money, it can be hard to commit to the self-reflection, consistency and repetition needed to correct them. For more information on The Mental Game of Trading LIVE, including an inside look at the online platform, click here.

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When Setbacks Strike

 

Setbacks are a common and sometimes unavoidable part of the deal as a trader, poker player, golfer, etc., or when working on your mental game. That doesn’t make them fun. Here you are striving to make progress and something blows up in your face. It can be demoralizing, destroy confidence, and create chaos. 

Some of you react to setbacks by trying to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. You tell yourself, “Today is a new day” and you quickly move forward, attempting to forget what just happened and prove that it won’t happen again. Or you have a stubborn, never say die attitude, that you rely on in these moments. This keeps you positive and motivated, but it may prevent you from being inquisitive about what is causing these bigger setbacks, making them more likely to reoccur.

Of course, sometimes setbacks are hard to avoid. Maybe you’ve been working with a poker, golf or trading coach and you’ve learned a ton of new skills on both the technical and mental side. But then you get sick or go on vacation, and when you get back it seems like those skills are gone and you have to start over.

Or maybe you’re a victim of variance, an unavoidable reality in poker and trading. Variance could impact your short-term results and the financial setback doesn’t reflect the progress you’ve actually made. Instead of being rewarded, you feel punished. While you know variance is part of the game, you’re struggling to maintain a level head. You know you shouldn’t be overly results-oriented, but can’t help yourself, especially with all the work you’ve been putting in lately.

Everyone will go through setbacks of one kind of another. So in some ways the question isn’t, will they happen, but how will you respond when they do? How quickly can you recover in the short-term and carry lessons forward for the long-term, so future setbacks are less severe?

For some of you dealing with setbacks is as hard as it gets mentally and emotionally, especially when it feels like you’re not making any actual progress.  

 

How Could This Happen?

Imagine walking in a dark room where there are literally holes in the floor. Setbacks happen when you fall through one of those holes. If you can’t see the technical, mental, or emotional holes, then you’re going to eventually fall into them, and likely repeatedly. 

This is what happens to a lot of my clients before we start working together. They’re blind to the factors and forces that influence their mental and emotional state, and thus they fall again and again – not understanding why or how to stop it.

Coaching, or the work you do to gain awareness/recognition of your pattern (through data collection, profiling and mapping), metaphorically turns on the lights so you can see the holes in the floor. 

But that doesn’t mean you’ll avoid falling into them. There will still be times when getting tilted or overconfident is blinding, or a lack of energy or focus, for example, leads to a setback. You can see, and in general see better, but you don’t have full command of those problems so you’ll continue to fall.

This phase is often the hardest to deal with because not only are you upset that you’ve had a setback or poor results, but you feel like because you “knew better”, can identify the problems, and you should have been able to stop yourself. 

The reality is that this is still new. You don’t have a complete strategy yet to deal with these problems. You can see them, but you can’t be assured you can avoid them at all times.

Another very common scenario is a setback coming after a period of success and progress. Let’s say you’ve had 2 to 3 weeks, maybe a month, of solid execution, making consistent money, and then all of a sudden, BOOM – one day erases all of it and you feel like everything you’ve just done has been wasted.

In my experience this scenario is most often caused by overconfidence. There’s a tendency to get ahead of yourself, to feel like you are past these problems, that you’ve done all this work and they’re never coming back. 

As one client put it, “I now understand my emotions and am cured.” This is an all too common myth. When knowledge and new skills are developed, they require regular attention. Two weeks, or even a month was just the beginning for this client to correct a long-standing pattern.  Not to mention he was making the common mistake of thinking you can solve your mental game permanently.

There is some good news. A scenario like this is often caused by a new problem. For example, tilt and lack of confidence may have been the original cause of concern, but now overconfidence has taken center stage. In a sense, this is a graduation. You failed forward. Your mental game evolved and you were tripped up for a new reason. Congratulations! You made enough progress for this to happen.

Lastly, some clients often fear a setback and believe that fear causes a setback. When you go through several instances of progress being immediately followed by a setback, you can start to get nervous when you are doing well, fearing a step back will inevitably follow. This isn’t irrational and it makes sense to wonder, “am I causing this? Is my fear causing my own demise?”

Your fear is causing you to not be at your best. That much we can be certain about. But in my experience, people stuck in this pattern either don’t yet have a mental game strategy or they have a strategy but need more proof that it works consistently enough to fully trust it. 

If you don’t have one, you need to develop your own, personalized mental game strategy. Or, if you have a strategy, let your setbacks show you where the holes are that you need to fill and keep at it.

 

What Do You Do After a Setback?

From a coaching perspective, I love a good setback. I know, I know. I sound like a sadist. I don’t want them to happen, but the fact is, the learning and lessons you can have from a setback can be transformational. So when they do happen I look for the insight that can help generate a jump forward.

When problems are particularly big, as they are at these times, it can be easier to see the full nature of what’s going on. Big, dramatic, setbacks give you a lot of information.  

Think of your problems as a volcano – when it erupts, it spews out the data you need to actually understand and solve the problem. In general, the bigger the blow up, the closer you get to the core of the issue. The lava is coming from deep within, because big problems are complicated.  Then it’s up to you to capture all the details of what came out from that blowout, make sense of it and develop a strategy. These big displays of emotion, whether it’s anger, fear, or overconfidence, contain the info you need to get started.

So first and foremost, you need to do a ton of writing to capture the data. It should be data collection on steroids. Second, you have to be on the lookout for overconfidence because it is just such a common problem after you make some progress. Indicators to watch out for are excuses to violate your rules, trading or playing at times that aren’t ideal, and having less motivation for key components of your routine such as study, preparation, or cool-downs.  Suddenly your general mentality is “I’ve got this” and you have a classic, inflated sense of having control over your future results.  

Third, you need a structured way of tracking your progress, whether on a daily or weekly basis, so you can reflect on key questions. What did you do well? What did you learn? What mistakes did you make? What can you do better tomorrow or next week? Take this opportunity to check in with yourself on a regular basis so you can get ahead of small problems that can build into bigger ones.

Setbacks are part of the process so the best you can do is learn enough to avoid what’s avoidable and to recover quickly when it’s not avoidable. 

If you think having additional support would help you, stay tuned for info coming soon about a new program, The Mental Game of Trading LIVE. Registration will be limited, so if you want to access early registration, you can add your name now to this list. Here’s a quote from one of the members of the beta test of this program:

“Jared zoned in on things I probably would never have identified on my own and provided great direction on steps to change emotions, patterns, and habits. I joined the course to become a better trader but now I feel like I’m a better person, husband, and father. This is the best money I’ve spent on self-development in a long time.”  

~ Eric Springer, aspiring full-time Futures & Crypto Trader

 

I find that when clients are in a drawdown, downswing, slump, or really struggling because of mental setbacks, that’s when they most often reach out for help. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can start preparing for the next setback by adopting a different perspective now, so when it happens you already know what to do.

 

The post When Setbacks Strike appeared first on Jared Tendler.

The Mental Game of… Improving Your Mental Game

The path to success is not a linear one. Instead, it’s the “one step forward, two steps back” kind of progress that is frustrating and tiring. Some of you may have seen this trampoline video that’s a great demonstration of what improving your mental game can look like. I’ve also provided, later in this blog, real examples of what mental game improvement looks like from traders in The Mental Game of Trading LIVE program.

And while I don’t want to get too “meta” or overcomplicated, there is definitely a mental game to the process of improvement. Practically speaking, that means your existing flaws can show up, or new ones can pop-up, and complicate your efforts to improve.

For instance, recent progress and good results leads you to get overconfident, which causes you to get too aggressive with your risk management or bankroll management decisions – which you only realize after some outsized losses. Naturally you’re very self-critical for being so blind/dumb, which leads to several more bad days in a row. That creates pessimism, and leaves you fearful and a bit stuck about what to do next.

Cleaning up a mess like this isn’t easy when you’re not prepared. But this reality is a common one, as overconfidence is the most common mistake made after making some progress with the original mental game problems that you started working on. The bigger problem is that overconfidence is hard to spot and so it naturally leads to more emotional ups and downs than is ideal. Your progress is slower, your performance is unstable, and you’re more unclear about what to do next.

To avoid all that, I want to outline for you what the improvement cycle can look like.

 

Stages of Mental Game Improvement

With so many ups and downs being part of the process, it’s important to focus on what improvement actually looks like so you can recognize it along the way. It’s also vital to appreciate your signs of progress so motivation remains intact and confidence stays high. 

Here are the distinct phases you will go through with each particular problem you face:

Step 1: Greater awareness

Step 2: Uncovering the root cause

Step 3: Establishing command/control of emotions in real-time 

Step 4: Resolution (meaning you have crossed the finish line for this particular problem and have graduated to the next set of challenges)

 

Step 1: Greater Awareness

While it may not feel like progress, being able to recognize the early signs that your emotions have been triggered, or that your mental state has dropped, is progress. When I start working with them, most clients are unable to recognize these triggers until after fear, anger, or boredom and distractions have become a big problem. Through data collection and mapping they gain the vision to see the early warning signs before costly mistakes are made. That does not mean they’re able to have firm command or control at all times though, so this stage can be particularly frustrating or confusing since losses and mistakes often continue to occur. Don’t let that deter you. You’re knocking on the door of taking that next step.

 

Step 2: Uncovering the Root

It’s hard to dig out the real cause of your mental game problems. This is the primary reason why clients hire me. When you’re able to put some pieces together and develop new insight, you should feel good about it. It’s a significant accomplishment. It means you will be able to trade or play poker with an understanding of what you’re truly battling against. With this new perspective, a strategy will emerge that will give you an ability to gain command in real-time so you can work towards long-term resolution. The biggest mistake I see at this stage is believing that simply uncovering the root will allow you to automatically win those battles and you don’t need to develop a strategy. That happens in less than 5% of the clients that I work with. Don’t gamble and assume you are in that category.

 

Step 3: Establishing Command/Control of Emotions in Real Time

When you reach this stage there will continue to be ups and downs but, in general, there are far more ups than downs. There are many more days when you are winning the battle to keep your emotions from costing you. You see them early, disrupt momentum, Inject Logic, and are either able to avoid mistakes or make better decisions while facing them head on. Even the frequency with which you need to Inject Logic decreases as these problems show up less and less. The biggest mistake here is getting frustrated that you have to continue to battle. Stay patient.  Achieving resolution takes much longer than many are prepared for.

 

Step 4: Resolution

You finally arrived! Now, automatically, what previously would have triggered FOMO, anger, lack of confidence, boredom, no longer does. This is the real power of my system – your mind is freed up to have the poise, presence, and energy to be at your best. The mistake that typically happens here is not seeing the opportunity created because these problems are gone. You can now take your A-game farther or address other C-game issues because your mental game has evolved.

 

Tracking Progress

To help you avoid mistakes and continue to improve, ask yourself these questions on a regular basis (daily/weekly/monthly):

What progress did you make?How did you do it?What mistakes or lessons did you learn while establishing that progress?

Because examples are often helpful, here are some real examples (with slight edits) of progress from participants of The Mental Game of Trading LIVE: 

 

Example 1

 

What progress did you make? “I am way more calm and relaxed when trading. My results were also better in the last weeks. I am now able to let winning trades go to the target rather than cutting them short (I still have room for improvement, but I don’t chicken out anymore). Never made more than 2-3 R per winning trade before, now I have a few 5-10 R winners under my belt.”

How did you do it? “In a Mental Hand History I discovered the belief ‘I have to be profitable right now’ was flawed and unrealistic and I came up with a new one: ‘Now is the time to learn and deepen what I’ve already learnt, put it into practice and get better over time.’ I drastically reduced my risk per trade and suddenly 90% of my ‘bad emotions’ disappeared. I am now more focused on what’s happening in the market than on my emotions. I am also absolutely ok with losing trades now. Trading is way more fun with this new attitude.”

What mistakes or lessons did you learn while establishing that progress? “I have to do the work (in this case sitting down and writing a Mental Hand History) to change. Some more thoughts: I probably lost touch on this course because suddenly all my problems seemed to disappear. I know that this can not be true so I want to be part of the ‘Mental Game of Trading’ journey again. Am I overconfident now? I am not sure. But I am aware of the possibility and think that’s good because I can take action if overconfidence becomes a new problem for me.”

 

Example 2

 

What progress did you make? “I still don’t have complete control over my emotions in real-time, but I am able to acknowledge them in the moment. Although I do think the severity of my emotions has begun to reduce naturally, without my having to step in, as a result of me filling in my technical knowledge gap.” 

How did you do it? “Soooooooo many Mental Hand Histories. Writing down the thoughts and finding the flaws within those thoughts allowed me to process a lot of emotions, which in turn allowed me to create a map of my emotions. The map has helped me to diagnose my emotional state faster in real-time.” 

What mistakes or lessons did you learn while establishing that progress? “That I just have to start. My first, second and third drafts will probably be sh*t, make 0 sense, and sound like a diary entry, but I just have to start. My real-time-strategies may have no effect on me and I may have to re-draft it several times, but I just have to start it!”

 

Example 3

 

What progress did you make? “I’m more aware of the impact emotions have on my trading. There has been an improvement of my trading across the board and I’m trading better technically and emotionally. I’m no longer afraid of taking a loss and I’m not only focusing on my PnL but rather looking at how I performed on the given day.”

How did you do it? “Mental hand history and the perfectionism worksheet. I also read my A to C-game analysis every day before I start trading. The biggest change came from collecting the data and giving me a chance to understand when and why my emotions start to cause issues in my trading.”

What mistakes or lessons did you learn while establishing that progress? “I have to do the work and be willing to resolve the issues. No one else can or will do it for me. There is no magic pill and I need to work on understanding myself and my triggers – something I have struggled with from day 1 in trading.”

 

***************

 

There’s no substitute for doing the work, which includes understanding and tracking your progress. It matters. 

And for those curious about The Mental Game of Trading LIVE, stay tuned! The feedback from the successful beta test has been very positive and I learned a ton about how to create an experience that will work for you regardless of where you are in your trading journey. I’ll make an announcement in early September about what’s next! To get access to early registration, add your name and email here.

 

The post The Mental Game of… Improving Your Mental Game appeared first on Jared Tendler.

Troubleshooting Your Real-Time Strategy

 

There’s a big difference between controlling emotions and actually correcting the problem. In all my books I talk about the importance of having a real-time strategy to apply in the actual moments when your mental game problems are about to impact your performance. 

As a reminder, or if you’re unfamiliar with the real-time strategy in my system, it consists of four steps:

Step 1: Recognizing that your problems have been triggeredStep 2: Disrupting the momentum of those emotionsStep 3: Injecting LogicStep 4: Using a Strategic Reminder

The real-time strategy is critical but must be developed in the right way or it becomes just another form of emotional suppression, management, or control. In that case it will work in the short term but requires you to constantly be vigilant and on guard because the risk of big mistakes will remain. I want more than that for you.

When done in the right way, your real-time strategy can be transformative. You go from being overrun by emotions to fighting back and gaining the mental stability that allows you to avoid the big mistakes of the past. Importantly, you are actually correcting the cause of your emotions, which makes this experience fundamentally different from controlling them – your emotions actually dissipate vs. getting bottled up.  

Once you develop and crystalize the strategy, you repeatedly apply the correction in the moment immediately after your emotions are triggered. What you are doing is defending against the reaction that already happened to prevent it from snowballing into a bigger problem. And, done right, you are also training your mind at the same time to correct the faulty thinking that got you there in the first place.

I recommend reviewing Chapter 9 of The Mental Game of Trading and/or Chapter 4 of The Mental Game of Poker to gain a fuller understanding of how to create the most effective strategy for you. That said, it can be challenging to do this work on your own so I wanted to flag a few of the most common issues I see with 1:1 clients, readers, and the participants of The Mental Game of Trading LIVE.

 

Thinking Awareness is Enough

Awareness/recognition of your problem is critical. If you don’t know what’s wrong, and can’t see it happening in real-time, how can you fix it? I often talk about the value of recognizing your problem in its earliest stages so you can prevent big blow ups. Awareness is huge, but it’s just the first step. What I hear over and over is “I know what I’m doing wrong, why do I keep doing it again and again?!” The simple answer is that awareness is not a solution. Developing the ability to see your problems emerge in real-time gives you the opportunity to apply a correction. 

Too many people fall for the false impression that because you are aware of the problem you have a deeper understanding of what’s happening. Then they fail to keep working and get to that next level of insight. Keep going. Complete every step and include all of the details. If you half-ass it, the problem will linger and you’ll end up being even more self-critical because you see your problems even more clearly and you’ll continue to make mistakes you thought you had licked

 

Not Using Injecting Logic Correctly 

Correcting your reaction is a combination of having the right logic and ensuring the logic is so clearly defined in your mind that it’s strong enough to stop the pattern in its tracks. Unfortunately, the role of Injecting Logic often gets misunderstood. It is not intended to give you a short-term burst of inspiration and get you thinking differently just in that moment. That’s great if it does, but remember the logic is not only to help stop your pattern quickly but, more importantly, it’s to correct the flaw/bias/illusion that lies under the mistake. 

In order to truly correct the flaw/bias/illusion, your Injecting Logic statement needs to be specific to you and, ideally, in your own words. Too often people use phrases or sentences that sound nice in theory and are technically correct but aren’t really targeting the root cause of your problem. It’s like having a specialized weed killer but using it on the wrong weed.

Another way that people tend to misuse this technique is that they show up unprepared and are not repeatedly applying it throughout the trading or poker session. The logic you are using has to be easily remembered to create the potency needed to crack through the emotion. Like chopping down a tree with an ax, it’s going to take a lot of swings to get the job done. This means you need to use that logic repeatedly and, ideally, as soon as your emotions have been triggered.

Some strong Injecting Logic examples include:

Focus (trading): Trading is a job. Run it like a serious business that demands my best. When the session is over, I can focus on other things. Not now.Overconfidence (poker): It feels like I can take on anyone, but I can’t. Thinking that way is an illusion.Hating to lose (trading): I’ll win some and I’ll lose some—losses are inevitable—but as long as I control my emotions when the losses occur and continue trading within my strategy, I will profit over the long term.

 

Quitting Too Soon

If this is your first attempt at creating a real-time strategy, go test it and see how it works.  Remember, however, one day is not enough data. Do it for at least a week. Make adjustments. Try again. Repeat.

Even if your strategy is the most effective one ever built, the ability to deactivate your triggers rarely happens in a single moment. You are building new neurological pathways, creating a new way of reacting. That will take time. Don’t get frustrated. If you get stuck and find that your Injecting Logic statement isn’t working, review these common reasons and troubleshoot:

The logic wasn’t strong enough in your mind → Study your statement and consider using a voice recording or a form of multimedia.Your level of emotion was stronger than you realized → Revise your map and Inject Logic sooner.The statement wasn’t potent enough → Revise your Mental Hand History.Accumulated emotion flooded your mind → Complete a Mental Hand History on the old emotion.Something new threw you off → Revise your map and complete a new Mental Hand History.

Remember, learning to correct your reaction is where a lot of the hard work in the system lies. 

First you find the flaw. Then you come up with a correction. But to truly change flaws, biases, wishes, and illusions, you must repeat the correction over and over, and over again. You become like professional athletes who spend dedicated and focused time to hone their technique, so it’s strong enough to compete. 

Here you’re learning a technique for the mind. In this way you’re mastering the correction so that it upgrades and permanently corrects the flaw. Once permanently corrected, you’ve reached resolution. The old way of reacting is disabled, and you automatically have the presence of mind needed to perform at your highest level.

Don’t quit. Correcting your problem is worth it. 

 

The post Troubleshooting Your Real-Time Strategy appeared first on Jared Tendler.

Building a Winning Routine

 

Routines matter. The reality is, every day you have to earn your A-game. You can’t expect it. That’s why you need to develop a winning routine.

If you want to reach a high level consistently, preparation is your primary tool. In arenas such as poker and trading, where so many variants that impact your results are external and completely out of your control, strong routines are your opportunity to gain command of internal factors that you can control. While they don’t guarantee that you will perform at your best, they do make it more likely.

Even more importantly, when circumstances line up to make your B and C-game more likely, preparation is what allows you to recover more quickly, an ability critical to maintaining high performance. This is especially true when you’re in a high-pressure situation, such as the World Series of Poker (WSOP), which is going on right now. It’s a torture test of trying to play high-level poker for seven straight weeks with life-changing money on the line. You better believe your routines matter then. 

The truth is, anything you do consistently, whether it’s your intention or not, is a routine. If you drink six beers every night and then go to bed at 2:00am, that’s a routine. I wouldn’t call that a winning routine, but it’s still a routine. 

The key to a winning routine is defining the purpose of the routine in question and then building it out with the right elements. For example, the goal of sleep is to be well-rested and refreshed for the next day of poker, trading, golf, etc. Once you factor in what your morning routine looks like and what time you have to get up, and then account for around eight hours of sleep, you’ll see a winning routine is likely an earlier bedtime and waking up without a hangover.  

When it comes to your Mental Game, I typically focus on four major areas for winning routines:

Daily Overall RoutinePre-Session Warm UpIn-Session/Tournament RoutinePost-Session Cool Down

It’s important to note, however, that changing a routine takes work. It doesn’t happen by magic or overnight. If your routines need improvement, start small. Look for just one thing you can add that can make a slight improvement. Over time you can continue to build and add elements to create the best routines for you.

 

Daily Overall Routine

Your daily routine covers the basics: what and when you eat, exercise, recharge, and sleep.  What do you need to be at your optimal level of energy while trading or playing? Pay attention to how each of these factors influence your state of mind and emotions, then create, and stick to, a routine that gives you the greatest chance of success. Remember, if your optimal routine requires drastic change, it’s OK to build in elements over time. You want to develop a routine that sticks with you long-term, and not something that just falls off like a bandaid usually does.

This is particularly true if you are at a pivotal time, such as the WSOP. If that’s the case, pick just one thing, such as committing to an extra hour of sleep a night.

 

Pre-Session Warm Up

Before you begin trading or playing poker, you need to get your mind ready – much like an athlete readies their body to compete. Without this, you won’t be sharp when you start and are at risk of mistakes or missing opportunities. 

There are a few key elements to include. You want to narrow your focus and remove any potential distractions, then review your decision-making process or actually practice making decisions. Why? Because your decision-making process is akin to the performance feats you see professional athletes display on the field. In the same way they do certain drills to be physically ready, you need your decision-making process to be ready to go.

Your warm-up should also include a strategic element. What is your game plan today on a strategic side? For traders, that sometimes means reviewing overnight sessions, looking at stock screeners or TA levels, and gauging what symbols you are looking for that day. Poker players might be looking at what the game plan is for a particular event, how many bullets you’re going to fire, and what adjustments to make based on table draw. Both traders and poker players should also include a mental game plan to address the problems that are most likely to affect you – such as tilt, boredom, focus – and have Injecting Logic statements and maps present and ready.

 

In-Session/Tournament Routine

Breaks during the day are a critical component of remaining effective and energized.  Tournament players need to remember to use the designated breaks to rest and recover, not burning energy complaining about bad beats.

Traders and cash game players don’t necessarily have predetermined breaks, which means you have to decide when to take them over the course of the day. My best advice here is to not wait until you need it. Find your trend, or key on early warning signs, so you can take a break before your energy nosedives. If you wait until you really need a break, you have waited too long and it will take longer to recover. Take a break a little earlier and you’ll be able to stay at a higher level longer. 

I know, I know. You feel the pressure to stay in it. If you’re not trading or playing you can’t make money. Of course, you don’t want to step away. But fatigue decreases your ability to control your emotions and emotional volatility increases your chances of making a mistake. Calculate the benefits of how regular, 5-10 minute breaks will allow you to perform better and avoid big mistakes, and it’s a no-brainer.  

 

Post-Session Cool Down

What you do after the session or event is all about tomorrow. If you are never going to trade or play poker ever again there’s no reason to cool-down. I assume all of you intend to trade or play poker again, so suck it up, put away the excuses, and do the cool-down, even when you don’t want to. Why? It makes it easier for you to consistently reset and show up the next day refreshed and clearer than you would be otherwise.

If you don’t, the chance you will make the same mistake again goes up and nothing is more frustrating than making the same mistake over and over. Too often people treat recurring problems as isolated incidents. Or, they think because they see it, they will automatically prevent it from happening in future. Not true. Repetitive patterns need to be worked through. If it was simple, it would have been solved already.

Plus, accumulated emotion is a real hidden danger. The importance of being able to get ahead of problems and be proactive cannot be underestimated. Again, this is especially true for our friends currently at the WSOP. Sometimes you don’t know you have a problem until it’s suddenly overwhelming. But when you have emotion from losses, suck-outs, mistakes, the tension of playing against better players, or being in big spots, all of that extra emotion can very easily be a difference maker on whether you play your best or make some big mistakes.

If you are building out your cool-down, there are a number of options but, in general, you want to capture the learning/lessons/mistakes from a strategic/technical/mental standpoint. If you take notes throughout the day, you can build on them or review them like a daily report. Doing something is better than nothing and doing more, if it is not arduous or painful, is even better. It could be 5-10 minutes, or 20-30 minutes.  

On days where there was some significant emotion, the goal is to reduce the chance of that emotion carrying over to the following day. If you have the energy, do a Mental Hand History. At a minimum, do a brain dump, writing out everything in your mind, what happened, what the emotion was, what the trigger was, any other key details of the hand/trade/situation that can easily get lost. Sometimes we rely too much on our memory. As soon as you walk away, details start to disappear. But those details can be the key to solving the problem and minimizing the chance it’s going to happen again.

 

Obviously there are no guarantees that winning routines will translate into winning results, but they definitely increase the probability, and who doesn’t want that?

 

The post Building a Winning Routine appeared first on Jared Tendler.

Surprising Facts About Tilt

Before I launch into a whole blog about Tilt, let’s make sure we’re on the same page as to what I mean. Tilt is essentially a more fun way of saying you have a problem with anger in performance. It’s a term that’s commonly used in poker and I think it should be used everywhere. If you’re going to have a problem with anger, you might as well try to have a little fun with it, right?!

Tilt is a problem because it costs you money. Anger has the power to compel you into making such poor decisions that it’s inexplicable how you could have done something so dumb. Anger blinds you from reason, and you feel justified in taking overly aggressive lines vs. an opponent who is constantly re-raising you, or jumping back into a position after getting stopped out for the second time. The cost of these, and many other mistakes, adds up over time and limits your ability to realize your potential.

When I was picking a theme for this month, I looked back at the blogs from the last two years and discovered I’ve written about a lot of topics, but not Tilt. Honestly, that surprised me given how common of a problem it is. And that got me thinking about what might surprise you about Tilt. So here are some of the most common surprises:

You may have a Tilt problem and have no idea it’s TiltTilt often shows up after making progress or reaching a new levelThere many variations of TiltWinner’s Tilt is not Tilt (This one Tilts me)Anger can make you perform better

I Don’t Have a Tilt Problem

Surprise, surprise…you just might! The truth is some of you have a Tilt problem and don’t realize it because, for you, Tilt doesn’t show up in the way you expect it would. You’re used to seeing people display anger in large, demonstrative ways and since you don’t do that, that must mean you don’t Tilt.

For you, Tilt can show up in the opposite way, a very subtle seething, where irritation or frustration can cause you to shut down – you become distracted, quiet, disinterested, or bored. This is your way of trying to calm down, like taking a pot of water off of a hot stove rather than allowing it to boil over. If you stay in it, so to speak, anger would intensify and cause bigger blow-ups.

If you have struggled to identify what’s holding your mental game back, consider taking another look at Tilt. Don’t automatically rule it out. Broaden your view a bit and re-look at some of the “symptoms” you may have classified in another category.

I’m Doing Too Well to Tilt

Sometimes Tilt shows up when you are performing really well, which can be baffling. Let’s say you’ve made progress on any number of mental game issues such as fear, confidence, or discipline. As your performance rises, your standards and expectations also rise. The desire to hit the next target becomes even stronger. Suddenly every misstep, mistake, or loss feels like a step backward and you get angry trying to defend your position. When you’ve seen meaningful progress, your tolerance for mistakes can go down. Deep down you hate the idea of regressing and going back to the mistakes of the past, and that can cause you to tilt.

Another one to watch out for is Entitlement Tilt, which is caused by a belief that your prior work, knowledge, and experience means that you deserve to win. In other words, you’ve become overconfident. Which isn’t unreasonable, given how well you’re doing. You’ve just inflated what doing well means about your ability to capitalize on present and future opportunities. This overconfidence is hard to see, so many of my clients don’t see it until it comes out as anger when they lose.

The good thing is that you’re factually doing better than you ever have before. You’ve graduated to your next mental game problem and it happens to be Tilt.

So Many Ways to Tilt

When I wrote The Mental Game of Poker, I identified seven different types of tilt:

Run Bad TiltHate-losing TiltInjustice TiltMistake TiltRevenge TiltEntitlement TiltDesperation Tilt

In The Mental Game of Trading I took the first and last out of that list to narrow it down to five. Run Bad Tilt is really not a separate type of Tilt, because the anger you feel when in a drawdown or downswing is a consequence of a large amount of Tilt-inducing triggers happening in such a short amount of time that your mind can’t recover. So Tilt carries over day-over-day, making it easier and easier for you to Tilt. Desperation Tilt is the most severe form of Tilt and it always has a weakness in confidence as the primary cause, so I moved it to the Confidence chapter.

While it may feel overwhelming to see all these variations and recognize yourself in multiple ones, the truth is it simplifies your work because you have a path. That’s why I broke Tilt down into these separate types.

Imagine going to the doctor, feeling quite bad and their diagnosis is that you’re sick. Figuring out specifically what is wrong is key for determining treatment, and the same is true mentally/emotionally. When you can determine the type(s) of Tilt that are affecting your performance, you can better focus your efforts to find a cause and correction. That’s how my books are designed to help.

Winner’s Tilt is Not Tilt

This Tilts me. Especially when someone incorrectly claims that I use the term “Winner’s Tilt.” No one gets angry about winning. Anger comes after the winning stops, but this problem is caused by overconfidence or fear, not anger.

The word Tilt in poker is often overused in such a large way that it becomes useless from a diagnostic perspective. Sometimes Tilt is used to describe any reason that you’d perform less than your best, such as “I have distraction tilt” or “I’m suffering from focus tilt today.” Beware of that trap. When a term becomes so broad as to capture everything, it means nothing. And, frankly, it’s just lazy analysis. Be specific with the problem you are working on, including the terminology, to drive results.

Anger Can Help You Perform

Anger is not all bad. Especially for some people, who rely on anger to perform their best. A common example of this are the poker players or traders who start out the session with their energy being too flat. As a result they make a few mistakes and/or take a few losses, which pisses them off and drives them to focus and play/trade better.

I’d argue in a perfect world this isn’t ideal since they’ve become dependent on anger to perform well, but it does work. So it’s up to them to decide whether or not to make a change.

Next Steps

Here’s where the surprises stop. If Tilt is interfering with your performance, you have to work the system. First up, you need to understand what’s causing it. If you are just getting started, check out my free worksheets. You can’t correct what you can’t see. These worksheets can help you to profile and map your Tilt, so you can clearly see what you’re up against.

If you’ve been here before, go back and re-read the Tilt chapters in my books, update your maps and complete a new Mental Hand History to dig in and figure out what’s causing you to Tilt.

Tilt is costly, but you can put an end to it. While some of you may never completely stop yourself from getting angry, you can at least develop a mental game strategy that stops anger from costing you money and opportunity.

 

The post Surprising Facts About Tilt appeared first on Jared Tendler.