Janice Dorn, MD, PhD
Neuropsychological Trading Coach
Janice Dorn, M.D., Ph.D., has been a full-time futures trader since 1994. Doctor Janice holds an M.D. in psychiatry and is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in general psychiatry and addiction psychiatry. She holds a Ph.D. in brain anatomy. A graduate of Coach University, she is a pioneer market psychiatrist and financial neurobehaviorist. Doctor Janice has written over 500 articles on the financial markets and coached over 600 traders worldwide. She is the Global Risk Strategist for Ingenieux Wealth Management Group, Sydney, Australia.
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The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. Happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy…H.H. The Dalai Lama
It is time to free yourself from the grasping, ravenous rat brain that wants to keep your full potential fettered for life. It is time to start letting go of attachment to outcome and learning to be fully present in the moment. It is time to begin cultivating a state of happiness and internal well-being. This will not only extend and enhance your life, but it will teach you the most important lessons about trading and investing.
Cultivating this inner calm and tranquility is easier said than done because we are all addicts of one sort or another. We need to check into Rat Brain Rehab to explore, understand, rewire and recover from the addictions that have plagued us since childhood. We all know about addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling or sex. However, the addictions that plague most of us run much deeper, and are so far hidden we can hardly recognize them. The rat brain fools us into thinking that how we behave is in our best interests because it will bring us money, power, fame and control over our lives. However by behaving as such, we grow addicted to anger, worry, greed, regret and the entire panoply of emotions.
The basic premise of this series on Emotion in Motion is that each of us has the potential to maintain a state of happiness that is resilient and immense. I am not talking about an ersatz Pollyanna attitude, always seeing the world through rose-colored glasses and drowning in the waters of self-deception. I am referring to a much larger state of internal well-being that buffers every situation that life presents to you.
This is the state of being happy. This state knows, understands and absorbs everything that happens in your day-to-day life. It's large enough to allow for heartbreak and regret, alongside love and gratitude. Indeed, it is only by living through a series of agreeable and disagreeable situations that we come closer to attaining inner peace. In trading, it is only through fully experiencing profits and losses that we learn to absorb these into the greater matrix of what it truly means to be a trader. This is our profession, and we are doing something that we love and are passionate about. Bad stuff happens. Good stuff happens. It's the nature of the job we love.
We owe it to ourselves and others to move forward within this state of serenity, but how do we work to achieve this seemingly-daunting task?
The first step in the twelve-step program of rat brain rehab is to take a radically honest look at ourselves in order to determine what is making us so miserable. We all know how to make ourselves completely unhappy. Just think about all the times in the past week when you were complaining to others or actually feeling physically ill about something you did in a trade or in life. Trying to understand the root of this behavior is the first step in eliminating it. If we look deeply enough, we are likely to find that the root of our unhappiness in these situations is that we have been disrespectful to ourselves.
"Hating" on ourselves, putting ourselves down or just knowing and feeling that we are not good enough and will never be good enough means that our rat brains have us exactly where they wants us. We are stuck in the endless cycle of self-pity; feeling awful; doing or saying something to ourselves or others that seems to bring relief but actually causes more pain; then feeling even worse about ourselves because of what we've said or done that has hurt us or someone else; getting angrier and down on ourselves; repeating the same or another hurtful behavior in order to try to get rid of the pain; continuing to spiral downward until we hate ourselves more succeeding in hurting ourselves and those we love to the point where we wonder if there is any way out.
This cycle of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results plays out in our lives and in our trading. It causes losses to mount as we push harder and harder to try to free ourselves from the inner pain we are feeling. This is pure insanity–both in living and trading.
How do we break this vicious cycle? The first step is to stop taking ourselves so seriously. We are not "all that" and we need to totally and completely get over ourselves. We begin by showing love, compassion and unconditional positive regard to ourselves. We do that quite easily with others, and now we must begin to do the same with ourselves.
We must begin–slowly, gently and with deepest sincerity–to gather the courage to be gentle and kind to ourselves. For many of us, this is an entirely new feeling and may take many months before it begins to kick in and we start to accept ourselves with all of the twists and turns of our personality and our authentic self.
This is the first step into true happiness – becoming real and accepting ourselves for exactly who we are. This is the first step to becoming a great trader–accepting our trades for exactly what they are. We did our best. We are learning. We are allowing everything to happen to us and both accepting it and learning from it. We are becoming human beings and traders who know that no feeling is final. It just doesn't get any better than that!
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?...Albert Camus
Until Next Time,
Good Trading and Brain On!
Janice Dorn, M.D., Ph.D.
janice@thetradingdoctor.com
P.S.—Take a sneak peek at my new book, Personal Responsibility: The Power of You, published in January, 2008, at www.personalresponsibilitybook.com.
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