Change and Psychology

Posted on April 26, 2007
Tags: Personal development |

I enjoy reading about popular psychology so Babak’s recent post on conscious choices led to a bit of google’ing and then a bit of Amazon’ing and I ended up reading a book by Kevin Hogan called: How to Get Anyone to Say “Yes” in 8 Minutes or Less!

I’ve only just started it but I can already see some useful parallels and insights applicable to trading too. The first chapter talks about change and the differences between the conscious and unconscious mind. Here’s a short excerpt.

Therefore it is critical to evaluate the emotions of the moment or the day and discover if there is a legitimate, rational signal that your brain is relaying to you. Or is the brain simply telling you it is afraid, and the fear is false evidence appearing real (FEAR)? If you decide (consciously) that the mind and body are feeling afraid without good cause for the situation at hand, realize that it will take some significant amount of time to overcome the fear of the situation. It certainly won’t go away in a minute, an hour, or a day.Typically it is necessary to wire in a completely new set of responses to the current situation and fight through fear and negative emotions every day until new levels of comfort can be achieved. One of the great problems of trying to know yourself is that you really can’t completely know yourself. Study after study shows that complete strangers are almost as good at predicting our behavior as we are ourselves. We think we know ourselves but we really don’t know ourselves as well as we would like to. Because of the way the brain works, though, if we don’t like what we see ourselves doing and thinking, we can change. It is a slow process and often difficult, but once change becomes the status quo, it becomes rigid. So select well.