#76 Dr Van Tharp - Avoiding a Victim Mentality in Trading

Narrative for Website

In this episode we spoke with legendary trading psychologist Dr Van K Tharp. Dr Tharp has been coaching traders for almost 4 decades and came to prominence when he was featured in Jack Schwager’s very first Market Wizard’s book back in 1989. As you can imagine, with someone with that level of experience and knowledge, this chat goes beneath the surface of trading and into the inner realms of human performance, touching on areas of 'who we are', 'how we are', and 'how we be’, that are rarely discussed with such depth when talking about trading. 

Some of the themes we would like to emphasise include 

Ø  Our different modalities when engaged in trading, these include a hierarchy of different states.

·       Things happen to me. > Becoming the Victim – Owned and liable to go into tilt.  

·       Things happen by me > Becoming a Non-Victim – Starting to Own Your Results. 

·       Things happen through me. > Awakening and Becoming at One with the Market

·       Being at One with the Market > May fleetingly or periodically be here but it’s impossible to remain here permanently. 

Ø  Science Thinking versus System Thinking:

Science thinking believes we can identify causation, and then use that to identify possible futures. Systems thinking accepts the complexity and uncertainty of the world and holds a light view of possible causation and holds the polarity of trying to identify possible futures, whilst accepting one cannot possibly identify with any high degree of certainty the possible future. 

Ø  Alignments between you and your system, method, or approach. 

The importance of matching approaches to the market, with who and how you are naturally.

Ø  How we hold beliefs about ourselves and how they influence our trading and how our negative emotions hold those beliefs into place. 

Ø  How we store negative beliefs in our body which then drive our decision-making behaviours. 

Ø  How these aspect conspire to put someone into victim mode. 

Ø  Modelling People who do trading well and the key ingredients needed to being able to model these, including being able to align yourself with their Signal, Feeling, Action sequence. 

You can find out more about Dr Van Tharp and his work at the Van Tharp Institute at https://www.vantharp.com

Access to his YouTube channel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/c/vantharp

His Twitter handle is: https://twitter.com/vantharp

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