Perceiving opportunity and the role of fear.
To grasp the fundamental nature of your own behavior, you will need to understand thoroughly all the effects fear has on your perception of environmental information.
At the most fundamental level, fear will limit your awareness of market information that could clearly indicate those possibilities that are in your favor and those that are not. How could any deep level of insight into the markets behavior ever develop if you’re constantly worried about with the market may do to you and cannot stay focused on the consistency and structure of the market itself. The market can’t do anything to you if you trust yourself to act appropriately under any market condition. Learning this is the key to gaining the level of confidence every trader needs to be successful.
In the larger perspective, fear will reduce the likelihood of you ever developing to the point of making the kinds of distinctions in market behavior when you acquire a vision of the big picture. When you understand how fear operates in your trading and have conquered it, you will be able to see how fear operates in the market as a whole and then be able to anticipate the group’s reaction to certain kinds of information.
Psychological damage is any mental condition that has the potential of generating fear. The negative energy stored in these experiences (that create and support a belief about the threatening nature of the environment) will generate fear to the same extent as the degree of energy stored in the memory.
By learning to release yourself from the pain, you will be reducing the fear and automatically opening yourself up to new awarenesses about the nature of the markets. You will be opening yourself up because fear will not be causing you to narrow your focus of attention. Instead of being focused on pain avoidance, you can be focused on what the markets are telling you. Learning how to release yourself from fear will also free you up to think of creative ways in which you can respond to the new relationships you are perceiving in the markets behavior. As a result, you will be increasing your confidence in the ability to respond appropriately to any given market situation.
h/t Mark Douglas