Impulse vs Discipline: Why Most Traders Lose the Battle BEFORE They Hit Buy

dr dave bonanno welcome to talking trading i wanted to kick off by asking you for the person listening to this show if they were to take all of the ideas you're about to share with us to heart what changes would they notice in their trading

thanks louise i believe they there really wouldn't be a battle Like, you know, a lot of times when people get advice online or from a guru or an expert or whatever, it's about changing your thoughts.

And then that takes practice and you have to kind of like, oh, yeah, that's right.

I have to be calm or I have to think in terms of probabilities or whatever.

But I think that once you are able to sort of adjust your nervous system, then you wouldn't go into fight or flight and you wouldn't really have the adrenaline.

And it would sort of be like at the end of the session, you would be, oh, man, I guess I didn't really get worked up.

So that's that's hopefully how it would be.

I love that.

And you know the thing, I think sometimes we are our own worst enemy.

It can plague us.

You often say that traders lose the discipline battle long before they put on their first trade even.

So I'd love you to take us through a real-life example of a trader who you've worked with who looked great on paper but was tripped up by impulse.

Sure thing.

So I started with people with PTSD and then my wife's uncle just came to me and he said that he was trading with a prop firm.

And then if he ever did go live, which he did sometimes, then he would just get like a surge of adrenaline, really.

With Uncle Pat, he was too focused on the outcomes.

And I know that it's really hard not to be.

And that's one of the things, of course, I try to get people to do is to really have kind of that laser focus on their own performance.

When money's on the line and when you're thinking a little bit too globally, like this guy was thinking, oh, man, I really want to retire.

And any time he would have a loss, he'd be thinking like, oh, my gosh, I'm never going to retire.

And then I'm not going to be able to please my wife.

And, you know, like this whole cascade of thoughts.

So for him, he was having a little too much of the fight or flight response.

Now you do want to have a certain amount of adrenaline because if you were to plot on a graph performance anxiety, like, you know, you need to have a little bit of adrenaline because if you didn't, then you wouldn't care and you wouldn't be engaged and you wouldn't have the mental energy to do what you got to do.

But if you have too much, then you'll see on the graph that it really starts, the performance starts to go down and, So my theory is that when you go into fight or flight, and of course it's fight, flight, or freeze, your logical brain is actually designed to go offline.