Reprinted from the Summer 1995 Safety in the Market Ticker Tape
In The Importance of Reframing, I talked about reframing the term ‘failure’ so that we regarded it as an opportunity for learning. We will take this concept a stage further now by adopting the viewpoint that every event which occurs in our lives carries with it the potential for personal growth. The process can be diagrammed in the following way.
When we observe ourselves doing something we regard as wrong, as something we would rather not do, that is where we can use Inner Stop. This is a matter of saying to ourselves, “Stop. This is not something I want to do or think or feel.” We are taking control over the situation by exercising our right to choose how we want to handle the event.
Through using Inner Stop, we have created the opportunity to distance ourselves from the unwanted thought, feeling or behaviour by employing Inner Separation. This involves saying to yourself, “this is not me; I am not like this, it is not part of me.”
Self-Remembering comes next as you say to yourself, “I don’t have to be like this. I can be quite different as I was when…” and you deliberately direct your thoughts away to some past event when you behaved, felt or thought quite differently.
Let’s see how this would work out with a particular event. Recently I spent three weeks in the United States. I was teaching courses on achieving change within the compass of a single therapeutic session. Other people on the teaching faculty were great, and the students were so eager to learn that it was a wonderful experience, added to the opportunity I had to dance in Waikiki both on my way to the States and on the way home. I arrived back in Australia feeling really high, totally positive and enthusiastic. Yet virtually everyone I talked to on my return was negative, critical and complaining about all sorts of trivial things. Almost without realising it, I joined in with this chorus of negativity. Then, through self-observation, I saw what I was doing and said “STOP”. I then separated from the negative thoughts and feelings and remembered how I was in the States. By immersing myself in these memories I changed my state, replacing the unwanted critical state with one of positive enthusiasm.
Now for a trading example. You are trading the Smarter Starter Pack and receive an entry signal. However, your two previous entry signals had resulted in you being stopped out at a loss on both occasions. Because of this, you talk yourself out of taking the signal. However, if you made use of the procedure I have outlined above, you would have observed yourself thinking, feeling and behaving in this way. This would have made you conscious of what you were doing. Observing that you were talking yourself out of following your system, you give yourself the opportunity to say “No. I won’t behave like this. If I am going to follow the Smarter Starter Pack system, I have to take every entry signal according to the rules.”
Inner Separation can then take place as you tell yourself something like, “I am not like this, a person who lacks the discipline to follow the system, a person who vacillates and cannot carry through with the course I have set myself.” Self-Remembering then comes to the fore as you recall a trade several months ago in which you followed the Smarter Starter Pack rules automatically and reaped the benefit of a big profit.
This is how the process works but it requires practice, a lot of practice. I remind myself every morning that I am committed to operating this way. I do this because of the enormous benefits it has brought, enabling me to take more control over my life than ever imagined possible. This process comes between you and life, allowing you to take control over many of the events that previously controlled you. Not that you will be able to do this on every occasion. As human beings, we are far from perfect so we must just do the best we can. However, if you realise that you have blindly gone ahead and done something without observing yourself in the manner I have outlined, all is not lost. In your imagination, go back over the events, stopping the negatives, separating from them and remembering a positive event. In this way, you are using the process of ‘remaking the day’ which I described in The Importance of Reframing.
By observing yourself, you create the possibility of replacing negative thoughts and attitudes with ones that are more positive. Another way of doing this is submodalities, a technique I have described in The Success Factor. It is based on the idea that we should not allow our minds to make us feel good or bad in response to any picture that they want to show us. Rather we can use submodalities to control the way we feel. Thus, we can think of a pleasant memory and turn up the brightness of our image to make it even better. Conversely, to make an unpleasant memory inconsequential, we could make the image dimmer, or push it well away into the distance.
Brightness and distance are two submodalities very effective in changing mood states. Others are size, colour, depth, duration, clarity, contrast, movement and speed. You can try these out one at a time so that you might then learn which one or ones work best for you. These may then be combined to achieve even more intense changes. Thus, a pleasant memory might then learn which one or ones work best for you. They may then be combined to achieve even more intense changes. Thus, a pleasant memory might first be seen as a movie rather than a still slide. It could then be pulled closer while, at the same time, it might be made increasingly bright and colourful. Conversely, to make an unpleasant memory inconsequential, you could dim the image or push it well away into the distance.
Using this approach with the trading situation described earlier, you would think of an event when you were stopped out of the market for a loss, then identify a picture in your mind related to this. Perhaps you would see a chart of the SPI with the Point C taken out. As you do so, describe this picture in terms of brightness, size, colour, distance, clarity and movement. Perhaps you might see it as bright, large, colourful, close, clear and still. This is often the way in which people see negative situations, and, by so doing, they are making the unwanted picture extremely powerful.
You then modify each of the submodalities, one at a time, in order to discover which one or ones, when varied, change the way you feel about the problem situation. They might be brightness, size and distance. By turning down the brightness of this picture, making it much smaller, and pushing it well away into the distance, you will be able to reduce the negative influence it is having over your behaviour.
You then develop, in your mind, another picture, one in which you see yourself looking at your very profitable monthly trading statement or a SPI chart showing a successful trade. By making this picture bright, large and close, you invest it with considerable positive power. This you use to replace the previous negative picture.
Like the self-observation procedures outlined earlier, these submodalities techniques will help you not only with your trading but also in many other areas of your life. By manipulation brightness, size and distance, or some other submodalities which you identify as being pertinent to you, you will be able to increase or reduce the power of your thoughts and, by so doing, gain increased control over your life.