The Challenge of Changing Yourself

Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D.

www.brettsteenbarger.com

The following is an excerpt from The Psychology of Trading (Wiley, 2003).

The intensity and the repetition of change efforts are directly responsible for their ultimate success. The new, constructive patterns that are likely to stick are the ones that have become associated with highly distinctive states of mind and that have been overlearned. Conditioning new patterns to a distinctive state of mind makes it easier to summon those patterns any time you reenter that state. This connection becomes internalized most readily when it has been rehearsed intensively. It is rare that insight alone will create change; more often, doing things differently allows you to make the change part of your ongoing repertoire. The greatest challenge to changing yourself as a trader is also the greatest challenge to change in therapy. It is relatively easy to initiate change, but it is far more difficult to sustain it. Without consolidation, people are likely to relapse into their habit patterns. An essential ingredient in change is to repeat a desired pattern again and again in the same way, at the same time, in the same situations on every occasion that presents itself. At first, enacting the new behaviors will require conscious effort. With repetition, however, the behavior becomes automatic, an internalized part of the self.

Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY and a daily trader of the stock index futures markets. He is the author of The Psychology of Trading (Wiley, 2003) and coeditor of the forthcoming The Art and Science of the Brief Psychotherapies (American Psychiatric Press, 2004). Many of his articles on trading psychology and daily trading strategies are archived at his website, www.brettsteenbarger.com.