Eliminate Distractions And Achieve Flow State

There have been some very hard lessons learned along the way of my trading journey but it wasn’t until I realized that the real success in the markets comes from first working on myself.

In order to become successful, and maintain that success as a trader, the majority of the work needs to be done on yourself before you can makegood, and then excellent, decisions with your money and your life.

Excellent decision making is hard. Good decision making is easier. But poor decision making is the easiest of all.

Trading is a performance-oriented discipline and every great athlete, trader, or performer will occasionally hit performance blocks. Every Olympic contender trained hard physically, but the difference between the ones who made the Olympic team and those who did not was the emphasis put on mental coaching by the winners. Much of a trader’s early education is concentrated on strategies and market analysis. But what are the necessary ingredients for peak performance? What are the tools for both mastering the mental side of the game and busting out of the inevitable slumps that can occur along the way? How does one ultimately get in the groove? There is no better feeling than being in the “flow” — especially with trading.

So, assuming that you have done your daily homework as a trader, the next step is to learn how to get into the groove. There is no better tool for this than having routines and rituals. Pre-market rituals help calm the nerves, get you into a rhythm, and also help to turn off the logical part of your brain– the part that wants to overanalyze everything. If you have a chattering monkey sitting behind your ear, routines and rituals are one of the best things to shut that monkey up. Maybe there is an opening sequence of tasks you do before the market opens. Perhaps in the middle of the day you draw swing charts or take periodic readings of the market’s action. Maybe you keep a journal and make notes to yourself.

Rituals are the main tools used to achieve consistency. However, rituals are not just a tool, they are a lifestyle.

As soon as I wake up, immediately before looking at my phone, any screens, emails, texts, Twitter, charts, news or anything else, that might cause any thoughts, I go straight to meditation.

There is a surprising amount of noise in our minds as we sleep. The activity of dreaming, then switching directly to external feedback, or someone else’s agenda (news, social etc), means that there is no time to switch context from what our subconscious mind was doing while we were sleeping, to the immediate barrage of stimuli.

Meditating immediately after waking can help organize those crazy subliminal suggestions and enables us to better get our thing in order before taking on the day.

Meditation slows the world down for me. I make better decisions and am not bothered by things I can’t control. I don’t meditate on accumulating materialistic things or winning; I meditate on building and developing my skills.

Meditation is a heavily used arsenal in Professional sports. (A trader who doesn’t meditate, shouldn’t be called Professional). There is plenty of scientific evidence to back this up (years of scientific research in the sporting industry).
-You can go to a basketball court and practice shooting for 10mins, shooting 50 baskets.
-You can go and meditate for 10mins in your mind and practice shooting, shooting 500 baskets
or
-You can do both and get greater results.

When you meditate, you speed the process and rewire your brain faster.

I believe meditation has enhanced my open-mindedness, higher-level perspective, equanimity, and creativity. It helps slow things down so that I can act calmly even in the face of chaos, just like a ninja in a street fight.

Ray Dalio

However, everything in life has a certain dosage before you see any changes.

-100 degrees before water starts boiling.

-150km/h before the plane start to fly.

-20Hz before you hear any sound.

-17degrees before a seed will germinate.

-100rpm before you generate electricity.

-500mg before penicillin will kill the bacteria.

-100baskets daily before you become a proficient basketball shooter.

If you fall below the dose, it falls apart.
If you are not meeting the dosage, you are wasting your time and energy.

So, let’s take a moment to notice what happened in our meditation practice. Whenever your mind was focused exclusively under breath, you were present. Of course, being human, your mind drifted into thought, as soon as you regained awareness you gently came back to your anchor, returning to the present moment. This was like a training exercise, helping you stay fully engaged and focused. The very state you need to tap into for peak performance. Stress is going naturally arise in many performances, but the more calm and clear we are the more mentally agile we become.

Another way, like the basketball analogy, would be to meditate practicing trading scenarios in your mind before trading. For example, I would picture in my mind the worst-case trading scenario and how I would behave/keep cool under the pressure. I would imagine the decisions I would make beforehand.

Mindfulness helps to stay in the present moment and stay on task, which offers this steadiness of mind. This allows us to stay in the eye of the hurricane and still see the blue sky and the sun right in the middle of the hurricane. In the middle of chaos (markets), you can be still and connect with the silence that invites the conditions for flow.

Whatever there is in your ritual list (good night’s rest, meditation, stretching, breathing exercise, healthy breakfast, workout, high-quality coffee, keeping a journal, book reading, etc.)

Your goal should be flow.

What is a general definition of “flow”?

Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness, a state where you feel youbest and perform your best. More specifically, the term refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption, when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Your sense of time distorts (either, typically, speeds up; or, occasionally, slows down). And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.

People with the most flow in their lives are action and adventure sports athletes (who routinely and loudly proclaim that without flow they cannot do their jobs), members of Special Forces (who feel the same), and artists.

Flow states have triggers or pre-conditions that lead to more flow. Essentially, flow can only arise when all of our attention is focused in the present moment, so that’s what these triggers do — they drive attention into the here and now. Put differently, these triggers are the very things that evolution shaped our brain to pay the most attention to, so, in using these triggers to hack flow, we’re really just using evolutionary biology to our advantage.

How do you drive focus in the present moment? One of the big ways you do it is by the release of dopamine. There are 5 flow triggers (dopamine triggers): 1) Risk, 2) whenever we encounter novelty, 3) complexity, 4) unpredictability and so does 5) pattern recognition which is the linking of ideas together.

So the next time you sit down at the computer to work, all notifications should be completely removed: no ringers, no pop-ups, all sounds turned off/muted. Your phone goes on Do Not Disturb. Interruptions from Instagram, Twitter, texts, and calls can crush your productivity. The reason is context switching. Anytime you respond to a message, call, or notification you have to refocus your attention. This refocusing costs brain power and precious time and also lose your focus in the present moment thus “flow” fly away.

Originally published at www.trading-manifesto.com