Skip to main content

Leaving Your Comfort Zone and Entering the Performance Zone

We've all heard about performing "in the zone", that state of being in which we are so absorbed in our activity that we lose self-awareness and awareness of things around us.  This has been called the flow state, and it's been linked to creativity and emotional well-being.  When we perform in the zone, we operate in a different state of mind and body--an altered state of consciousness.  We enter that state as the result of intense, sustained concentration fueled by deep interest.

Therein lies the challenge for traders.  What we do to stay in our comfort zones keeps us out of the performance zone.  We cannot stay in our usual states of mind and hope to be unusually focused and in flow.  Our normal states of mind are not optimal states of mind:  we are too distracted, too self-focused, too broadly aware to be deeply aware.

To be sure, those normal states of mind are useful for normal living.  Broad awareness and high sensitivity to events around us can be useful when we're driving a car or navigating party conversations.  Normal life does not call for immersion and optimal performance, and normal life becomes our norm--what becomes our comfort zone.

We prepare for trading by studying market patterns, and we prepare for trading by writing in journals, creating our plans, and anticipating market scenarios.  Rarely, however, do we prepare for trading by preparing our state of awareness.  If we don't train ourselves to sustain flow states in our preparation, can we really expect to access them in the heat of market activity?

In coming weeks, I will be revisiting biofeedback as a training tool for preparing the day's trading.  The idea is to train ourselves to sustain focused awareness during our market preparation so that we are more likely to achieve that focus during the day's activity.  It may be the case that brain training is the best psychological training of all, enabling us to operate in the zone more consistently and for longer periods of time.  More to come re: this project.

Further Reading:  Three Uses for Biofeedback in Trading
.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Benefits Of Healthy eating Turmeric every day for the body

One teaspoon of turmeric a day to prevent inflammation, accumulation of toxins, pain, and the outbreak of cancer.  Yes, turmeric has been known since 2.5 centuries ago in India, as a plant anti-inflammatory / inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and also have a good detox properties, now proven to prevent Alzheimer's disease and cancer. Turmeric prevents inflammation:  For people who
Post a Comment
Read more

Women and children overboard

It's the  Catch-22  of clinical trials: to protect pregnant women and children from the risks of untested drugs....we don't test drugs adequately for them. In the last few decades , we've been more concerned about the harms of research than of inadequately tested treatments for everyone, in fact. But for "vulnerable populations,"  like pregnant women and children, the default was to exclude them. And just in case any women might be, or might become, pregnant, it was often easier just to exclude us all from trials. It got so bad, that by the late 1990s, the FDA realized regulations and more for pregnant women - and women generally - had to change. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) took action too. And so few drugs had enough safety and efficacy information for children that, even in official circles, children were being called "therapeutic orphans."  Action began on that, too. There is still a long way to go. But this month there was a sign that
Post a Comment
Read more

Not a word was spoken (but many were learned)

Video is often used in the EFL classroom for listening comprehension activities, facilitating discussions and, of course, language work. But how can you exploit silent films without any language in them? Since developing learners' linguistic resources should be our primary goal (well, at least the blogger behind the blog thinks so), here are four suggestions on how language (grammar and vocabulary) can be generated from silent clips. Split-viewing Split-viewing is an information gap activity where the class is split into groups with one group facing the screen and the other with their back to the screen. The ones facing the screen than report on what they have seen - this can be done WHILE as well as AFTER they watch. Alternatively, students who are not watching (the ones sitting with their backs to the screen) can be send out of the classroom and come up with a list of the questions to ask the 'watching group'. This works particularly well with action or crime scenes with
Post a Comment
Read more