How This Trader Learned To Change His Self-Sabotaging Habits
Apr 20, 2025
Last Week’s Emotional Mastery for High-Performance Trading Webinars Were a Huge Success!
A big thank-you to all the traders who showed up and played full out with the determination to resolve their trading challenges! You playing full out made these sessions so powerful.
Because you brought your A-game, many of you started breaking through those persistent old trading challenges and brought in new better habits!
Here's to continued growth and mastery on your trading journey!
Trader Story From Last Week's Webinar: Why This Trader Couldn’t Take His Loss—Even When He Knew He Must!
During the webinar I worked with a trader to uncover why he couldn’t close a losing trade - even after his exit strategy was clearly triggered and he knew there was no recovery in sight.
Logically, he understood it was time to exit. But emotionally, he felt stuck—hoping, resisting, frozen. Together, we got to the root of what was really going on beneath the surface, and that’s when the mindset shift began.
The Slippery Slope of a Profitable Trade Turned Emotional Trap
In the 5-minute Dow Jones chart (see screenshot), this trader nailed the long entry - perfect timing, strong profit early on. But when price pulled back, he convinced himself it was just a retracement and the uptrend would resume.
Despite knowing Jesse Livermore’s golden rule - “Never average into a losing position” - he added to the trade. The market kept selling off, but he clung to his bullish bias. He began shifting his stop loss... and then removed it entirely
That was the moment things started to unravel!
Price flushed downward. He was now deep in a losing position - logically knowing he had to exit, but emotionally he couldn't get himself to do what he knew he had to. In his mind the loss had grown too big to accept, so he held on, hoping for a miracle bounce where he could maybe get out break-even.
But as we all have learned at some stage in our trading career - hope doesn't help!
Eventually, the emotional pain of holding the loss outweighed the fear of closing it. That’s when he finally exited.
This is the kind of self-sabotage that happens not from lack of knowledge—but from old conditioned emotional patterns. Recognizing it is the first step. Reprogramming it? That’s where the real journey to mastery begins!
How I Helped This Trader Starting To Overcome This Self-Sabotaging Behavior
1. We Identified The Core Emotional Drivers
He didn’t break his rules because he didn’t know them. He broke them because of what was driving him underneath:
- The break of his support area caught him by surprise and the move was so fast, that his mind completely froze!
- Every time he thought of closing the trade, the fear that the trade would turn the moment he took the loss and skyrockets leaving him behind in the dust kicked in!
- He started praying: Please turn around! If it turns around this time and I will get out break even, I promise I will be good next time and always take my losses! [Of course, it's empty promise as long as the root cause of this behaviour has not been resolved!]
- On the surface level he wanted to avoid the emotional pain of taking the loss. But what was underneath was that loss felt shameful for him.
- Through guided coaching, I helped him bring to the surface the exact emotions, thoughts, and even past experiences fuelling this self-sabotaging behavior.
2. Interrupt and Rewire the Pattern
Once the emotional triggers are clear, we started reprogramming his mind:
- Identifying ways to deal with unexpected market moves: we worked through different scenarios how he used to get caught by surprise and consequently froze in the past and practiced several new ways of how he could respond with the situation from a place of empowerment!
- Reprogramming his automatic thoughts: Instead of allowing his mind to entertain thoughts his trade turning around without him, I helped him redirect his focus to what truly matters: What does the price action tell you and what is your risk management! Always focus on protecting the goose that lays your golden eggs, aka your capital!
- Somatic anchoring: helping him to build emotional safety around taking losses
- And then we added lots of Mental rehearsal of rule-following scenarios to retrain the brain
I hope you find this newsletter helpful for your own trading journey.
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