1/5 I don't often share personal insights - I want my work to be more about you than me, but thought this could help some of you.

Wishes/illusions can often hide in plain sight. That's what makes them so hard to combat. For me, they were a bigger issue years ago, causing... 2/5 overconfidence and emotional instability. Nowadays it's a smaller prob - I get ahead of myself, hindsight bias creeps in as I think unproductively about a past mistake, or as I realized today it shows up when my discipline is poor and I'll feel stuck and have a harder time...

Some of you are too optimistic going into this week when you need a sober dose of reality about what you're facing.

Don't think that just because you made progress last week that WILL happen this week. If you expect progress to continue, you're telling your mind it's ok to relax Be prepared to face the challenges that are likely to come your way today and throughout the week.

Don't be surprised if your mental game gets worse before it gets better. Once you start looking more closely, you might find the problems in your mental game are worse or more complex than you had originally thought. Essentially you’ve ripped off the bandage to get a look at the injury, and it’s not pretty. While the truth can hurt, at least now you know what you’re dealing with, and can plan how to proceed. At least now you're not in the dark about why you've been underperforming.

The biggest mental game mistake that I see isn’t tilt, fear or overconfidence. It's the faulty way that traders, poker players, athlete’s, etc view their problems. The problem isn't FOMO, fear of failing, hatred of losing, overconfidence, boredom, distractibility, you name it. All of those problems are symptoms or signals of the real problem which are the underlying flaws, biases, wishes, or illusions that exist in the recesses of our mind - or our unconscious. In the trading book I talk about over 30 of such flaws, generally they include...

A quick thread for those working through the book and have done your first Mental Hand History in Chapter 3.

REALLY IMPORTANT: Your answers to steps 2 or 3 can't include anything that suggests the reason you have the problem/emotion is irrational or illogical. Here's an example I got from from @ReidSeosamh

Injustice Tilt, aka hating bad luck or raging against neg variance often happens for two reasons, and that's not bc you're cursed, the poker gods are out to get you or the market has it out for you. There are practical reasons you FEEL this way & those reasons are based on a flaw 1) You expect to win so when you do win you don't notice it as much. Why would you, it was expected. Then when you lose your emotions are higher bc losing was unexpected, and that intense emotion makes a stronger impression in your mind. So you remember losses more than wins.

While high expectations are often used for motivation, they're a double-edged sword causing self-inflicted damage to confidence. Which increases emotional volatility, causes big mistakes, slows progress, leads to dissatisfaction and burnout, and ultimately strains motivation. There is another way, and that doesn't mean lowering your expectations. THAT COMMON way of dealing with high expectation is not a solution for people driven to excel at a high level, or the highest level. Instead you need to change the game entirely.