The subconscious software

Have you noticed that for some reason people keep running the same laps over and over? Have you noticed that you do it too?

When we say we are on track, we mean that we are now heading in the right direction and cannot be diverted. That is exactly what rails are for: they lead towards the destination. I have never seen a tram drift or a train take a sharp corner. Rails determine the path - both when we see that as a good thing and when we see it as a bad one.

Water flows in the pipe. The pipe determines the direction: the water does not go this way and that, it goes where the pipe takes it, regardless of what we think about it. Rails are rails, and a pipe is a pipe.

Being on rails, being in a pipe, being on a road, being in a track: all of it sounds rather bad when, despite all our efforts, we keep returning to the starting point, keep failing, or end up in the usual situation even in the face of favourable signs and even favourable events.

When we feel trapped

Someone who makes terrible efforts to get ahead and does not manage it over a long stretch of time becomes prone to feeling trapped, and blames it on fate, on being cursed, on bad luck. It is very hard to look at our own thinking, our emotional patterns, our behaviour and our typical decisions with a clear head - and to notice that we have patterns at all.

Until we can break these covered, hidden patterns, we cannot achieve change in our lives.

The patterns that determine our lives are the subconscious itself - the non-conscious software running here without our knowledge - and they really do influence us the way program code influences, say, an operating system.

Why does this affect traders more?

In my own experience enlightened buddhas are relatively rare among traders, so almost everyone who sits down in front of a monitor to make money comes up against the patterns that, hidden in the subconscious, drive not only their behaviour but their emotions, their thinking and their decisions, keeping their life inside a frame.

A trader is exposed to the hidden influence in their own mind to a greater degree, because trading is extremely intense: it is like life compressed, with a great deal of stress, loss, forced decisions and, at times, serious emotional storms. That is the drawback of trading, but it is also its advantage. A drawback, because great opportunities evaporate because of our patterns; an advantage, because within days we see ourselves as we would otherwise only see after looking back over years or decades, and that gives us a chance to notice subconscious programs that would otherwise be extremely hard to discover.