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HOW OUR FEARS FUNCTION TO CREATE THE EXPERIENCE WE ARE TRYING TO AVOID

 Fear (high degree of negatively charged energy) has a profoundly limiting effect on the range of information that we can pay attention to. It causes us to narrow our range of perception to focus our attention on to the object of our fears.

The purpose of fear is to help us avoid those things in the environment we have learned to perceive as threatening. However, when we couple our painful memories with our natural propensity to associate and group environmental components together— instead of avoiding the object of our fears—we will actually create the very experiences we are trying to avoid.

What we focus our attention on in the environment is what we will usually get.

Remember that all fears act on our perception as a warning mechanism to help us avoid what we believe to be threatening. One way to avoid the object of our fears is simply to refuse to acknowledge the existence of threatening information. Another more subtle way that will create some real blind spots in our perception is to focus all our attention on alternative - nonthreatening - information to the exclusion of everything else. These blind spots will exclude whole categories of perceivable information from our awareness, which can result in some disastrous consequences, especially in the trading environment.

Fear causes us to act without a perception of choice. When we are afraid to confront certain categories of market information, it drastically limits the choices that we perceive as available. Cutting a loss isn't a choice if we systematically block from our awareness any information that would indicate that we are in a losing trade. Staying in a winner isn't a choice if we are consumed with the fear that the market is going to take away our money. To prevent these blind spots in our perception, we have to learn to trade without fear. And to trade without fear we need to completely trust ourselves to confront and accept whatever information the market is offering about itself, and we need to be able to trust ourselves to know that we will always act in our best interests without hesitation, regardless of the conditions.
Any endeavor will require some degree of trust. We would find it difficult to cross the street it we didn't trust ourselves to be able to get out of the way of the oncoming traffic. From a psychological perspective, the market environment can wreak just as much havoc in our lives as getting hit by a car. To be successful as traders, we need to believe that we can win with an absence of fear so we can make better assessments of the conditions and perceive more choices. What this means is that we have to do the necessary mental work to release ourselves from anything within us that would cause us to narrow our focus of attention or specifically block certain categories of information from our awareness.

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