Skip to main content

Understanding the Nature of the Mental Environment

Anything that goes on or that happens on the inside of you would constitute your mental environment; all your experiences and memories of those experiences, all your beliefs, all the emotional energy attached to those beliefs, all your feelings, needs, wants, expectations, and goals, and all your thoughts, regardless of whether or not you have expressed these thoughts into the environment, make up your mental landscape.

Positively Charged Emotions: Love, happiness, joy, confidence, peace, acceptance
Negatively Charged Emotions: Fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, disappointment, confusion, impatience, stress, anxiety, betrayal
Illusions: Denials, rationalizations, intellectualizations, distortions
Beliefs
Intents: Goals, aspirations
Expectations: Wants, desires, demands Needs Dreams: Sleeping dreams, daydreams
Thoughts Attractions Memories Creativity Intuition

WHAT EXACTLY IS THE MENTAL (INNER) ENVIRONMENT?  

Beliefs are formed and meanings get attached. The mental environment is where our experiences of the outside world form into a complex belief structure about the nature of the physical environment and our relationship with it.

There are two things that I want you to note about this definition. First, it is limited, because it doesn't take into account mental activities that generate from within, exclusive of outside sensory information. This is something I will expand on later. Second, I am not including the brain as part of the mental environment, even though the activity of the mental environment takes place inside of the brain. (Why I am not including it will become clear in a moment.)

One of the first characteristics you may notice about the mental components listed is that they are all intangible. You can't see, hear, touch, taste, or smell them, at least not as they exist in the mental environment. For example, no surgeon operating on living brain tissue has ever encountered his patient's beliefs, thoughts, dreams, or memories, even though he knew they were in there somewhere. Biochemists have discovered DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) while working at the molecular level of tissue make-up and as of yet have not encountered one of the mental components listed earlier. Yet we know they exist because we can experience the results of someone's beliefs or thoughts as they are expressed outwardly in the physical environment through their behavior.   

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Maximizing Your Profits with Scoring

SETTING YOUR MAXIMUM INTRADAY TRADING LOSS First things first: set a max intraday trading loss. There will be days when you just do not have it. Why do you think coaches pull their players when they are not playing well? They are more harmful on the field than off. When you are underperforming, you are hurting your team and your trading business. You need a system to yank yourself over to the bench. A stop loss is your answer. TRADING BASED UPON THE TIME OF DAY A good trader makes note of what time of day it is, when he trades most profitably, and adjusts his trading to fit such times. Your numbers at the end of the month will not reflect your true trading potential. Make the most trades with the most size during the trading periods that statistically are most profitable for you. Money saved during your weaker trading periods is money earned. Consistency The fact is that most trades you make will start working for you right away. But the new traders also hold stocks that are trading ag...

CAN A FIRM ALWAYS SPOT THE NEXT GREAT TRADER?

 No. But a prop firm can tell who has a poor chance to become a CPT. To be good at anything will take everything you have. Not having developed the skills to work hard is a turn-off. Trading is a skill learned by doing, not just by reading a lot, theorizing, or the faux art of “paper trading.” THE PROS AND CONS OF RECRUITING EXPERIENCED TRADERS Loyalty is a good thing to a point, but it cannot trump logistics and reality. losing money should really bother you. If I am negative three days in a row, I spend a long evening on my couch with a bottle of red wine and comfort food. As traders, we can all recite the memorable line from Wall Street: “A man looks in the abyss, there is nothing staring back at him. At that moment he discovers his character. That keeps the man out of the abyss.”  Traders don’t talk about how they want to trade, what they want to read about trading, or how they wish they could talk about trading. Traders trade, read about trading, and talk about trading.

How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard. This is an inversion of the 3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it dif icult. If you find yourself continually struggling to follow through on your plans, then you can take a page from Victor Hugo and make your bad habits more difficult by creating what psychologists call a commitment device. A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones. When Victor Hugo shut his clothes away so he could focus on writing, he was creating a commitment device. There are many ways to create a commitment device. You can reduce overeating by purchasing food in individual packages rather than in bulk size. You can voluntarily ask to be added to the banned list at casinos and online poker sites to prevent future gambling sprees. I’ve even heard of athletes who have to “mak...