The Fears That Hold You Back From Successful Trading | Podcast Episode #24

0:00
Hey, everybody. This is Ryan Mallory doing another podcast with you this week, and I’m excited to talk about this topic because this is one that’s probably a little bit more personal for me, something that I don’t really talk too much about, but I was thinking about this particular topic, uh, over the last few days, and I thought, you know what, I need to open up a little bit to my audience here and try to, uh, talk about something that might actually be beneficial to you guys as traders.

0:29
So, Let’s go ahead and do that. That, what I want to talk about is the, the fears that keep us from successful trading. And I’m not a psychologist or pretend to be one or anything else, but I do know a lot of the emotions that go into trading and how they can really hold us back. And so, a lot of those are also shaped by our life experiences, right?

0:48
I mean, you know, from, from early childhood, and they can, they can carry into our trading without us really even Consciously knowing that. For me, I think one of the big things early on in my trading that really held me back was the fear of success.

1:03
And you wouldn’t think that people should have a, a fear of succeeding. In fact, everybody should embrace that, but oftentimes you get to the, to the edge of success and you can almost self-sabotage or you almost like start pulling back a little bit to where you don’t even really want to engage the the opportunity of success.

1:22
A lot of times that’ll be ingrained from something early on in in childhood or in our development years. And for me, I think it really came back to when I was in high school. And, uh, one of the things that really plagued me as an athlete in high school was, was football.

1:39
And I was very passionate about football. It was something that, you know, growing up, I had always wanted to be a quarterback, and I would throw the football on a daily basis and I would Practice and practice and practice. Then when I got to high school, and I got to the point to where I’m actually going to be the quarterback of the football team, that was a very exciting time for me.

1:58
I mean, I had these big dreams and, and hopes and maybe even the desire to play college football one day. And just to let you know, I did not play college football, um, much as I would have liked to if I was undersized and definitely not tall enough.

2:13
I was about, I’m 6 ft and I was, I think I was in high school, I weighed about 160. So, uh, I was pretty, pretty thin too. But, We played a very tough schedule that year.

2:29
In fact, I think 10 out of the 11 teams that we played had been ranked in the state’s top 10. Now, if you know anything about Florida high school football, it’s very competitive. A lot of your professional athletes come out of there. And in fact, a number of them that I played in high school ended up going on to play in the NFL. People like Clinton Portis and Sebastian Janikowski.

2:44
So all these were athletes that we played in, uh, high school. So here I am, the quarterback. Yeah, I’m undersized and everything, but I still, you know, like any kid has hopes and dreams for what he might be able to become, and they didn’t pan out that way. In fact, our team was really bad, so bad that we lost every game that year.

3:03
And, uh, we went 0 and 11. And yeah, it was against some tough teams and, but, but we just didn’t win. I mean, I would have thought we could have won one game.

3:23
And then my second to last game, I was, I was, uh, carried off on a stretcher, you know, with a, with a type 2 concussion. So it was a, um, surreal season because it didn’t go the way that I expected it.

3:42
I had basically lost every single game that I had played that year. And not only that, but just I was in a very heavy run offense and that wasn’t really my skill set. And my, my coach wanted me to be the option quarterback for our team.

4:02
And yeah, I was fast, but I wasn’t anything more than just like straight line fast. I couldn’t make, you know, sharp cuts or juke people or anything else. I could just go run from point A to point B very fast, and I did a good job of that, but I wasn’t going to break tackles or, or, uh, be real shifty as I was making moves downfield.

4:23
So it was still very easy to tackle me, and I didn’t have breathtaking speed, but I had decent speed. So, Here I am, you know, 6 ft, 160, 165 pounds, and they wanted me to be an option quarterback. That just wasn’t working.

4:47
I was getting clobbered and everything. I would have been better off doing more like of a run and shoot kind of offense where I was making, you know, quick, quick reads and, and making, making the throws, you know, screens and slants and quick outs. That would have been more adaptive to my particular style of quarterbacking, but that wasn’t to be the case.

5:05
And so, The coach had a different offense. It really didn’t work and I didn’t even throw any touchdowns. I, I threw a few interceptions, but I didn’t throw any touchdowns because every time we got down to the field, he just wanted to start running the ball and it just kept that from, you know, ever coming to, Reality.

5:22
Looking back, it’s, it’s funny how that experience in high school really shaped my outlook on success and how I viewed it, and I had to tackle it head-on because it really did hold me back because I kind of started doubting my ability to be a successful person at anything in life.

5:44
Now, I wasn’t a fearful person because I, I have never had problems of taking calculated risks or chances in life. And I, I, I love doing that, you know, when the, the risk is in my favor. But I was always afraid of the success component.

6:12
And so that that was a big deal for trading because I really didn’t have the confidence to think that I could sustain successful and profitable trading over a very long period of time. But, um, I had to get over that and, and realize that success in the market has really no bearing on what might have happened to me in my life and that I, I can approach trading.

6:36
Without any worries about what I might have been conditioned to think early on in life because the market doesn’t care. The market is going to treat everybody equally, and it’s just about having a strategy and implementing that strategy and following a profitable and winning strategy.

6:52
And so, once I got past that, and once I started realizing that, hey, I don’t have to be a person that draws conclusions between what happened when I was a kid playing football in high school and who I am today as a trader.

7:07
And so, As crazy as it sounds, I’m really not making a big leap to, to say that things that happened in your childhood, like what I just talked about, not winning any football games in high school and, and really not being a successful quarterback, even though I had trained and, and practiced and practiced and practiced to be a, a good quarterback in high school, it didn’t come to fruition.

7:29
And that kind of stuck with me for the years, for, for the years that followed. And anytime I didn’t succeed at something, or if I didn’t get a, a job or I didn’t get an internship, or I didn’t get the grades that I was expecting, it kind of would conjure up these memories from, from high school football.

7:50
And so, it was very easy when I started getting into trading again after, you know, a hiatus from college that I was thinking about my experiences as a, As a high school quarterback.

8:10
And, and so when the trades wouldn’t go my way, or if I would have a really good month, and then the next month I gave back all the profits, I was like, I kind of expected that. And I would even think that sometimes I, I could even sabotage the success that I was experiencing because I just expected to fail and that, that whole mindset kind of took over my trading and allowed me to make bad decisions.

8:31
Now, fast forward to today, is that a problem? No, it hasn’t been a problem in years upon years, if not more than over a decade, you know, where that’s even been, been even something that’s crossed my mind, but I was just, I was thinking about it last night and, uh, I had been thinking about it, Uh, a few weeks earlier and I decided, you know what, I’m gonna talk about that because it’s not really something I’ve ever talked about.

8:56
I’ve never written a blog post on it. And so I think that this is something that can actually be a, a benefit to people to realize that, yeah, there’s things that, that can really shape our attitudes towards success in the stock market.

9:11
And then there’s some things that we can be so fearful of that it can cause us to be paralyzed to take action when the best. Opportunities arise because we’re so afraid of failing that we can’t bring ourselves to take advantage of the success that lies right before us. So they’re two different things.

9:55
I’ve been paralyzed in the past by the, the fear of success, but then there’s others that have the fear of failure, and neither one of those are good because they’ll both burden you heavily as traitors.

10:12
But what I want to tell you is, is that nothing in your path. Should affect you as a trader going forward. You see, the market doesn’t care about that. The market doesn’t care about what has burdened you before, what you might be trained to think from what your parents might have told you, or some of your own personal experiences with money or neglect or failure or success.

10:28
None of those things should play a role in your trading because there’s no relation to that. I could understand if You had gone through a, a, a, a horrible divorce, and you’re worried about that next relationship, yeah, there’s going to be some baggage there. But the, the fears that you’ve dealt with in life, they shouldn’t carry over into your trading because the market gives you a fresh start every day. That’s what’s so cool about the stock market is that every day is a new day. Every day is a new opportunity, and every day is the opportunity to succeed, but you have to be willing to take it and you can’t say, to yourself that you’re not worthy of it or that you’re not capable of succeeding in the market or that you can’t face the difficult failures that, that’ll come along the way in your own trading without having to tie it into something into the past, you don’t have to do that because your trading and your success can be had and it’s, Makes no difference what you’ve gone through in the past or what you’re going through right now. You can still succeed in the stock market, but you have to disassociate the stock market from everything else in your life because it has no bearing. You simply have a strategy, you follow that strategy, and you succeed at that strategy with profits. That’s gonna be pretty much the podcast for today. I’m glad we got to have the discussion and talk about this because I think it was a very good thing for us to talk about. And if you have any questions or want me to even talk to you more about some of the stuff, feel free to email me and, and I’d be more than happy to talk to you. Um, my email is ryan@shareplanner.com and have a great day and evening.