Lesson 8. Destructive and Useful Patterns of Behavior

Your behavior pattern plays a tremendous role in binary options trading. The amount of money you can lose or earn on trading mainly depends on that factor.

Overcoming negative traits and emotions allows you to minimize losses. It is difficult to overcome
destructive character traits, but it is not impossible. In the eighth lesson, you will learn how to get rid of bad patterns of behavior and develop new habits.

Lesson Topics:

1. Problematic behavior patterns
2. Replacement of destructive patterns
3. Finding solutions
4. Consciously acting in a new way
5. Developing a success pattern
6. Setting rules and developing new habits

Problematic Behavior Patterns

After some time, keeping a trading journal will become a part of your routine. You will begin to discover more and more new features and patterns in your own actions. Over time, you will learn a lot about yourself and develop an accurate understanding of your behavior patterns during binary options trading.

Most binary options traders do not have even a dozen of different behavioral patterns. There are
patterns of a higher level, which run through all identifiable patterns that occur in many people. It sounds complicated and confusing, but it's important to figure it out.

For example, if your personal problems are caused by deep-rooted fears, then the consequences of
these fears will manifest themselves in all problem patterns. If the statements below correctly
characterize your trading actions, it means that the main pattern that characterizes your trading
behavior is based on fear:

• You make too little investments because of fear of losing money.
• Fear of the unknown prevents you from trying new trading strategies.
• You are missing out on good opportunities because you are afraid to enter the market.

Even if these patterns of behavior seem different to you, they are all actually related to the single main problem you need to solve: your fears.

Replacement of Destructive Patterns

The transition from problem patterns to solution patterns occurs in stages:

1. You identify problematic patterns through self-observation.
2. Elimination of destructive patterns. A trading diary will allow you to determine which situations provoke emotional behavior that harms your trading success. You'll be able to determine what losses problem patterns lead to and there will be a motivation to take countermeasures.
3. Replacing destructive behavior patterns with useful ones. Your attention shifts from identifying problems to solving them. Indeed, this will require mental flexibility and adaptability, but you will succeed with practice.

So which patterns of behavior are useful? Here are some good examples:

• Avoid the market phases that make you feel uncomfortable.
• Trade on the timeframes that bring you profit more often.
• Learn to accept losses as an integral part of any trading strategy.
• Immediately stop trading if you feel that you are acting under the influence of emotions.

The secret to successfully replacing the counterproductive behavior is modification of the destructive pattern. You do not have to alter the entire model to achieve effective changes, it is enough to change individual elements. The whole pattern is determined by the interaction between the conjugate elements.

You have the opportunity to test yourself and practice on a demo account on Pocket Option and other platforms. If you find your trading style to be one-sided as a result of training, which means that you always act in the same way, then you can expand your repertoire through simulators. This way you will learn to react quickly to various market conditions.

Finding Solutions

Imagine this situation: you keep your trading diary in a disciplined manner and have identified a number of destructive patterns, but you can't eliminate them. What should you do in this case?

The so-called solution-oriented therapy is used in psychotherapy, which is a method that involves finding and creating solutions without analyzing a person's past experience. In other words, you need to mainly focus on your abilities and strengths, not on the problems.

Your trading is affected not only by problematic patterns as you can also identify success patterns. You already have the resources needed to find the right solutions on your own, you just need to develop them. Effective change is differentiation, that is, adding new features to old patterns.

Consciously Act in a New Way

Suppose it is obvious from your trading diary that you constantly make the same mistake (for example, enter or exit the market prematurely). First of all, focus on those cases when you did not make this mistake:

• What were the circumstances under which you didn't make a mistake?
• What exactly did you do differently?

The answers to these questions will show you possible patterns of solutions, and you will have the opportunity to consciously respond to them in a different way. You can also set the rules that will help you avoid such trading mistakes.

Destructive patterns are always somehow related to your emotional and physical conditions. Fitness, rest and breathing techniques help in case of problems, enabling you to look at them from a different angle and come up with new solutions.

Developing a Success Pattern

After a problem is discovered and recognized, there is little to do, now you can focus on possible ways to solve it. “If the things you do are ineffective, try doing something else.” This is one of the basic principles of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). It is also applicable in trading. You should focus on the things you do well. Remember your most successful transactions and determine what exactly resulted in success in certain situations.

To do this, it is important to keep a trading journal which will allow you to closely monitor what you have been doing throughout the day. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What went well today?
• What did I do right?
• What worked better today than usual, and why?

Concentrate on your strengths and start improving them.

Behavioral patterns are developed in the course of overcoming difficulties that you have to face at different stages of your life. They are subconsciously repeated in the process of trading. You look at the binary options market through your unique worldview.

As you might guess, troubles in real life can also affect trading. If you have experienced psychological trauma and mental pain, we strongly recommend that you contact a psychologist for professional aid. The binary options market is probably one of the worst places to solve psychological problems.

Setting Rules and Developing New Habits

Identifying problematic models of thinking and finding solutions to prevent their occurrence in the future is the key to your success as a trader. At first, it is difficult to adhere to the changes. Habit is the second nature, and it's difficult to give it up.

What can you do to avoid returning to the old behavior patterns? It's simple: work through the solution patterns over and over again until the new behavior becomes habitual. From a neurobiological point of view, repetitiveness causes neural circuits to consolidate so much that you automatically stick to the desired behavior without even thinking about it. As they say, repetition is the mother of learning.

There is also an important element needed to achieve success: rules. To develop new habits, you must establish detailed trading rules and strictly follow them.

A set of rules is the foundation that provides support and stability in volatile markets. In addition, it allows you to keep your emotions under control.

Unfortunately, innate human behavior does not lead to success in the binary options market. Therefore, the rules are an important corrective measure. Trading according to the plan imposes discipline and forces you to do the right thing.

It is better to train using the trading rules on a demo account for two reasons:

• You will figure out if the strategy works and how effective it is, while not risking real funds.
• The simulator allows you to practice using new or modified strategies. You learn to follow them and develop new habits.

Remember: being aware of the problem is already good.

Trading rules are more than just a description of what you should or shouldn't do. You have to be confident that you are doing the right thing. It should be obvious to you that trading without clearly defined rules is doomed to failure.

In this regard, the advantages of keeping a trading diary are again manifested. You train your inner observer, which improves your ability to recognize patterns. The journal teaches you to control emotions and develops solution-oriented behavior patterns.

Summary

A behavior pattern is an established, proven behavior, introduced into a habit.

Introspection or self-observation is a method of psychological research, which oversees observing one's own mental processes without using any tools or standards.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a field in psychology devoted to studying the influence of human thinking on behavior.