Discover the Gold in Your Shadows

By Mercedes Oestermann van Essen

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This simple and profound saying by Carl Jung is a phrase every trader, investor and wannebe should have firmly programmed into their minds, for our shadows are stalking us day and night, mostly without our conscious knowledge.

And this is precicesly where the big danger is lurking, because the unconcious mind is far more powerful than your conscious mind. In fact, it is your unconscious mind that ultimtely drives you to achieve your goals and not your conscious mind.

For every conscious thought you have literally hundreds of thousands unconscious thoughts, and observations which are logged inside your mind, but without you being consciously aware of any of them. How could you? The operating system of your mind is designed to operate on auto pilot.

You do not need to consciously think how to move your legs to walk, or how to perform any of those daily tasks that keep you fed, watered and proably in a sustainable lifestyle. Learning to perform on auto pilot is the ultimate goals of trading mastery, few traders ever achieve.

You too have shadows

Unfortotunately, everyone has some mental wiring problems.which go largely undiscovered. Particularly for those traders of us operating in a macho world of following rules with iron disciplone, which, as every book on trading psychology will tell you, is a key requirement that will make you a consistently profitable trader.

Our shadows are largely disowned and covered up with distractions, like playing golf, socialising, sex or even relentless striving for success. Your mind has learned for centuries to suppress your true nature and instead feed you with a fiction of what you believe to be true of yourself. The result is that you have an image of how you should be and are feeding these ideas with manipulative mental distortions that drive you even further away from the truth about your authentic self.

This game of hding from yourself may even work for a while, alas such self manipulation on a grandiouse scheme, which is drilled into us by conditioning, seldom lasts forever.

Sooner or later there will be a wake up call though. The world just had the biggest wake up call for decades on a grand collective level: The recent stock market crash was a clear indication that we cannot carry on repairing a broken pot forever. And so it is with your disowned shadows. Shadows need to be faced.

If only you could be totally honest with yourself

Yet, as every trader will know being ruthlessly honest with oneself is one of the biggest challenges we face. You will do anything to avoid this essential task. Instead it seem much easier to just concentrate on finding the right trading system and keep developping new trading methods. Anything to carry on the illusion that you are an okay guy and in charge of this game.

There is a deep rooted fear inside us to face up to our shadows and own them, yet this is the only way to overcome them. There is a fear of facing some aspect of ourselves that, once unearthed may be deeply unsettling and even threating to our existence, our status quo and that presious image which we made of ourselves.

And those fears are actually correct, but for the wrong reasons. You have a very wrong idea of who you really are and how your mind and the universe work. These misconceptions, which have been faithfully passed down from generation to generation and form the basic tenets of the collective consciousness all over the world have led to giant collective illusions about our reality.

Once you can face up to looking deep inside and start dealing with all that atuff that presently stops you from trading profitably free from unresolved, suppressed fears of something that in reality does not even exist, you will be able to take your game to the next step of mastery.

Learn how you are doing things...

I would advise anyone new to trading to learn about themselves and how we make up reality first before you start looking into trading strategies that suit you best. Only when you get to know yourself well and own all aspects of you, including your suppressed fears, anger and anxieties, will you be able to make accurate decisions about your trading style and call the markets correctly.

The inner work comes before the outer work. Once you are alright inside, the trading strategies will fall into place automatically. You will be greatly shortening the way to trading success if you follow this order of doing things.