Jared Tendler's Blog

Some parts of your mental game work require a change in habits. The most basic being the need to break how you even engage with the mental game. In my experience a lot of people want to fix their mental game without actually spending time actively trying to improve it. And that won’t work.

Of course, there are many other bad habits you could have – such as skipping aspects of pre and post-routines, or missing them entirely, sloppiness in execution, or allowing distractions to reduce focus.

The list is too long to attempt to be comprehensive…but you already know your own bad habits. They are the firm aspects of your C-game and you have plenty of evidence to know that they are not serving your best interests and stand in the way of you achieving your goals.

Whenever correcting bad habits, it’s important to first distinguish between whether they’re caused by a discipline issue or an emotional problem. 

Emotional problems are not bad habits to re-train. In fact, if you treat them like a discipline issue and attempt to correct them using tactics designed to improve discipline, you’ll make things even worse!

Correcting a discipline issue requires that you push yourself to build mental strength and endurance around a bad habit – but around an emotional problem, that will create a pressure cooker-like effect. Rather than correcting your emotional reaction, you suppress it and then intensify it so much that your mind will eventually be overwhelmed. The dam breaks and your mind is flooded with more emotion than you can handle and significant mistakes, losses, and setbacks can ensue.

That’s why it is so important, when analyzing your C-game, to distinguish bad habits that are firmly being caused by emotion. Emotional problems require deeper analysis to identify the root cause, something you can work through using the Mental Hand History (MHH). 

After you’ve made progress with your emotional reactions you might find that while you don’t react with the same fear, frustration, or euphoria as you did before, some bad habits remain. Here you’ve cleaned up the reaction but haven’t trained the correct action – like staying in a trade longer, folding a hand on the river when you know you’re beat, or being clear on the exact shot you want to hit on a tough hole.

While the emotional downsides of those situations may be diffused, the habits still need to be broken.

Or it’s possible your bad habits are firm discipline issues, like impatience, procrastination, distractibility – that led you to develop habits which may not have been costly at earlier points in your career, but are now.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” ― Archilochus

With these habits, there have likely been times when you’ve broken out of them for a bit. A common short-term motivation is New Year’s Resolutions. 

That time of year many people rely on the inspiration of a new year to avoid succumbing to the ills that plagued them the prior year. But this is a temporary fix. The magic of the new year may seem like it washes away your sins, but when momentum fades the old rhythms reemerge. 

Unfortunately, bad habits truly do die hard.

 

How to Break Bad Habits

The MHH is a tool I recommend to analyze emotional issues tripping you up. When you’re trying to leave bad habits behind, the MHH takes a slightly different shape but with the same fundamental framework. You go through a series of steps to make progress.

Sometimes bad habits are only defined as “bad” because you are in the middle of improving. Those very habits might have once represented your A-game. They aren’t necessarily wrong, they’re simply outdated. And now that your A-game has evolved, they hold you back.

To truly break them requires identifying why they served you in the past and identifying the logic that supports that analysis. Next is evaluating why that logic is flawed in context of what you now understand.

Sometimes you know what the correction is. You have a process. Your A- and B-game don’t include these mistakes, so the answer could be as simple as being better prepared and having corrections in place more firmly. You might need to get tougher, and have more command, conviction, and desire to fix it. Find a way to Suck Less.

Or maybe you have been a little lazy, simply hoping it would go away.

Hope doesn’t cut it. You need to be actively working on it and be diligently focused on reaching Unconscious Competence. As long as you are still in the earlier stages of training, or re-training, a habit, you’re vulnerable to distinct steps backwards.

If you feel like you’re doing that and still getting tripped up, there may be some elements you’re not firmly understanding or in control of. At that point, revisit the MHH for underlying emotional causes.

Lastly, you might also check out Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is a book both I and many of my clients have enjoyed.

 

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The post Breaking Bad Habits appeared first on Jared Tendler.

A couple months ago I asked readers of my blog to submit questions/situations for me to review – providing us with a different style of content from my usual writing which I’m calling “Your Pitfall, I Spitball.” I got a lot of great responses and have selected two that share a similar theme.

My intent is not just to provide advice, I want to use real problems as a way to also help you understand how I dissect them so you can further develop this skill. 

Before we dive in, two bits of context. The first question that always goes through my mind is: Why does this person feel that way, or why are they struggling in this situation? There’s no randomness when it comes to performance, or performance problems. Sure our results can be random – but not our performance. Many of you often don’t know what’s causing the variation that exists in your performance, but that info is essential, and that’s why it’s the first thing I consider.

Second, we’re also going to examine both what’s included in the question/problem and hypothesize what’s missing…often what’s missing is the most relevant. During my client sessions, I ask a lot of follow up questions to help tease the details out. Here I brainstorm a few possibilities that often appear around these problems, such as balancing emotional stress, family pressure, and real-world chaos.

Let’s dive into two scenarios that are both about wanting to make something happen quickly. When you “have” to make money, you often trade worse.

Q1: “I struggle greatly with sizing correctly. I feel like the amount of money I am ready to risk is not sufficient enough to make any significant amount of money, and keep sizing bigger than I am mentally ready to, which keeps adding more emotions to my trades and makes proper execution extremely difficult.”

 

Q2: “Most of the time I run into trouble now is due to wanting to be rich within my “window “. Oversizing, not honoring stops, etc. is usually because I want to pass my evaluation TODAY or get to payout NOW. But the market doesn’t care about MY (arbitrary) deadlines. I’ve done better with my perspective recently but think you can really hammer it home.”

 

I’ll start with Q1, which is less severe. In the recent Ask Better Questions blog I talked about the importance of asking the right question to elicit information that helps get to the bottom of an issue so you can start addressing it more quickly. My first questions are: 

How long have they been trading?Why is this person adding so much emotional intensity to their trading that they are steamrolling any ability to trade their system the way they are supposed to?Why is money such a huge driver for them at this point in their trader career? 

The reason it’s important to understand how long this person has been trading is because my advice for this issue would be very different for a veteran trader who has been at it for more than 10 years vs. a relative newcomer who has been trading for 6 -18 months.

With a seasoned trader, this issue indicates there may be some scar tissue and an inability to handle losses. My suspicion would be that they have been treading water recently, and have scaled down with the intent of lowering emotions, only to produce different emotions because the situation is so distasteful. They likely have a lot of accumulated emotion around losses and being forced to limit the size of trades.

For newer traders, however, it’s very common to want to scale up faster. The challenge is that you do so at the risk of not developing your skill set more deeply. Being able to apply your strategy/system on a regular basis and make small, discretionary adjustments is vital to your long-term success and scaling up quickly prohibits you from working towards unconscious competence.

Traders often don’t appreciate how vital it is to have a majority of the basic elements of their strategy or system reach the level of Unconscious Competence, where it’s mastered and requires no thinking. Mastering elements of trading doesn’t mean you’ve mastered trading – but in order to become a highly skilled and successful trader you must master the foundational parts. Those building blocks must be strong in order to free up your mind to tackle the nuances of trading that often make a huge difference in profitability.

Wanting to speed through the learning process is a classic error. Rather than racing upwards without a foundation to support your ascent, take time to apply your current skills consistently and effectively. Focus more on skill acquisition than profit.

My suspicion is that this trader is new-ish (probably more in the 18 – 24 month category), is trading on the side, and looking to make trading either a significant secondary income or a full-time profession. They likely also believe that the amount of money they are making is the primary determinant of their long-term viability as a trader vs. the integrity of their skill set. 

I would argue, however, that skill set is far more important for longer viability. You can’t copy/paste your results from one month to the next. PnL doesn’t carry over, but skills do. That’s what determines your capability in the future, but you can’t force skill to develop, just like you can’t force muscle to develop faster. Sure you could take steroids, but you do so at the risk of long-term consequences. If you force PnL, it can produce significant out-sized gains that don’t reflect skill and crumble in the future.

This trader likely believes money is more important than skill and that’s the primary flaw to correct. My advice here is to take a step back to refocus your energy on skill and execution. Make a dedicated chunk of trades (50 or 100) where you don’t care about the size, only caring about skill development and the quality of execution. Grade the quality of the trades and journal about what you learned during the trading day.

Remove the pressure impairing your ability to develop skill. Embrace the fact that money should be the carriage, not the horse. The real driver of long-term success is your skills, knowledge, and experience. PnL/Results should follow from that.

Mind you, it will take some time to develop the skill and reorient your mind to that approach. I would suggest dedicating about three months. From there, map out a schedule/pacing of what it would look like to increase size. Consider consulting other traders on how to do that effectively.  Err on the side of caution in this phase. Once you scale up without impairing execution, consolidate that expansion of skill before increasing size again. Carve out this highly concentrated period of time to incubate and develop skills and perspective and you’ll create a higher base to launch your next move.

Now let’s move on to Q2, here it is again:

“Most of the time I run into trouble now is due to wanting to be rich within my “window “. Oversizing, not honoring stops, etc. is usually because I want to pass my evaluation TODAY or get to payout NOW. But the market doesn’t care about MY (arbitrary) deadlines. I’ve done better with my perspective recently but think you can really hammer it home.”

 

For this second scenario, my questions to begin digging further would start the same way. The difference here is the issues go beyond sizing and center on aspects of their trading execution being compromised. 

Here it’s clear they’re a relatively newer trader and in my head I’m wondering what additional flaws may be present that would distinguish this person’s issues. I immediately think about wishes, such as a wish for trading to be easy and thus easy to become rich. Or, perhaps there’s a flawed view that the “window will close,” and you only have a small window of time to be successful as a trader. While it may seem that way, I’ve worked with many traders who are successful in second careers in their 50s and older. It’s not like being a professional athlete where the necessary attributes, like speed and strength, automatically decline.

Of course, some traders worry that they have a smaller window due to family pressures. They aren’t sure how long trading is viable if their income is not sufficient. At the same time, however, they want to provide a certain lifestyle and if their main career is stuck at a certain level, trading seems like a way to accelerate that, which can play into fantasies of what they could provide. 

When I consider the difference between the trader in Q1 and the trader in Q2, I wonder what the accelerant is that’s intensifying the emotions to a higher level. What’s the gasoline, so to speak? It might be situational, but situations still expose underlying beliefs, flaws, or wishes that make the situation a bigger issue. In other words, the situation magnifies an existing problem to a large enough extent to be noticeable and get you to work on it. But the situation is not the cause. The cause in this case is the wish driving you to make trading work NOW.

While this trader has evidence of a wish, they do seem to have some logic present. Were they only to follow the advice from Q1, they could make some progress but would not truly crack through. They have to figure out the underlying wish using the Mental Hand History (MHH) and ultimately kill it. That doesn’t mean killing the dream – it means freeing you up to see the road ahead of you in a realistic manner so you can pace yourself and realize the dream in a pragmatic way, that keeps an eye towards being successful long term.

If I were to guess, I’d bet the underlying wish is to become rich quickly and easily. That’s the crux of the problem.

The truth is, however, that you don’t want to get rich without the skill of being able to handle it. Approximately 80% of lottery winners are broke, or back to their prior net worth, within 3-5 years. If you hit it big in trading tomorrow without the skills to back it up, odds are that the money would disappear quickly.

You can’t allow the urgency to make things happen now override the real driver of success.

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Obviously I’m making some leaps here because I am not talking to the traders directly. But whether I’m right or wrong, hopefully seeing the way I think about the problem is helpful. I’d love to hear if you liked this blog format. If you have feedback, or a question you’d like to have reviewed, please submit it here.

 

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The post Urge to Make it Happen Now appeared first on Jared Tendler.

I recently asked for feedback on topics you’d like to see covered in blogs. Effective journaling was one of the suggestions and I decided to tackle it right away because of the ROI. Journaling is the highest value activity you can do that’s not actually playing or competing given the benefit it provides in the time you spend.

Journaling serves multiple purposes. Most importantly, it gives you a chance to look at your performance with some objectivity, the way a coach would. I’ve discussed this concept before, that most of you are without a dedicated coach observing your every move, and so you need to be an effective coach for yourself.

While you are trading or playing, you don’t want to be too self-reflective, beyond making real-time adjustments (or knowing when to quit), since it distracts from delivering your best performance. When your job is to perform and compete, that needs to be your sole focus. Afterwards, however, it’s vital to stop and reflect on the quality of the performance as it directly affects future performance.

Journaling gives you what a good coach would provide: The feedback needed to improve. Journaling helps you understand what you did well, where you improved, what you did poorly, what you can learn, and how you can do better the next time you play or trade. If a coach was watching you the whole time, this is what they would comment on afterward. While you can try to do this reflection in your head, it’s inefficient. The mind has a limited ability to manage and wade through large amounts of information and retain it into the future. Journaling can help you do it for yourself.

Journaling also helps you clear out the clutter in your mind, get organized, and make sense of what happened. It’s an opportunity to release emotions in a productive way and learn from each experience, so you can recover quickly and avoid accumulated emotion. This allows you to move on with your life and come back to trading, poker or golf with a clear mind, ready to perform at a high level, or at least improve upon previous efforts.

Journaling is not a complicated exercise, but it is one that is easily undervalued. Many of you have tried it at times but the habit doesn’t stick – you go through waves where you do it regularly, only to fall off during periods when you’re doing quite well, evidence of some subtle overconfidence weakening your process. You’ve also stopped journaling when your performance has been so bad you don’t want to review it and make yourself feel worse.

Some of you fall out of the habit simply because you’re not convinced of the value. It’s a fair question to ask, but not one that you’re consciously addressing, so it just slips out of your mind. Always remember that as competitors you’re involved in an ongoing experiment to figure out how to be the best trader, poker player, and golfer you can be. You try things and see what works. Not doing something can be a way to actually find out its value. What I hear frequently, even from clients, is “I slipped up recently with my journal even though I know it’s something that’s been quite valuable.” Sometimes you need extra proof that journaling is, in fact, a tool that helps you to avoid steps backwards, recover faster from a tough day, avoid getting swept up in a big win, and develop new insights into your game and mentality.

If you have gone through cycles like this before, or if qualitative journaling is something that’s new to you, remember that like any other habit it’s going to take time to build and master. The establishment of the habit can be challenging at times, but the idea is to eventually reach the point where it’s so ingrained as part of your daily routine that you can’t not do it.

Many have made the mistake of thinking they have made it a permanent part of their routine only to slip up when traveling, returning after an illness, or dealing with personal distractions. Don’t lament losing momentum, see how quickly you can recover the habit.

To get started, I suggest committing to a two to four week period of time where you’ll journal 3 – 5 minutes each time. This is a reasonable starting point to begin judging for yourself the benefits that it can have. And when you recognize the benefits, make note of them in a separate section of your journal to reinforce the value.

As far as the format of your journal, do whatever works. Maybe you like to have a dedicated notebook and write with a pen. Maybe you want to type it out, or use voice to text. There is a benefit to journaling even if you never look at it again. So do whatever works for you.

For myself I have found that when I’m writing about something I don’t have a firm grasp on yet and I’m just beginning to understand it, I can’t type. Writing by hand helps me explore the ideas and allows my mind to go in different directions.

Once I know the direction, however, I switch to typing because it is a much faster way to get my thoughts out. There is also benefit in talking things through. When I’m brainstorming an idea, I do much better with someone else than alone. If you aren’t sure what works best for you, try these different avenues. For traders, if you think a sparring partner to discuss topics with would be helpful, The Mental Game of Trading LIVE offers an opportunity to link up with like-minded traders to collaborate with so you are not alone in the process.

 

Journaling As Cool-Down

Journaling immediately after you play or trade is about preparing for tomorrow. Mental clarity is one the most important factors for doing your best. Trading, poker, and golf are intense activities. Your mind absorbs a lot of information in each session/game, and if you rely on the brain’s natural digestion of all of this data, it might impair your sleep and your ability to recover, which means you’ll show up the following day a little bit cloudy. At its most basic level, the post-session journaling is designed to process information more efficiently.

On days where intense emotion is triggered, or at least enough that it affects your performance, the risk is that emotion will carry over to the following day. You need to get the emotion out and the best time to do it is soon after you’re done.

I know you don’t want to. You want to move on and not focus on it anymore. But you can’t. The mistakes and losses rattle around in your mind and limit your ability to truly move on. Journaling can help get those issues out of your mind, so you can rest and reset. Plus, you gain an opportunity to discover something transformative that could improve your reactions in the future.

In general, you want to capture the learning/lessons/mistakes from a strategic/technical/mental standpoint. If you take notes throughout the day, you can build on them or review them like a daily report. Doing something is better than nothing. At a minimum, do a brain dump, writing out everything in your mind, what happened, what the emotion was, what the trigger was, any other key details of the hand/trade/situation that can easily get lost. Details can disappear from memory and they can be the key to solving the problem and minimizing the chance it’s going to happen again.

Some people have a difficult time with a blank sheet of paper. Here are three basic questions you can use in reflecting afterward:

What did you do well in general and/or improve on the things you’ve been working on?What mistakes did you make?How can you improve on them and/or be better next time?

It’s a simple, straightforward way to get started.

On days when your emotions are particularly intense, you can also complete a Mental Hand History. Clients find that structure helps them to get the emotion out and analyze the problem more deeply while the emotion is quite raw. This can be hard, but you’ll get an opportunity to uncover hidden insights that can be very revealing and create a breakthrough.

 

Journaling in Your Warm-up

Journaling can also be used in your warm-up to create a bubble around poker, trading or golf, where the only thing that matters is performance. That doesn’t mean performance is the most important thing in your life, it just means at that time, you want to have deep focus where nothing else is distracting you from the activity.

When you have external concerns that are very real, whether it is illness, financial struggles, moving, a laundry list of tasks to complete, or strife in a relationship, all of those emotions and tasks swirl around in your mind, impairing your judgement and ability to be focused and present.

To create your bubble, write for up to 15 minutes, one hour before you start to play/trade. This gives you an opportunity to get some of the emotion out and/or make a list of tasks, with the intent of being able to put them away for now. Once you’re done, draw an imaginary line in your mind where all of the concerns you’ve noted down are behind you, and you can pick them back up once you’re done.

In a way, this gives you a short break, or vacation of sorts, from those tasks and concerns. There’s nothing to do about them now. You’ve logged them and now you can focus on the job at hand.

This kind of journaling is capped at 15 minutes because you don’t want to go too deep and tap a whole well of emotion just before you perform. You want a little release without getting too deep. That said, the additional 45 minutes left in your warm-up time does give you an opportunity to add anything still rattling around in your mind.

You could also re-read your journal from the previous days during your warm-up, but you don’t need to. Sometimes it can be overwhelming to have to review it.

There is, however, additional benefit available when you review the journal in the future because it can be a great way to reference how you were thinking/performing in the past. Your mind has a limited capacity to recall data and manage it, but a journal helps to offset those limitations. And if you are struggling with similar issues from before, reviewing a journal can give a different perspective and help you dig out the important information.

***

Thank you again to everyone who responded to the survey with feedback about what you want to hear more about in future blogs. I’m a big believer in journaling and hope these tips will help you start to form the habit or pick the habit back up if you have fallen off the wagon.

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The post Effective Journaling appeared first on Jared Tendler.

Years ago a mentor gave me advice I never forgot: “If you want better answers, ask better questions.” 

While this is generally good advice in any field, when it comes to psychology it can be a game-changer. I have used this as a guiding principle in my work ever since, and take great care when working with clients 1:1 or during interactions via The Mental Game of Trading LIVE to ask questions that lead to informative answers.

The value of asking good questions is to help my clients dig through specific problems they’ve come to me to work on, as we look to identify and eliminate the root cause of what’s going on, not just manage the symptoms.

Often the answers don’t need to come from me, they come from the clients. Good questions can help them, and you, uncover truths already known but not verbalized or understood. Tapping into knowledge that hasn’t been readily accessible because you were asking the wrong questions, not looking deep enough, or assuming you already knew what was wrong without probing further.

Of course that’s not true for everyone, or at all times. I frequently make the link, provide direct advice or call out the deeper issues for my clients, but the questions I ask along the way make them more open-minded and receptive to my suggestions.

Since I can’t work with all of you as individual clients, I write books, like The Mental Game of Trading or The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2, to bridge the gap. In these books I set out to provide both the knowledge to help you identify the issues you’re dealing with and an interactive approach that is not as typical in a medium that tends to be pretty static. While you and I don’t get to talk directly when you’re reading one of my books, I pose direct questions to get you thinking like I do in a client session – often they’re the same questions. I ask you questions in a very purposeful way to go through the profiling/mapping process, examine the root of your problem in the Mental Hand History, and peer deeper into individual problems. 

The benefit of these questions only materializes if you engage with them seriously. Your progress doesn’t come just from your consumption of the material. It comes through your interaction with the material.

My questions, both in the books and in my client sessions, are intentionally challenging. They’re intended to encourage you to connect to the issues you’re facing in a different way, and see them from a different angle since often your perspective about your problems is the first thing to correct.

Interestingly enough, in responding to these challenging questions clients will often say something at the end of an answer that, to them, seems like a throwaway comment. It’s often a joke or their tone of voice and delivery indicates they don’t consider what they’re saying to be relevant. Often, however, this is where the gold lies and where the deeper understanding comes from.

My co-author from The Mental Game of Poker 1&2, Barry Carter, shared the following story in The Mental Game of Poker:  

“Never joke during a session with Jared Tendler. He doesn’t let it go. He probed me on why, if my image of success is winning a tournament, do I hardly ever play them? Lots of ‘Jedi Mind Tricks’ later, he made me realize that risk aversion was stopping me from working on my game this time because I was equating success with something I wasn’t even trying to achieve, so I had a perfect excuse when I didn’t achieve it.

This ultimately led me to the core of why I wasn’t working on my game. I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I had to be accountable if I lost. Being a poker journalist, I have to report on successful players every day, and I’m friends with a lot of pros. What I really feared was humiliating myself in front of them, so I took the low-risk route of not working on my game, blaming bad luck, and not leaving myself open to ridicule.

Playing out the fear like this gave me an end point. I knew that the absolute worst thing I could experience if I started to work on my game was ridicule. I also realized from the whole experience that I wasn’t nearly as good a player as I thought, which was a good thing, because it meant I could improve. Thanks to some pretty solid learning concepts like the ALM and Inchworm, I now know there is always something I can work on, and I have ways of noticing small gradual improvements no matter how bad it gets.”

With that story in mind, when you get to the recommended exercise below, don’t censor yourself. Don’t allow your internal editor, or the logical part of your mind, to omit the emotional side. This is not about writing good prose. This is about you uncovering deeper layers of problems that you’ve had for a long time. Your internal editor prevents you from accessing the gold locked within.

Whether you do the next exercise or not, start the digging by asking the question “why?” and actually answer it. Then follow it up with another “why?” Repeating this process like a five-year-old child does when they’re allowed to explore with boundless curiosity. Kids will ask “why?” all day long, and, unfortunately, this is a simple question that as adults we forget to ask. This is a situation where emulating a child is a great way to start getting unstuck.

Complete the New Client Questionnaire

If you want to use an additional tool to go farther to assess your overall mental game and dig deeper into key areas, I suggest completing my new client questionnaire, even if you never plan on working with me.

Each time a new client signs up they fill out a very detailed questionnaire that is designed to help both of us prepare for our first session. I’ve heard over the last 15 years that just filling out the questionnaire has helped many clients make connections or gain insights.

To be clear, this is not a solicitation for new clients. (I mean, if you are truly interested, feel free to check out my coaching page, but I obviously can’t coach all of you 1:1 and that’s not what I’m going for here.) Rather, I want to offer this tool as a way to ask yourself some better questions to help you get unstuck.

If you are serious about improving in trading, golf, or poker, take this process seriously. If you are going to half-ass it, it’s not worth doing it at all. You’ll just regurgitate info you already know and won’t gain any value.

To start, it’s important to fill the questionnaire out in a relaxed environment and add detail over time. Although some questions may seem redundant, asking overlapping questions is important to properly assess all areas of your mental game. Fill out the questionnaire in two phases following these directions:

First phase. Write down answers that come easily to you. If you are having a difficult time answering a question or believe that it’s not relevant to you, skip it, and come back to it at the end.

Second phase. Three to five days after completing the questionnaire the first time, read each of your answers and only add anything new that comes to mind. Begin these answers with the notation (2rd) in bold. This gives you the opportunity to identify new details that weren’t originally at the top of your mind and gives you access to deeper layers. Details matter a lot when resolving mental game problems, and digging additional ones out of your head can make a big difference in how quickly you improve.

You can download the questionnaire from the middle of   this page .

After you fill out the questionnaire, if it’s obvious what you need to prioritize in working on your mental game, use what you found to engage in a more practical way with the poker or trading books.

With a more precise understanding of your issues, work through them by using the chapters and completing worksheets like the profile/map, Mental Hand History, A-to-C-Game Analysis, or Goals Worksheet, all of which you can find here: https://jaredtendler.com/worksheets/ 

If it’s not obvious what to prioritize, since you can’t improve everything at once, put the questionnaire away for a week so you can examine your issues from another angle. As a coach I provide clients a third-person perspective, but you can have a bit of that yourself with a written document describing what you’re dealing with and a week to clear your mind and come back to it with a fresh set of eyes.

Feedback

Once you have dug deeper into an individual issue or completed the questionnaire, it might be a good time to share what you are wrestling with.

I recently asked readers to describe a problem they were having and I would provide some feedback, along with insight into how I got there, in a future blog. If you didn’t respond before, going through this exercise might give you a clearer idea of where you could use more direction. Click here to share a problem for feedback.

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My aim is to provide high-quality blog content that has a meaningful impact on your performance. I strive to provide a substantive and practical exploration of topics that will be helpful no matter the stage you’re in, while remaining relevant and useful over time.

I’ve built a strong reservoir of material that I’m proud of and I want to keep pushing the bar higher. To do that, I could use your input to help directly shape the future of this blog. Here’s how:

Suggest a Topic. If you have a topic idea that you’d like to see me cover, please let me know in this form.Share a Real Problem. In 300 words or less, use this form to share a scenario that you’re struggling with or a problem that’s plaguing your performance. I’ll select a few and respond in future blog posts, not only offering guidance, but also providing a window into how I arrived at that advice. This will give you a more detailed view into my coaching process, philosophy, and problem solving approach as a way to help you become better at solving problems on your own.

If this sounds interesting, I’d love to hear from you. I think with your input I can make this an even more valuable resource for you and your peers.

 

The post What’s Your Problem? appeared first on Jared Tendler.

 

156 players will be teeing up this week at the US Open and I will not be one of them. It would have been surprising if I was one of them, but that never stopped me from dreaming.

Over the last 28 years I have tried and failed to qualify for the US Open multiple times. I wasn’t expecting to qualify this year, and wasn’t even going to tee it up either, but the first stage of qualifying happened to be at my home course and so I had to give it a shot.

The good news is that I played significantly better than I have in the last several years and came to the last hole knowing that I was two shots out of a playoff and needed to hole out for eagle from 165 yards. I even had that opportunity because I birdied the 16th and 17th holes – almost making eagle on both too. While I didn’t dunk my second shot on the last hole, I was proud of how well I competed and how well I played all the way around. I hit a lot of great shots. Had a few marginal ones that got some bad breaks, but I didn’t let them affect me, hung in there and gave myself a chance.

Most importantly, I made all the short putts that I needed to. Something I didn’t do in my first attempt 28 years prior where I missed four putts inside of four feet and was on the outside of a playoff by just a single shot. The pressure got to me that year, but it was ultimately a catalyst for my career as a mental game coach.

Truth be told, my insights about failure didn’t come during or after the round. They actually came beforehand, while examining my pre-tournament nerves. 

It occurred to me that I’ve been trying to qualify for this tournament for close to three decades and just being here, trying once again, was actually an accomplishment. 

My failures haven’t killed or maimed me, they’ve made me stronger. I’m still willing to get up and give it another go, throw myself into the fire to see what I can do. I’m not beaten down, I’m still aspirational, and that’s something worth celebrating.

That realization alone helped some of the nerves melt away instantly. 

The past was not hanging over me like an imposing force, adding more pressure to make this year the year that I finally realized a dream. No. It wasn’t about the past anymore. I was proud to still have an opportunity right in front of me and it demanded my full focus.

I know I’m not alone here – whether you’re competing in trading, poker, or golf, the struggle is real. Some of you have struggled for years to break through and achieve the level of success you want. 

This is especially true in trading and poker where “breakthrough” moments are often harder to define because there is no trophy, or they’re few and far between. You’re instead trying to unlock distinct points of success – breaking even and not losing money, starting to make money, making money consistently, making good money, and realizing your dreams – when you struggle to reach a benchmark, sometimes for years, the strain of past failures can wear on you, making you hungry or more desperate for success right now. 

At times, each failure feels like you’re digging a deeper hole, falling farther and farther behind where you want, or expect, yourself to be. Each day, each trade, each poker session, each round of golf, become evidence of progress or proof that you’re still stuck in a place you don’t want to be.

 

Converting Failure from a Liability to an Asset

 

Past failures, struggles, mistakes can loom large in your mind. Even though you may not have them consciously in your mind while trading, playing poker or golf, your overall emotional temperature is raised. 

You react more intensively to bad breaks, losses, mistakes, or poor results. You also react more positively to great days, feeling like you’ve finally turned the corner, except you might be fueling overconfidence and can easily get knocked back down. 

When that happens, your mind goes into overdrive trying to figure out how to be better and avoid repetitive mistakes that you thought were corrected. You feel compelled to do something special to get to the place you want to be and that makes you gamble, take bigger risks, or get stuck in the “f its,” just hoping that you can find your way out.

The thing is, past failures offer a lot of insight. Practicing before the US Open qualifier, I hit a really poor second shot on the opening hole, and part of me wanted to hit it again. But I knew exactly what went wrong – I didn’t have a detailed picture of what I wanted to do with the shot. I was too relaxed. Rather than hit the shot again, I wanted the consequence, to learn the lesson.

Our failures offer us a lot of insights but too often we are so results-oriented that we only focus on the failure itself. We don’t dig into what went wrong, don’t allow our problem-solving abilities to work for us and fail to understand why we failed.

Some of those answers might be technical and beyond the scope of this blog. But when the reasons are mental and emotional, the answers are out there for those who are willing to dig deeper than what’s obvious. This is most needed when you are stuck in a cycle where you keep making the same mistakes again and again. 

There’s the classic quote from Einstein, about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

In my experience, it’s less about insanity and more about overconfidence. 

Yes, when you’re in a lot of emotional pain and you think you have an answer but the evidence shows that you don’t, you’re overconfident. 

Overconfidence is a common, yet hidden reason why failures of the past continue to loom large. It prevents you from understanding why you’re actually failing or struggling, you just assume you already know why.

The reality is that what you’re currently doing isn’t enough, you don’t have an answer yet. That’s ok. This level of honesty is an important starting point for helping you to turn your failures into an asset that you can use to make you stronger and more capable.

Sometimes there are valuable lessons to take away from failure. For example, after failing to qualify last year, I decided to change how I’m approaching the tournament this year. I stopped trying to improve my golf swing, having made some significant improvements the last few years. What was lacking now, was a clear picture of what I wanted to do with each shot. My decision-making process was weak from spending more focus on actively trying to improve my swing and technique.

There are many lessons you can learn from your past failures, both technically and mentally. As long as you don’t view failure as permanent, all that information from your past can be converted into an asset by going back through your failures to extract the lessons and learnings left behind.

 

Accumulated Emotion

For some of you it’s not about converting a failure into some objective takeaways that can help you progress. The problem is that old emotions from past failures are locked inside and they can very quickly flood your mind today. 

Accumulated Emotion is a wild card that can explain why your emotions become intense so quickly, why you can’t adhere to your trading strategy or rules even though you “know better”, and why you can struggle so much to gain command of your emotions even using my system.

The reality is, emotions are messy. They build up in both the short term and the long term. And while the brain has a natural digestion process for emotion, sometimes there’s residual emotion left over—this is accumulated emotion.

We often call it emotional baggage, scar tissue, or trauma. Don’t let the trauma word scare you. It’s just a measure of how much the past is ever present. When emotion from the past is unresolved, it remains intact and becomes capable of being triggered. You’re trying to do your absolute best to be successful today, all while dealing with emotions that make it an unfair fight. And past failures can really stick with us.

The way to crack through them is using an adapted version of the Mental Hand History called the Trauma Mental Hand History (below), which just changes a couple of questions to help you figure out why you are still holding on to that emotion from the past. 

Time does not heal all wounds. These emotions may not go away just because you say you’re “letting go” of the past. 

Scar tissue in the mind is like scar tissue elsewhere in the body. It builds up to provide protection against injury or pain. Just saying I’m letting go of scar tissue in my quad doesn’t mean it’s gone. I still can’t stretch that muscle fully until I work through it and it’s often painful to do so. But it’s pain with a purpose.

It’s very common that flaws in the past are still active, affecting you today and part of the reason why you’re not able to break through. Revisiting these memories is not about trying to torture yourself and re-experience old pain again. It’s about examining the past to identify the flaws, biases, wishes, hopes keeping the emotional pain frozen in your mind, preventing you from truly moving on from the past. 

It’s about figuring out what you need to learn to be able to use your past as the asset that it really is.

 

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Discussions about the act of competing can be hard because it all sounds so cliche: Play hard, just go out there and compete, leave it all on the field, give it 110%, winning is a habit. And this is also a topic that I don’t overtly address often.

My clients in the higher levels of their fields already have a competitive fire and I don’t need to flame it.

My clients aspiring to those upper echelons tend to be more focused on the problems blocking them from that next level of success. But in a similar fashion to improving your C-game and reaching for the next level of skill, sometimes a little emphasis on the act of competing can help raise your focus and intensity and draw out more of your best. 

On a day-to-day basis, whether you’re trading, playing poker, playing golf, or any other field you choose, competing means doing everything in your control to win or put yourself in the best position to win. Giving maximum effort, not being derailed by setbacks, and being totally focused, prepared, and clear minded.

You win when instead of half-assing your warm-up like you want to, you find the drive to do it right. You win when you fight back the urge to close a position prematurely. You win when you trust your intuition/gut when it’s hard.

A competitive spirit brings energy, effort, passion, and a love for what you’re doing. It’s a never give up attitude. It’s taking care of the little things that often get missed when you are stuck in your own head or your energy is a little low. 

When you’re losing or struggling, it can be easy to try to do too much to quickly start winning again – like hitting a more aggressive shot in golf, increasing your position size in trading, or bombing the river in poker. These are gambles – you’re not competing, you’re hoping taking a bigger risk will bail you out. There’s no room for hope in competition. 

Sometimes your biggest competition is with yourself. It’s not the golf course, the market, or other poker players. Winning those internal battles is how you position yourself to win. 

Competing with yourself means fighting or redirecting impulses like, for example, continuing to be aggressive by aggressively doing what you know works and doubling down on your process and strategy. Doing so strengthens your process and builds reliable confidence. Give up on it in those critical moments, and even if your big risk pays off, you’ll lose confidence. You wouldn’t trust a friend who bails on you in moments you need them most – why would you trust yourself after doing the same thing?

Alternatively, focusing on competing can also be a way to get out of your head and escape those internal battles by diving deeper into the action. Compete with the golf course by getting even more focused on the subtleties of the wind, course set up, or green reading. Compete with the market by digging deeper into your indicators, sensing what’s happening in the market rather than bringing a biased viewpoint. Compete in poker by looking for patterns in your opponents’ play, even the weaker regs or fish who you already have a big edge on – there’s always some information you can find that you can exploit.

The will to compete is a concept that can sustain you when you need to take those extra steps or create endurance for an event/round/day. For the poker players out there, this idea is particularly timely with the start of WCOOP and the World Series of Poker.

 

In the Battle

Even if your will to compete is strong, it’s also important to be aware of what it actually looks like when you’re in the trenches “battling.” 

Recognizing your own performance level is vital. Are you in your A-game? B-game? C-game?  Identify where you are that day and make adjustments against yourself. There are times when everything clicks in place and you’re naturally playing or trading great. Things are going in your favor, you’re getting good bounces, trades running to their target, or favorable run-outs. When that happens competing can seem pretty easy. Stay sharp and enjoy the ride! 

But don’t expect that’s how it is always going to be.

On those other days, when it’s a bit tougher, your goals don’t need to change. You still want to win the tournament, score well, and make money. But those outcomes are not entirely in your control. Here are some ideas to ensure you’re competing hard and controlling what you can control as best as possible: 

Stick to Your Routine – This includes your daily overall routine, a pre-session warm-up, and a post-session cool down. It also includes your in-session routine, like taking real breaks so you stay fresh and clear minded.Injecting Logic – Use injecting logic statements and strategic reminders to help ensure you retain emotional stability and quality decision making. Protect Energy and Clarity of Mind – These are the two main factors that influence your ability to get into the zone. Be aware of them and learn how to cultivate them.

Don’t try to apply all these ideas at once, particularly if you are gearing up for the WSOP. Instead, select one that can have an immediate impact, or can make a difference with just a little bit of effort. 

Imagine all of them being automatically present when you compete. If that feels like a very large gap, you’re still in the early stages of learning and development and should be prepared to stick with it for 3-6 months.

Remember, mastery is the ultimate aim with any skill you’re developing and that includes becoming a tougher competitor.

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Last month I went to The Players Championship, the fifth biggest golf tournament in the world behind the four majors, to work with a client playing in the event. As I walked the grounds of the TPC Sawgrass, the demanding course hosting the event, I was reminded of my own struggles handling the pressure of big golf tournaments. 

One of the primary reasons I struggled under pressure was that I didn’t know the nerves I felt were a normal part of high level competition. Growing up I assumed the steely eyed calm of the golfers I watched on TV reflected their internal experience. Quite the opposite. 

When you are competing in a meaningful tournament or endeavor, where your dreams and ambitions are on the line, that should absolutely generate some nerves, anxiety, or adrenaline. These are high stakes moments that you’ve earned. Tennis great Billy Jean King describes it with a powerfully simple message: “Pressure is a privilege,”

For some, the absence of feeling nerves is actually a bigger problem – it’s a sign that you might not care as much as you think, that you’re not as motivated as you believed yourself to be, or that you’re pretending not to care to manage an issue like tilt or fear.

Not to mention, the amping up of your nerves is a major source of fuel to help you be at your best. Adrenaline primes your senses and helps you pick up on details you normally can’t see, helping you to access higher level intuition. You have a better chance of reaching the zone due to the extra intensity as long as you can keep it from overwhelming you. 

The 17th hole at the TPC Sawgrass is perhaps the most famous hole in golf for producing the kind of performance anxiety I’m describing. The famed island green, pictured below) is an imposing target when trying to win a golf tournament. The wind is difficult to judge, and even though players have just a wedge in hand (for the non-golfers that means it’s a short shot), there’s little room for error. This hole has derailed many past competitor’s chances of winning. And this year was no different as JJ Spaun’s tee shot flew the green in the playoff, giving Rory Mcllroy an easy path to victory.

To thrive on a stage like this, or in moments that parallel it in your own life, requires a few things beyond accepting that nerves are part of the game.

 

Finding Real Certainty

Anxiety preys on uncertainty. Thinking about it, if you knew what was going to happen, some of your nerves would disappear. The unknown can be imposing and make you feel a sort of desperate need for certainty. You want to know how much the wind is going to affect your tee shot over the water, whether price will continue going up in the trade that you want to close, or if your bluff on the river will get your opponent to fold. 

Simply wanting to know these uncertainties can turn nervous tension into problematic anxiety or fear. 

Your mind’s desire for certainty isn’t wrong, it’s just misguided. While you can’t know what’s actually going to happen, you can be certain in your strategy, track record, mental resilience, experience and skill. Real certainty in an uncertain moment comes from the experience you bring to that moment. 

Sometimes you can get so myopic about this one particular shot, trade, tournament, or moment in your career that you lose sight of your bedrock of knowledge, skills, and experience. That foundation doesn’t guarantee positive results, but it does make it more likely. Reminding yourself of that fact when the anxiety hits can help you focus and rise to meet the moment.

 

How You Breathe Matters

The way you breathe has a direct impact on your ability to perform. That statement often surprises people, but research has shown there are effective and ineffective ways to breathe under pressure. 

When under pressure people often breathe mainly in their chest, known as shallow breathing, which takes in less oxygen. In a stressful situation, when less oxygen is absorbed the brain automatically reacts by diverting mental energy from the advanced functions needed for golf, poker or trading, to areas vital for survival; commonly known as the “fight or flight” response. This process is literally millions of years old and, once triggered, continuing to shallow breathe actually fuels it.

Breathing diaphragmatically, or into the lower chambers of the lungs, both reverses the process and helps to prevent it. Diaphragmatic Breathing absorbs more oxygen and triggers the brain to relax so it can resume normal function. The “sigh” you take after a stressful situation is a perfect example of your brain trying to go back to normal.

Diaphragmatic breathing is natural breathing. Just watch an infant breath; it’s the only way they know how. Adult breathing patterns frequently change over time from stress, and following the instructions in this video are a way of getting back to that natural state. This takes practice like anything else. If you want to rapidly change your breathing under stress you need to train. 

Slowing yourself down in this way can also help with the overthinking that tends to happen in those intense moments. Focused breathing disrupts the tension and gets you purposeful about what the moment requires of you.

 

Calculated Risk

Risk aversion is linked to second guessing and not trusting your gut – examples of ways you protect yourself from failing or being wrong. There’s a lot on the line and you want to hit the right shot, or make the correct choice. At times your mind tries to escape the discomfort of being wrong or failing by avoiding the risk altogether. 

By not trying, or holding something back, you aren’t truly giving it your all and that feels less risky. While you protect yourself from risk you also protect yourself from success.

The less risky option is to put your best foot forward, whatever that means for you. Rare is the person or player who fell short and sleeps well knowing they didn’t give it everything they had. The emotional risk of that option is actually higher because the regret looms large.

To do your best and fail is painful and hard, but an easier pill to swallow. You can rest on the fact that you trusted yourself, gave your best and it just wasn’t enough. You can learn from the experience and have more opportunities in the future. And, even if you don’t, there is some peace that comes with the certainty that you did all you could.

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For some of you, the idea of fearing success sounds absurd. How could anyone fear the very thing we all want to achieve? Yet it’s more common than you think. Often the reason isn’t that you fear succeeding per se, but there’s a fear of what could come with that success, namely overconfidence or arrogance, or feeling like an imposter.

Do you make excuses for not increasing stakes, sizing up, or playing in bigger golf tournaments?Are you more motivated to avoid losing, failure, or making mistakes than to drive yourself towards your bigger goals?Do you find yourself continually retreating to the safety of what you’re already doing well and not pushing yourself to learn more, search for resources, train harder, or practice more efficiently?

Answering yes to any of these questions doesn’t necessarily mean that you fear success. However, if your C-game has gotten stronger, or you’ve achieved some success already, and are still having trouble breaking through to higher levels of performance, it’s possible a fear of success is holding you back.

At the heart of the problem is a slight weakness in confidence. 

Your subconscious is smart. You’re not going to put yourself in a position to really damage confidence. When anticipating success adds pressure, you throttle back your motivation to avoid success and reduce the risk that the weakness in your confidence will get exposed. That’s why the fear of success is closely linked to Impostor Syndrome, which is the worry that you will be “found out” as being incompetent, and have been all along, and thus undeserving of any past success.

The answer to Fear of Success is stable confidence. The first step is recognizing your pattern so when the fear shows up you are ready to disrupt that pattern – which often can be hidden since it emerges less as a feeling of fear, and more in relation to your motivation, focus and drive. Beyond that, let’s look at some of the most common causes of Fear of Success and some corrections to overcome it.

One of the largest causes is your own expectations. For those of you who tend to have high standards, are perfectionistic, and expect a lot of yourselves, once you reach a certain point the thought of going even higher adds too much pressure. Where previously you were constantly driven to level up, now you find yourself too often retreating to comfort. You wonder how you’ll be able to replicate previous success again, let alone achieve even more. The gap between your aspirations and confidence has gotten too wide, as I explain in more detail in this blog.

One tactic to address this is to complete the Perfectionism Worksheet and do the work to truly recognize your past accomplishments. If you feel like success is something that can be taken away from you, failing now would erase previous successes. On the other hand, when you feel like what you’ve accomplished is part of your permanent history, and can’t be taken away, you will have less fear of going after any future success.

There are other versions of the Fear of Success as well. 

You might be worried that success could turn into someone you don’t recognize. You’ve seen other successful people change under the spotlight, becoming arrogant, egotistical, and full of themselves, and you’re concerned that would happen to you. 

That worry could be legitimate when overconfidence has been a problem in the past. But in my experience, the fact that you’re tuned into the potential of this problem means your version of overconfidence is unlikely to become extreme. It doesn’t feel that way, because relative to you it can still be extreme, but not when you compare it to others who have become outwardly arrogant and lose connection to themselves.

If this rings true, start with the last page of the perfectionism worksheet. When you strengthen your own independent confidence and identity by creating clarity on who you are as a person, professional, or performer, you are less likely to become overconfident. This strengthens your base of confidence, and you are therefore less likely to become someone you don’t recognize.

Lastly, depending on what environment you’re in, success might come with more attention from other people, possibly making you a bigger target for the haters. Certainly some of you have the luxury to succeed without many seeing it, although jealousy can come from familial places as well. 

You might fear success because you can’t handle added attention from other people who might try to tear you down. Ideally you’d be viewed as someone who can show others what’s possible, share how you did it, and help others. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who don’t want any part of that. They instead see you as an outlet for their own issues and you fear not being able to handle the negative attention.

In this case, try playing out the fear. What would you actually do or say if you were to face the kind of negativity you envision from others? What challenges would you anticipate?

Taking the time to game plan and actually come up with ideas of what you would say and do allows you to feel more prepared. Then you get to make a choice: Do you want to limit your success to prevent yourself from having to deal with those potential situations, or do you want to go after what you want and then face the test? You have to pick one. It’s not ok to be in limbo.

***

My vote in all of these scenarios is to strengthen your confidence or increase your competence. Being successful in trading, poker and golf is already hard enough and it feels like a travesty to hold yourself back from achieving more. But the choice is yours and there is no shame in choosing the easier route. 

 

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As you think about your goals for this year, it’s a great time to remind yourself about the realities of C-game.

Do you have a good estimation of the most likely weaknesses that could derail your ability to accomplish those goals? If the answer is no, your goals are at risk. This is why I often point out that New Year’s Resolutions are stupid – they don’t account for the realities of C-game.

C-game is like gravity – it has the power to drag us down and that will always be true. This is why preparation, getting the right sleep, eating well, and all the things we do to have good energy are simply the minimum requirements to escape C-game and earn B-game and A-game.

Remember, everything you do involves some learning.

 

Your C-game is what you have learned so well that no matter what is happening, it’s achievable. That’s why you have to earn B-game and A-game. They take more effort. C-game is what you have learned so well, it has reached the level of Unconscious Competence.

By and large, the issues you experience in C-game are not technical or strategic. For the majority of you, the necessary improvements here are much more mental and emotional. So instead of focusing on trying to acquire new skills and knowledge, the best thing you can do is address the underlying issues.

 

The Work vs. The Reward

It would be nice to not have to concern ourselves with these un-fun pain points, but that’s just not reality. Plus, when I look at the people who have had the most success using my coaching and books, that success has generally come after they fully accept that they can’t will or wish their way to reaching the level they want. They have to do the work to eliminate weaknesses.

I like to compare it to going to the gym. Most people aren’t excited about their gym workout and often want to quit in the middle of a set or class, find it hard to even get there, or are feeling banged up and struggling to perform. It’s just not that fun.

What people do enjoy, however, is the outcome. Maybe you’ve increased your strength, improved your balance, enabled yourself to play better golf or soccer, or have better posture and are in less pain. You like what the gym does for you, but the work is rarely fun.  

In the same way, the work needed to achieve C-game improvement is rarely fun and this can be compounded by isolation, which is an ongoing concern in trading. Regardless of where you are, the starting point is always the same – actually figuring out where you are.

(Side note: If you want to feel less isolated in your work check out The Mental Game of Trading LIVE . Members are often seeing tangible benefit from simply engaging with others who are going through this process. It’s like a group workout. You’re not absolved of responsibility, but it feels easier when you see someone else’s challenges and that they are struggling too.) 

 

Understanding Your C-Game

The beginning step is gathering data about your C-game. This can involve comprehensive tracking or simple journaling. But recording is essential, especially capturing what is going on when you are at your worst. Writing when you are at your worst is actually one the best things you can do in the moment because that knowledge will help you later.

Fun fact – clients will often email me a wall of text after having a big blow up or hitting rock bottom. Typically, however, I don’t respond for at least a day or two because I almost always receive a follow-up email saying that they feel better and the crisis has been averted. The act of writing the email allowed them to get the emotion out, see what they were dealing with, and have their problem-solving skills kick in. 

The point is, if you are truly going to understand your C-game, you need to take advantage of those instances when you are at your worst and write down what’s happening.

If you are new to my system, start here. Begin observing and tracking when emotions get the best of you. 

For those of you already familiar with the system, it’s time to recognize and celebrate the progress you’ve made so far, then make a fresh evaluation to target your current C-game.

You don’t need to rediscover your C-game every day, but when you have a reset moment, such as setting annual goals, you need to acknowledge that those goals can be torn apart by your C-game and get prepared. 

One example would be fully expecting 2025 to be even better than 2024, which is subtle overconfidence. Maybe you are going through the motions of a plan, but if the vibe you are bringing is just that you expect a better outcome without specific risks identified and plans to address them, that’s a C-game mistake.

It’s also important to acknowledge that old stuff can be a factor. When you just continually get tripped up again and again and again, it can feel like you are sabotaging your own efforts, which adds self-criticism and can cost you confidence and motivation. 

For those of you who truly feel trapped, like you are in an unrelenting cycle, it could be scar tissue or trauma that is more personal, and not related to trading, golf, or poker at all. Your personal C-game is the foundation for your performance C-game and any cracks that exist there can certainly bleed through and make it an unfair fight when you are trying to tackle performance. If that rings true, consider watching this video about identifying and resolving accumulated emotion.

 

Getting to Work

Now that you have a solid understanding of why C-game matters, it’s time to get to work. Unlocking you from this place is going to come from identifying the flaws, biases, and illusions that are driving your C-game. You’ve got this!

 

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