Boom or bust. Feast or famine.

If you deal with extreme ups and downs in your performance, you know exactly what this feels like.

You’ll have stretches where everything clicks—strong results, confidence high, execution sharp—followed by bewildering crashes that seem to erase all progress. One month you’re a golfer whose handicap drops from 10 to 7. Then inexplicably you’re struggling just to break 90.

In trading, you have streaks where you’re either crushing the market for weeks or steadily making solid gains for weeks, feeling in sync, stacking profits, envisioning future glory, only to watch it all evaporate in an inferno of overtrading, revenge and greed.

In poker, it feels like all the work put into your game has paid off, you’re locked in, making great reads, building your bankroll, constantly going deep in tournaments, then one day it all starts to disappear, you tilt and give away heaps in soft game, and you struggle to get you rhythm back and steadily bleed each session, unable to stop the slide.

The shared characteristic of these boom and bust cycles isn’t just poor results; it’s the inability to stop the cycle of emotional chaos that paralyzes progress.

Eventually this can lead to lower motivation–why keep picking yourself up again when you’ll end up back at square one?

Breaking out of this cycle is hard because there are multiple moving pieces and the first one is often the least well known: overconfidence.

During the boom phase, when things are going well, overconfidence quietly builds. Execution starts to slip, but it’s not obvious and goes unpunished. This is especially true in poker and trading where variance can bail you out. You play a marginal hand poorly but still win. You hold a winner longer than usual and the market moves your way—rewarding the extra risk.

Your success goes unpunished.

Golfers can get lucky too. The hero shot out of the trees finds the green, not the water. Escaping calamity provides a confidence boost, not a reality check.  

At some point, however, the bubble bursts. Small gambles don’t pay off, variance inevitably turns, things start to become a struggle. You force, trying to make something happen. Process and execution degrades further as the self-inflicted mistakes make things worse.

As the bust phase accelerates, emotions hijack technique, strategy, and reason. You look for results–money, wins, great shots–to find stability. But your mind and emotions are too far gone. Anger, revenge, hope, wishing, loss of confidence, the f*ck it’s all converge and force you to make decisions that you know aren’t correct, but can’t stop.

You might even start procrastinating, not working as hard as you should, losing interest, looking for the reset to snap you out. Others will do the opposite, voraciously consuming content searching for an answer: backtesting and studying charts in trading, working with solvers and reviewing videos in poker, or endlessly hitting balls on the driving range in golf.

It’s always better to look for a solution than simply escape. Sure a break can be welcome opportunity to come back refreshed enough to find your groove again…but nothing changed. You just dumped the emotion out of your mind, like emptying a bucket catching leaky water. You’ll be back in the chaos again once the cycle resumes.

Overworking yourself isn’t the answer either. No, you can’t just out work this problem by studying more, improving your discipline, or fixing your swing. The problem isn’t technical and mostly comes from your mental game. So if you’re going to work hard, work on the right part of the problem.

The deeper issue includes a faulty desire to go back. In the depths of the bust phase, you’re desperately trying to get back to the top.

You don’t want that.

The top, at least how you’ve experienced it in the past, is too fragile and lacks the integrity to prevent the crash.

You don’t want to go back to that. 

You want to build something new. You want to build a stronger foundation to your mental game. One that doesn’t allow your performance to crash…or get too high.

To truly break the cycle, you need to isolate each piece of it and understand the lifecycle.

Chronologically, overconfidence is generally where the problem starts. Spotting the early signs of overconfidence is critical. For some of you, this alone can significantly change the cycle. Minimize the high and you’ll reduce the crash.

Take a look at this blog on Overconfidence to help you recognize signals that often go unnoticed.

Curbing your overconfidence can be tough–for one, you might deny your overconfident because you’re overconfident. As one client described it, his mind felt like it had a glaze on it, blunting the seriousness of any transgression. That can be tough to crack. Sometimes briefly stepping away when things are going great, is a helpful way to spot the overconfidence, correct it, and get your mind back on solid ground.

The bust cycle is chaotic, but presents clear opportunities to learn the truth about your C-game.

C-game has the power to pull you down to its weakest point. You’re not going to fix your weak points until you understand them. In the midst of emotional chaos, take a lot of notes detailing what you’re experiencing.

Rather than trying to get your best back, figure out what’s causing your worst. That’s how you’ll start to minimize the down cycle, now, and next time around.

You might even find that your current C-game is already stronger than it was. While this most recent bust was bad, it’s less bad than before—less of the f*ck its, better risk management, less hope, more control. 

Think back to previous cycles and periods in your career. Compare your current C-game to your previous C-game. Are things as bad as they were? Odds are no. So how’d you do it? 

Did taking time off help? Reading stories from traders, poker players or golfers about their struggles? Was it doing certain types of studying or work? Understanding why something works will help you use it as a tactic, not just a last resort.

Keep in mind that you will have to go through a full cycle to have any evidence of real progress. Overconfidence sneaks in when you are doing well and you forget you have to fix this stuff—you think because you have improved, it’s all solved. Don’t fall into that trap.

Your inchworm will continue to progress. There are always going to be periods of advancement. When things slide downward, your job is to suck less and build your C-game and B-game back stronger than they are today.

Build a stronger foundation for the next upward cycle.

Recognize details and have corrections for each piece of it – then apply them regularly and consistently. 

Cycles will continue. Ups and downs are part of growth. Minimize the severity of downside and you’ll build a foundation that will sustain a bigger upside.

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