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I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a 3-day weekend (along with 5 other traders) with Mark Douglas back in the mid 90's. It was a surreal experience sitting in the glass-walled conference room of a high-rise condominium building (where he lived) overlooking one of the piers on Lake Michigan in such an intimate setting.
That weekend is a story for another time, but I want to work on one of the things I learned there.
During that weekend he gave us a mental exercise he called the "coach and quarterback technique." The exercise is meant to not only develop/improve the ability to focus your thoughts, but to lessen the amount of time it takes for you to realize that you are in the middle of the distracting or self-sabotaging thoughts that lead to destructive (losing) behavior.
In essence to "monitor our own thoughts." Similar to the way a coach monitors a quarterback. The quarterback is essentially in control of the game, but if he starts getting sacked or misreading the defense and starts veering off the game plan, the coach is there to get him back in line and back on track.
Lately I've lacked conviction in doing the exercise so I'm starting this thread to make myself a little more accountable, to report my daily progress with it for at least the next 30 days, and to share the exercise here. I'm not looking for astonishing results, just a consistent application of the exercise.
This exercise is much like any other "meditation," and there are a million different ones to talk about, but this thread is not intended to be a discussion of all of the various meditation/mental techniques – I'm sure there is already plenty of that in this part of the forum. This thread is focused on a discussion of this specific technique and a journal of my practice of it.
I have a lot to do today and I want to get this started, so I'm going to give the basics for now and I'll elaborate as I go along and think of more details.
The Exercise
It's a simple counting exercise. Sitting comfortably and relaxed with eyes closed, breathe in and count "1." On the exhale say (mentally or out loud) "and." Then inhale and count "2." On the exhale, "and," and so on up to a count of 4, then start the cycle over again.
Breathing should be relaxed, as full as you want and at a comfortable pace.
What you will discover (because it happens to everyone) is that shortly after you start your "counting" you will begin to experience a stream (or even bombardment) of other thoughts about all kinds of things – everything but your counting.
What's interesting is that when you realize that you're not counting anymore, you won't know for sure how long you've been doing it. It could be for just a few seconds or even a few minutes.
And it is precisely this aspect of our minds that causes so many problems with our trading. It only takes a few moments of this lack of focus for the distracting or self-sabotaging thoughts to enter and cause us to do something we shouldn't. How many times have you looked back after a trade and said, "I know better than that! Why did I do that? What was I thinking?!"
So while you're doing the counting exercise, as soon as you're aware that you aren't counting anymore, just acknowledge it and then gently bring yourself back to the exercise. The idea is to train yourself to become aware of these distracting/destructive thoughts more quickly; to monitor your own stream of thoughts.
Start with a few minutes a day and work your way up to 15 minutes once or twice a day – whatever works for you. Mark suggested that we do it for 15 minutes, twice a day. That's what I'll be attempting to do here.
I'm calling it my "Focus Meditation" just because I like the connotation of those words, but you can call it whatever you want.
For now I'll leave you with the last thing that Mark said to us about this exercise – kind of like anything else in life: "This exercise produces enormous beneficial effects for everyone who does it. It's just that very few people will do it."
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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I'll be keeping these dailies short and simple so I have little excuse not to post.
7:27am: 10 minutes of Focus Meditation - Only did 10 minutes because at this point I still hadn't decided to go through with creating this thread and doing 15 minutes, twice a day.
9:51pm: 15 minutes - First few minutes weren't too bad, but the remaining time my mind was constantly wandering off course. Feel like I have the attention span of a gnat - at least when it comes to focusing my thoughts.
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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I don't plan to post more than once a day here, but I thought of another thing so I'll post it along with this morning's meditation.
While I'm doing my Focus Meditation I have earphones in and I listen to one of my Monroe Institute Hemi-Sync tracks like “ Surf.” Mark Douglas turned us on to the Monroe Institute stuff while I was in Chicago. Not sure how much it really does, but it's great for drowning out outside noises and it's nice to know that it might also have beneficial effects.
7:50am: 15 minutes – I only found myself completely off and away from my counting a few times. But for the rest of the time I had a nearly constant stream of chatter and distracting thoughts running concurrent to my counting. Toward the end I even began having thoughts about whether I had remembered to set my iPhone alarm because it had seemed like a long time. Very little actual singularly focused thought.
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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Great thread, I'm looking forward to reading more. I have used holysynic meditation cds before, but never listen to them long enough to determine their usefulness.
9:41pm: 15 minutes - I was pretty tired when I started so I didn't think I'd do very well, but I was actually doing a better job of focusing on my counting than this morning. I don't think I ever got through a full 4-count cycle without other thoughts coming in but it was noticeably better.
Then it suddenly struck me that I had forgotten to set my timer for 15 minutes. I jolted my eyes open, unlocked my iPhone, and then saw that I actually had set the timer and I still had a little over 6 minutes left. What was that about? I was nearly certain I had forgotten to set it - weird. After that I was back to a ton of distracting thoughts like this morning.
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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15mins is way too long for me to stay focused at this point. I try to do 2min but can rarely keep my thoughts focused for more than about 10secs at time.
Join the club. Just remember that this isn't as much about "thinking about nothing" as it is about beginning to recognizing when you're "off track" with your thoughts - having thoughts that may be counterproductive to your overall objectives - and then being able to redirect them.
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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I pretty much have the same thing. There are few moments when I am only focused on my counting. Every time I realize that other thoughts are streaming through, I try to just release them and go back to counting - but it seems like it's about every 2 seconds that I'm doing that.
Mark said it can take at least a week of doing it twice a day, 15 minutes a day just to get to the point where you might be able to get through a 1 - 4 count cycle without other thoughts coming in.
I'm still not completely clear about what I'm going to accomplish with this yet. This is an experiment as much as anything and like I said in the intro, I'm just trying to apply the exercise consistently for a while to see what happens.
So back to your question: There really isn't a "right way" and a "wrong way." There's "your way," so keep at it for a while and see where it takes you.
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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