I have just been listening to a Tim Ferris interview with Caroline Paul (author of The Gutsy Girl -Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure) who is one of the few female firefighters in the San Francisco Fire Department as well as a pilot, white water rafter and all-around adventuress.
What really caught my attention though was how she described dealing with fear, she observed fear as though she was looking at at wall of bricks and fear was one of the bricks, she then asked herself what weight she wanted to give the fear in what she needed to do, she then remembered the importance she attached to feeling brave, she then pushed the fear somewhere else at the back of her mind as she decided not to allow it to be of importance.
To have bravery as one of her core values and then choose to be brave and place low emphasis on fear during high risk situations is a strategy that a trader can learn from. Can you create an image of your emotions which you can manipulate such as a pile of bricks and assign emotions to them and move them about according to importance?
Maybe use another mental construct if bricks don’t do it for you, something that you can move around and control. This all depends of course on being able to distance yourself from your emotions rather than being hijacked by them; a key skill for traders.