Tharp's Thoughts Weekly Newsletter

• Article: Motivating Yourself in the New Year Through Psycho-Logics, By Van K. Tharp
• Workshops: Oneness Awakening Workshop. Bring Your Valentine for Half Price
• FREE BOOK!: Trading Beyond the Matrix
• Tip: Apple — A Company So Good, It Gets No Respect, by D.R. Barton, Jr.
• Swing Trading Video Workshop

THIS FEBRUARY!

Wake Up & Change Your Life

Participating in the Oneness Awakening Course is an extraordinary opportunity to benefit from some of the important journeys Dr. Tharp has taken to transform his life.

The course has become a fundamental tool in Dr. Tharp's mission to help his clients succeed. Don't miss this chance to learn more about how you can become more aware, positive, calm, centered, and successful! With permanent awakening you start seeing things as they are. And you can start paying attention to everything around you without judgment, just as it is. Can you imagine trading the markets from this state?

This workshop is about transformation. This is not a trading workshop. However, if you are interested in joining the Super Trader Program, Dr. Tharp does use the exercises in this workshop to help evaluate if a student is ready for the Super Trader Program.

Learn more...

Feature Article

Motivating Yourself in the New Year Through Psycho-Logics

by Van K. Tharp, Ph.D.

Click here to resolve formatting problems

Inside ourselves we are free to express or state any thought, feeling, memory, mental state, imagination, decision, or anything that comes up for us as a frame for our experience. In this way we are psycho-logical. Alfred Korzybski in his famous book Science and Sanity, put a hyphen in the word psychology to describe that way you map your internal world. In other words, what we do inside isn’t logical (reason and understanding), it’s entirely different or psycho-logical.

Many of you, for example, if you have at least partially done the Peak Performance Home Study Course begin to understand that. What you resist internally tends to persist. For example, if you attempt to escape your feelings by pushing them down inside and storing them in your body, then those feelings tend to become the glue that holds non-useful beliefs in place. This is not normal logic. Instead of escaping those feelings, they tend to dominate our lives.

In addition, inside ourselves we bring one emotional state to judge or preside over another primal state. This is what the latest version of NLP calls metastating, or applying a state to another state. For example, you might have a basic fear response. But then to that fear response, we could bring any of the following meta-states as shown in the table below:

A general principle of metastating is that the highest metastate is what rules and dominates everything. Thus, if you fear fear, then metastates of fear dominates the original fear and makes it much worse. If you welcome the fear, then the metastate of welcoming dominates and the fear just seems to melt away.

So let’s apply that to the New Year. For example, lately I’ve had a bad cold. I’ve felt tired and have not seems as motivated as I normally am. As a result, I decided to start to examine my psycho-logics about the New Year.

So the initial question I asked myself was “how come you are not that motivated right now?”

The response back was “What are you looking forward to in your life? What are your goals? What excites you?”

And the answer was “I don’t know.” And actually I didn’t feel too excited about anything.

So most of my time right now was concerned with getting ready to teach the New Infinite Wealth course which I present on Friday. When I first developed it I was really excited about doing it. But when my Internal Guidance asked me how excited I was about it now, my response was “I don’t know, but probably not that much.”

I’m also doing a lot of work on health and exercise including getting involved with an anti-aging clinic, but when my Internal Guidance asked me about that, my initial response was “I’m not too excited about it right now.”

I’m also going to India at part of an 18 year journey toward becoming a Siddha yoga and the next trip is in June. But when my Internal Guidance asked me about that, my response was “It’s the hottest time of the year in India and I’m not looking forward to going at all.”

And then I’ve been thinking about writing several books, so my Internal Guidance asked me about that. My response was, “Trading books aren’t selling right now, so I’m not very motivated to do a new one.”

So this brings up an important point about metastating and psycho-logics. If you don’t like goal setting, it sets you up for disappointment. You basically metastate yourself with some anticipated disappointment, and all of that would be somewhat tinged with dislike. Look at me, I wasn’t looking forward to any of the things I was doing in my life. So when I actually looked at myself, it was no wonder that I wasn’t motivated and felt quite lethargic. And as a result, my Internal Guidance ask me to list what I was doing, to prioritize it, and to find one good thing about each item on the list. So I did just that. And I came up with the following list:

1. I’m doing a new workshop starting Friday, The New Infinite Wealth Workshop.
   a. There is some great material in that workshop. The workshop is full and I get to help a lot of people.
2. I want to support my wife in her projects and her personal evolution.
   a. When my wife is happy, I tend to be happier. She and I support each other mentally and emotionally. She’s a wonderful wife and she needs some mental support.
3. I’m watching a number of old NLP videos.
   a. When I learn something new that I can use or apply to helping others I get really excited about it. And there is plenty of new stuff in the videos I have, including lots that I have forgotten.
4. I’m developing a new workshop called Trading Genius (Peak 102) that will probably be introduced at the Super Trader Summit in 2016.
   a. This is really exciting because I’m combining Neurosemantic principles with the NLP I already know and helping people to get to new states that will dramatically help them so yes that’s exciting.
5. I wish to improve my heart strength through the PACE program by being able to do 525 steps in 3 minutes (1 minute at a time) on the Versa-Climber® at the gym. And I also want to work with an anti-aging clinic to improve my energy and health.
   a. When I first started this I could only do about 135 steps in a minute and after doing so I felt like I was going to die. If I did this three times, I worked out to a 405 steps in 3 minutes. But several weeks ago, before I got a cold, I managed to do 516 steps, including 184 steps on the peak run. I thought that was impossible. So why not bring it up another notch to 525. I haven’t done it for a while but it’s doable within a month.
6. I’m working on a new motivation book as part of the Peak Performance Course
   a. This will help a lot of people and it will be self-published. People are eager to do the Peak Performance Course and this is a chance to really improve it even more.
7. I want to work through five videos in my Great Courses series.
   a. New ideas really excite me and this is a chance to expose myself to a lot of them.
8. I’m taking the luminosity tests daily and I want my brain scores for all five areas to be in the 95% for my age group.
   a. When first started Luminosity about 5 months ago, I was in the bottom 25% for my age group. Now my composite score in is the top 3%. Two of the five tests however are only in the top 10% for my age group, but with more practice I can get all of them into the top 5%, so let’s do it. If I’m in the top 5% I know my brain is very healthy and I’ll be able to continue this work for a long time.

My Internal Guidance asked me to notice how I felt after doing that. And the answer was really good.

So think about this for yourself. How to you feel about beginning and shaping 2016 with some great new goals? What do you think about yourself as someone who can turn your goals into a new reality for you? And how do you feel about the goals you set last year? Are your thoughts and feelings about these questions positive and supportive? Or do you frame them with limitations and “blah-ness.” How do you think you create your attitudes that shape your mind in a particular way? We have just talked about how you do it. You meta-state those attitudes into existence. Your attitude is a composite about all the multiple frames of mind that you have about something. So now you know how to supercharge your attitude.

What would happen this year if you started focusing on your metastates about goals and your attitudes (another word for metastates) about your life? What if super-charging those became your goal for 2016.

What we are teaching in the New Infinite Wealth game is that to win the game of wealth, to become infinitely wealthy, you need to work on your inner game of wealth. When you win the inner game, then the outer game becomes easy. So ask yourself with respect to trading, wealth, and your level of happiness for 2016:

• Are you winning at the inner game of trading, wealth, and happiness?
• To succeed externally at trading, wealth, and happiness, what inner game to you need to master?
• What frame of mind are you bringing to the table about the effort, discipline, patience, education, self-work, and long term commitment needed to remake yourself as a winner in these games.

So begin to realize more fully than you ever have done before, that you are psycho-logical. How are your psycho-logics? Ask yourself the same questions that my Inner Guidance asked me. And when you do, what kind of answers do you get and what insights do you find about yourself? Do your psycho-logics empower you?

To conclude, my inner guidance asked me to focus on the New Infinite Wealth Workshop and find five benefits for me immediately in giving that workshop. This is what I came up with.

• I could apply the teachings of the workshop for myself. Yes, I’m already infinitely wealthy, but there are so many great principles about inner wealth that I could adopt including, having a continual attitude of how to give more value to others through everything we do.
• I could have as an objective that we get rave reviews about the workshop and that everyone is talking about what a great workshop it is.
• While I’m infinitely wealthy, my tax problems are rising (i.e., I wish you all such problems), as I find myself having to take retirement income and social security income. As a result, I could develop a plan to purchase a new building to help get more deductions 2017 when all of this starts to really impact me.
• I could have an attitude of delivering massive value to everyone in this workshop and to personally do my best to insure that everyone gets it.

And the net result of doing that exercise is that I’m really looking forward to doing the workshop and I am eager for it to start. That’s called changing my psycho-logics. Actually, this was my internal guidance helping me through this process. I simply started the process by asking “how come I’m not as motivated as I was a month ago?”

About the Author: Trading coach and author Van K. Tharp, Ph.D. is widely recognized for his best-selling books and outstanding Peak Performance Home Study Program—a highly regarded classic that is suitable for all levels of traders and investors. You can learn more about Van Tharp at www.vantharp.com. His new book, Trading Beyond The Matrix, is available now at matrix.vantharp.com.