accept whatever information the market isoffering about itself, and we need to be able to trust ourselves to know that
103we will always act in our best interests without hesitation, regardless of theconditions. Any endeavor will require some degree of trust. We would findit difficult to cross the street it we didn't trust ourselves to be able to get outof the way of the oncoming traffic. From a psychological perspective, themarket environment can wreak just as much havoc in our lives as getting hitby a car. To be successful as traders, we need to believe that we can winwith an absence of fear so we can make better assessments of the conditionsand perceive more choices. What this means is that we have to do thenecessary mental work to release ourselves from anything within us thatwould cause us to narrow our focus of attention or specifically block certaincategories of information from our awareness.
104CHAPTER 11
Why We Need to LearnHow to Adapt
There is a direct relationship between our ability to adapt to changingenvironmental conditions and the level of satisfaction we feel about ourlives. To adapt to the changes occurring in the outside environment impliesthat we are changing ourselves as we learn more and more of what theenvironment has to offer in terms of distinctions about its nature. Themore distinctions we can make between the various components of theenvironment and how they act as a force on one another, the moreinformation becomes available to us through our perception. As weexpand our perception of information available, we will gain a deeper levelof understanding and insight into the cause-and-effect relationship that wehave with the outside environment, that is, how the environment has thepotential to act as a force on us and how the environment will react to theforce of our behavior.
The deeper the level of our understanding and insight, the moreeffectively we can interact with the environment to fulfill our needs andachieve our goals. Fulfilling our needs and achieving our goals create withinus a feeling of well-being, confidence, and satisfaction about our lives thatwould otherwise be characterized by feelings of dissatisfaction,disappointment, and deterioration when we can't fulfill ourselves. Success,confidence, and satisfaction are all synonymous. They breed from oneanother to create and perpetuate a positive cycle of expansion and mentalgrowth. And, by the same token, disappointment, dissatisfaction, anddeterioration also feed on one another to create negative cycles ofemotional pain, anxiety, and depression.
105To fulfill our needs and achieve our goals, there has to be some level ofcorrespondence or balance between the inner mental environment and theouter physical environment. What I mean by "correspondence" is somelevel of understanding of how the outer environment works. Our needs,intents, goals, and desires—all— exist first in the mental environment.Then one of three things can happen in some future moment in thephysical environment; they are either 100 percent fulfilled, partiallyfulfilled, or not fulfilled at all, resulting in feelings of satisfaction ordissatisfaction equivalent to the degree of fulfillment.
To fulfill ourselves, we need to interact with the outside environmentalforces. The extent to which we fulfill ourselves is a function of knowing themost appropriate set of steps to take in relationship to the outer conditionsand to what extent we can act on what we know. Knowing the mostappropriate set of steps to take in relationship to the prevailing conditions isa function of how much or little we have learned in relationship to what isavailable to be learned.
Example: Draw a large circle with a diameter of approximately 6 feet.This circle will represent everything that is available to be learnedabout the nature of the universe, not limited by what we know of it,but as it exists in every way as yet to be discovered. Now, draw asmaller circle within the larger one, with a diameter of approximately 2feet. This smaller circle will represent all the accumulated knowledgeof humankind since the dawn of our existence, in other words, whatwe have learned in relationship to what we have yet to discover aboutthe interacting forces of our environment and ourselves. Now, place adot within the smaller circle. This dot would probably be a fairrepresentation of what each of us as individuals has accumulated inknowledge, insight, and understanding, in relationship to what hasalready been discovered and learned by others (both in the past andpresent), in relationship to everything else that is still waiting to bediscovered.
The empty space between the inside boundaries of the larger circleand the smaller circle is basically everything we don't know or haven'tlearned about yet, either individually or collectively. There are manythings in the environment available to be experienced. However, untilwe learn about them, we won't experience them, just as peoplecouldn't experience atomic energy until it was discovered. Yet it ex-isted in the environment, waiting to be experienced and learned aboutfor hundreds of thousands of years before we actually discovered it.These were hidden components that had to be actively uncovered bysomeone. Otherwise, if the environment acts as a force on us in waysthat we haven't learned to understand yet, we will either dismiss theexperience as not real or form some superstition or think of it as someunknown or random force, until we investigate and understand the
106phenomena. When we investigate, we learn to make enough distinc-tions to recognize all the interacting components acting as a force onone another to create the effect that we also believed was random,until we learned about the experience. For years, many people in theacademic community believed that the markets were random; this is aperfect example of their general lack of understanding of humannature. People act as a force on prices in perfectly logical ways, whenyou understand the logic of their fears.
The small circle represents what has been discovered and experi-enced by somebody at sometime in human history. All the discoveriesthroughout human history have expanded the small circle to includemore and more of the larger one. For example, the small circle wouldprobably have been a tenth of its present size during the Middle Ages.Each discovery since then changed the environment that we couldexperience because it added something to the mental environment thatdidn't previously exist in it. In other words, as we learned, we changedthe way we perceived the world around us, resulting in the evolutionof the thinking of humankind overall.
There is no question that the accumulated knowledge of hu-mankind has increased to levels that would be completely inconceiv-able to or boggle the mind of even the broadest, most progressivethinking person alive just 100 years ago. Everything that exists nowthat didn't exist then (cars, planes, phones, computers, etc.) is theresult of what someone learned and shared with others, and conse-quently it changed the consistency and makeup of the environmentwe live in. And yet all of what we have now existed as possibilities since thebeginning of humankind. The possibility for manned space flight existedfrom the first moment that a person looked up into a star-lit sky andwondered what it would be like to be on the moon. Of course, we didn't evenattempt to do it until our knowledge evolved to a point where mere wishingcould be turned into a reality. But what if we could go back to 1889 and tellthe typical 40-year-old person about the world their great, great, great-grandchildren will grow up in? There is no way he would believe howdifferent things will be. He wouldn't believe it because he wouldn't have themental framework to believe it, just like we would have a very difficult timebelieving what we will have evolved into 100 years from now.
The dot simply represents the world we experience as individuals inrelationship to what would be possible to experience if we had inside ofour mental environment all the accumulated knowledge of humankind.Everything you and I know as individuals in relationship to everything wehaven't learned yet would represent the current set of limitations that weoperate from. That is, all our individual accumulated knowledge—everymemory, belief, distinction, association, insight, or understanding—aboutthe nature of the physical environment would all represent our personallimitations compared to what is available in the environment to experience,
107believe, and understand. That is, there will always be more informationavailable in the environment than what our personal limitations will allowus to perceive or experience.
Just contemplate the immensity of what we don't know yet; consider thatevery person who exists acts as a force on the environment to change it insome way that can affect us as individuals in some gratifying orunsatisfying way. The way in which each individual acts as a cause tochange the environment, which in turn, affects everyone else, willcorrespond to the makeup of his mental environment. So, until you or Iunderstand every facet of everyone else's behavior and the ways in whichthey can express themselves to act as a force on the environment (meaningthe rest of us), then every other person that exists would represent anunknown outside force to the extent that we haven't learned about humannature or understand it.
We could start filling in the small circle with dots to represent theknowledge of each individual that exists on the planet, until the circle wasalmost filled. The blank space left in the small circle would representknowledge that exists in some form that is not inside the mind of someperson alive today. We could also organize the dots into clusters, where eachdot would overlap a bit to represent the shared knowledge and beliefs ofdifferent cultures, although they couldn't overlap too much because we allknow something different because of our individual differences inexperiences. The dots would also have to be different sizes to represent theincreased or decreased levels of understanding and insight that we operateout of in relationship to one another. For example, the dot of a child wouldbe much smaller than the dot of a typical adult.
The physical environment was here before we were born—and wecertainly weren't born with the insight that we need to interact with it insuch a way that we can assure ourselves of experiencing high levels ofsatisfaction. For example, if there was a 100 percent correspondencebetween our mental and physical environment, then everything there is toknow about the nature of the physical environment we would havealready learned, and this knowledge would be a component part of themental environment. Implied within this perfect correspondence wouldbe a complete understanding of all the forces that operate in the physicalenvironment, coupled with a complete understanding of their cause-and-effect relationship. We would know exactly how the environment wouldact as a force on us to create experience and how the environment wouldrespond as a counteracting force to the force we apply to it through ourbehavior. And, therefore, with this perfect understanding we would knowthe most appropriate set of steps to take to fulfill our needs, intents, goals,and desire, resulting in a complete state of satisfaction. I am definingbehavior as the outward physical expression of mental energy acting as a
108force on the outside environment.
Obviously, none of us possesses this kind of perfect correspondence withthe environment, and, as a result, it is probably safe to say that none of uslives our lives in a complete state of satisfaction. However, the more weunderstand and know about the interacting forces behind our own behaviorand the interacting environmental forces outside of us, the easier it is tofulfill our needs and achieve our goals, resulting in greater levels ofsatisfaction that we will experience in our lives. Conversely, if we don'tunderstand our own behavior, we certainly can't begin to understand oranticipate anyone else's, and the less we understand and know about therest of the environmental components that have a potential to act as a force on us,then it would stand to reason that the less potential we have to fulfill our needsand achieve our goals, resulting in feelings of disappointment, stress, anxiety,unhappiness, and fear.
LEARNING ANDTHE QUALITY OF OUR EXPERIENCES
As I have mentioned, we aren't born with the knowledge that we need to operateeffectively in the physical environment to fulfill ourselves. However, we areborn with the need to know. This need to know operates as a driving force in ourlives coming from the innermost depths of who we are. Our natural sense ofcuriosity compels us to explore and learn. For example, once we have learned thenature of something or accomplished some task, we quickly become bored andgo on to something different. Boredom acts as an inner force compelling us to lookfor something new to discover and learn about.
Attractions also act as an inner force, compelling us to move through theenvironment to discover and create experience. Take the object of a child'scuriosity (something he is attracted to) away from him and what will happen? Hewill usually start crying or even throw a fit His crying is an indication that hisinner needs are not being fulfilled. Crying is a form of grieving to compensatefor the lack of balance between the inner and outer environments. When wehave explored the object of our attraction to our satisfaction, it means the insidehas been filled with what the outside has to offer in terms of experience. Whenthat happens we simply lose interest, become bored, and start to scan theenvironment for something else that might attract our attention.
There is another characteristic of our nature that supports our need to learn.Whenever we learn a skill, the steps involved in the operation of that skill dropdown to an unconscious level of operation, so we are then free to learn somethingnew. To learn a skill, we usually have to break the skill down into a series ofsmall steps and concentrate on each individual step until we can put all the stepstogether into a series of effective movements. By concentrating on each smallstep, we narrow our focus of attention to the point where we are oblivious toanything else going on in the environment. For example, think of a time inyour life when you were tying to learn a new skill, say, in some sport, and
109while you were trying to put all the movements together, someone wasattempting to get your attention on some completely unrelated matter. Insuch a situation we would find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, tostay focused on one without destroying our concentration on the other.However, after we have successfully made the skill a learned resource, wecould easily perform the movements while focusing our attention else-where.
Without this characteristic of our nature, where our skills drop to anunconsciousness level of operation, we would find it nearly impossible tomove beyond the performance level of a typical infant. Just think what itwould be like if we had to concentrate on all the movements necessary justto pick something up the way a typical infant does. We didn't always havethe eye/hand coordination that we take completely for granted. We had tolearn it. We learned it because we were attracted to things in theenvironment we wanted to experience with our sense of touch. As we learneach skill, we can automatically access the series of movements to executethe skill so we don't have to concentrate on any of the individual steps,which then frees our attention to explore and continually expand what wecan become aware of.
Learning is a function of our existence. It will occur quite naturallythrough our powerful sense of curiosity and what we find ourselvesattracted to in the environment that we just need to know everything about.At the most fundamental level, learning will happen just because we arealive and have to interact with the environment to stay alive. So we willlearn something. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that what wehave learned is very useful with respect to how we might go about fulfillingourselves in some satisfactory way. We have very little control in our earlyyears over what we learn about the nature of the outside world and how itworks. I will discuss this in more detail in a moment.
As we expand our personal dot (as in the example) to learn more andmore of what the environment has to offer in the way of insight about itself,we increase our level of correspondence with it When we learn, we changethe makeup and consistency of our inner environment. Each change wemake on the inside simultaneously changes our perspective andperception of the outside. The outside environment is different because weare operating out of new insights and understandings as a result of what hasbeen added to or changed on the inside. Each new insight makes availableto us new and different choices on how to interact more appropriately withthe environment to change the quality of our experiences.
This may seem like an obvious correlation between what we have learnedand how much satisfaction we experience in our lives, but I assure you it isnot. If it was so obvious, then most people wouldn't have such a difficulttime making the connection between the deteriorating conditions, lack ofhappiness or satisfaction in their lives and their lack of insight, coupledwith a refusal to acknowledge there is something they don't know and
110need to learn.
There are always greater levels of satisfaction available in everyexperience until we reach the point where we know everything there is toknow. If we did know everything there is to know, we could expectoutcomes from the outside that would correspond exactly with the insidemental environment. This kind of perfect correspondence between innerand outer would be the result of our perfect understanding of ourselves—the inner forces that act on our behavior—in relationship to the outerenvironmental forces that act on us. Since none of us is at the level ofperfect knowledge, we can assume that within every experience we havewith the physical environment there are other probable experiencesresulting from other choices that were available but unknown to us at thetime, the point being that what we end up with in any given situation willcorrespond exactly with our level of understanding, insight, and ability toact on what we know.
The more we allow ourselves to learn, the better able we are at makingassessments about the possibilities that exist in some future moment.However, implied within the foregoing statement is that we are, first,willing to acknowledge that other possible futures exist, not just the onefuture that our expectations and beliefs about what we have already learnedlock us into. Keep in mind that everything we know in relationship toeverything we haven't learned yet would represent the current set oflimitations that we operate out of. Conceptually, these individuallimitations are no different from the choices people in the Middle Ageswere blinded to by believing that the Earth was flat.
If we aren't willing to acknowledge that in any given situation moreinformation and choices exist than what our beliefs allow us to perceive,then we will never learn to recognize or anticipate the existence of theseother more satisfying possibilities. By acknowledging the possibility that amore appropriate set of steps exists, we open ourselves up to perceive andthen learn the steps that can lead to greater levels of satisfaction. Refusingto acknowledge the existence of these possibilities would be the same asclaiming that electricity didn't exist before it was discovered. When wecontinually argue for the status quo by defending what we already believewe know, the environment will seem to be constantly assaulting us,resulting in feelings of stress and anxiety. The outer environment becomesassaulting because it is offering us more to learn about the nature of theways in which things exist and we are simply refusing to learn.
In fact, we can easily determine if we need to learn something to operatein the environment more effectively by just monitoring the way we feel. Ifthere were never an imbalance or lack of correspondence between the mentaland the physical environments, then theoretically we wouldn't ever have areason to feel disappointment, frustration, confusion, stress, or anxiety. It isonly because there is an imbalance, a lack of harmony or correspondence,between the mental and physical that we ever experience any of these
111unpleasant, negative emotions. Because when there is a balance betweenthe inside and outside, we experience the opposite feelings of joy, happiness,and satisfaction. So it would stand to reason that any time we feel thesenegative emotions, it is because we either didn't know the most appropriateset of steps, resulting in frustration and disappointment, or we don't knowwhat to do next, resulting in stress, anxiety, and confusion. Jn any case, ourfeelings will always tell us about the state of our relationship with theenvironment and point the way to what we need to learn to experience greaterdegrees of satisfaction.
For example, if we aren't experiencing satisfaction in our personalrelationships, would it be too simple to assume that the reason is becausewe haven't developed the appropriate interpersonal skills? Is it possible thatthere are certain communication skills available that—once learned andused—can result in much more satisfying personal relationships and deeperlevels of intimacy? The problem is that it is just as easy to assume that theappropriate skills leading to greater levels of satisfaction don't exist or that wealready know what we need to know and if we aren't experiencing satisfactionnow, it must therefore not be possible to experience it at all. When we operateout of the last assumption, even if the environment presents us with evidence thatdeeper levels of satisfaction are possible (observing another couple who areexperiencing satisfaction), we would probably assume that they are acting as ifthey were happy for appearance's sake. That way, we won't have to takeresponsibility for learning something they might know.
The first assumption would result in investigation, learning, and expansion,leading to greater levels of effectiveness and satisfaction. The last two assumptionswould obviously lead to more dissatisfaction. The names and places may change,but we will experience the same kind of painful conditions over and over again.These cycles of dissatisfaction will continue until we acknowledge there is some-thing we need to learn and go about the task of learning it.
WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW WILL BLOCKWHAT WE HAVEN'T LEARNED YET
Obviously, acknowledging there is something that we need to learn is not as easyas it sounds. In fact, acknowledging that we don't know something or that whatwe do know isn't very useful or effective presents us with one of the majorparadoxes of life. The dilemma we are confronted with is how can we knowwhat we don't know when what we have already learned will block ourperception of what we haven't learned yet. For example, once we learn thattrading is easy (the first few quick winning trades will establish that belief), itwill block our perception of information to the contrary, that trading is probablyone of the hardest endeavors one could choose to undertake. Each of thesebeliefs—that trading is easy or trading is hard—would result in the perception ofcompletely different choices as being available from the environment, resultingin very different outcomes based on the choices perceived and acted on.
112We don't question the usefulness or effectiveness of something we have alreadylearned, simply because what each of us has learned we experienced in some way.That is, we won't question what we have experienced just because we experienced it,meaning the reality of the experience is based in our five senses: what is insideof us we either, felt, saw, heard, smelled, or tasted. That's real enough. Oncean experience becomes a component part of our mental environment in theform of a memory, belief, or association, it becomes a part of what iscommonly believed to be our identity and beyond question.
However, we are open to learn practically anything the environment hasto offer, if we haven't been previously exposed in some way. We will soakup first-time information like a sponge, regardless of what it is. However,once it is inside of us, we will either defend it or defend against it (hide frominformation in the environment that we don't want to acknowledge as a partof our mental environment), instead of making ourselves available to learnmore of what the environment has to offer in the way of insight about itselfor ourself as the case may be.
To defend against the intrusion of information requires energy. Thisinvestment in energy is commonly referred to as stress. The simplestdefinition that I can think of for stress is that it is what we feel when we areactively blocking information from the environment. In physical termsstress is really no different from walking against the wind. Symbolically,the wind would represent various categories of environmental informationwe don't want to confront; our bodies walking against the wind wouldrepresent what we have already learned—what is already inside of us thatblocks what is outside of us. The two forces clash and we feel stress.
One of the biggest ironies of life is that everyone wants to be right. Inother words, everyone assumes what they have experienced and learnedabout the nature of the way things exist to be the true and correct version.The irony is everyone's version is correct by virtue of the fact that what isinside all of us was experienced by our physical senses—if we saw it, if weread it, if we heard it, if we felt it, if we tasted it, if we smelled it, or anycombination thereof, we experienced it. However, not everybody's version(of what the environment has to offer in the way of experiences) isparticularly useful or effective as a resource for interacting with theenvironment in a way that would lead to satisfactory outcomes. Justbecause something gets input into our mental environment doesn't meanthat it's of any real value in helping us to fulfill ourselves.
A child has no way of conceptualizing how his experiences are formingbeliefs about the nature of reality, concepts that would, in fact, be muchdifferent under different environmental conditions.
He unquestioningly takes an experience as a fact of reality because thebeliefs he is forming are founded in feelings and emotions. He does notreflect on his experiences to assess the quality of the beliefs he is forming.He has no way of determining how these beliefs will either act as resourcesor obstacles to self-expression in the future.
113The child doesn't understand that any belief that he forms will definereality in a way that excludes other possibilities or that he will makeassociations with experiences, lumping components of the environmenttogether in ways that are very limiting and not practical. Many of thesebeliefs will just naturally be decharged as his attractions cause him tointeract with the environment in new ways. All of us will just naturally growinto a new set of limitations as we expand our awarenesses by learning,which in turn releases us from things we used to believe. However, if thequality of the energy in many of our beliefs is negatively charged, then ourfear will act as an obstacle to self-expression, limiting what we can perceivefrom the environment as possibilities.
For example, someone who grew up constantly being belittled orcriticized by his parents knows exactly how that feels. The beliefs he formsabout himself and his relationship with the environment, as a result, wereformed in a reality of pain. Certainly he wouldn't know, while growing up,that he was forming a belief about his relative unworthiness as a person.Unworthiness is a concept that he may not learn about well into his adultyears, and he may never learn how to release himself from the damagingeffects. But in the meantime, his fear of being ridiculed and belittled willdrastically limit the possibilities he perceives in the environment for self-expression. Many possibilities that seem self-evident to someone withoutthis fear would be totally out of the realm of possibility for him.
An even bigger irony is that the more we acknowledge the possibility thatour version of the way things exist isn't as effective of a resource as it couldbe, the more we make ourselves available to learn from the environment. Byexpanding our personal dot to include more of what is outside of us insideof us, the more it increases our level of correspondence with the outside,leaving less and less of what is out there that we don't know about, therebyincreasing our ability to be right.
The more we allow ourselves to learn, the better able we are at makingassessments about the probabilities that exist in some future moment. Howcould we not be better off by learning something when you consider thatthe environment can act as a force on us in an almost infinite variety ofways, some of which we know about, many others we couldn't begin toanticipate unless we keep on learning in spite of what we already know?The more we believe we know, the more we make the environment prove tous that what we know isn't particularly useful or effective. The problem isthat proof could be right in front of our noses and we wouldn't have themental framework to recognize it, unless we willingly allowed ourselves toconfront it and consider it. Otherwise, if we all knew so much, we wouldn'tever experience emotional pain, because it is a perfect indication that wedon't know how to interact with the environment to our satisfaction—because if we did, we would.
All this should be somewhat apparent because it is not a typical humancharacteristic to actively gather and consider information that conflicts
114with what we already know and believe to be true. However, consider thathidden within the environmental information that we haven't learned toperceive yet, either because we haven't learned to make the appropriatedistinctions or because the information is being blocked by our current set ofbeliefs, are a more appropriate set of steps to fulfilling ourselves. What wehaven't learned yet is outside of each one of us waiting to become a part ofour personal dot. What we don't know represents all the information thatcould result in choices that have much more satisfying outcomes. However,since we can't know what we haven't learned yet and what we do knowblocks the perception of other alternatives that exist for satisfaction, weeasily get caught in these terribly unsatisfying life cycles, believing that is allthe world has to offer, when our predicament is merely the result of ourinability to adapt ourselves. When we do allow ourselves to adapt, we learnthat there are always more choices available than our beliefs will allow us toperceive. What I mean by adapt is to identify and actively changesomething that is already inside of us so there is a higher degree ofcorrespondence between the inside and outside.
Each first-time experience with the physical environment creates adistinction in the mental environment about its nature. All information orpossibilities that exist in the same category as that first experience willthen be filtered perceptually through what we learned from thatexperience. Again I will use the example of a child whose first experience witha dog is a painful one, meaning that the first dog the child attempted to play with,out of his natural sense of curiosity, bit him. As a result of this one experience thechild will "naturally associate" all dogs with the one that bit him. What helearned will then act as a mental barrier to anything else the environment may haveto offer with respect to all other dogs.
I have used the words "naturally associate" to point out that the child willnot have to actively think about the limiting way in which dogs will becharacterized in his mental environment. The associations will occurautomatically, as a natural function of the way our minds are wired. So he willnot have to see "the" dog that bit him; any dog will cause him to remember thepain of his previous experience. As a result of his first experience with a dogbeing painful, he will automatically associate any future encounters with dogswith his one painful experience. Regardless of how erroneous his association isor how the environment may try to prove to him that most dogs are friendly andwill not cause him pain, he won't believe it, because what he has already learnedabout dogs (not one dog, but all dogs) will cause him to block the acceptance ofthis new information into his mental system.
However, if the child's first experience with a dog is positive, he will obviouslyhave no reservations to play with any dog until he has a painful experience. In thiscase, however, if he is bitten, he will not automatically associate all other dogswith the one that bit him because he has already learned that the environmenthas more to offer than this one painful experience. What he will learn, that isnew for him, is that not all dogs are friendly and that he must use some caution
115when interacting with them until he can determine their disposition.
The child whose first experience was painful doesn't know that he canexperience happiness and joy with dogs. He doesn't know it because he hasn'texperienced it; it isn't something he has learned yet, regardless of the evidencethe environment may be presenting him. Nor will he likely learn it until he iswilling to step through his fear. All other information being offered to him aboutthe nature of dogs will be blocked or rejected by the energy of what he has alreadylearned.
You can teach a child anything you please, regardless of how erroneous ordysfunctional it is relative to the environmental conditions. The child willbelieve what you teach him because what he experiences becomes a part ofhis identity. Anything we experience will become a functioning part of ouridentity. When I say "functioning," I mean that once something is inside ofus, regardless of what it is, it then has the potential to act as a force onour behavior. All these functioning parts that we call memories of expe-riences, beliefs, and associations, in turn then act as an internal force toshape our perception of the environment we experience out of what isavailable to experience.
As you already know, what each one of us fears as individuals issomething that we have at some point in our lives learned to fear, as a resultof our experiences. When we feel fear, it is because we have learned toperceive the environmental conditions as threatening in some way,whereas someone who hasn't had a painful experience associated with thosesame environmental conditions has learned to perceive the environmentconditions in a completely different way, a way that corresponds with hisprevious experience. One person can perceive the conditions as a threat,the other as an opportunity, in the same moment, based on what is alreadyinside of them. In other words, what they have already taken into theirmental environment as experience will determine how they perceive theenvironmental conditions, whether as an opportunity to experience joy oras a threat to experience pain and all the degrees in between. What isreally interesting is that neither one would be able to convince the other ofthe validity of his perception, because what they are experiencing at themoment is directly related to what they have already learned.
We will usually only question the value of something that is inside of us, ifwe are forced to, as an absolute last resort. What would be the ultimateproof that we need to finally make us acknowledge that there is somethingwe need to learn? Pain! We will acknowledge the need to learn when weare experiencing the emotional pain of a great disappointment or stressand anxiety because we don't know what to do next, and we are finding itincreasingly difficult to shift the responsibility for what we are ending upwith.
If we go back to the "believing that trading is easy” example, why wouldwe consider that trading is difficult when we already know that it is easy?What would cause us to question the usefulness of such a belief? The
116emotional pain of disappointment as a result of not being able to achieveour goals? Once we question the usefulness, what happens? A whole worldof information opens up to us on how we can learn to interact with thetrading environment more effectively by increasing our level ofcorrespond