Uncertainty is back.

With volatility surging around the latest tariff headlines, traders across stocks, crypto, and futures are being whiplashed by sudden reversals, irrational moves, and the creeping question:

“What do I do here?”

This kind of market rewards clarity and conviction — but punishes hesitation, overreaction, and emotional bias.

Many traders are about to be tested in ways they’ve never experienced before.

And it won’t be their strategy that determines success —It will be their psychology.

The Emotional Trap

In unpredictable markets, even experienced traders fall for the same trap: They start making decisions based on emotion, not process.

Fear is the most obvious one. But emotional trading shows up in subtler forms too:

• Taking a loss personally and trying to “get it back” from the market
• Assigning moral judgement to market moves (“This isn’t fair!”, “This isn’t how things are done”)
• Biased trading based on hope or anger instead of clean data
• Letting one unexpected loss unravel your confidence and discipline

When your emotions start leading, your edge vanishes.

It doesn’t matter whether the emotion is fear, greed, panic or elation —any heightened emotion creates avoidable risk before you ever take a position.

Why Emotional Trading Bleeds PnL

Once emotions are driving your actions, you’re no longer trading your plan —you’re trading your past.

Your subconscious mind takes over. And that’s where your deepest fears, doubts, and outdated survival patterns live—not exactly the entity that you would ideally want to be in charge of your finances.

You start:

• Breaking your own rules
• Overtrading, revenge trading, or freezing completely
• Making biased interpretations of data to justify bad entries or exits

Worse, as mistakes pile up, your emotional state spirals — leading to more errors, more damage, and a toxic loop of:

Uncertainty → Emotion → Execution Decay.

5 Ways to Bulletproof Your Psychology

You don’t have to let chaos and uncertainty wreck your performance — or your trading account.

When you understand the psychological traps that surface in volatile markets, you’re far better equipped to navigate them. In fact, extreme pressure can sharpen your execution — if you have the internal systems to channel it.

Ideally, your mental edge is something you’re developing consistently, long before volatility hits.

Just like elite athletes don’t wait until the Olympics to train their mindset, serious traders don’t wait for market chaos to build psychological resilience.

But even if you’re just starting to work on your trading psychology, the following strategies can help you stay grounded and effective — especially during turbulent stretches.

Here are five proven ways elite traders stay sharp when everyone else is spiralling:

#1 – Focus Only On What You Can Control

It’s easy to get swept up in headlines, expert predictions, and global narratives. But your edge doesn’t live there.

It lives in the actions you can control.

Start by drawing a clear line between what’s within your control and what isn’t. Keep the list simple. Then double down on executing the habits and systems that drive performance: your pre-market routine, risk management, execution process, review protocols.

Scrolling Twitter (X) doesn’t improve your entries. Precision in your prep does.

When you consistently take care of the controllables — especially in chaotic conditions — you put yourself in the best possible position to prosper.

#2 – Anchor Yourself in the Present Moment

When markets feel chaotic, your mind will want to race ahead — projecting worst-case scenarios or replaying past mistakes. That’s where panic takes control.

Grounding yourself in the now is a powerful antidote.

Use your senses: feel your feet on the floor, take one deep breath, look at the chart and ask, “What is the market showing me right now?” Not what you wish it would do, not what it should do — but what it’s actually doing.

The more time you spend in the present moment, the more access you have to clarity, data, and clean execution.

#3 – Become a Self-Awareness Ninja

Most traders react to the market. Elite traders notice how they’re reacting to themselves first.

Self-awareness is your first line of defence.

Start tracking your internal signals — tension in your chest, frustration building, thoughts getting scrambled. These are early warnings that emotion is creeping in.

It can be helpful to do a reflection exercise away from your trading desk, where you give yourself time to consider your triggers and the predictable pattern of how you react under extreme pressure.

If this includes defaulting to hope-based trading, freezing, revenge trading etc., then you can train yourself to consciously intervene to disrupt the pattern as soon as the initial internal signals are triggered.

You can’t manage what you don’t notice. So develop ninja-level awareness of your internal state — before it hijacks your next trade.

#4 – Give a Voice to Your Confusion and Fears

Bottling up emotion doesn’t make you stronger — it makes you volatile.

When you feel uncertain, angry, or afraid, don’t shove it down. Acknowledge it. Label it. Say it out loud or write it down:

• “I’m afraid I’m losing my edge.”
• “I’m confused by what the market’s doing.”
• “I’m feeling reactive — not rational.”

That simple act of naming the emotion creates space between you and the feeling. It gives your rational mind the room to re-engage — and keeps your next decision from being driven by impulsivity or subconscious programming.

#5 – Manage Your Stress—Personal and Trading-Related

You can’t separate your trading mind from your real life.

If you’re sleep-deprived, overstretched, or bottling up stress from outside the market, it will leak into your execution. Your resilience gets worn down, and your ability to manage pressure weakens.

Treat stress management like a skill — not a luxury. Build in recovery: sleep, nutrition, movement, boundaries.

When your baseline is steady, you’re much more equipped to handle volatility — in the market and in your own mind.

Final Thoughts

Chaotic markets expose the gaps in our psychology. They amplify whatever isn’t solid — mentally, emotionally, or structurally.

But they also offer a powerful opportunity: to strengthen your internal edge, refine your execution, and rise above the noise.

The traders who thrive in times like these aren’t the ones with the most information. They’re the ones who can stay grounded, self-aware, and intentional under pressure—

“The best antidote to external uncertainty is internal stability.”

– Créde Sheehy-Kelly

If this post resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts — how are you staying sharp in the current market conditions? What’s helping you manage pressure, or where are you feeling tested?

And if you’re an experienced trader ready to develop unbreakable trading psychology that can withstand any market environment, you might be interested in exploring my signature trading psychology program:

Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading

It’s designed specifically for high-performing traders who are ready to evolve beyond surface-level mindset tips and build a system for mental and emotional mastery.

The post Five Psychological Survival Tips for Traders in Chaotic Markets – The Elite Trader Mindset appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

Elite Traders Don’t Work Harder. They Manage Their Energy Like Capital.

There’s a dangerous illusion in high-level trading:

That if you just push harder, work longer, stay in front of the markets 24/7—that you’ll finally break through to the next level of performance.

But in almost two decades of a career working with top-performers in professional sports, business and trading, here’s what I’ve seen again and again:

It’s the people who are clinically effective with their mental, emotional and physical energy who outperform the majority of people in the field.

The reality is that working relentlessly and burning yourself out might boost your ego and sense of productivity…

But it doesn’t deliver bottom-line results.

If you are focusing your energy on the wrong things that don’t actually move the dial on your trading execution…

You will be busy, burned-out and caught in a cycle of underperformance.

Three Core Shifts to Maximize Trading Performance

To become an undeniably successful high-stakes trader, you need to treat your energy like it is valuable capital.

This means:

• Recovering cleaner after losses – quickly identifying the learning and moving on instead of dwelling on the loss and allowing it to continue influencing the next series of actions you take in the market.
• Optimizing your resilience to pressure – accepting that high levels of pressure are inherent in trading. Building internal capacity to maintain effective decision-making, clarity of thinking and precision of execution even in conditions of extreme pressure.
• Having repeatable systems that take the mental and emotional effort out of peak performance – creating highly-effective routines for mental conditioning, pre-market preparation, continuous improvement and post-trading review and decompression.

Most of the serious traders that I work with don’t have a technical skills gap.

They don’t need a better strategy.

They don’t need to push themselves harder.

They need internal clarity—a system for becoming clinically efficient with their mental, emotional and physical capital and for seamlessly navigating pressure and uncertainty without eroding execution.

Have you ever felt like no matter how much time and effort you invest in your trading, you’re spinning your wheels at the same PnL set point?

If so, this isn’t a personal failure.

It’s a solvable systems issue—inside you.

Free Masterclass: Mental Performance for Serious Traders

I break this down in my free Trading Psychology Masterclass.

This isn’t for beginners. It’s for serious traders who’ve outgrown surface-level psychology tips and want to do the deep work that actually moves results.

You can register free here -> https://credeperformance.com/masterclass-register

The post Why Elite Traders Manage Their Energy Like Capital. appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

In my many years of exclusively coaching traders and hedge fund managers, I’ve observed an interesting trend—there are five key reasons why traders fail to conquer their trading psychology (and subsequently, consistent profitability).

#1 – They truly don’t understand the relevance of mindset for trading performance. 

#2 – They understand that mindset and psychology is important for trading performance—but they don’t prioritize improving it.

#3 – They want to actively work on their trading psychology but don’t know how or where to start.

#4 – They passively consume all the trading psychology content out there, but without applying it, nothing changes in their results.

#5 – They proactively implement mental training tools and apply the advice of trading coaches, but without addressing the root cause, they only see temporary improvements—never lasting transformation.

Unfortunately, many diligent and highly-motivated traders fall into this final category. 

They continue to struggle with issues like fear of missing out, trading on tilt, hesitating to take trades and general inconsistency which decimates their trading profits… but it’s NOT because of a laziness, a lack of willpower, or a lack of effort.

This is the most frustrating cycle to be stuck in—when you are making every effort to improve as a trader and seeing the same disappointing patterns playing out in your PNL.

The truth is though, when you know the right questions to ask, and the right frameworks to apply, getting to the root of deep-seated mindset challenges and indiscipline doesn’t have to be a long and painful process.

It can happen in as little as 20 minutes.

Rather than just taking my word for it, check out this process in action in my live coaching video where I helped three traders struggling with different mindset blocks to (1) identify the root cause of the issue and (2) create a practical action plan to overcome it.

We dig into :

• Choking under pressure and self-sabotage
• Trading on tilt and blowing up funded accounts
• Extremely high expectations leading to bad trading habits

These clips were taken from the Live Q&A Webinars which are a bonus feature of my Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading course and published with the kind permission of each trader involved.

So, if you’ve been struggling with destructive habits for a while now and you were beginning to feel like they were a permanent feature of your trading, don’t lose hope. 

Let this video be a reminder that you are by no means alone in grappling with mindset gremlins. And that your breakthrough might be just one insight away.

After watching, drop a comment on YouTube—do any of these trader struggles resonate with you? And do you want more of this type of content?

Three Ways I Can Help You Master Your Trading Psychology

Want to learn more?

1. Join The Trading Psychology Masterclass (Free):  Join my FREE masterclass to learn the secrets to overcome some of the most common trading psychology challenges that hold traders back from reaching consistent profitability. Plus get two FREE bonuses to help you apply the insights covered in the masterclass to your trading for maximum impact.
2. Enrol in Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading: This is my signature Trading Psychology Program to help you permanently end destructive trading habits and reach pro-level consistency in as little as 8 weeks.
3. Unbreakable Trading Psychology —The Book. Join the waitlist for my upcoming book: Unbreakable Trading Psychology: The Seven Principle Playbook for Building a Razor-Sharp Mental Edge. Launching in 2025.

The post 20-Minute Trading Psychology Breakthroughs appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

The answer: Much more than you might think.

Recently, at my daughter’s Saturday morning gymnastics class, I watched through the parents’ room window as she tumbled around the gym. What initially seemed like playful chaos began to make sense—I realized each seemingly random activity was actually laying the foundation for proper gymnastics moves.

• Bunny hop with hands on the ground: foundation of a cartwheel
• Belly-sliding on a cube on with hands down: foundation of a handstand
• Rocking backward, feet overhead: foundation of a backwards tumble

For every gymnastics skill that the kids will eventually go on to learn, there is a series of smaller “building block” skills to master.

With this logical and systematic progression, even a more advanced move like a backflip can eventually be conquered with high levels of confidence and minimal risk.

The secret is that each skill in the series builds on the one previously. And they eventually gel together to culminate in the fluid and intuitive execution of a complex move.

It’s not just motor skills that require this phased approach to mastery—it’s the exact same principle with cultivating your trading mental edge.

Perfecting The Trading Mental Edge

When you set out with the intention of “achieving pro-level discipline and consistency” in your trading, that is akin to the novice gymnast being faced with the challenge of wanting to perfect a backflip—it’s entirely possible, but it requires a strategic and repetitive training regime.

This is an aspect of trading psychology that is often overlooked.

Many traders believe that if they watch the right YouTube videos, read the right books or follow the best gurus, they will discover the “secret” to mindset-mastery that can unlock large profits in the market.

But, in reality, there is no one “holy grail” secret or solution. 

It’s the consistent, daily conditioning of your emotional control and your mindset inside and outside of the market that will help you reach peak performance.

Follow The Blueprint

If you are currently struggling with breaking your trading rules; revenge trading, ignoring daily loss limits, hesitating to take trades, jumping out of winning trades too early…or even blowing up accounts…

…then it may feel like you are light-years away from the pro-level execution that you are craving.

Even with the dedication and discipline of a Marine in terms of a daily mental conditioning practice, it can still be daunting to try and jump from rocking backwards on the floor to pulling off a triple back flip.

But, in truth, it’s only daunting when you don’t have a blueprint to follow.

If you treat mastering your mental edge like a series of smaller, building-block skills that culminate in pro-level trading plan execution, your chances of success increase exponentially.

Then the challenge of conquering your trading psychology becomes a simple three-step process:

1. Find out the key skills that need to be acquired.
2. Understand the linear sequence in which to tackle each skill to increase your chances of success.
3. Commit to working on your mindset and psychology on a daily basis so that you condition your mind to help you achieve the results you desire.

Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading: A proven system for cultivating unbreakable trading psychology.

This is the exact approach that I took when creating my signature Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading program to help traders overcome destructive habits and reach elite-level discipline and consistency.

I developed the system over 16 years of 1-1 performance coaching with traders, athletes, business leaders and professionals in other high-performance arenas.

In working with thousands of clients, I found that in every 1-1 coaching program we ended up following a very similar trajectory in terms of the topics addressed, the skills that were mastered and even the sequence in which we tackled each skill.

This was true whether I was working with an athlete, pilot or CEO—there was a natural methodology emerging from the coaching process.

In 2021, after working with many traders on a 1-1 basis and seeing the same methodology proving itself yet in the trading arena, I committed the system to a formal structure and created the Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading online program.

This is an 8-module, comprehensive online program that helps you to systematically sharpen your mindset, discipline and consistency for peak trading performance.

The program follows a logical progression where each module builds on the foundation of the one before —just like the gymnasts gearing up for their backflip.

We start by auditing all the factors that can possibly impact your trading performance, then establish a clear goal-setting and tracking process for 100% accountability. 

This sets us up to then systematically work through every aspect of the mental edge from deep subconscious limiting beliefs that are holding you back in your trading, to eradicating biases and mind traps, bolstering resilience to pressure and setting up the high performance routines and habits that can carry you to success.

The result? You…

• Decode the root causes of destructive habits in your trading.
• Systematically build the mindset, discipline and consistency of an elite trader.
• Finish the program with a deeply personalised mental training routine that becomes an integral part of your daily and weekly trading.
• Acquire a complete skill set that allows you to quickly decode and resolve any future  trading psychology challenge—essentially helping you to become your own trading psychology coach.

Trader Case Study – Meleen Sheth’s Measurable Results in Just Six Weeks

Meleen Sheth was a trader who took the Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading course to address some costly challenges with his trading psychology.

Meleen had hit a wall in his trading. He was struggling with exiting his trades early and not following his profit-taking process.

Crucially, Meleen followed the Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading system to a tee. He didn’t jump from one topic to the next. He systematically built his trading mental edge block by block.

The results? He experienced measurable improvements in discipline, consistency and profitability in just six weeks. Some of his key wins included:

• Taking 100% A+ setups as opposed to 75% before starting the course
• Following his profit taking process for 93% of trades as opposed to 61% prior to taking the course
•  Increase in trading profits and growing his trading account

In his video testimonial for the course, Meleen breaks down the exact steps he took that worked for him:

1. Identified process and performance goals that would eventually lead to achieving PNL-based goals.
2. Decoded the subconscious blocks that were holding him back.
3. Narrowed down habits that were supportive and unsupportive of what he was trying to achieve.
4. Clarified triggers for good and bad habits.
5. Built a Decision-Tree to help him bring about the results he wanted.

But this isn’t a once-off phenomenon. Many other traders who have taken the program—and followed the system in its entirety—have experienced similar improvements in discipline and consistency. You can check out other trader testimonials here.

Your Next Steps

If mastering your trading psychology currently feels harder than Simone Biles’ triple backflip, start by eradicating the overwhelm.

Break it down into a set of skills that can be tackled and mastered one step at a time.

And if you want to skip the trial and error, the Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading program provides a ready-made blueprint to accelerate your progress.

Check it out  here  and start building your mental edge today.

Rooting for your trading success,
Créde

Créde Performance

Three Ways I Can Help You Master Your Trading Psychology

Want to learn more?

1. Join The Trading Psychology Masterclass (Free):  Join my FREE masterclass to learn the secrets to overcome some of the most common trading psychology challenges that hold traders back from reaching consistent profitability. Plus get two FREE bonuses to help you apply the insights covered in the masterclass to your trading for maximum impact.
2. Enrol in Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading: This is my signature Trading Psychology Program to help you permanently end destructive trading habits and reach pro-level consistency in as little as 8 weeks.
3. Unbreakable Trading Psychology —The Book. Join the waitlist for my upcoming book: Unbreakable Trading Psychology: The Seven Principle Playbook for Building a Razor-Sharp Mental Edge. Launching in 2025.

The post The Gymnastics of Trading: Mastering Mental Agility Block by Block appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

If you asked any trader or entrepreneur why they chose their path, the answer would likely be the same: to create a life of wealth and success, not endless hustle and struggle. 

Even if money isn’t the primary motivator, there must be a meaningful payoff to make the journey worthwhile. 

After all, diving into high-risk worlds like trading or entrepreneurship with no hope of reward would be madness.

People take on these challenges because they believe the risk and sacrifice will lead to a better life. They aim to become a “Topdog,” not remain stuck in the grind of “Underdog” purgatory. 

The key difference between achieving a Topdog lifestyle—however you define it—and staying trapped as an Underdog lies in mindset. 

Unfortunately, many traders and entrepreneurs cling to an Underdog mentality far longer than it’s helpful, severely limiting their progress and success.

When the Odds Are Stacked Against You 

When you are starting out in trading or entrepreneurship, it’s natural to have an underdog mindset.

You’re new to the game, you have a lot of skills to learn and you are looking to highly successful people who are much further down the path for inspiration as to what might be possible for you to achieve.

At the beginning, the odds are objectively stacked against you— failure is statistically more likely than success.

According to the US Bureau of Labor statistics, 45% of businesses fail within the first 5 years of opening. And according to research by Barber, Lee and Odean (2010), only 1% of day traders are able to consistently profit net of fees.

The problem is, when you cling on to the underdog mentality for longer than is necessary, you cement your underdog positioning in the pecking order of “success”—it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What starts as a necessary phase can turn into a limiting belief that keeps you stuck.

The Consequences Of Identifying As An Underdog

Your actions shape your reality, but your beliefs, thoughts, and emotions drive those actions. 

Repeating narratives like being a “Victim,” “Loser,” or “Underdog” creates a lens through which you interpret the world. This lens influences both the actions you take and how you react to external events.

So let’s say you are running the story of being the Underdog unconsciously in your mind—you are then more likely to take Underdog actions such as:

• Downplaying your potential: You believe that because you have only been in business for a short amount of time, people won’t resonate with your product as much as a competitor’s product and you adjust sales expectations accordingly (Underdog)…instead of acknowledging the quality of your offering and seeking every possible pathway to maximise sales in the first year of business (Topdog)
• Excusing poor habits: You buy into the idea that breaking your trading rules is something every trader experiences and that it eventually gets ironed out with time in the market (Underdog)…instead of believing that you can eradicate indiscipline early by working on your trading psychology (Topdog).
• Overvaluing hustle: You sacrifice personal life, relationships, and health in the name of grinding (Underdog)…rather than designing a sustainable lifestyle and business model from the outset (Topdog).

An Underdog mindset leads to Underdog actions, which reinforce Underdog results. Breaking this cycle is crucial to achieving Topdog success.

Underdog Versus Topdog Mindset

The Underdog mindset thinks that by taking the same quality of actions, the results will someday magically turn in their favour.

By contrast, the Topdog thinks with the mindset of someone who is already crushing it. They work smarter instead of harder and find solutions that elevate their external reality to the level of their internal self-concept.

That’s not to say that having a Topdog mindset equates to having unrealistic expectations around the effort or timeframe involved in success.

It’s more the case that because you are taking Topdog actions, you increase the likelihood of capitalising on pathways and opportunities that can accelerate your progress and lift you to higher levels of success.

The Underdog Comfort Zone

There is a reason why people feel more comfortable in the underdog position. When you are an underdog, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

If you fail? Well that’s what the statistics predicted anyway—it wasn’t your fault. There is no massive threat to your ego or self-concept to be chasing success from a standing start.

If you succeed? You have beaten the odds and established yourself as an extraordinary player in the game.

When you are a Topdog, however, success is expected. It’s not a clap-worthy moment if you maintain lofty revenue targets or support your family with your annual trading profits—it’s the minimum expectation that you consistently perform under intense pressure.

If you slip up? Take a few bad trading losses or miscalculate a pivot in your business and drop below your usual standards?—the perceived “failure” can feel magnified.

There is more pressure and a bigger potential threat to your ego to be in the Topdog position. Not to mention additional pressure and stress as you become a target of other people’s envy and jealousy.

This is the reason why some sports teams always perform better when they are up against an opponent who are cast as favourites. The team who are not expected to win are actually walking into that match with less pressure on their backs than their opponents.

The Underdog team’s job, from a psychological perspective, is easier.

Becoming a Topdog

If you want a Topdog lifestyle, you need to cultivate a Topdog mindset—and that includes embracing the additional pressures that come with success. 

Muhammad Ali exemplified this approach when he declared, “I am the greatest” at just 22 years old. This bold proclamation came before he achieved massive success, yet he understood that phenomenal results start with an unshakable belief in oneself. 

As he later reflected:

 “I said that even before I knew I was. I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I really was the greatest.” – Muhammad Ali

To develop a Topdog mindset, focus on these three steps:

1. Visualize Success. Use your imagination to create a vivid picture of the person, achievements, and lifestyle you want. Regularly revisit this vision, as research shows the brain processes mental imagery much like it does real experiences. This practice helps align your thoughts and actions with your goals.
2. Be Task-Driven, Not Ego-Driven. Prioritize the quality of your actions over attaching your self-worth to outcomes. Focusing on consistent, high-quality effort ensures that the process itself propels you forward. Results will follow naturally.
3. Practice Being The Person You Want To Become. Identify the attributes, habits, and beliefs of the person you aspire to become. Will they wake up earlier, invest in personal growth, or balance work and family? Begin embodying these traits today. Success flows from aligning your current actions with the person you aim to be.

Final Thoughts

The transition from Underdog to Topdog isn’t just about external achievements; it’s an internal evolution. 

By shifting your mindset and aligning your actions with your aspirations, you can break free from limiting beliefs and build a life that reflects your full potential.

Start thinking and acting like a Topdog today—your future success depends on it.

Three Ways I Can Help You Master Your Mental Edge

Want to learn more?

1. Subscribe to The Extra Edge Newsletter:  Join my weekly newsletter for Traders and Online Entrepreneurs. Each week, I deliver actionable tips and insights directly to your inbox to help you get the mental edge and win bigger in business and in life.
2. Join my FREE Trading Psychology Masterclass or my Free Mental Edge Masterclass for Online Entrepreneurs where we decode and resolve some of the major mindset blocks faced by traders and entrepreneurs.
3. Enrol in Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading or Go Deep to Level Up Your Business: These are my signature Performance Psychology Programs to help you leverage your mindset for peak performance and a richer life.

The post Are You Thinking Like A Topdog Or An Underdog?—Why This Matters For Your Success appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

If you’ve traded for any length of time, you’ve felt it: the impact of your mind and emotions on your trading results.

Even with a well-tested strategy, the heat of the market can throw you off course. You know what you should do to remain profitable but pressure makes it hard to stick to the plan.

Whether it’s frustration after consecutive losses or greed tempting you to squeeze “just a little more” from a winning trade, your emotions can derail even the best strategy.

At a certain point, technical skills alone won’t cut it. Your mindset becomes the deciding factor in your success.

This is where trading psychology coaching comes in. But what many traders don’t recognise is that not all trading psychology coaching is created equal.

Here’s how to know which approach is right for you.

1. Coaches For Newbie Traders 

These coaches often focus on foundational trading concepts—risk management, position sizing, and emotional awareness. They may have trading experience but lack formal psychology training.

For early-stage traders, this is often enough. Basic reminders to “focus on the process” or “stick to your plan” can help you develop a profitable strategy and gain confidence.

At this level, the emphasis is often on awareness rather than mastery—understanding how emotions like fear and greed impact decision-making but without deeply addressing their roots. 

New traders often struggle with impulsive behaviours, cutting winners short, or holding onto trades too long. These coaches can help you recognize these mistakes early and provide simple tools to mitigate them, such as journaling trades, creating pre-trade checklists, and enforcing clear risk-management rules. 

While this is useful, this level of coaching may feel too basic as you evolve.

At some point, reminders to “be disciplined” or “follow your rules” won’t solve deeper performance challenges.

2. Coaches for Established Traders

Once you’re technically proficient, the real challenge begins:

Can you execute your trading strategy consistently under pressure?

This is where patterns of indiscipline and self-sabotage emerge:

• Revenge trading after losses
• Ignoring stop losses
• Hesitating to pull the trigger on valid trades
• Overtrading or undertrading due to emotional swings

To break these patterns, you need more than surface-level advice. You need to develop deep self-awareness and understand the psychological drivers behind your behaviours. 

This is where certified and formally trained coaches who specialise in the trading niche step in. They use structured frameworks to help you dig deeper:

• Certified Coaches: These coaches (e.g., executive coaches, life coaches) provide structured environments for reflection, goal setting and accountability. They help you analyse your behaviours, identify triggers, and shift perspectives to improve discipline and decision-making.
• Clinical/ Counselling Psychologists and Psychotherapists: Equipped with in-depth training in human behaviour, these professionals help you decode subconscious patterns, unresolved fears, or emotional responses that influence your trading. If self-sabotage is deeply rooted, this approach can uncover why you’re repeating destructive habits.
• High-Performance Psychologists and Coaches: Specialists in performance under pressure, these coaches decode the root causes of underperformance and apply science-backed tools to optimize mindset and emotional control. They combine practical techniques with a deep understanding of how high performers operate under stress.

At this stage, trading psychology coaching shifts from surface-level advice to a targeted process of decoding, understanding and rewiring mental patterns.

3. The Tactical Approach for Peak Performance

For technically proficient traders who want to achieve and sustain peak performance, the tactical, science-based approach of high-performance psychology is a game-changer.

Think of high-performance psychology coaches as the strength and conditioning experts for your mind.

In trading, the pressure is relentless. You’re making decisions in real time, under financial and emotional stress. Without targeted mental training, your mindset can become the weakest link.

High-performance psychology coaches use proven techniques to help traders:

1. Decode Underperformance: Identify the root causes of inconsistency, such as emotional triggers, subconscious limiting beliefs, stress-responses, lack of resilience or loss of confidence.
2. Train Mental Skills: Apply mental training tools to develop resilience, focus, discipline, and emotional regulation.
3. Build Systems for Peak Performance: Design repeatable routines to maintain clarity and control under pressure.

Their expertise isn’t just general psychology—it’s performance psychology: the science of human behaviour and emotions under intense conditions. 

These coaches often work with professionals in arenas where split-second decisions can make or break a career: elite athletes, military personnel, surgeons, and traders.

My Approach: Tactical High-Performance Coaching for Traders

I’ll be upfront: I’m not a trader. I don’t offer technical strategy advice. I am, however, a chartered high performance psychologist (with the Psychological Society of Ireland). As such, my expertise lies in the psychology of human performance.

If you’ve mastered the technical side of trading and still struggle with discipline and emotional control—that’s where I come in.

Who I Work With:

• Traders breaking their rules, blowing up accounts or hesitating to act.
• Technically skilled traders who can’t unlock their full potential due to mindset challenges.

What I Do:

1. Decode Root Causes: We uncover the beliefs, triggers, and thought-patterns driving your behaviours in the market.
2. Create a Tactical Training Plan: Using science-based tools from high-performance psychology, I help you design personalized mental training routines to resolve underperformance and build resilience, confidence, and discipline.
3. Optimize Your Mental Edge: I help you cultivate an unbreakable mindset that focuses on strengthening what is working as much as fixing what is not. You learn the practical skills that empower you to execute with consistency.

The result?

• You understand why you’re breaking your rules
• You have practical tools to regulate emotions and improve focus—to actually change your actions in the market
• You show up to the market with clarity, confidence and control

Essentially, I help you upgrade your mental edge through tactical mental training.

Why High-Performance Psychology Works

High-performance psychology works because it trains your mind like a muscle.

• Just as athletes condition their bodies to perform under pressure, traders can train their minds to handle market stress.
• The techniques are backed by decades of research in elite sports and performance environments.
• By consistently applying these tools, you rewire habits, strengthen emotional control, and upgrade your mental edge.

High-performance psychology coaching transforms abstract mindset issues into actionable strategies—making discipline and consistency second nature.

Your Coaching Should Match Your Goals

Trading psychology coaching isn’t one-size-fits-all. The depth and focus you need depends on your level, challenges, and aspirations.

If you’re serious about elevating your mindset and achieving lasting success, choose coaching that aligns with your goals.

Three Ways I Can Help You Master Your Trading Psychology

Want to learn more?

1. Join The Trading Psychology Masterclass (Free):  Join my FREE masterclass to learn the secrets to overcome some of the most common trading psychology challenges that hold traders back from reaching consistent profitability. Plus get two FREE bonuses to help you apply the insights covered in the masterclass to your trading for maximum impact.
2. Enrol in Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading: This is my signature Trading Psychology Program to help you permanently end destructive trading habits and reach pro-level consistency in as little as 8 weeks.
3. Unbreakable Trading Psychology —The Book. Join the waitlist for my upcoming book: Unbreakable Trading Psychology: The Seven Principle Playbook for Building a Razor-Sharp Mental Edge. Launching in 2025.

The post Not All Trading Psychology Coaching is Created Equal… appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

The post 3 Ways to Stop Unrealistic Expectations from Decimating Your Trading Account appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

The post 3 Trading Psychology Mindset Shifts to Increase Your Wealth appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

Profit is the bottom line performance metric in trading.

So, once you have a solid trading strategy and have experienced some success in the market, it’s natural to aim for bigger returns.

At this point, most traders try scaling up by increasing position size, trading more contracts or diversifying strategies.

However, scaling up increases pressure—and with it, weaknesses in your trading psychology.

Problems like fear of missing out (FOMO), impulsive trades, and broken rules become more prevalent and costly.

To mitigate these risks, you need a sharp mental edge and a strategic approach to scaling up.

In this blog post, I’ll share a simple framework to ensure you psychology is robust and ready for the pressures of scaling up—no matter whether you are going from sim to live trading or taking the leap from 60 to 80 contracts.

Before we jump in I just need to caveat that this framework assumes three things: 

• You already have a solid trading strategy that is theoretically profitable
• You have good technical skill 
• You have the mental training tools at your disposal to strengthen your mental edge

If you haven’t yet achieved those milestones I would encourage you to work on those first before tackling this framework or attempting to scale up. 

And if you need help with optimising your trading mental edge, check out my Free Trading Psychology Masterclass for a proven system to build unbreakable trading psychology.

Knowing When to Scale Up 

For many traders, the decision of when to scale up is based on emotional factors—impatience with your rate of progress, fear of missing out, greed or even comparison with other traders.

Let’s use the analogy of building a mansion. 

To build a solid mansion, you have to pour the foundations first. But you look at your neighbour next door who is also building a mansion and you see theirs is going up quicker than yours and you feel you really should be further ahead with your own schedule.

You skim through the foundation setting and jump straight to phase 3 of building the mansion—trying to build the third floor and decorate it with the most stylish furnishings…

You are building a house that will inevitably crumble down around you—you are setting yourself up for failure.

It’s the same with scaling up in trading— if you rush through the process of scaling up and try to move to a higher level before you are psychologically ready, this will have catastrophic consequences for your account.

The best way to determine how, when and by how much to scale up, is to completely unplug from emotion and adopt a logical, systematic approach.

In the same way as prop firms set out very clear criteria as to what determines passing a tryout and earning a funded account, you can create a similar system for yourself to take some of the risk out of scaling up.

Phased Approach to Scaling Up Without Blowing Up

Here are the 3 steps to creating your own performance-based framework for successfully scaling up:

#1. Identify your baseline.

List out how you are trading currently—your current risk-reward ratio, position sizing, how many contracts you are trading with, whether you are trading on sim or live etc.

This gives you the baseline criteria from which you can then plan to scale.

#2. Map out each phase of your plan for scaling up.

Think of scaling up like a set of stairs—each step is a new phase. You may want to reach an entirely different level in your trading but the pathway to getting there is by taking small, incrementally more challenging steps. 

I suggest starting with planning the next four phases. For each phase, decide what the new position sizing or number of contracts will be. 

Crucially, nothing fundamental about your strategy or the markets you are trading in will change with each phase. 

You are just incrementally increasing the level of pressure and risk that you are taking in the market in order to see slightly higher returns at each juncture.

#3. Identify the concrete milestones you need to hit in order to pass each phase.

The phased approach to scaling up is based on hitting performance goals, rather than time in the market. This helps you remove emotion and comparison from your decision-making.

Map out specific “passing criteria” that you need to hit in order to progress to the next phase. 

You can include a minimum timeframe of consecutive weeks in which you need to consistently hit your goals, but moving to the next phase does not automatically happen when this timeframe expires—only if your goals are achieved.

These goals should reflect success in both your process (discipline in the execution of your trading plan) and profitability (PNL). So for example “sticking to my daily loss limit on 100% of days, 85% or higher of all trades taken met my A+ setup criteria, and consistently profitable over a specified period of time (e.g. a 6-week period)”.

As risk increases, performance needs to correspondingly improve. 

Example Scenario

Let’s take the example of someone who is currently trading on sim with 20 micro contracts on the NQ.

Phase 1

• Baseline Criteria: 20 micro contracts trading on NQ on sim
• Passing Criteria: Achieve 4 “green” process and green PNL weeks in a row before moving to phase 2.

Phase 2

• Criteria: 20 micro contracts trading on NQ live
• Passing Criteria: Achieve at least 9 weeks out of 12 consecutive weeks of hitting my process and PNL goals before moving to phase 3.

Phase 3

• Criteria: 3 mini contracts trading on NQ live
• Passing Criteria: Achieve at least 10 weeks out of 12 consecutive weeks of hitting my process and PNL goals before moving to phase 4.

Phase 4

• Criteria: 4 mini contracts trading on NQ live
• Passing Criteria: Achieve at least 13 weeks out of 16 consecutive weeks of hitting my process and PNL goals before moving to phase 5.

Three Tips for Successful Scaling

To get maximum value from this framework for your trading, consider these three important tips:

1. Make sure your psychology is robust in each phase before progressing to the next one. 

If you are hitting your goals but still seeing problems like revenge trading, ignoring loss limits or moving stops in your trading, iron these out before moving to the next phase.

2. Don’t make too big a jump at any one time.

You wouldn’t try jump from lifting a 10kg weight to a 100kg in weight in the gym within one week—the same principle applies here. Smaller increases in pressure and expectations will help you build your psychological resilience for long-term success.

3.  Be prepared to move down the phases if needed.

If you see that your psychology has become shaky as you move to a new phase, you may want to move back to the previous phase to give yourself an opportunity to troubleshoot and resolve what is going wrong.

Whether it’s personal stress, a change in market conditions or a technical adjustment that is required in your strategy, minimising pressure while working through the issue is the best way to preserve your trading account and keep momentum going strong.

If you enjoyed this article and found it helpful, consider sharing it with other traders who could also benefit from having a phased approach to scaling up.

Three Ways I Can Help You Master Your Trading Psychology

Want to learn more?

1. Join The Trading Psychology Masterclass (Free):  Join my FREE masterclass to learn the secrets to overcome some of the most common trading psychology challenges that hold traders back from reaching consistent profitability. Plus get two FREE bonuses to help you apply the insights covered in the masterclass to your trading for maximum impact.
2. Enrol in Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading: This is my signature Trading Psychology Program to help you permanently end destructive trading habits and reach pro-level consistency in as little as 8 weeks.
3. Unbreakable Trading Psychology —The Book. Join the waitlist for my upcoming book: Unbreakable Trading Psychology: The Seven Principle Playbook for Building a Razor-Sharp Mental Edge. Launching in 2025.

The post The Trading Psychology Secret to Scaling Up Without Blowing Up appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

The post 5 Trading Psychology Tips to Go from Sim to Live Trading like a Boss appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.