I slept on this new information (to me) about getting financial gaines out of my head and I wasn’t exactly sure how to start training myself to remove this aspect because indeed, this has been a brunt of my trading psychology woes. Of course there is more than this, but this is a big one.
So I asked ChatGPT (It does give some awesome answers in certain situations. This is one of them and here is the answer). Don’t judge me, I just woke up when I asked it. 
BTW, my “mornings” aren’t as bad anymore. I genuinely think PEACE is helping with my mornings.
ChatGPT's answer (it's very long & detailed)
Yes. What that professional bank trader told you is a well-established idea in trading psychology, although I would make one important distinction:
The objective isn’t to eliminate emotion. It’s to remove your personal financial needs, goals, and expectations from the individual trading decision.
That distinction is extremely important.
There is a substantial body of trading-psychology literature around process vs. outcome, and research involving professional traders has found that emotion regulation is genuinely relevant to trading performance.
And I think what you’re describing may be particularly relevant to you because of the way you were taught to think about money from an early age.
The fundamental shift
There are actually three different things that can easily get conflated:
1. Life financial goals
“I want to have $X invested by age Y.”
That’s perfectly reasonable.
2. Trading performance goals
“I want to average $X per month from trading.”
Potentially problematic, depending on how strongly you attach your identity/emotional state to achieving it.
3. Trade-level financial goals
“I need to make $500 today.”
“If this trade makes $1,000, I’ll be on track for the month.”
“I need this trade to work.”
“If I get another 30 pips, I’ll hit my target.”
This third category is the one I think your bank trader is talking about eliminating.
And it can be surprisingly subtle.
Why this matters so much
Imagine your setup appears.
Objectively, your system says:
Entry: yes.
Stop: 20 pips.
Target/management: according to plan.
Risk: 0.5R.
Execute.
But simultaneously your subconscious says:
“If this works, I’ll make $600.”
Now something interesting happens.
The trade isn’t merely a probabilistic event anymore.
It has become connected to your personal life.
Your brain isn’t just processing:
"Is this a valid trade?"
It’s also processing:
"Can this trade give me something I want?"
And those are radically different questions.
The first is analytical.
The second introduces attachment.
That attachment can manifest as:
- wanting the trade to work
- interpreting ambiguous price action optimistically
- moving a stop because you “need” the trade
- taking profits prematurely because you don’t want to lose the money
- holding too long because you want more money
- entering marginal setups because you’re behind your target
- revenge trading because you are behind
- increasing size because you’re ahead
- feeling euphoric when you’re ahead
- feeling threatened when you’re behind
- looking at P&L while the trade is open
- mentally spending the prospective profit
This is essentially outcome fixation.
Trading psychology sources repeatedly recommend shifting attention toward process rather than short-term monetary outcomes for precisely this reason.
And there’s an even deeper issue in your situation
You said something I think is extremely important:
“I was taught in my early teens (early 1980s) to set financial goals so this is ingrained in my thinking.”
I would not try to fight that programming by telling yourself:
“I must stop having financial goals.”
That creates another mental struggle.
Instead, I’d teach your brain a different context for goal setting.
You don’t need to eliminate your financial ambition.
You need to separate financial ambition from execution.
Think of it as creating two completely different mental rooms.
Room #1 — The Investor/Planner
Here you can think about:
- wealth
- retirement
- account growth
- income
- financial independence
- long-term returns
- trading as a business
- capital allocation
These are legitimate concerns.
Room #2 — The Trader
The trader has only one job:
Execute the edge correctly.
Not:
“Make money.”
Not:
“Grow the account.”
Not:
“Hit my monthly number.”
Not:
“Get back what I lost.”
Not:
“Make enough to retire.”
Just:
"Is there a valid opportunity, and can I execute it correctly?"
That’s a profound psychological separation.
I would actually change your definition of success
This may be the most useful exercise for you.
For the next phase of your trading development, don’t define a successful trade as:
Trade that makes money.
Define it as:
A trade in which I correctly executed my edge and accepted whatever outcome the market produced.
Therefore:
A winning trade can be a bad trade.
You violated your rules, entered impulsively, oversized, and happened to make $1,000.
Bad trade.
A losing trade can be an excellent trade.
Perfect setup, correct entry, correct position size, correct stop, correct management—and the market stopped you out.
Excellent trade.
This is not just philosophical. It is crucial because a single trade’s outcome contains substantial randomness. Professional-trading psychology literature similarly distinguishes decision quality from immediate outcome.
Here’s the exercise I would have you do
I think this could be particularly powerful for someone with decades of conditioning around goal setting.
Step 1 — Keep your financial goals
Don’t delete them.
Write them down somewhere outside your trading workspace.
For example:
“My long-term objective is to build substantial wealth through disciplined trading and investing.”
Fine.
But then add:
"These objectives have absolutely no authority over an individual trade."
That’s the critical boundary.
Step 2 — Eliminate the word “money” from the trading decision
Before entering a trade, you should ideally be able to make the decision without knowing the dollar outcome.
Instead of:
“I’m risking $500 to potentially make $1,000.”
Think:
"I’m risking 1R for a setup that meets my criteria."
This is one reason professional traders frequently conceptualize risk in R-multiples rather than dollars.
The dollar amount is relevant for risk management, of course.
But psychologically:
R = trading unit
rather than:
$ = emotional meaning
You still absolutely know your dollar risk before entering. You simply don’t give the dollar amount psychological significance during execution.
Step 3 — Create a “financial thought detector”
This is where I think you can really retrain yourself.
Before every trade, ask:
“Am I thinking about the market—or about what the money would do for me?”
Examples:
“If this wins, I’ll be up $800.”
Financial thought.
“If this trade works, I’ll hit my weekly goal.”
Financial thought.
“I need this one.”
Financial thought.
“I’m behind this month.”
Financial thought.
“That would pay for ___.”
Financial thought.
“I can finally get back to where I was.”
Financial thought.
None of these thoughts require fighting.
Simply recognize:
"Financial goal detected."
Then return to:
"What is the market actually doing?"
That is all.
You’re not trying to suppress the thought.
You’re deconditioning your response to it.
Step 4 — Replace the question
Your old mental question is probably something like:
"How much can I make?"
Replace it with:
"What does the market give me permission to do?"
That’s a dramatically different orientation.
And because you’ve previously described your tendency to project hopes and fears onto charts, I particularly like this distinction for you.
You’re trying to move from:
Me → market
to:
Market → me.
In other words:
I don’t tell the market what I need.
I observe what the market is offering and decide whether my edge says yes or no.
Step 5 — Remove the scoreboard during execution
This is potentially huge.
If possible, hide your account-equity/P&L display while you’re actively managing a trade.
You need to know:
- entry
- stop
- position size
- risk
- trade management levels
But you don’t necessarily need:
+$742.38
flashing in front of your brain.
Because $742 doesn’t mean anything to the market.
The market doesn’t know:
- your mortgage
- your retirement goal
- your monthly target
- your previous loss
- your account balance
- what you want to buy
- how badly you need the trade
And therefore none of those things belong in the market’s decision process.
Step 6 — Create a new trading mantra
I’d make yours very simple.
Before every session:
"I am not here to make money today. I am here to execute my edge."
And before every trade:
"This trade owes me nothing."
And while you’re in a trade:
"My job is execution. The market decides the outcome."
That last sentence is particularly important.
Step 7 — Change your daily scorecard
Don’t give yourself a daily score based primarily on P&L.
Instead:
| Question |
Score |
| Did I take only valid setups? |
0/1 |
| Did I follow my entry rules? |
0/1 |
| Did I use correct risk? |
0/1 |
| Did I respect my stop? |
0/1 |
| Did I follow my management rules? |
0/1 |
| Did I avoid outcome-based decisions? |
0/1 |
| Did I remain neutral toward the market? |
0/1 |
| Did I accept the result without interference? |
0/1 |
Then separately record P&L.
Don’t ignore P&L.
That’s an important distinction.
You need P&L to determine whether your strategy has positive expectancy over an adequate sample.
But don’t use today’s P&L to determine whether you were a good trader today.
That’s two different measurements.
This process-over-outcome approach is widely advocated in trading psychology, while longer-term performance data remains necessary for evaluating whether the actual strategy has an edge.
Here’s the deeper mental transformation I’d aim for
Eventually, you want to get to this:
Before
Setup → “How much will I make?” → emotion → interpretation → decision
After
Setup → “Does this meet my criteria?” → risk → execution → acceptance
That’s the entire transformation.
And there’s a beautiful paradox here:
You don’t become less interested in making money.
You become less interested in making money on any particular trade.
Your financial goals move up one level.
Instead of:
“I need this trade to make $X.”
You think:
“I want to execute my edge over the next 500 trades.”
That is where probability starts becoming your friend.
One more thing I’d strongly recommend
Don’t attempt to achieve:
"I will never think about money while trading."
That’s unrealistic.
You’ll think about money.
You’ve spent decades associating goal-setting with financial achievement. Those neural associations aren’t going to disappear because you tell yourself not to think about them.
Your objective is much more achievable:
Notice → label → detach → return to process.
Eventually the thought becomes increasingly irrelevant.
And I suspect that is much closer to what the professional trader meant by removing personal financial goals from trading.
He isn’t saying:
“Don’t want to be wealthy.”
He’s saying:
"Don’t make the outcome of this particular trade responsible for making you wealthy."
That is a very different proposition—and, in my view, an extremely powerful one for trading psychology.
If you’d like, I can take this one step further and build you a 30-day “financial detachment from trading” training protocol, specifically designed to retrain the old goal-setting habit without suppressing it.
So I will break this down over the next couple of days and work out a protocol I can start using to help reprogram me.
Yes, there will be another checklist. It will also be integrated into my daily, weekly and monthly trade reviews once I figure out what to track.
Why so many checklists? It genuinely helps take emotions out of the game. I was taught this early on by a professional trader. Would you be comfortable if you’re sitting on a plane waiting to take off and the pilot rushes on and says “Give me five minutes to warm up the engines and we’ll take off. I don’t need no stinking checklists. I’ve done this hundreds of times. I’m sure I won’t skip anything. You guys’ ready for you’re flight?”
LOL.