Denise Shull made a name for herself training Wall Street's top investors to perform better through psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Here are her top tips for traders.

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• Denise Shull, performance coach and renowned author of "Market Mind Games: A Radical Psychology of Investing, Trading and Risk," explains how emotions and feelings undermine sound decision-making in financial markets.
• She also offers tips on how to mitigate these emotions and feelings in the presence of market volatility and uncertainty.
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It's no secret that every market participant is looking for an edge.

But whether it's information, an algorithm, or an under-the-radar technical indicator, these ideas rarely result in sustained returns. And once they've fizzle out, they're gone for good.

One renowned author and performance coach says traders and investors are looking in all the wrong places - and she thinks they can generate alpha if they focus their attention inward.

"The trick to performing better - the trick to making more money - is to become more self aware, and to start to understand this data set of senses, feelings, and emotions that is delivered through your body, physical knowledge," Denise Shull, performance coach at The Rethink Group, said on Real Vision's Mental Game of Trading video series.

She continued: "Incorporate the whole human being, and understand where your conflict and conviction is - which is a physical thing - and getting systematic about that is such an advantage."

The overwhelming majority of market participants litter their analysis with bias, which is perfectly normal. Recency, availability, and confirmation bias all have an uncanny ability to undermine sound strategy. But what's worse is that investors often don't know when they're in play.

That's why Shull wants investors to concentrate on the feelings that are at the source of faux pas. In doing so, you're addressing the real problem, and not the effect resulting from the problem.

"Your cognition is generally not stronger than the feeling," she said.

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She goes on to provide an example of a stubborn, overconfident trader that doesn't know when to cut his losses, despite his trade being outside of his model's risk tolerances.

Was it a desire to be prove his intellect? Could he not deal with the prospect of being wrong? Did he think he could control the outcome?

These questions get to the heart of the issue.

'Gut feel is no longer a metaphor'

According to Shull, the associated feelings tend to manifest physically, showing up in the chest or stomach. If you can connect the physical feeling to the emotion - and understand why/how it's affecting your behavior - you can vastly improve your outcome.

"There's a lot of information now about how we really do think with our bodies," she said. "Gut feel is no longer a metaphor."

Her advice is directly applicable to a wide range of traders and investors - even quants and algorithm-based traders that rely heavily on numbers and statistics to form models.

"There are discretionary decisions that model-algorithm builders make," she said. "It's the same sorts of stuff, where a human being is acting out a feeling they don't know they have, they're just acting out via an algorithm."

She's referring to factors such as implied volatility and time frame as discretionary inputs relied upon by quants. So even though those individuals think they're unaffected by bias and emotion, they're still transferring feelings into their analysis.

How to conquer your impulses

With all of that established, getting in tune with these feelings and mitigating them is inherently difficult, Shull offers advice on how to conquer some of the most invasive impulses.

"The only way you can ever prevent acting out the emotion, is to put the emotion into words," she said. "Putting emotions into words - all of them - makes them less likely to be acted out."

That means writing out why you're right, how you feel making a decision, and how you think you'll feel in the future. This should help quell impulsive behavior and also provide a tool for reference.

"What you're doing is your fighting the current impulses with a future vision," Shull said. "And that has the ability - much more than your intellect - to fight the kind of unhelpful, emotionally driven behavior."

In doing so, you make your feelings and emotions explicit. This form of effective prediction helps traders avoid actions that have painful repercussions - even if they feel good in the short term.

In addition, Shull recommends sticking with the personal strategy that you understand and believe in, and not to adopt ideas from others who have a different vision.

To her, if you adopt someone else's strategy, you're setting yourself up for disaster. Just because you've embraced someone else's emotions doens't mean you'll be able to mirror their behavior.

"You win in markets - the neuroscience shows that those who are best at predicting price action, are predicting the people," Shull said.