"Detached" ... excellent choice of word. Things pretty much happen as you describe them, the difference being I celebrate for all sorts of reasons but never for a good day trading. It strikes me as counter productive to the expectation I have created for myself, but that is just me. I might add that what people describe as a "mental edge" is a prerequisite to me. In other words I think people are wasting their time in this game unless they are prepared to change, ...which means they must first understand the need to change, ...which means they must understand that they must meet the price on the price's terms not theirs, ...which means they must understand what I have just written. How many people are prepared to do this. Mostly, from what I have read here, people write rhetoric, and as has been accurately pointed out "as you think, then so you do" Price will not absorb rhetoric, it accepts only Buyers and Sellers ... so what chance do most people here have in making money from trading.
What contributed most to me attaining my goal of trading in the zone was a long period of intense manual backtesting of my edge. The invisible hand that was limiting my trading touched me day after day, causing me to over think my setups and pick and choose from among them. Every day I'd find excuses not to trade certain setups despite the fact that a valid setup is a valid setup. I'd frequently miss many excellent trades this way. I'd also move my stops too quickly on trades and get stopped out b/e a lot when if I'd just left things alone, my target would've eventually been attained. I would do a daily post-market analysis of all valid setups, stops, targets and results. Over the months, this daily analysis demonstrated to me how powerful my edge was, and helped me develop rules for placing protective stops, choosing profit targets, and getting more than target in certain instances. Now I have more losing trades, but significantly more profit. That may sound irrational. However, by trading all my setups, I know that statistically I'll have more losing trades than I did when I tried to second guess setups and nervously micromanaged my trades, but now I'm nearly always positioned for the big moves. I posted an example of my daily analysis on another thread a while back, and will post it here as well. If you do analysis like this for several months and keep getting net profitable results, you will come to trust your plan and feel comfortable trading every setup that presents itself.
Good resource (thought provoking) thread (the video links) http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=215117&perpage=6&pagenumber=1 RN