Here’s some trading advice for one of the struggling trader’s toughest obstacles – staying positive.
Perhaps you’ve had a string of losing days or even months! Or perhaps you’ve started to become profitable, only to blow it all on one day where your discipline slipped. Its so easy to give in to the tempation to dig yourself into a hole of despair and gloom.
“I’m so *&^*& stupid”, “Why can’t I just follow my system”, “I’m obviously not meant to be a trader”, “I’m doomed”. These are some of the things I remember saying to myself pretty regularly when I was struggling. But guess what, talking to yourself like that will only make things worse. Think like that regularly enough and you’ll start to believe it. Once it becomes a belief its going to start to affect your future thoughts and actions and will sabotage your trading.
In trading, confidence is critical.
As a struggling trader going through the learning process, you are naturally going to be faced with up months and down months. Even for experienced traders, it can be very challenging mentally when the market environment changes, when strong trends are replaced by sloppy rangebound days that are a nightmare to call.
Experienced traders know that there are going to be average months, bad months, and fantastic months that make up for the rest. They key is to hang in there mentally so that, when the market presents its opportunities, you are in the opportunity flow.
So what are the ways to stay mentally resilient?
Learned Optimism
Dr Martin Seligman has written a great book called Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life in which he teaches simple cognitive techniques, or thinking habits to overcome negative thoughts and either maintain or regain optimism. This book should be in every traders library.
Clearing Negative Self Beliefs
If you are going to become a successful and profitable trader – in addition to developing the skills and mindset of trading, you are going to need to believe that you can succeed. Many of us wreck our own chances of success because of old, outdated beliefs that are still stuck in our subconscious – that sap our confidence.
Of course all the positive thinking in the world is not going to help you if you don’t have a trading method with a positive expectancy, and the ability to trade it consistently. But no method will give you profitable trades all the time. There will be days, weeks, or even months where you struggle to break even. The question is, when your method experiences a natural draw down due to market conditions, do you take it personally? Do you start to undermine your ability to stay in the opportunity flow by beating yourself up? Can you distinguish between the kind of tough self talk that helps you to stay motivated, and the self talk that destroys your chances of success?
Clearing for Trading Success
You’ve probably heard about books like Think and Grow Rich, and the Law of Attraction — about the power of affirmations. There are many ways to use the power of your own thoughts and beliefs to build a positive mental environment where you attract the success you want in your life. However, what most of the teachers of these universal ideas don’t teach you, is that unless you clear your old beliefs, your new one’s don’t stand a chance.
So if you’ve been struggling for some time and you’ve stocked up your subsonscious with beliefs of doom, gloom, failure and loss you are going to need to clean them out before you can turn the page.
Here are three techniques that work based on my own personal experience. I recommend all of them very highly. They will help you in your trading and in the rest of your life as well.
