Be Like Water, My Friend, It Will Improve Your Trading And Investing

As a trader and trading psychology coach I have come across many seasoned traders who believe that first and foremost they need to work on their trading system to improve trading results.

The talk often goes like this: "If I could enter the trade a few ticks earlier my stops would be X instead of Y. or maybe I should alter the parameters of the Bollinger bands, the ADX, etc., etc."

Master traders know that all these considerations are secondary considerations. In the final analysis there is only one thing that makes you a better trader and that is improving your relationship with yourself.

Most traders don't get this simple wisdom

The sheer irony is this: We spend 24 hours with ourselves every day, month and year until death do us part. Yet we insist on looking outside of ourselves to improve.

If only I could make you see the total insanity of this premise and thus give you the impetus to look inside yourself, instead of looking outside of you, this article will have achieved its purpose.

So, why is it so difficult for us to be on intimate terms with ourselves?

The reason is to do with our conditioning which has formed our beliefs and views of ourselves and our world. The idea of focusing on the self is viewed as ego-centric, selfish and regarded as an act of unsocial behaviour with a capital U. Truth is though, that in order to be a contribution to the world you absolutely have to be in tune with yourself first. This is so, because everything flows out from inside of you. What you give out comes back.

Consider this:

How can you love anyone if you cannot love the person from whom love, creativity flows, which is YOU. The same hold true for your trading too:

How can you possibly return consistent trading results when the person pulling the trigger is at odds with him or herself, self doubting themselves, second guessing trading decisions and wondering if they made the right trading decision once in the trade, and criticising themselves when a trade goes against them.

This kind of behaviour obviously points to incongruencies with yourself. The first challenge is to notice the issues for what they are and then dealing with them. In coaching sessions I show traders where their thoughts are causing incongruent feelings and emotions which lead to poor trading decisions. Once brought to your conscious awareness issues begin to fall away of their own accord, since you cannot hang to things once you notice how they are doing you a disservice.

Self inquiry is the process that starts unravelling those unwanted trading emotions that stop you from being in the flow.

Being in the flow is about being in harmony with yourself and your environment, your trading environment in particular and allowing market events to present themselves to you, without mental interference.

It is a fact that when you are hanging on to old thoughts feelings and emotions, refining yet another trading system to fit in with your fixed points of view of how your trading must be and how it is to evolve you are out of touch with yourself. Separation begets separation. It causes behaviours, like impulse trading, anger, hesitant trading and fear of losing and much frustration.

Notice how just reading the above paragraph makes your energetic vibrations  go dense. Dense, harsh lop sided macho energies without the balanced heart energy cause water to turn into rocks. Can you trade like a rock? Sure, anything is possible.

From my experience though this is immensely hard work, hugely demanding and exhausting. Why would you want to make your trading life so hard for yourself when with a little change of perspective you might find an altogether easier and ultimately more rewarding way to trading mastery.

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