This is a sample from the the Advanced Traders Mindset course.
This clip focuses on why we choose the “easy path”, and how it doesn’t benefit your self image, nor for your success.
Tag Archive for: forex trading mindset
This clip talks about the Marshmallow Experiment, and how the findings from that experiment are relevant to developing a successful trading mindset.
This is a sample from the Advanced Traders Mindset course.
This clip is an exercise in visualizing mental toughness, and how it applies to both the real world as well as in trading.
This is a sample from the Advanced Traders Mindset course.
This clip covers some of the ingredients of low self-confidence, and how they impact your current situation.
Last week in a free private webinar for my course members, I asked a key question about what builds confidence in trading.
Trading is without a doubt, an endeavor you need confidence in. Having a confidence that you can do this will be a fuel when you need it, clear obstacles when you face them, and provide a focus on what is essential. Confidence will accelerate your learning curve.
On the flip side, lacking confidence can be one of the most destructive traits for a traders mindset. When losses come, how will you re-bound and focus? What happens if you start your day with two, three, or four losses? Will you doubt your system, trading plan or skill set?
All eyes can see, lacking confidence is destructive, while having confidence gives us a greater chance for success. Although we know this conceptually, or intellectually, often times our actions tell a different story.
So how do we build confidence in trading? What can we do create an unshakable belief in our abilities? If we engage specific things, will they help us form a foundation to profit consistently?
The answer is yes, you can, without a doubt build confidence in yourself and your abilities. In this article, I am going to share a method to help you build confidence. Will it be enough? I don’t know, but it’s a great place to start.
Successful Endeavors
I am very proactive in protecting my mental capital and self-image. Having a strong self-image and a healthy reserve of mental capital will lead to increased performance.
With that being said, what do you think it does to remember your past successful endeavors? Do you think it builds up your confidence, or brings it down? The question is rhetorical, but I want you to begin thinking about this more deeply.
I’ve worked with thousands of traders over the years, and one common trait among most of them, is they are all good at something. Chess, poker, math, sports, finance – you name it, they are likely good at something.
In our courses, we have well over 50 doctors, many of them surgeons. We have poker pro’s and tournament champions who are wanting to transition into trading. I have a few traders on the NYSE or for some large prop desk while others are high profile trial lawyers. Engineers, programmers, IT specialists….we have them all and the list goes on.
As a whole, most students who want to learn forex trading are intelligent, probably successful in their current field, and likely good at some skill. So how do we leverage this to build confidence?
A Method
One simple method you can use is to think about what you are already good at. Think about what you went through to get there, the obstacles you overcame, the doubts you faced, the hurdles you passed, how many times you weren’t sure you could be good at it. Yet in spite of all that, you became highly skilled at it.
Notice the confidence you feel to perform that skill or endeavor. Did you always feel that same way as you did now, particularly in the beginning? Unlikely. But you got there, and now have a competent level of skill in it, whether it be a skill, sport, job, martial art, musical instrument, work or endeavor. This current experience and skill can (and should) be used for our trading process.
Hence, take some time to think about deeply what skills or traits you can do well. Think about it till it brings up a feeling of confidence to engage that activity and do it well. Remember this feeling and apply this towards trading.
Climbing Mountains
It is important to remember, all of you at some point in your lives have broken through obstacles, difficulties, and gone past your doubts. Maybe these were small, or maybe they were mountains, but every one of them we’ve climbed reminds us of how far we’ve come, and what we’ve overcome along the way.
As I said, before, ‘Overcoming is the Currency of Success.‘
Remembering this, and having contact with our past successful experiences will help you build confidence in yourself. This is another method for protecting your mental capital and keeping a strong self-image.
Hence, take some time to remember all the obstacles you’ve overcome along the way. This should give you a feeling that you can overcome your inner obstacles to trading successfully.
In Summary
Having confidence and a strong self-image are two of the most essential weapons for a successful trading mindset. Most, if not all of you, have had to overcome something in your life. And equally most are already good at some skill, sport or work.
Think about your developed skill set in any particular field, and what you can do with those skills. Think about what obstacles you had to overcome throughout your life. Notice how it makes you feel about yourself when you think of what you can do, and what you’ve grown past along the way.
Sometimes, we need to just remember our strengths, inner resources, and wisdom we’ve acquired along the way. Sometimes just noticing those things will remind us of our capacity, and our potential. This is just one method you can use to build up confidence in trading.
It should be noted, there are other crucial methods you can be engaging daily to build an unbreakable bedrock of confidence. Take some time to ask yourself what builds confidence in trading for you.
Please make sure to share your ideas on this, how it helps, and any comments you have regarding this article.
In my previous article Developing A Successful Forex Mindset Pt. 1, I discussed how your trading mindset is essentially a product of three things;
1) Your Neuro-Physiological Wiring
2) Your Mindset of Level of Mindfulness
3) Your Psychological Conditioning
I focused specifically on how your Neuro-Physiological Wiring, specifically how your mind and brain are integrated and help in your development as a forex trader.
I also talked about the three main fundamental functions of your brain (regulation, learning, selection) and how these mental functions are critical for building a successful forex trader mindset.
Today I’ll focus on number two from above – how your level of mindfulness helps to build your trading mindset – gearing it towards success or failure.
Your Level Of Mindfulness
As a general definition of mindfulness in trading, your mindfulness equates to the degree of awareness and attention to both your inner and outer worlds. Although this is particularly critical during the trading process (including just before and after), it is also connected to your mental activity and thoughts separate from trading.
Why?
This is because there is no compartmentalized section of your brain just for forex trading. We didn’t evolve to be forex traders sitting in front of a computer for our survival, so we are using skills and neurons from all portions of your brain. Because the brain is an interconnected whole, our experiences in life around wealth, mindset of abundance, family, memory, fear, greed, confidence, and more, all effect our trading mindset, and thus – how we make trading decisions in the moment.
Particularly true for trading (but also in life), your brain learns primarily from what you attend to in the moment. In an ode to Star Wars fans, Qui-Gon Jinn once stated, ‘your focus determines your reality‘. Thus, since your mind essentially learns from what you focus on in the moment, your level of mindfulness is the gateway to taking in helpful information (and avoiding non-useful info). How you perceive information (internally and externally) via your level of mindfulness, is what facilitates your learning process and thus trading mindset.
30-80x a Second
I’m going to be sharing a few ways you can build your level of mindfulness to sharpen your mental faculties, but wanted to briefly mention the potency of mindfulness practice.
In a study in 2004 by Lutz et al., he examined various Tibetan meditators as they went deep into their meditation and he found something highly impressive. Lutz noticed these meditators produced an uncommonly level of powerful and pervasive brainwaves, whereby unusually large regions of neural connections were pulsing in a ballet like synchrony. These large regions of neural connections pulsed at 30-80x a second allowing them to unify large territories of the mind.
Part of Einstein’s incredible mental faculties were his ability to involve large regions of his brains to work together via the cerebral cortex. His level of activity and connection (or higher) has also been found in those meditators who have build up their level of mindfulness via a sitting meditation practice. So a genius level IQ or mental abilities, along with highly perceptive qualities are not reserved for people born with these gifts.
Like all things in the mind, they can be learned and developed, particularly through mindfulness practices.
Mindfulness & Wisdom in Trading
As a whole, trading wisdom and mindfulness is not your ability to spot price action patterns in the charts, or understand proper risk management. Trading wisdom and mindfulness comes from a few steps;
1) Understanding what hurts and helps your trading process
2) Based on this understanding and experience, letting go of those habits which hurt your trading process
3) And strengthening those that help move your trading forward
As a whole, mindfulness and wisdom in trading are supported by the three basic functions I mentioned in the last article (regulation, learning and selection). Your brain learns through forming new circuits, strengthening new ones and weakening others. It selects through experience what is valuable and what is not.
Mindfulness in turn leads to new (and accelerated) learning, since your attention shapes what neural circuits are built. Regulation is done through a combination of excitatory and inhibitory activity. Thus, by learning to improve these three processes, you will improve your neural functions, and thus improve your trading mindset.
Two Methods For Building Mindfulness
Although there are dozens of methods to help you build mindfulness which will flood into your trading, I will talk about the two that I have practiced for over 12 years now; Yoga & Meditation
Over a few thousand years old, Yoga has hundreds and hundreds of scientifically proven benefits, such as reducing fat, increasing muscle tone, improving digestion, enhancing your sex life, glandular function, and relaxing your central nervous system (or CNS).
Your CNS regulates an enormous amount of activity from motor to mental activity to breathing. Are you mouth breathing rapidly? If so, you are likely to be more excited, emotional and less relaxed/focused during trading. Yoga is a great practice to help build both a relaxed CNS, but also to build awareness, both physical and mental.
To really do yoga well, you have to maintain awareness of your entire body, and control your internal energy. Any inability to do this will manifest in your yoga practice. Don’t believe me, try and do a balancing pose (like tree pose) and see how long you can hold it? I’m willing to bet almost any experienced yoga instructor can hold it for much longer than you. How so? Through a greater ability to relax their body, mind while maintaining awareness.
Thus, Yoga is a fantastic option for building mindfulness as that is the root of all yoga practice.
Meditation is another alternative, particularly silent sitting, sometimes known as vipassana, shi-ne, zazen or many other names. More than likely there is a center around you that offers a silent sitting practice, but those who engage this practice fully not only notice mindfulness benefits, but greater clarity, happiness and without a doubt – better neural functioning.
The general goal of any silent sitting practice is to build your mindfulness and awareness in the moment.
Many people wonder how I became a successful trader being self-taught. I am unlikely smarter than many of those I teach. Nor did I take a single economics or business class in college. But one edge I had for sure, was my yoga and meditation practice over the last 12 years.
This helped accelerate my learning curve as I figured out much quicker what to focus on, what price action setups were high probability, how to build my trading skills and trading mindset to be successful. If there was one key edge between me and others, it would be this, and the benefits continue ad infinitum – probably the best investment and ROI I could have ever come across in my life.
Regardless, these are a few options for building a successful trading mindset and your mindfulness in trading.
In Closing
Your mindset, brain and mental activity is what forms your trading mindset, and thus – determines your level of success. Mindfulness in trading equates to the degree of awareness and attention to both your inner and outer worlds. This would mean your emotions, your level of relaxation or excitation, your ability to focus in the moment and detect the order flow in the market, along with how your mental activity is helping or hurting your trading decisions.
Mindfulness increases your learning process by focusing on what is beneficial and profitable for your trading process, while avoiding what sets you backward.
Two practices you can engage in to build your mindfulness are yoga and meditation, which will sharpen your focus and mental activity so you get more out of your brain and mind when trading.
This is part two of the three part series on Developing A Successful Trading Mindset, so stay tuned for the last edition soon. But I hope this gives you some ideas of looking beyond the strategy to what may be keeping profits and success in trading just out of reach.
Kind Regards,
Chris Capre