Have you ever experienced doubt…or worry, or fear, or any of the other negative emotion that can sideswipe your results? Of course you have…you are human; and as a human you are an emotional being. Now, as an emotional being, you cannot take emotions out of the trading equation. Yes, it is possible to distance yourself from negative emotions that can distort your judgment and distract your thinking through training and consistent work at it; but to think your will ever be “totally” in control and/or devoid of emotions is an exercise in futility. It is far more effective to learn to “manage” emotions in order to maintain focus when you are in the trader trenches. Managing emotions is not easy, it means that when you get to that fork in the road and you have a choice between going left (falling off the cliff and essentially giving in to ego-driven tendencies while reaching for temporary relief) or choosing right ( doing what is in the highest and best interests of your A-Game). When you are trading from this proactive position and you are engaging in a mindset that is fiercely focused on what matters most in the trade, you are “trading to win.” The alternative is to “trade not to lose.” Let’s examine the differences in these to concepts a little more closely.

Larry Wilson in his book “Play to Win” asks whether your orientation to life is a play to win strategy or playing not to lose. A playing not to lose strategy is based on the need to remain in your comfort zone and constantly look for temporary emotional relief by giving in to impulsive behavior and hoping you get the results you want. Things must come easily when playing not to lose. People with this strategy are constantly looking for the magic bullet or the quick fix that will create results out of thin air with no regard for their development. The philosophy of playing to win on the other hand is about the notion that life is growth, that courage and meeting the challenge are the harbingers of success. It is about commitment to excellence and a belief that learning (both about the market and your unconscious faulty ego driven beliefs) is critical for both professional and personal effectiveness. The core maps (your mental models and paradigms that filter perceptions) of playing not to lose are driven by fear, greed and other negative emotions. These emotions are attached to deep seated limiting beliefs about yourself and out of these limiting beliefs come thoughts. Thoughts similar to the following; “…I must make this trade, I can’t possibly allow any trades to slip by, that is money lost; and losses are for losers. Conversely, the core maps of a person playing to win which is trading to win when in the markets reflect a belief that there is an abundance of opportunities, that they don’t have to chase every trade impulsively because there will be another, and another after that – she knows that there is power in patience and stalking the high-probability trade like a hungry lion. When you are playing not to lose you are trading not to lose and it also means that you are tentative and unwilling to “put it on the line” so-to-speak; making your effort your best effort.

Trading to win also entails the search for objective reality and, holding on as you would a life jacket in a stormy sea. A trading not to lose strategy is closed with limited alternatives; it blames others or outside influences first and seldom looks inside to identify issues that are negatively affecting results; this strategy promotes irrational thinking.   The trade to win strategy owns all results by using techniques like journaling to find out what is and is not working. The trade to win trader is prepared to use protocols and effective routines in order to ensure sustainable success. This strategy is intellectually and emotionally honest along with garnering the enthusiasm and energy necessary to vigorously address trading weaknesses, but you can’t address a weakness that you either don’t know or don’t understand. Trading not to lose encourages erratic and illogical behaviors while looking for the easy win, often putting large positions at risk thereby simply gambling, and by reneging on commitments to established rules – if they have rules at all. The trade to win strategy recognizes that trading necessitates losses and that effective long-term winning means managing risk, having an iron clad commitment to rules, goal-setting, planning and methodical, smart trading. The trade to win strategy is winning the psychological war one battle at a time – “going as far as I can with all that I’ve got” in a growth oriented, fun, honest and healthy way.

Your issues, obstacles, and problems that plague your trading must be treated like an infestation in your home, you want to know that the cockroaches are there so you can weed them out and get rid of them. That’s why documenting your trades and incorporating a feedback loop by using a “Thought Journal” and a trade log are critically important parts of your tool box. Most of you already know that smart trading means tracking and documenting your trades in order to get data on how well your trade plan is working. Similarly, you must also gain data on what you are thinking and feeling because this is how you uncover the unconscious issues that act as drivers to bad behaviors that bring on unwanted results. You’ve got to be willing to dig deeply to find out; you must pull back the layers of the mental onion and face your issues so that with the right mental and emotional tools you can successfully resolve them. A “don’t bring me no bad news” outlook is going to turn you into a Sisyphus, the Greek mythological character that was doomed to roll a boulder up a mountain only to never reach the top. You’ll never reach the top of your trading goals but will be doomed to push that boulder (your issues) until you run out of either energy or money and it’s usually the latter first; that is if you are unwilling to look at your ego driven unconscious faulty beliefs. The smart trader accepts the challenge and realizes that trading to win is about the long haul.

So, you must decide which life strategy you are willing to undertake in the service of your trading. Will it be the courageous and comfort-zone expanding trading to win, where you are committed to growth and excellence? Or, will you reach for the easy button with a strategy based on not wanting to get outside of your comfort zone; avoiding challenging yourself and living by default with blinders on. The choice is always yours. Remember, trading to win is where you are going as far as you can with all that you’ve got!

Have you ever tried to ride a bike that had wheels that were out of alignment? It is not a pretty site. Once when I was on a century ride for the last 30 miles I felt a strong tug, which made me feel as though I were in a head wind. I had to work twice as hard to go a half as fast. It was very difficult to say the least. When I reached the end of the ride I noticed that I had broken a spoke. This meant that the wheel had become out of alignment and looked like a wobbly noodle. As a result, the wheel had been rubbing on the brakes almost constantly which caused me to work against myself. This is what happens when you are out of alignment in your trading. You begin to work against your own best interests as your internal conflict rages causing you to become confused, frustrated, angry and fragmented, to name a few. This is not a good prescription for properly planning and executing your plan as you trade. And, your trades are so serious that you’ll want to have all your mindset cylinders “rockin” as you enter and exit trade set-ups. So, part of the point illuminates the fact that your mental/emotional system is immensely critical to this process of Alignment along lines of body, mind, and spirit so that you are going in the same direction with your preparation and training taking you to ever higher heights of trading while you execute your trade strictly according to your plans.

Being in alignment with yourself can also be described as thinking, feeling and doing in a way that resonates with reality of the charts and optimizes all of your internal and external resources. It is supporting yourself through states of mind that have a confidence based on competence; it is founded on a belief system that maximizes supportive positive beliefs and minimizes limiting beliefs that may still be in your unconscious. Being in alignment also means that you are aimed to be and remain in the Now of the trade because you are necessarily reducing the available attention in your mind when you allow yourself to become distracted and fragmented. Becoming distracted and fragmented are negative in and of themselves; but when you are in the trading process these negatives compound your deficits and exacerbate any ill thoughts or feelings that you might be experiencing. No doubt you have noticed when you were out of alignment and out of the trader zone in a trade where you became highly conflicted about what would be the best thing to do vs what your ego was telling you. That ego-voice might have been telling you, “Don’t mind that plan, you can move that stop if you want to!” Another indication that you are out of alignment is when your values become challenges for instance “keeping commitments and promises” you seem to become tolerant of rule violations and other lapses of judgment.

When you think, feel, say, and do in a way that is congruent—meaning that you have internal and external consistency, perceived by others as sincerity or authenticity—then you are in alignment. It can also be termed an ‘intra-rapport’, moving in tandem with self, in sync and balanced, centered and grounded. You can also be described as having integrity and ‘walking your talk’. Alignment cannot be overstated in its importance to trading or anything that involves performance, for like the congruency and alignment of the moving parts of an engine or piece of machinery, if integrity and alignment are compromised, even in minute ways, the object will either not reach its destination or it will, due to internal friction, become off course and disengaged to the point of disruption and destruction. On the other hand, when alignment is true, optimal performance is all but guaranteed. All parts are moving towards the same goal and in the same direction with precision.

Humans are often out of alignment, but sadly, many don’t recognize it. They trudge along trying through force of will to achieve desired outcomes, and when they descend into mental and emotional fatigue due to the stress of moving against themselves, they often wonder why and search for the answer to their issues from every vantage point but the one that matters—inside of themselves.

There are many parts that are involved in alignment. Some of the more important parts are:

• Purpose
• Beliefs
• Values
• Identity
• Behavior

Purpose is first on this list because it’s of vital importance that you’ve identified the reason why you are in pursuit of any goal, objective, or desire. You must be able to answer the “why” question. A compelling reason will not only move, but catapult you to achievement. There are categories of reasons that form the context for being compelling, such as:

Marriage or family—when you associate the thing you want with the people you cherish, that thing you want also inherits a large degree of that energy. Spirituality is another of the “compelling” reasons that might be used. By tying what you want to your notion of the Creator and devotion; that is, to do things on a higher plane, for some holds great force. Also, the concept of community and one’s desire to be an agent for positive change would be a powerful reason as well for some people. Additionally, your reasons may have a strong tie with personal growth, to be the best that you can be. Knowing the underlying gripping reasons why you want to trade will greatly support your success. Know what your purpose is for trading and it will go a long way in the service of you goals. Online Trading Academy has Extended Learning Track programs that can help you to identify that compelling reason which will tie into your passion and greatly support you in becoming and remaining aligned.

Next, you’ll want to have beliefs that support your purpose. Of course, you must first know what your beliefs are. Many of your beliefs are unconscious and must be discovered through a process of introspection and reflection. An excellent vehicle for this process is a Thought Journal to be used with your Trade Log. For instance, by using your Thought Journal, if you discover a belief that you lack the intelligence and analytical skills, or if you think that the markets are based on “luck” and you are not lucky, then it doesn’t matter much how compelling your reason is for trading. You are out of sync and the prospects of becoming successful—as long as you harbor those notions—are slim to none. You should be able to answer the question: What are my beliefs about the market, my abilities, and my worthiness?

Values are also critical. As with beliefs, values must, for the most part, be uncovered. You may want to “choose” values that are lofty and noble, but if you aren’t already “living” a value, it is not a personal value; it’s a personal principle, no matter how much you talk about it. Personal principles and values are similar but not the same. Personal principles are what you hold as important, and you aim to be true to those standards and maintain them. Personal principles are what you “want” to live by. Values are how you are living – how you roll, so to speak. Once you identify a personal principle and incorporate it into your life by committing to it as a behavioral standard and using it as a mantra of movement, then you transition to holding it as a value. That is why values-clarification is misunderstood by some. They think that, given a list of salient-sounding concepts like honesty, charity, health, wisdom, learning, diligence, integrity and so forth, they would then include in their personal values list the ones they “like.” However, you can no more declare a value than you can declare good health without doing what it takes to be in good health; this would be out of alignment and incongruent. Here is how it works taking for example good health. You would have to declare your commitment to good health, then eat, sleep, and exercise to finish the equation to take it from personal principle or aim to a personally held value. You can change a principle into a value once it is assimilated into the fabric of your being and reflected in how you live. So, true personal values are reflected in where your attention flows and what your behavior shows.

Identity is another important aspect of you that must be in alignment. It is the description of who you are. Of course, you must first figure out which person in you we’re talking about. Who are you first thing in the morning? Who are you when you are really stressed? Who are you when things are going well? Who are you when you’ve just entered into a trade with an oversized position? The fact of the matter is that you are not one personality; rather, you are an amalgam of any number of personas fashioned by your experiences taken from all manner of influential figures throughout your life. The trick is to identify the person you’d like to be and begin to incorporate courageous change works into your daily routine to activate the strong, healthy parts of you towards being that person. In this way, you can use the treasure from your wounds and focus on the goals of your highest and best self. When you are able to do this, you are on your way to becoming, step by step, the person you aspire to be.

Finally, what are you doing in the service of your alignment? Are you focused with a purpose that encompasses the desired outcome? Behaviors are the test of alignment. In other words, are you doing what you said you were going to do, like keeping commitments, following through with projects and following up on task items? Do you have a trading plan and are you following through on it? Do you have trading rules? Are you practicing appropriate money management and position sizing? When you have losses or experience other disappointments, are you able to accept the reality and move on, or do you wallow in self-pity, sadness, and anger? Are you following the market? Or, do you wish, hope, pray, and otherwise try to make the market go where you want it to go? Are you journaling? Are you logging your trades? What you do speaks volumes about who you are. Alignment also relates to how you are conducting yourself in other parts of your life. Are you expecting more from others than you are willing to give yourself? Are you keeping your promises? Are you having difficult conversations with loved ones and other important people in your life? Are you exhibiting courage? Align yourself and your trading for consistent success. You are an organic machine, and you work best when all of you are working in the same direction and on the same goals.

Sally felt like she was in the zone. Her plan had identified a demand zone on the 60 minute ES E-mini chart and the price action had pulled back as it was about to enter it. She had placed a limit order on the 5 minute chart to go long in the zone and bracketed her order so as to place a stop just below the demand zone when she was filled. Sally prepared for the trade and she had determined that it was high probability with a good chance of hitting her target. The trade got filled and stalled for a moment before the price action began to drop. As it got close to her stop, Sally took a deep breath and thought, “It’s going to take me out, I can deal with that, my stop is working.” Now, the interesting part happened when the price action took a turn and began to move up. As soon as it went into the green, Sally found herself to be very anxious and fearful. She panicked as she thought, “Oh boy, this has a profit and I’d better grab it because I need all the profits I can get before it might go back down and I’ll be left with a loss again.” The urge to take the small profit was too much for her to manage. Sally prematurely exited the trade and didn’t allow her winner to run. She went against her plan. She second guessed herself. Right after she took herself out of the trade, the price action continued to rise and soon it hit what would have been her target. She found herself feeling dejected, depressed and angry because she had “caved” again to anxiety and fear of letting the “green” and what she was telling herself about it, distort her judgment and distract her focus. She had again done what she had specifically told herself that she would not do,… again.

Prematurely exiting a trade and not allowing a winner to run is a common problem. One of the things that you’ll want to do when you notice this issue is to note it in your trade log/journal. Documenting the trade data helps you to uncover the mechanical triggers that are prompting the exit. For example, in Sally’s case, it wasn’t the price action’s threat of hitting her stop; which is an issue for many who move stops in an effort to avoid the loss; it was the movement of the price going in her favor that initiated the anxiety and fear that the profit would be lost if the price action suddenly reversed and then hit the stop loss. Gaining the mechanical specifics will take you closer to getting a handle on a solution. Additionally, you want to document your internal data; that is, what you are telling yourself as you are about to take yourself out of the trade. In Sally’s case, she said, “Oh boy, this has a profit and I’d better grab it because I need all the profits I can get before it might go back down and I’ll be left with a loss again.” This thought is what prompted the anxiety and fear. In other words, what Sally told herself was masking a deeper limiting belief that a small profit meant that she was a “good” trader and that she must hang on to that at all costs…even the cost of hitting her target. The limiting belief was connected to her self-esteem and it became more important to hang on to this small profit because of what it meant than to risk it by letting the winner run. Finding out the deeper core issues is one of the important byproducts of documenting your internal data. You can’t confront this type of issue if you aren’t aware of what is motivating the behavior. See, the thought of “I’ve got to keep this profit” is often connected to an underlying belief that profits, however small, will validate you as a trader despite the fact that it is keeping you from an even larger profit and a better result. This underlying belief could prompted by another deeper limiting belief that your profits are limited and you must take them whenever you can, which is also a belief in scarcity. So, the anxiety and fear continues to get triggered as your unconscious conversations around what this small profit means to you are circulating. As you unearth more and more of the limiting beliefs that are prompting negative emotions which drive bad behaviors, you are putting yourself in a position to be proactive in dealing with them and pre-emptive in decreasing them as a factor in your behavior.

Now that you have pulled back the layers of the problematic onion by using your journal/log process it’s time for you to address the negative thought stream head on.

Interrupt the pattern once you recognize it’s happening by stopping the process in its tracks. As soon as you feel the tension, anxiety, butterfly stomach, etc.; stop and take several deep breaths. Count to ten or higher. Change your position by standing up or doing something different such as a brief exercise. This will take you out of the pattern, bring you back to the moment and help you to focus on what matters most in the trade. Then ask yourself, “What must I be telling myself or believing to feel this tension, anxiety, butterfly stomach? What is really happening to the trade? What is in the interests of my A-Game right now?” At that point you are in a position of strength. You have interrupted the pattern, identified what is driving the desire to exit the trade, focused your attention on what matters most, and you can then do the right thing. This is not a panacea, you must practice this procedure. It’s like any important behavior you want to install as a habit; you must develop the capacity for strength and endurance by doing it repeatedly and training yourself.

It’s imperative that you work on bringing and keeping your A-Game at your trading platform. This begins with becoming aware of what will take you off course and documenting the mechanical and internal data. When you have identified the underlying issues, then become proactive and pre-emptive in dealing with them by changing the negative thinking and interrupting the patterns one trade at time. Letting your winners run is an important component of being consistently successful and getting the results that you want. Remember, you can’t change what you can’t face, and you can’t face what you don’t know.

As you trade stocks or any other financial instrument your beliefs play a huge role in the results that you get. In fact, your beliefs are very important components to your programming that took place years ago and still have considerable impact upon your follow-through…or lack thereof. Let’s consider Brad, as he reeled from the sound. Even though it was in his head, it felt like it had just happened with all the force and humiliation of that moment, over 37 years ago. It was hard to imagine that this event would still have the strength that it did. He remembered with stark clarity how in a parent-teacher meeting his father had become furious because he had received a C on his algebra final. None of his older siblings had ever received anything lower than an A-, let alone a B and how totally unacceptable that he would humiliate the family by stooping low enough to get a C. And, it didn’t matter that Brad was a very obedient student and child…or that he had excelled in literature, writing and art. His retired general and engineer father took it as a personal affront and called him worthless, stupid and lazy in front of the teacher.   Brad had felt mortified by his father’s assault, and although he still achieved high marks throughout high school and college, and had become a successful business man, he always believed deep down that he wasn’t good enough or smart enough; which often kept him from going further and doing more in his life.

Now, as he watched his trade get stopped out again for another major loss it was as though his father were watching his results from the grave with that same disdain and disapproval that his face had often showed in life. When he heard the slamming door sound that he had programmed into his trading platform indicating that the stock trade had closed, it had the same impact in his heart and head as that day his father verbally attacked him. He felt like a failure in his father’s eyes every time he lost in a trade, which lately seemed to happen all the time. He felt out-of-control and embodiment of all that his father feared he would be. Brad had become a prisoner of his limiting beliefs and they affected so much of his life and unfortunately, his trading as well. To make matters worse, he didn’t even know that he harbored these beliefs let alone their impact upon his results. These results would remain until Brad would become aware of his limiting beliefs and then change them.

A belief is anything that you hold to be true…or false; and, it is a thought that you think all the time, albeit for the most part out of your awareness. Beliefs are very powerful because they determine to a large degree, the meaning you give to any event…along with values from which beliefs stem. And the meaning that you ascribe to an event is connected to an internal representation (visual, sound, or feeling) that determines or creates the perception of the event. So, beliefs, meanings, perceptions and internal representations are intricately connected to one another. Also, how you perceive something (either as bad vs. good, friend vs. foe) has a direct impact upon what you decide to do about the event. For instance, if you have a trading loss and you have an unconscious belief that if someone losses in a trade they are somehow a stupid trader then the unconscious conversation might be “that means that you must be stupid;” so that your internal representation might be comprised of you being told by someone (like your father perhaps) that you are worthless and this internal representation would give further credence to the perception that losses are a very bad thing and you are a bad trader to have them. These unconscious thoughts would give rise to emotions like anxiety and fear associated with the trade. So, you might decide to do something in your trade like for instance “move your stop” to avoid a loss; and, in most cases this type of behavior is going to come back to “bite” you!

Beliefs are created early and throughout life and are based on the experiences stemming from your environment, good and bad, positive and negative. These experiences will form the mental models, the internal structures of how you interact with your environment. These structures are largely out of your awareness and are formed by everything that you learned from your family, friends, religious affiliation, media, sports, school and authority figures. The mental models are also only a representation of reality, that is, a story that you tell yourself, which may be far from what is really happening. Furthermore, mental models are triggered by events that happen during the day. An event is anything that gets your attention. When the event takes place you will first ask yourself three questions – three questions that most often will remain out of your awareness. They are: What is the event? What does it mean? And, what am I going to do about it? Of the three questions, the one that holds the meaning is the most important. To determine the meaning, the event is filtered through your internal structures or mental models or the lenses through which you see the world and you will interpret or draw a conclusion based upon your beliefs and values. For example, if you were driving down the freeway and someone cut you off (an event), you might respond with anger at having been put at great risk of an accident. This anger would be associated with a thought or belief (which might be out of your awareness) that the guy cut you off purposefully. For some people, this thought or belief that then fuels the anger might lead to a behavior like road rage. But how angry would you be if you “knew” that the guy cut you off because he was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital because the baby was on it’s way out. In other words, when the event happens you will “make something up” which of course will be the meaning you ascribe to the event. Next, you will respond to this meaning of the event with an emotion. If the emotion is positive, then your focus will likely remain leveled on what is important in the situation – for instance keeping your rules in the trade. If the emotion is negative, such as anxiety, fear, greed, anger or the like, then the corresponding behavior will be reflective of the emotion as in fear driven rule violations like moving stops or doubling down.   Of course, rule violations are going to prompt results that you don’t want.

So, it is critically important to first become aware of any limiting belief that is impacting negatively upon the results that you want.   The way to do that is to monitor your emotions because what you feel, either emotions that you can identify (as in anxiety, fear or greed) or feelings in your body like neck tension, or fluttery stomach just as you are about to do something in the trade; provides valuable information about what is going on in your subconscious. This information becomes available as you ask questions like: What must I be telling myself or “believing” to feel this way? What is really going on in the trade and in the charts? What behavior at this moment will provide the best outcome as in following my rules? The answers to these and other questions will begin to reveal your beliefs about the trade and about yourself.   When you document this internal data by using a Thought Journal along with your Trade Log, you are then able to track patterns of limiting beliefs that drive thinking, feeling and doing, which directly determine the results that you get. It’s really about doing what it takes to get and keep your A-Game locked in while trading.

Change is a common theme of my blogs. That’s because too many traders are not getting the results that they want, and they need to “change” something (thoughts, emotions, behaviors) in order to get different results. We have talked about tools, techniques and concepts that are designed to help you to think, feel and do differently. In today’s blog we will take a closer look at the thought process and the importance of not only “what” you say, but “how” you say it. In other words what are you using to carry the load of what you’re describing has a lot to do with the impact of that thought on your emotions and of course your behavior.   The language that you use to describe what happened in a particular financial instrument, what you are doing while managing a trade, the results you got from a trade, etc., has a huge influence on your feelings and your subsequent actions. Actually, every result that you get is determined first by what and how you think. Thinking determines how you feel. And how you feel will drive how you respond. So, it is imperative that you hold your thoughts close to your vest and monitor how you are saying what you say. This is how you begin to first make sense of and afterword effectively manage the swirl and sway of all those trading variables. Now, if you haven’t figured it out already, we are talking about “metaphor”.

Metaphor is a literary figure of speech where we use an image, object or story to represent or explain an idea and the reference helps us understand. When the markets are described, they are often referred to as “a fight between the bulls and the bears” to explain their adversarial nature. Or, when a loss is incurred some might talk about how it is “eating away at them” as a way to illustrate the emotions that they feel about that loss. Or, what about “trying to hit a home run” when entering into a trade – this would define your extreme intentions regarding the kind of profit you were pressing for. Each of these examples is an image or symbol and tells a story to represent the situation that you want to convey. Even though each example is only a brief phrase they convey a lot of information. That’s part of the power of using metaphors. It’s like the picture that’s worth a thousand words, the metaphor through images and symbols tells a story; and often the story can be emotionally compelling. Here are a few more. In order to get something done you “step up to the plate.” With difficult choices, you’re “doing the heavy lifting.” You “grab the bull by the horns” when you accept a challenge. The lexicon is replete with metaphor, and it is powerful. Emotions are activated on conscious and as well unconscious levels through metaphor due to the rich symbolic association with concepts, both painful and pleasurable.

Metaphors can be really inspiring, supportive, motivating and uplifting or they can be daunting, disturbing, unnerving and destructive to your performance. You see, they are often closely connected to your core paradigms and mental models about life. They would present as a mental structure that embodies your rules for living, and rules for trading. Take a look at this statement, “the market’s out to get me.” This brief phrase can be highly toxic to how you envision the markets and more importantly to how you react and/or respond to situations in your trading; for example, when someone says something like, “the markets out to get me” they are setting themselves up for failure and accepting of a notion that they have very little power to perform. What you tell yourself determines how you feel and how you feel drives what you do. Going further, when you use a powerful image rich phrase that is connected to your inner most limiting beliefs about your ability or “inability” to succeed, you are creating a barrier between you and the results that you want. In order to create substantive change, it’s important to identify and reconstruct the underlying metaphors that drive your stories about you, your abilities and the markets. For example let’s take the metaphor, “I am as dumb as a rock because I lost on this trade.” If you said that to yourself, what kinds of emotions would you probably feel? Most would feel a level of anxiety and anger. Negative emotions like these don’t promote positive actions. They rob you of stamina and the ability to follow through with your rules while focusing on what matters most in the trade meaning that they rob you of getting the results that you want. On the other hand, if you use positive metaphors that are motivating they will help to establish rock-solid responses to trading situations through uplifting images and symbols that are connected to core beliefs. What about the metaphor example, “I am trading with the courage of a lion?” As you consider this metaphor, take a look at how you feel. Your emotions are probably much different from the metaphor, “I am as dumb as a rock because I lost on this trade.”   This is how you ratchet up your ability to create changes in your thinking. By uncovering negative metaphors and changing them you put yourself on a fast-track of doing things differently and therefore getting different results.

Change comes from facing fears, and doing things differently. But, you can’t do differently without thinking differently. Becoming self-aware is crucial to your development as a trader. You must monitor your thoughts, feelings and actions in order to begin to modify those that aren’t working for you – especially metaphor. Bringing your A-Game to the platform and doing what it takes to keep it there is what will make the difference in your performance.