Trading is a tough business. It challenges your character flaws, personal issues and weaknesses at every turn. It is for this reason that persistence and perseverance are crucial to your ability to not only bring your A-Game to the trading platform but to sustain it over the long haul. How often have you found yourself at a “fork in the road” of your trading and faced with a choice to either go to the left and violate a rule thereby doing something that is not in your best interest; or go the right and bring your highest and best trader to focus attention on what matters most. Tapping into this type of energy is what can make a distinct difference in following through with you plan and your rules.

The definition of persistence is basically never giving up. Perseverance is never giving in. Roz Savage knows something about never giving up and never giving in. She holds four world records for ocean rowing, including first woman to row solo across three oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. She has rowed over 15,000 miles, taken around 5 million oar strokes, and spent cumulatively over 500 days of her life at sea in a 23-foot rowboat. In 2010 she was named Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. Some people do not allow obstacles, setbacks, or hardships get in their way to keep them from what they want. Don Jackson is a black man who was dyslexic in the late 40’s and 50’s at a time when most professionals didn’t know what it was. He grew up labeled as retarded in special school systems. But, Don knew that he was not retarded, he had a light emanating from his Spirit into which he plugged his heart and decided that he too wanted to learn. When he decided to go to college everyone tried to discourage him, thinking that they were saving him from major disappointments and pain. But Don never gave up. Even though it was very difficult because of his disability, he did well. He passed his remedial studies and was admitted into college whereupon he not only graduated but today is a Ph.D. in education and works with young people whom society has given up on. He had persistence and perseverance … never gave up and never gave in; he would not allow anything to keep him from his burning goal. He never lost sight of his vision. He created solutions to his problems.

There are 5 critical steps to achieve strong levels of persistence and perseverance:

First, have a trading purpose and a vision of that purpose. Rekindle the vision of your purpose everyday as it will connect to the passionate emotion that sustains you. It reminds you daily of the rewards and benefits of the goal. If you haven’t identified your purpose for trading you’ll want to take care of this right away. Your purpose is the starting point for successful trading. It is where you connect the “what-matters-most” of your life to the “what-matters-most” in the trade. It is how you infuse a passion for remaining on task to the process of your trading. The visualized purpose is the vehicle that drives you like a turbo jet towards your trading goals.

Secondly, the journey of 1000 miles begins with one step. You must firmly anchor the attitude by using this heartfelt statement as your own; “I can achieve anything I set my heart and mind to, nothing is impossible for me to achieve if I want it badly enough and am willing to pay the price, for no matter how much work is involved, or how long it takes, or how difficult it is, I can and will achieve”. This belief in self is imperative to remaining focused.

Thirdly, remember to view setbacks, losses and failures as learning opportunities – those things that hurt, instruct. All great achievers have made innumerable mistakes and have failed, that is what provided the “experience” and the “education” that actualized achievement.   This is necessary to manifest your trading vision.

Fourthly, always increase your market knowledge by identifying the mechanics that will help you to form a foundation in the markets that you have chosen to trade. This can also be termed “a results orientation.” Experiment with different approaches, perspectives and paths.

Fifthly, transform your work into fun. Make what you have to do, into something that you want to do. Work toward your life goal shouldn’t feel like a sacrifice because it is what you want more than anything for you and your family. As you gain more “process mastery” in your trading you will increase the “joy” of doing it well.

Now, let’s look at five ways to deal with setbacks:

1) Don’t aim to avoid a handicap such as starting your trading business without capital or wanting understand a new market despite time constraints. If you have a challenge study it from all angles and seek to identify a creative solution; otherwise a tiny toy wrench can grow into a huge iron monkey wrench stopping your progress cold.

2) Don’t blame others for your problems. Successful trading requires personal accountability and self-limits. Be honest with yourself. Use your mentors and as well you can be your own mentor by pretending that someone has come to you for advice on that very trading issue. How would you answer them?

3) Continue to strive and strengthen your qualities of self-discipline. You will not make it as a trader if you can’t keep your commitments. Setbacks that are caused by commitment implosion often can cause weaknesses in special areas, turn the weakness into strength. Be your own heaviest critic but don’t beat yourself up – in other words, you are not a failure, you had a learning experience.

4) Every setback or loss has a silver lining or seed of opportunity. Find it and use it. It may involve a new strategy, but you are getting there anyway.

5) Take the attitude that every issue has a solution. A problem is only a problem if you think you can’t and therefore you won’t solve it. As Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, either way you’re right.”

The items above are some of the ways to strengthen your persistence and perseverance. As you strengthen your ability to never give up and never give in you will come closer, step-by-step, to achieving the goal of becoming a consistently successful trader.

Human beings are impulsively driven by greed and the desire to dominate. They will take the easiest way to get and keep what they want. This often has negative and unintended consequences that are frequently destructive. And, humans are not naturally prone to accountability or self-discipline, which is why we need laws, rules, boundaries, and limits in society. Reaching YOUR goal requires self-imposed limits and these limits must be created through personal accountability. You must know what you require in the way of protocols, strategies and rules in order to create effective self-limits or self-control.   It’s very important to identify the weaknesses and the strengths of your execution. After that, new habits and supportive behaviors can be created.

It’s critically important to identify the faulty patterns of thinking that cause behavior inconsistent with your stated objectives. After identifying bad behavior (often the lack of follow-through or violated rule(s), isolate them which might entail making another rule to put greater specificity in your process. The goal is to get into a mindset in order to identify how the behavior reflected foggy thinking and how thoughts and emotions work together to create results—this knowledge helps to get and maintain a focus on the most important elements in the “next” step in order to remain on target, on task and on purpose. Then you can cut losses and position yourself to re-observe the order flow without the emotional noise.

You are not always the same and how you are is based upon what part of you shows up. Also, the environment, biorhythms, discomfort vs. comfort, and recent events that may have shaken your confidence, all have an impact upon who shows up. So, sometimes you are confident and relaxed; sometimes you are agitated and anxious; sometimes you are depressed and fatalistic. Deep-seated irrational beliefs create these emotions. They result in “who is coming to work today” and greatly affect how events are perceived. The ideal is to approach life in an open, alert and focused state, being in balance and resonating with the market system. This means remaining in a constant state of curiosity and observation.

The objective of dealing with emotional interference is not to attempt to eliminate it. Emotions are an inextricable part of who we are as human beings. The point is to learn how to understand more about them so that the negative can be contained and the positive can be harnessed and used as allies to boost the drive to stay on course so behavior and performance are reinforced rather than adversely affected. As you modify both cause and effect, you know where that modification is leading. By knowing your strengths and weaknesses, knowing the state you want to achieve, and knowing you are on the path to getting there, you close the gap between expectations and results. Remember, you can’t change what you can’t face, and you can’t face what you don’t know.

Fear of success is just as daunting as a fear of failure although fear of failure may be more easily understood because fear of success is somewhat counter intuitive. Firstly, fear of success stems from the meaning that you ascribe to it. Meaning gives context and definition to an idea as in what is the importance or significance. For example, your 16 year old son comes home one evening and is sporting a new tattoo…on his face! You would ascribe a significance to it, and it would define how you felt about it, and, what you intended to do about it. With regard to success, if your meaning entails having to be stronger, smarter, or somehow better-than then this could be very scary. Or, if your father told you as a child that rich people are jerks; then on a subconscious level that would mean that in order to be rich and successful you would be a jerk. That meaning would make it difficult to follow-through with behaviors designed to get successful results.

Another subconscious fear is that when you grow, evolve and create another expression of yourself, you leave behind other aspects of yourself, which can represent inner conflicts. You may outgrow people, places and things. For instance, as a child you may have really enjoyed reading “Jack and Jill” stories; however as you grew and matured in your literary tastes, you no longer get the same level of enjoyment from reading less challenging and therefore less engaging works. As you grow and develop your sensibilities and sensitivities refine. That doesn’t mean that you have become “better” than anyone else, it’s just that your interests have expanded. Additionally and as an outcome of subconsciously considering such an idea you may harbor unconscious doubts, as in, “Have I done the right thing?” Or, “Will this success make me someone who I don’t want to be?”

Success can also be scary due to the level of complexity, commotion and potential turmoil that it can bring. You may be programmed to suppose that there “should” be no chaos and that would lead to subconscious limiting beliefs such as, “I can never be happy with success;” or, “Success is too chaotic for me.” These unconscious thoughts stem in part from childhood programming that seeks to stabilize chaos through “black or white” thinking; that is, it is either one way or the other, which makes it difficult to see elements of the confluence or grayness of life. The point is that this absolutist approach leaves little room for the possibilities of considering how things could be woven together.

Now that we have discussed to a degree how fear of success can become manifest in your life; it is important to view this or any fear from the standpoint of ally rather than foe. The meaning here is that your growth as a trader and human being is predicated upon identifying and confronting your fears along with your other emotional issues that take you outside of your comfort zone and drive behaviors that are not in your best interests. There is no growth without effort and courage to challenge your weaknesses and face your fears. These improvables are best approached as opportunities to learn more, do more and be more.

One of the ways to confront the fear of success is to ask the question: What will happen if you succeed? This question is not a few-moment perusal of what consciously seems obvious to you about what you would like to success to be; or what you fear might happen. This question is one that you want to take quiet time to realistically contemplate. In other words, so you achieve your goal; then what? What will change in your life? If you take the time to allow the question to seep into lower levels of your awareness, your subconscious will answer the question. There are often unintended consequences associated with getting what you want and they could be enough to prevent you from taking committed action; such as the meaning, the inner conflicts or black and white thinking. The bottom line is that whatever the reasons that would motivate you to avoid the fear of unintended consequences you’ll want to root out and shed the light of day on them. By asking, “What will happen if I succeed,” you can focus your conscious attention on the potential unintended consequences and therefore the fears. This provides you with “grist for the mill” in other words, with what was causing you to shrink away from taking committed action in your trading. Then you can consciously deal with them in advance. You’ll send a message to your subconscious that you needn’t fear this because you have a practical way to solve it; you can devise a new strategy for moving forward. Here are a few of the limiting beliefs associated with fear of success:

• That you are undeserving of success.
• That you will accomplish all that you set out to, but that you still won’t be content, satisfied or happy once your goal has been achieved.
• Belief that there are others who will take away your success.
• Fear that once you achieve success, the motivation to continue will fade.
• Belief that you will find no happiness in your achievement and that you will always be dissatisfied with your life.

Any fear can be difficult to overcome. The important thing to remember is that you can’t overcome a fear that you are unwilling to confront and you can’t confront a fear that you are unaware of. Fear of success is real and if you are continually plagued by getting in your own way and sabotaging your efforts fear of success may be the culprit.

In any important effort where you are up against other individuals that are as motivated, as intelligent, as competent and as prepared if not better than you, then it is crucial that you identify an edge in your game in order to come out ahead of the pack and get the win. Trading is a good example of this due to the solitary nature of the game. You are in there alone in most cases and ultimately the only person that you can rely upon is you when the ride gets bumpy. By having and using an edge you are employing an approach, a strategy, a belief, a mindset, or a tool that will support you in bringing your absolute best to the platform and keeping it there. Surely you have experienced times where you found yourself at a crossroads in a trade; a fork-in-the-road where you had to make a choice to either go to the left and violate your rules, break your promises and crash and burn; or, you chose to go to the right, kept your highest and best trader engaged while trading in your highest and best interests. When you do-the-right-thing in such an instance, you not only support your ability to follow-through more consistently; but, as well, you have cataloged a peak experience that has the effect of catapulting you forward, bolstering your confidence and strengthening your self-esteem. One such edge is a tool that aids you in remaining focused intently on what-matters-most in the trade by interrupting disruptive patters of thinking, feeling and doing that can and do cause you to take the left turn at the fork in the road resulting in catastrophic results. This tool is called Stop, Challenge and Choose.

One of the most common rule violations that novices and some experienced traders make is inappropriately moving a hard stop when the price-action is inching toward it. The first signal that you normally become aware of is an emotion that is other than positive or neutral; such as in this instance fear or anxiety as you watch the price-action. That emotional signal is not the first thing that happens however. The first response in you is an internal dialogue that for the most part is out of your awareness, which is why you must attend to the emotional signal as the first stimulus that comes to your attention. When the fear/anxiety is felt immediately “stop” what you are doing in order to interrupt the emerging pattern, which would culminate in moving the hard-stop, increasing your risk and in most cases end in a greater loss than you would have experienced had you maintained the hard-stop. By stopping you take a deep breath which will initiate a relaxation response in you; then change your physical posture and assume a position of power, for example, standing up straight and unclenching fists or teeth. By doing this you are not only interrupting the emerging bad pattern, you are also exchanging a forthright intention for what a moment ago was frustration, frazzlement and fragmentation. Then you “challenge” yourself by asking 3 important questions: 1) What must I be thinking or believing to feel this fear or anxiety? The answer in this instance might be, “…That price-action is going to hit my hard-stop and that means I’ll lose, and that means I’m a poor trader, and that means I’m stupid…” You get the picture. 2) What is the objective reality? In this example the reality is that the price-action may or may not hit your hard-stop; and in actuality it doesn’t matter because your initial plan calculated the best hard-stop placement according to the risk assessment. 3) Is there an alternative interpretation? For our example, the alternative interpretation would be that the hard-stop is there to protect your capital and therefore if it is activated by the price-action then it has done its job and you are more not less intelligent for allowing the plan to go forth without interference or second guessing from you. After asking the three questions then it’s time to “choose” a response that is in keeping with your highest and best goals for the trade and that would be in this instance to be patient and allow the process to play itself out. You’ll not only maintain your A-Game at the platform, you will have gathered more mechanical and internal data; and trading is all about the data.

Stop, Challenge and Choose is simple and highly effective “edge” for interrupting emerging bad patterns and placing yourself in a position to not only follow rules and keep commitments, but to maintain a position of increasing your skill levels. Additionally, it works quite well with your journal to memorialize the process in order to track the instances of emotional turmoil so that you can identify the bad patterns of thinking, feeling a doing as they take place. In this way you are poised to anticipate the occurrence and become proactive and pre-emptive in the process thereby greatly enhancing your ability to sustain your highest and best trader at the platform.

Metaphors can be life affirming or a denying metaphor that would present as a mental/psychic structure that embodies the individual’s rules for living, and for our purposes, her rules of trading. As in “the market’s out to get me.” Also, to create substantive change, it’s important to identify and reframe/restructure/redefine and alter the underlying metaphors that drive our stories about what’s going on in the price action. As discussed in earlier chapters, we have in our MAPs, paradigms and mental models symbols that embody rich and complex structures of metaphor. For example, when we think of things like love, war, birth, death, success, marriage or money, the dynamic is multi-varied with associations and cross associations relating both directly and indirectly to our sense of self, relationship to others, familial bonds, fears of success, and fears of failure. And, through the global interconnectedness of the markets, when we participate, we are putting and pitting all of the psychological and cultural variables that impact upon our psyche as a “trading persona” against it. Furthermore, as we move and shift our paradigms surrounding these underlying metaphors that are not working for us, it is important to identify and then transfer the cultural/organizational/personal lessons, and this happens most steadfastly through metaphor modifications. For example, “I am a sinking ship and a loser if I don’t make money on this trade.” Metaphors establish the door to creativity as in pictures, sounds, physical feelings, tastes and smells, which can be woven together or individually focused as metaphor or symbols that define who we are and what we do.

 Right-brain mediated exercises help with strengthening intuition, development of right brain analysis and communication between the two brain/minds. Some of these exercises are:

• Role play
• Letter writing
• Dance
• Poetry
• Ritual
• Trance
• Hypnosis
• Guided imagery

Change comes from facing fears, and doing things differently. Using old and ineffective strategies to address new challenges is like using your old boxcar to go on the freeway. Identify a state—like the state of intense focus, or the state of relaxed detachment but fully present, or the state of curious fun as in doing a crossword or playing chess—one that is new or novel and like that of having taken a test when you received a very high grade. You embodied a relaxed focus and you were tuned into the flow of the questions in such a way that it was pleasurable but aligned. Begin to research and study trading patterns in this state. Develop a routine with a set of steps that does not waiver. Ensure that this state is nurtured and used for “every” period of study and paper trading by shifting gears consciously for each trade simulation and actual trade. Repeat until it seems out-of-the-ordinary not to do it. Old habits and patterns must not only be interrupted but also replaced with new patterns that have been reinforced through repetition. In this way you bring the power of “both” sides to your trading.