If you are not getting the results that you know you are capable of, it might be time for you to find a role model if not a mentor to guide and support you in developing your A-game. The term mentor originates in Greek mythology with Odysseus and his travels. In his absence, he left a wise old man—his name was Mentor–to look after the kingdom. Mentor did such a fine job that his name became associated with wisdom and guidance. Of course, role models are also important to people looking for guidance. You might identify an expert whose life, story and strategy for getting desired results is in a book and with whom you have no relationship, however the “how to” is still strong. A mentor on the other hand is a role model and what’s best is that you have a personal connection as well. All across history people have been influenced by role models, some negative and some positive. A role model can be from the past or the present, from fact or fiction, and you can follow their example using their story as a pattern of what to do. Mentors are actually available and provide individual guidance and interaction. You gain the power of possibilities by identifying with your role model/mentor. Once you learn about the role model/mentor, both strengths and weaknesses, they then become real and human.

People with the same goals often think alike and usually have many similarities. William James once wrote: “… if you want a habit – act like you have it. The Central Nervous System can’t distinguish from real experiences and strongly imagined ones. Acting as if has remarkable powers.” Today, a common cliché is “Fake it ‘til you make it.” The only difference between you and great achievers is that they put forth a disciplined effort. With the same effort and a strong strategy to follow, you can achieve the same level of success. As you emulate your role model while working toward your goal, you are like a child playing dress up. Every time you imitate the successful behavior, it becomes more and more a part of you. Actors spend months studying a part before they play it, but when they know it, they are completely believable.

When first looking for role models and mentors, consult books, films and biographies with the understanding of your purpose to identify strategies for successful trading. Ask yourself questions, such as:

• What do I need to do?
• What do I need to learn?
• What actions do I need to take?
• Did the subject achieve the results that I want?

Your mentor will have faults; this is the nature of being human. Actually, mistakes bring the two of you closer by making your mentor ‘real’. If imperfect people can do it, so can you. Most great artists and performers still become jittery and anxious when confronted with their idol, even though they may have surpassed them in achievement.

Most achievers draw inspiration and strategy from role models and mentors. As the story of the role model and mentor unfolds, a pattern begins to form: the role model’s thinking, style and action can be emulated. By following this pattern you can begin to rate your own strengths and weaknesses. You must learn what you don’t know first, both about you and about what is necessary to trade successfully. With time, you begin to use this deeper self-understanding a part of your own personality. You develop an emotional belief that you can do it, just like your mentor did.

Role models and mentors can be extremely valuable in supporting the development of your A-Game. Strategies must not only be identified in your mechanical data (information that is directly or indirectly related to the markets), strategies must also be identified in your internal data (thoughts, emotions and behavior, which are often unconscious) for how to manage and focus on what matters most in the trade. Whether you are using a long deceased expert from your favorite book, or a high achieving colleague with whom you have a strong relationship, role models and mentors hold valuable keys to your trading strengths and getting the results that you want.

People with the same goals often think alike and usually have many similarities. William James once wrote: “… if you want a habit – act like you have it. The Central Nervous System can’t distinguish from real experiences and strongly imagined ones. Acting as if has remarkable powers.” Today, a common cliché is “Fake it ‘til you make it.” The only difference between you and great achievers is that they put forth a disciplined effort. With the same effort and a strong strategy to follow, you can achieve the same level of success. As you emulate a role model while working toward your goal, you are like a child playing dress up. Every time you imitate the successful behavior, it becomes more and more a part of you. Actors spend months studying a part before they play it, but when they know it, they are completely believable.

Modeling is an extremely proficient way to break down or “code” what you see as a role model’s or mentors successful actions. As the saying goes, if someone can do it, anyone can learn it. Modeling is a state of curiosity and selflessness. It is a desire to listen to, watch, respect, and learn from others as well as yourself. Modeling is process over content. Process or the “how” something is done is arguably more important than content or the “what.” The process is where skill is focused to create the end result. There are countless ways to do anything, but there are ways that are effective and there are time-and-energy wasters that might get you to the same result … eventually. Modeling can take many forms. Some of your most fundamental skills have been acquired through modeling others. Babies and young children are expert modelers. Only when they start learning by more traditional methods do they begin to lose this skill.

Modeling also involves mentoring or “sitting next to an expert.” This is an excellent way to model skillful behavior. The subject being modeled can also benefit from being modeled by learning from feedback on how they structure their experience. Even if someone does something well, it doesn’t mean that they know how they do it. Quite often behavioral strategies, that is, the detailed “how” is not in the trader’s awareness. This will become evident as you ask “why” questions focused on elements of the mentor’s process. With this awareness the “unconscious competent” can achieve greater consistency in the skills they have. A few years ago, I had enlisted the help of a mentor to assist me with my futures trading. As we traded and my questions became more detailed I noticed that on a number of occasions I asked the same question 2 or 3 times to ensure that I got it and at first became confused because she changed her answer. It became clear that she was operating “intuitively” in some cases and hadn’t actually coded her process. We then began to break down her protocols and eventually identified what had been out of her awareness. This feedback also increased her results.

Uncovering the strategies necessary to trade consistently well involves observing personal program(s) that are sequences of mental and behavioral codes. For instance, how you do what you do when you walk, talk, drive, or read. Normally you don’t think of how you do these things, but they constitute a code of behavior. The programs that make them happen are managed by your unconscious mind. These are known as strategies. When you have the strategy for how someone manages his or her experience, you have the key to reproducing that experience for yourself. Trading has context specific patterns that produce excellence around things like planning, rules setting, position sizing, money management, technical analysis and fundamental analysis; but these are not all. There are ancillary aims and concepts that indirectly support your success. Often really successful traders share that they give service to the community—a notion of giving back, which reminds them that they are a part of a larger community and that this perspective helps them to remain grounded in the face of greed. Secondly, they have a purpose that illustrates why they desire to be successful. They have a skill in using metaphor and visionary thinking. Winning traders are able to create a sensory rich vision of success that creates a subconscious passion for what matters most; that is, keeping rules, and following their plan. They also have a dedication to sequential and purpose-driven protocols, i.e. effective routines that develop strong habits leading to skill-building around rule based methods.

Identifying a role model or mentor isn’t as difficult as it may seem initially. The important point is that it is extremely helpful to brining your best to the platform and trading in your highest and best interests. Your A-Game is the only game that will consistently get you the results that you want. You’ll want to provide yourself with every “edge” possible.

The importance of persistence and perseverance to disciplined success can never be repeated enough. The undisciplined are driven by quick fixes and impulsive schemes, and they are at the mercy of greed and fear. As soon as the tick goes against them, they panic, and their minds are no longer focused on what the charts are showing. They see only what the distortion in their perceptions will allow. They are easy quitters when the going gets tough. They continually complaining about the present or their failure but seldom do anything constructive about it. Successful achievers stick to their vision despite setbacks. They don’t give up when met with hardships. Successful achievers are relentless and stubborn. They succeed against all odds, and when they are discouraged, they draw inspiration and motivation from their sensory-rich vision along with other tools to support them in remaining focused on what matters most.

Nothing worth having is captured and mastered overnight. It takes time and energy. You need to develop the dogged determination and the endurance to go the distance and become a winner. The closer you get to the goal of process mastery, the stronger the belief and the clearer the vision, the more real it becomes. As you continue this relationship and strive to achieve, the vision fuels the goal of process mastery (rule based planning); and the goal of process mastery fuels the vision. With each tiny, private victory, you are developing more capacity for going to the next level of success. Like training for the marathon, it is achieved through a process of consistently building endurance and strength to go to the next level of achievement. Between the vision and the goal, this revolving course of action acts like a nuclear reactor and puts into motion a self-perpetuating spiral of vision, belief, emotion and reality. This self-perpetuating spiral will change your life from the inside out. This is what motivates men and women to achieve greatness. Greatness is spawned by the development of an inner obsession with honoring commitments and consistent follow-through. Greatness lies in the understanding that it is not focusing on the win but mastering the fundamentals and consistent implementation that leads to the win. Greatness is in your grasp—you can program yourself for success with the right combination that unlocks the power of intention. Success is where opportunity meets preparation. Persistence here refers to the single-minded determination that you must follow rules to achieve your goal. It is an unyielding focus on habitually planning every single action, and the building of a greater and greater capacity for winning—and winning is defined as religiously keeping your commitments.

Persistency and Perseverance are part and parcel of the A-Game and they must be carefully and consistently developed so that they are strong enough when needed. Mastering your mental game cannot take place without these energy transformers. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, I hope it was helpful to you.

An Approach to Learning New Skills and Abilities

Identify the skills and knowledge you need by asking, “Will I succeed without this skill or knowledge?” In this way, you will begin to develop the parameter of what you “need to know.” This helps make the process logical and easy to follow with one step after the other, and prevents you from cluttering your mind with unnecessary information.

After you have identified what you need to know, design a flow chart or mind map; i.e., “a visual knowledge plan” with a start box and a finish box, outlining things to learn at the same time in linear boxes (one under the other) and those that come one after another in horizontal boxes.

None of this is any use, however, unless you believe that you can learn. Negative belief loops established false assumptions about subjects you may have the aptitude for, but not the attitude; things like math, etc., which you “just know” you can’t learn. Why? Because that’s the way it happened in school at a very early age. Einstein did poorly in elementary school; however, he had a dream and vision of what he wanted to do, which drove him to learn math in order to explain his vision to others. Dr. Mimen, known as the father of the laser and widely accepted as a genius, flunked his Ph.D. orals and had to retake them. Learning did not come easy for him.

Attitude is 90% of success. Rod Carew, the great former baseball player and coach, did not make his high school baseball team; his coach thought he wasn’t good enough. But, through thousands of hours of practice, he became a professional player and went on to win 7 batting championships and became one of the few players who achieved over 3000 hits in his career. Don King, who as a youth wanted to become a lawyer, became a numbers bookmaker instead and went to prison for manslaughter. While in prison, he read literature and philosophy and made the decision to rehabilitate himself. Through correspondence courses, he maintained an A average at Ohio University and went on to promote charity boxing after his release. Soon after he convinced Mohammad Ali to put on a charity match in Cleveland, he became a promoter and manager grossing several hundred million dollars and building an empire of televised boxing events. Malcolm Forbes, of Forbes Magazine, did not make the staff of his college newspaper. Les Brown, the famous motivational speaker, was told he would never amount to much; that he was dumb. He knew what he wanted and learned how to make speeches. Little by little, he acquired new knowledge and skill, and today commands several thousand dollars for a one-hour speech, all paid in advance. With this same asset-based thinking, you can accomplish what you previously thought you could not as you identify your Visual Knowledge Plan and acquire the no-how necessary as you raise the belief in yourself. The negative feedback loop is broken through step-by-step accumulation and application of knowledge.

The next thing to consider in this learning approach is Patience. Einstein once said: “…the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know, and the more I realize I don’t know, the more I want to learn.” Leaning new knowledge and skills is a systematic step-by-step process, acquiring knowledge fragment-by-fragment and building little by little on a cellular level. It necessarily takes time and starts off feeling very slow. Excellence is based on seasoned learning, and sticking to it over a period of time. The quick fix rarely works; you must create consistency in both acquiring new knowledge and applying that knowledge.

As you draw inspiration and fortitude from your vision it doesn’t matter how much or how hard it is to achieve. Every time you master a skill, your confidence in your ability to achieve increases. But to master a skill, you must first learn the necessary specifics of the game; you must acquire an intimate knowledge of not just what it takes, but what it is. To be skilled at chess, you must first learn the foundation of the game, how the game is played and what constitutes winning. Then you must learn exactly what skills are necessary. Next, you acquire each skill, and after that, you master each skill. When each skill has been learned and added to the toolbox, you become a master of the game.

Getting the knowledge necessary to make your game plan work is crucial to developing your A-Game. In other words you can’t master your mental game without arming yourself with data. And remember … “Knowledge is not power, it is the application of knowledge that is power.” Author unknown.

In this “information-is-power” age, you need knowledge and skill to succeed at any goal. There is a tremendous amount of minutia involved in becoming successful in your aims. However, getting that knowledge can be a daunting task. Also, your attitude regarding your internal stories about your ability to learn and assimilate knowledge can be either helpful or harmful to the process. Often, you become your own worst enemy due to those internal stories. For instance, you determine what you need to learn and to do; then you play the story in your head about how difficult it’s going to be, or how you “flubbed” it up the last time you tried it. This type of internal story is called a “negative feedback loop.” In many cases a negative feedback loop can disrupt and dislodge your ability to learn and stay on the learning course.

Negative feedback loops most often are established in childhood and built upon the negative messages you received from authority figures, family, and peers regarding your performance or worthiness. These negative loops go off like recorded messages that have been playing and replaying in your thoughts since very early ages—phrases like “You can’t do that”, “You’ll never make it”, “You dummy”, “You’ll never amount to anything”, and other types of abuse. Statements like these are hurtful even as an adult, and may have left you with low self-esteem, a poor self-image and, in some cases, self-hatred. If you’ve swallowed these labels whole, they can’t be digested. They remain stuck, deep in the psyche, leaving you frozen at that point in your childhood development with the same logic and reasoning abilities of a child at that age. Consequently, you react automatically when the stifled part of your personality is activated by events pushing the button on your recorder. However, with self-knowledge and learning how to successfully handle the circumstantial triggers when they surface, your self-image is lifted, and the process of breaking the old negative loops has begun. As an example, most people wouldn’t try to run a marathon without the appropriate preparation; it’s a foolish thing to attempt. If you really want to do it, you will greatly increase the probability of success if you build up to it by running a little at a time, maybe a half-mile at first, then a mile, 3 miles, 5, then 10, 20, and so on. You also gain knowledge of how to train, and learn the importance of good nutrition. In other words, small steps build small but ever-increasing capacity and self-confidence while expanding strength and know-how. With each new item learned, and with each win it serves to support the effort to take that next small step and fuel the desire to take another.

A famous 1968 psychological study entitled “Pygmalion in the Classroom” by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, was done with two sets of children, one labeled “gifted” and the other labeled “slow” (only for purposes of the study). Those labeled as gifted were told that their potential was unlimited; those labeled as slow were left to their own devices. As you might imagine, even though the labeling was completely arbitrary, the ‘gifted’ children excelled, while the ‘slow’ children lived down to the expectations. Success breeds success, no matter how small, and breaks negative loops with positive achievements. Make sure to check in on my website tomorrow to see what tools you need to turn a bad habit to something successful.