- Plan in advance and operate on the basis of habit
- You need to have a trading plan that covers all permutations that the market can possibly throw at you. You need less willpower to follow a clearly defined plan than to try adhering to broad principles in reaction to the market.
- Keep practicing applying your trading plan, so that you can make following the rules a habit. It is like driving, the more you do the less effort it requires progressively.
- Motivate yourself, remind yourself of the importance of what you are doing
- You need to remind yourself of the importance of achieving good trading results, of the importance of not throwing your hard-earned money away.
- Use visualization techniques to picture situations where you follow your trading plan successfully. Thinking that you have lots of willpower actually makes it so.
- Think of some trader you admire that have lots of self-control and unfazed by market movements (e.g. Ed Seykota)
- Exercise your willpower
- Willpower is like a muscle, the more you exert your willpower in whatever tasks, the greater your capacity for self-control.
- You can get yourself to follow rules such as sitting up straight, opening doors with your left hand, etc.
- Have sufficient food
- Exercising willpower uses up glucose. Being hungry means you don’t have the energy to exert willpower.
- Have sufficient rest
- You can replenish your ‘willpower’ stores through sleep. Get sufficient sleep every day.
Archives of “autonomy” tag
rssWhat Kind of Person is Best Suited to Trading?
Great traders have a few personality traits that do give them a natural advantage. That’s not to say you can’t succeed without them, just that it’ll be an uphill battle and a greater degree of reflection and self-correction will be required. The trader with the best chance of success will be –
Independent. Being happy with a good deal of autonomy will allow you to confidently execute your plan without needing 25 people to concur with your analysis. Trading is a solitary game, and you need to be able to thrive on your own, to a large extent. Support is great but when it comes down to it, it’s all up to you.
Decisive. If you take hours to do something simple like choose a burger off a menu, the odds of you being able to see a trade set-up and coolly pull the trigger are greatly diminished. Especially if you trade short time-frames that can be the difference between success and failure.
Insightful. If a trader can honestly look at their skills, motivations and short-comings and actively work to rectify them, they have the tools to over-come nearly anything the market throws their way. (more…)
SIX Ways to Improve Your Self-Discipline Today
1. Acknowledge Your Weaknesses – Whether cookies are the downfall to your diet, or you can’t resist checking your social media accounts every two minutes, acknowledge your pitfalls. Too often people either try to pretend their weaknesses don’t exist or they try to minimize the negative impact their bad habits have on their lives. For example, many smokers think, “I could quit if I wanted to,” because they don’t want to admit they’re hooked.
2. Establish a Clear Plan – No one wakes up one day suddenly blessed with self-discipline. Instead, you need a strategy. Whether you want to increase good habits like exercising more often, or you want to eliminate bad habits like watching too much TV, develop a plan that outlines the action steps you’re going to take to reach your goals.
3. Remove the Temptations When Necessary – Although we’d all like to believe we have enough willpower to resist even the most alluring enticement, it only takes one moment of weakness to convince ourselves to cave to temptation. Making it difficult to access those temptations can be pivotal to increasing self-discipline. If your weakness is Facebook, turn off the internet while you’re working. If you can’t resist overspending when you go to the mall, leave the credit card at home and only take a small amount of cash.
4. Practice Tolerating Emotional Discomfort – It’s normal to want to avoid pain and discomfort, but trying to eliminate all discomfort will only reinforce to yourself that you can’t handle distress. We can usually stand a lot more discomfort than we think we can. Practice allowing yourself to experience uncomfortable emotions like boredom, frustration, sadness, or loneliness and increase your tolerance to the negative emotions that you may experience as you increase your self-discipline. (more…)