Discipline is such an interesting word. When we are children we are "disciplined" sometimes harshly, which has left a great many of us with a rather fearful connotation of the word. Self discipline is often considered the ability to attack oneself for not being on top of their responsibilities. Discipline is about creating a self empowered place of personal responsibility. Parents often smacked or spanked their children as punishment, not as discipline. Discipline is in all actuality a very positive place and one of absolute total self empowerment.
Trading with discipline means being able to hold to your beliefs, being able to stick to your trading principles, and being able to feel completely empowered regardless of the outcome. There will be times when you will be perfectly disciplined and the result will be anything other than profit. There will be times when discipline might mean you refuse to take a large risk that pays off in the end for many other traders. But discipline also means that you would be able to make enough self empowered trading decisions to counteract or balance out those times when your discipline seemed to be working against you.
When we put together our trading strategies, we often have to look inside and find our own set of beliefs regarding trading potential. What are we looking to accomplish, what are we satisfied with, and what are we comfortable risking in order to get there? The disciplined trader is one who can answer these questions with unwavering certainty and stick to a plan of attack that is obviously working well for him or her.
Does that mean that a disciplined trader never goes off task for a moment or never makes a decision based on new information that goes against their initial plan? Of course not. We are not talking about building trading robots but we are more interested in creating a place of self trust and empowerment that allows us to make strong decisions when it comes to our ability to interpret the information around us. When we can do that, then we know we are creating our own path to success and that we are doing it in a way that is completely comfortable for us.
We are going to assume that you are in the trading game for the long haul. Making trades that aren't even anywhere near your basic trading plan is often one of the key mistakes that creates enough self doubt that many could be traders wash out. Without the benefit of a solid trading plan and without the benefit of empowered self discipline, chances are that you are doing a lot more educated guessing than most traders. Educated guessing isn't going to carry you through the long haul, especially if you aren't even really sure why your educated guessing is even accurate.
Since trading is basically a numbers game that plays off of a variety of averages, disciplined traders are able to create their trading plan and work from it with total confidence. Without such mechanics, the law of averages never comes into play and we are once again back to educated guessing. We need consistent behavior in order to get to the end game with more money in our pocket than we started with. And there certainly isn't anything more rewarding than knowing that you built it all from an internal space inside you when you decided to create discipline and follow a particular strategy.
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82
Date Published :
Dec 5 2008