CONSISTENCY: A STATE OF MIND

• Consistency is a state of mind that has at its core certain fundamental thinking strategies that are unique to trading.
• How do we account for the contradiction between what we believe about trading and our actual trading results over time?
• Your state of mind is a by-product of your beliefs and attitudes.
• You can’t rely on the market to make you consistently successful, any more than you can rely on the outside world to make you consistently happy.
• The best traders stay in the flow because they don’t try to get anything from the market; they simply make themselves available so they can take advantage of whatever the market is offering at any given moment. There’s a huge difference between the two perspectives.
• What happens when the market doesn’t behave in a way that will fulfill your expectations? Your mental defense mechanisms kick in to compensate for the difference between what you want and what you’re not getting so that you don’t experience any emotional pain.
• To be consistent, you have to learn to think about trading in such a way that you’re no longer susceptible to conscious or subconscious mental processes that cause you to obscure, block, or pick and choose information on the basis of what will make you happy, give you what you want, or avoid pain.
• The market doesn’t perceive the information it makes available; you do. If there’s a struggle, it is you who are struggling against your own internal resistance, conflicts, and fears.
• Accepting the risk means accepting the consequences of your trades without emotional discomfort or fear.
• You will make yourself available to take advantage of whatever situations you define as opportunities.
• When the internal struggle ends, everything becomes easy. At that point, you can take full advantage of all your skills, analytical or otherwise, to eventually realize your potential as a trader.
• Like many other things about trading, what seems to make sense, just isn’t the case.
• It is completely possible to think the way the professionals do and to trade without fear, even though your direct experience as a trader would argue otherwise.
• Discussed up to this point was designed to get you ready to do the real work.
• Learn how to create a new relationship with the market, one that disassociates your trading from what it typically means to be wrong or to lose, and that precludes you from perceiving anything about the market as threatening.
• Being aware of something doesn’t automatically make it a functional part of who you are. Awareness is not necessarily a belief. You can’t assume that learning about something new and agreeing with it is the same as believing it at a level where you can act on it.
• Many of us have what we know to be irrational fears and simply choose to live with the contradiction because we don’t want to go through the emotional work that is necessary to overcome the fear.
• Several typical contradictions and conflicts surrounding the issues of risk and responsibility, where holding two or more conflicting beliefs can easily cancel out your positive intentions, no matter how motivated you are to be successful.