Forget About Psychology - Get Present

I have been trading for 8+ years, I have tried everything there is to try in the forex field, I spent years trying to “work out” trading psychology and how I can get myself and my brain working with me to become successful. I have tried meditation, incantations, visualisation, mantras, listening to music, trading in different working environments, mental rehearsal… the list goes on.

For quite sometime I had an awesome trading style, I could clearly see all the trades I needed to take and the ones that were high probability, the only problem was, some alien being took over my body on regular occasions and forced me to do things that were not in my own best interests. I was sabotaging myself, this was in amongst the fear and greed based trading.

Most of the time I was totally in my mind when trading, my mind was feeding me ideas that were not helping me at all, all my subconscious fears were coming to the surface through my mind whenever I traded. These fears could be broken down into 2 types:
[ol]
[li]Fears about the past - past mistakes re-occurring, not being worthy based on past mistakes…
[/li][li]Fears about the future - I need to make lots today or my dreams will never happen, I need to win so I can be free etc etc
[/li][/ol]
[B]The Turning Point[/B]

Things started turning around for me after I read “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle and subsequently his next book “A New Earth”.

Basically this is what I learned: The only moment there ever is, is right NOW. There is no past, the past happened in the now, there is no future, there is only now.

Your mind and your ego have this way of overtaking your body to make you think that you need to work out how to have the best psychology, your ego tricks you to make you think that you need to make it complex and work it out. Your subconscious mind and your ego feeds you all the fears that are based on your subconscious beliefs, societies fears, collective fears. These fears then play out in your trading behaviour.

Do you want to eliminate all fear and greed based trading, and no more sabotaging?
This is all you have to do:

BE PRESENT

You know how everyone talks about “being in the zone”, this is the zone, the present, where nothing exists but your true self.

Be in the now, in this present moment, no fear can exist in the now, the past and future don’t exist in the now, the now is the access point to your true self, the part of you who only wants to act in your best interests. Make being present part of you life, practice it as much as possible throughout your day and while you are trading.

Doing this is what turned me from a trading loser into a consistent winner, hands down the most powerful thing I have ever done in my life.

Read the books to get an understanding and practicalities around implementing this in your trading.

I should also add that getting an understanding of the beliefs that are driving your behaviour is also a great thing to do.
By doing this you learn to accept yourself and see all the situations, events that have shaped your beliefs, a lot of people have negative money beliefs that limit their ability to be profitable. These beliefs are typically subconscious so you are not aware of them consciously and most often are giving to you from your parents, peers and the society you live in. I am talking about beliefs like, money is hard to get, I am not worthy of success, Money is evil, having money makes me a bad person… there are literally hundreds of beliefs you could have.

One of the best trading psychology book I have read is “Trading on Target” by Adrienne Toghraie. If you want to understand trading psychology this is the best book you could read. But once you know about the psychology and understand where your beliefs are limiting you, just accept what is and move forward in your trading from a place of presence, know that when these beliefs cause limiting thoughts to come into your mind that they are just fears that have no place in the present moment and have no power over you, move yourself back into the present moment, the more you do this the less power these beliefs will have over you until eventually they are so weak that they disappear.

This is an ongoing process, you deserve success, allow yourself to have it by leaving the past behind and being present.