"Mental toughness": How do you define this and how do you strengthen it?

That’s pawesome to hear! I hope you do well! :smile_cat:

When we talk about mental toughness, it have to do with combination of experience, result and money management. It’s not something with our feeling, emotion and assumption.

The sign of your mentality very obvious to these parameters:

  1. Do you know your money management well? It’s about you know how to calculate clearly, your total asset, trade-able amount and active trading fund. If you can’t answer this point, you are not ready as a trader.
  2. Next you know very well the stats of your strategy. For example risk reward ratio, trading setup and have definitive proof of result. You must have real data of how it works, time frame, instruments and clear rule and restriction to use it.
  3. You must have discipline to execute every details of your trading routine with no doubts every day.

There is no shortcut to improve this factor other than learning from bottom. It took me almost 3 years to find serenity in trading.

The first step is the hardest, you need to learn how to analyst market properly. Understand how market work, focus on only to max 2 instruments. Learn how the instrument behaves. Next find what type of strategy work well with the instrument. Once you have familiar with the strategy, start with demo account. The point is you know the stats of your strategy. This one will take a long time. It can be shorten by having a good mentor, but it’s rare.
It usually takes about 6 to 12 months to get confident with your strategy, as long as you get profit. Even though the profit is small that will be fine. From here you have accomplish point #2.

The next steps is your money management. You have to know your comfort level in relation to negative floating or risk. Some people feel comfortable with floating -1000, some can’t even deal with -50. Mostly it comes with total assets and personal background. In general, comfort level when your trading capital is 1/20 of your total assets. Start trading your strategy from smallest volume, a long the time, you will be able to coupe with bigger volume. It took me almost 5 years to trade from 0.01 to 10 lot. This is how you strengthen point #1.

The last point can be seen by reviewing your trading result. Evaluate your trading history, how often you break your SOP. It’s impossible to have improvement if the person keeps breaking the SOP. Mostly the person’s account will get clean out as the result. Naturally the person will get humbled by market, and becomes obedient by market.

These are how mentality toughness is formed.

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It is all about resilience and the ability to stay focused and determined in the face of challenges. I see it as having a strong mindset that allows you to push through adversity without losing motivation or confidence. Strengthening it involves practicing mindfulness, setting realistic goals, and consistently pushing your comfort zone. What’s your approach to building mental toughness?"

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That means staying strong and focused when things get tough. To build it, manage stress well, set clear goals, and keep a positive attitude through difficulties.

Absolutely, trading can be quite tiring.

Traits of mental toughness involve remaining composed in stressful situations, sticking to your strategies with discipline, booking your losses and gains according to risk management rules, and avoiding impulsive trading decisions.

To build this resilience, try meditation or mindfulness to help with focus and stress management. Regular exercise also plays a big role in keeping a clear mind.

Reading books on psychology and mindset can offer valuable insights too.

thanks for sharing your experience, really help

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According to me mental toughness is how disciplined and aware I am while I trade. It involves continuously making decisions that align with my strategy and not getting swayed by greed. I also put a lot of emphasis on being aware of my emotions and taking time off in times when I feel too emotionally overstimulated.

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I feel like a broken record, but here goes :slight_smile: :

TL;DR: What losing traders perceive as an experienced trader’s “mental toughness” is more often than not the experienced trader defining success & failure by an entirely different set of metrics compared to the losing trader.

Believe it or not, trading for a living is mentally very similar to professional golf. Aspiring pro golfers have all the talent in the world but making or missing a 2 foot putt can be the difference between winning enough money to continue another year on the tour and having to go back to work at the grocery store to save enough money for next year.

The way these golfers psychologically handle these high-pressure situations is to have and adhere to their very own process:

  1. read the slope of the green
  2. read the grain direction of the grass
  3. picking out an aim / target point
  4. judge the speed of the putt by visualizing the path the ball will roll on its way to the hole
  5. couple of practice strokes to get a feel for how much energy the ball needs to achieve the right speed
  6. step up and aim the putter to the chosen target point
  7. take a breath, look once, twice at the hole, slightly forward press the putter shaft and recreate the practice stroke but for real this time
  8. watch the ball roll, did you get the speed right, did it roll and catch the break the way it was visualized, did the real stroke feel like the practice stroke? If not then make mental note to correct this and work on improving the process at the next practice session

(yes, I tried to play pro golf, but didn’t have the raw talent :confused: )

Up until now, nowhere is the player worried about the result (= did the ball go into the hole or not). The result (= whether the ball went in the hole or not) DOES NOT MATTER. If he/she adhered 100% to his/her process then they did everything right and that counts as a success (even if the result is bad = ball misses the hole) and the golfer should be satisfied with his/her discipline. If they didn’t follow their process then this counts as a failure (even if the ball goes in the hole = good result) and the golfer should not be satisfied with his / her lack of discipline.

In no way is the golfer emotionally controlled by the results of the day, instead the golfer judges his/her performance (success/failure) on how closely they adhere to and improve their process.

Getting back to trading.

Losing traders obsess over trading system win rates, risk-to-reward-ratios and the resulting profit/losses.

Profitable traders obsess over following and improving their processes and couldn’t care less what their win rates and risk-to-reward-ratios are. They know that their win rate, risk-to-reward-ratio and resulting profit/losses are just statistics of them following their own process over and over again. They also know that continuously improving their process will over time improve their results (win rate, risk : reward, P&L).

An interesting aspect is that traders who have been profitable for a long time, have a genuine love for the process, they enjoy everything about it, it’s their whole reason for getting up and getting in front of their screen every morning. The resulting profits are just a nice bonus but it’s not the reason why they trade.

So I would say that profitable traders are not “mentally tougher” than losing traders. Instead profitable traders use a completely different set of metrics to measure success (adherence to and improvement of process) compared to losing traders(win rate, risk-to-reward-ratio, resulting profit/loss).

This is why a loss (or a win for that matter) has very little emotional impact on profitable traders because in their minds they were successful if they adhered to their process. While a losing trader sees the losing trade as a failure and perceives the profitable trader as “mentally tough” for not being emotionally affected by this “failure” (losing trade).

I’d recommend anyone looking to develop “mental toughness” to look into sport psychology.

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Before you get into it you accept that there will be losses and bad moment in there, right?
If that acceptance can play itself out in practice, then I consider that person as being mentally tough.

I completely agree. Mental toughness in trading means staying disciplined and true to your strategy, even when emotions run high. Recognizing when to step back is crucial for maintaining focus and making clear decisions.

Exactly true

exactly but the main theme for mental toughness is discipline and consistency

Yeah, but I find accepting the unavoidable aspects in any field to be the required block to build those principles on.

My problem is I always have a good trade set up and entering but the issue is am having problem with greed cause every time I should be targeting 1:3 but my expectation is always one is to 5 ration the I will take the trade and the next thing I can be in profit up to 1 is to 3 or 2 at the end of the day waiting till my take profit market will go against me

Mental toughness is staying focused and resilient under pressure. To strengthen it, you need to push yourself out of your comfort zone and learn from challenges. How do you work on building yours?

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It is very difficult to do this. Some days I follow my plans perfectly, and then I break the rules. This has become a continuous process for me. But the good thing is that I am able to control my emotions until the day I break it.

Mental toughness for me begins when I make a resolution to follow my trading plan and apply strict stop loss. I predetermine my risk to reward ratio and once set, I let the trade play out and materialise according to my preset plan. If it plays out otherwise, then I analyse the trade and re-strategise. Basically what I’m trying to say is that mental toughness begins by determining what portion or size of my capital I’m willing to lose per trade. I hope this helps.

Am having issues with trusting my analysis it’s always on a good set up but my mindset always got me worried

Is there anyone else mentally tougher than me in here considering the battle I went threw , but I fought and came out on top :muscle: that’s what makes you a mentally tough trader challenging yourself against other people

I realized that trading manually is quite difficult from a psychological point of view. You are constantly waiting and hoping to close the order with a profit, fearing that the price will go against the trend. As a result, I decided to switch to auto trading using robots. I described this experience in detail in another forum thread:

https://forums.babypips.com/t/trading-robot-sky-grid-platform-mt4-for-19-currency-instruments/1259167