In Chapter 2 of the book, “What God Said” by Neale Donald Walsch, he provides a 2,000 word complete summary of the core conversations from his works, which is pretty cool.
In #21, he’s speaking spiritually.of course, but what he has to say pertains directly to trading.
“There are Three Levels of Awareness: Hope, Faith and Knowing. Spiritual mastery is about living from the third level.”
Over the 10 years I’ve been helping traders work through hesitation, fear, doubt and anxiety, I’ve found that this provides a very helpful insight in getting past your difficulties.
Let’s look at all three, from the perspective of your trading.
1. Hope.
If you’re at the level where you’re trading largely on hope, then you’re living in a near-constant state of anxiety which is very stressful.
That’s because you just plain don’t know what to expect from your trading system or your trading in general.
2. Faith
Trading on faith is not quite as stressful, but still not where you want to be.
Trading on faith usually equates to a false confidence about a trading system, given to you by whomever sold you the system.
It’s a false confidence because it’s based on claims and wishful expectations, but not on successful personal experience with the system itself.
In many ways, trading on faith with a false confidence is actually worse than shooting in the dark trading based solely on hope.
Why?
Because with false confidence, your healthy fear is subdued, leaving you susceptible to doing things that you otherwise wouldn’t do – and subsequently getting hurt really badly.
3. Knowing
However, if you’re operating from a position of KNOWING, now you’re at an entirely different level and having an entirely different experience.
True mastery with your trading system means that you KNOW that it works and very clearly what to realistically expect when you’re trading with it.
You don’t stress over whether or not you’ll be okay.
You know.
You have REAL confidence and peace of mind.
Your trading is enjoyable and it produces.
The underlying problem is that most traders don’t know what they don’t know.
They know they’re capable.
They know they’re smart enough.
They’re tired of losing and getting beat.
They’re tired of having their confidence shaken.
They know that their missing something, but they don’t know what it is.
So they go looking for solutions, for answers.
But they get the same old “help” that does NOT fix the problem.
“Focus on your discipline.”
“It’s up to you to keep a clamp on your emotions.”
“You just need to try our trading system.”
Magic pills that don’t work
And your subconscious knows this.
That’s a primary reason that it keeps on sabotaging your efforts, and will continue to do so indefinitely – until you fix the real problem.
So what can you do?
Well obviously to answer that satisfactorily will require more than simply an article.
But it is important.
That’s why I took the time and went to the effort to create a page that fills in all the blanks for you
Discover “what you don’t know” and move your trading forward by clicking here
Successful people are always learning.
The purpose of this article is to raise your awareness to a very common and problematic aspect of being a self-directed trader so that you can act on it.
I hope this has been helpful.
Cheers
Brian
