Mindset Of A Pro Trader (Life Changing Advice!) | Forex Trader Motivation

I always believed I deserved to be successful, right? This was before social media. Like kids these days, you know, it's a bit of a dark viewer at a disadvantage. Like you're taking all this time looking at other people's life. How much time are you investing and thinking of yours? I used to sit at home and think for hours. And I think thinking is a lost art. And so back then I thought about, look, if I didn't deserve the wildest success possible in this world, why the hell am I here? Why would I be here? If I don't deserve it, why don't. And if I don't deserve it, why should I take up more breath from other people who are out there who do think they deserve it? So I have, you know, I'm an extremist in a lot of ways. You know, always be afraid of an extremist with a beard. But like, I guess what I could tell you is I had the money mindset to begin with and it was just more or less about growing into it. But if you're an individual who has a low self worth, I could tell you a few things to help you with that. Right now it's all about a reframe. So if somebody thinks, as traders, we spend so much time in logical thought strategy, here's the volume. Because we're really afraid to deep down dive into our own personality, right? We're closed off ourselves. We put a wall where like working on me is a scary place to be. And so I think start out with asking yourself what are your beliefs around money? And it'll be shocking to a lot of the listeners because they probably haven't asked themselves that question. And those beliefs and values have come from the time you were seven years old, the imprint period. If you've never questioned that the values are the same, they haven't changed. Start with just being reflective. Get a piece of paper out and answer this question. As much words as come to your mind. Don't think about it, just let the things flow out. That's your subconscious. When you think about things, you're. That's 0.004% of your brain. When you ask yourself a question and listen and pops up, that's your subconscious. That's important stuff. Ask yourself what is important to me about money and just list it on a piece of paper. If safety is up there, you know you're going to have a hard time trading. If family security is up there, it's going to be a hard time trading. If growth is there, if you're like, you know, abundance. I want to just live the best life I can. You're going to do good. Trading is going to enrich that endeavor. So find out your beliefs around money. That's really important because at the end of the day, you don't realize this, but every time you click the mouse to enter a trade, you're actually a living personification of your value system. You're putting your value system on the market. And if your value is safety, you're going to be so focused on risk that you get scared when you lose. And when you get scared, you trigger a nervous system that's thousand years old that's going to get you out of the the position at a loss. Because what the traders do, they start out scared to trade. So out of fear, they lose more money. Now they're trading from behind. If you lose 50% of your account, you got to make 100 to get back. So that brings in fear. Now you're fighting from behind. That brings in more fear. Until. Excuse me, until they blow out their account. Why is blowing out their account success in the subconscious mind? Because you no longer have money to risk. The fear is over. Your subconscious mind wants to get you out of fear. Unfortunately, if you have values that aren't serving you, the fastest way out of fear is to stop doing what you're doing, meaning blowing out your account rationally. You're like, damn it, I'm mad. That's.004% of your mind. You're like, I could have done better. It's my system. I'm gonna follow it. 99.964% of your brain power is saying mission accomplished. You were scared and now you won't be right. But you didn't get the goal you wanted to. So start with like the money mindset. Start with what are your values and beliefs around money? If safety is up there, you could reframe that. If you ask people what about safety is important? People say, well, I just want to take care of my family. I want to be able to pay the bills, go on a vacation, and that's it. Most people have simple goals of what safety is. And you ask them, look, if you are making $10 million a year, wouldn't you be able to do that anyways? And they'll say, well, yeah, but I don't want $10 million. Why not? Why not? Why don't you deserve that money? And it goes down to self worth, Etienne. I think our self worth has been really deteriorated.

One of the things that I've learned to do now is I will listen to an interview, I will start to note down some of the advices that they give and so on. And then I would rate myself from those advices. So it will talk about the management of emotions management or over trading or management of, you know, the confidence that you may have in executing or fear or whatever it may be. And then I would rate myself. So at that particular aspect out of 10, what am I at the moment? What do I think? And if they, if they mention something that I think I'm less than 5, then a lot of work would go into that. So it would go into my diary that, hey, you need to work on this. And I've done that a lot with Brett as well as Mark Douglas.

I spent decades of my life as a complete degenerate, right? I mean, up all night, smoked cigarettes, drank pot, coke, everything, right?

And then I had a complete life turnaround in 2003. I got a DUI and I just hit bottom. And this is what happens with a lot of people. And I did a complete turnaround where I suddenly. And I was already 45 at the time. I'm 62 now, so I had already been through a lot of. Right. And so I really. And I had a wonderful.

Partner who's now my wife. And so I turned it all around with meditation. Okay. Like overnight I got the dui. I was in jail. I was like, this is it, I'm straightening up. And so I started meditating every day on August 18, 2003, and I've never missed a day since. Now I happen to have enough information at that time that I knew that that was going to be a really good thing for me to try that I didn't have any idea how good it was going to be. And so much of my writing and my teaching is about working meditative techniques into your game directly. In fact, we'll talk about what people can do when they're trading at their computer to add meditative techniques while they're trading. Okay? So the answer to your question is how do I maintain my discipline? I'm all the way on the other end line now. All the way on the other end of the discipline cycle scale where I do a full one hour meditation yoga every single morning, guaranteed. During the day. I never work for more than like a half hour at a time when I'm riding, you know, maybe an hour if I'm really on a roll. I take a lot of five minute breaks, a lot of 10 minute breaks. I eat super healthy food all the time. Every day. And so I'm like a model of discipline now. It's not, not fun. I mean, I'm enjoying life better than ever because I don't have any dips or funks. But this has been a 17 year path since 2003 of constant effort. That's gotten me to this point of like, shit's good now.

So what you can do with your posture is you sit up straight. You know, I'm on a regular chair here, just a plain dining room chair. And I sit right on the edge.

Very, very edge right there. Put your sit bones right there. If you have a fancy office chair, you can do it, but if it doesn't work, go get a regular dining room chair, sit on the very, very edge and make your spine perfectly straight. And you'll feel it when it locks in. It's like boom. It's just right there. Okay? Sitting up like this.

You know, you're sitting there, you're trading up.

And you go like this. That right there forces a wedge of awareness into your head. You, for at least a split second, you stopped the unconscious racing mind and you put some attention on your body. So that's where one of the benefits come is from. The actual act of stopping, the other benefit is that your air goes through tubes. If you take a tube and you bend it, it constricts the airflow, right? So if you want to fully oxygenate all the molecules in your brain and your entire body, if that's your objective, then you want your tubes to be completely straight. So that's what sitting up does. Instead of constricting your tube, your esophagus, it. I mean, your bronchial passages, they're straight. Everything's straight. So anytime you sit up consciously, you're improving your performance. Okay, Another thing, and I've been through this with like hundreds of hundred clients at least over the years. And anybody that reports back to me, it says they do these while they're playing online poker. They're like, holy cow. And I tell them, set a timer like that goes off every half hour or ten minutes to remind you to do some mindfulness act, which is what this is. Here's a big one. Stand up, walk around your chair, sit back down right in the middle of your training session. It's just a forced break. And if you do that, like throughout the day, multiple times a day, every day, you'll never dip into one of these funks where you've just been sitting there for a half an hour and you're just like.

Now this Won't cure everything, but it's probability play. It increases the likelihood. While you're back here, maybe give it a little squat, give it a little stretch, come back. Okay, so that's posture stuff. You want me to move right into the breathing.

This right away definitely helps. It's like also just sometimes walking away, coming back kind of changes your way of thinking and your mindset about things. That's really good advice.

Instead of letting it happen randomly, you do it on purpose. And you said the key thing, like, a lot of times, one of the main things I talk to clients about is quitting. People play too long, right? So let's say that you're trading and you've been playing too long and. And you're in the habit of taking these little breaks. Well, during the break, you might think to yourself, hey, I think I'll just quit today. I'm done.

Right?

But if you hadn't taken the break, you'd just be caught in that cycle.

When I started trading, I learned to trade because I was working with traders for the first time, and it was completely new to me. So I wanted to understand the world, the language and so on. So when I started trading, I was fortunate that I spent quite a lot of time in sports psychology, and I was beginning to really begin to get into and understand trading cycles. And I genuinely believed having that knowledge helped me to learn faster and to lose less. So definitely I think it can be an advantage. But I think there's a difference between reading about the psychology of losing or about mindset or about emotions in trading when you've never traded compared to when you have traded. And when I used to do a lot of work on the graduate training programs and we used to teach trading psychology, almost without exception, people would say, steve, I understand there's these mental mistakes people might make and there's all these biases. But look, I'm a smart guy. I'm not going to make those mistakes. There's almost a little bit of a, you know, people. It almost feels run your profits, cut your losses. How hard can it be? And I think at the early stages, it can feel a bit like that. Like we can kind of understand it conceptually. It's a bit like saying to a child, you know, don't touch the flame. We know what it's going to be like if they touch the flame. They don't know what it's going to be like. They've got almost. They've got to touch the flame. And I think trading is the same. So I think you can understand the concept of it's hot, but I think you only realize it's hot when you touch it. So I think there's a you can know the concepts, and that's helpful in advance, but I think there's still an element where people need to actually be involved in the markets. And this is what I found for myself. You know, take some risk, have some wins, have some losses, really feel what it's like. And then I think you understand it more, and you're probably more likely to do the work that's needed to then train it, because it does. It takes a lot of work to train the mind and to train the body, the same as it takes a lot of work to train, you know, the craft and the skills and the knowledge and the strategy. And that's really key. So it.