Kardec Trader argues that traders who set only income or equity targets rarely hit them. The missing piece is performance goals: the specific mindset and actions needed to execute under pressure. An Olympic hurdler counts "1,2,3,4" during races to stay focused, not on winning.
Welcome. You know, here I am, I'm in South Florida on the Gulf coast in December. And what we're doing. What we're doing is a review of our year. We're taking some time off. We're taking stepping back, and we're reviewing our year and asking ourselves, what have we done? How can we improve? And how are we going to accomplish what we're setting out to do? It's the same thing that a trader has to do at this time of the year. You're in this beautiful moment in the holidays where trading's kind of down, and it's a time to reflect, review, to set new goals and to say, how am I going to accomplish those goals? Well, what I want you to do is this. First, take a look at the goals you wrote down last year. Notice this. Very few traders accomplish their goals. And I'm talking about an outcome goal, one that says, I am going to be making 200, 300, $400,000 by the end of 2015 of the definitive outcome goal. And because that's an outcome goal.
The question becomes, how are you going to accomplish that? How do you do that? This is a performance goal. How do you produce the mind in the moment that actually does that? Instead of having a goal way out here, what's the goal inside? The outcome goal is really about who do you need to become to make that external goal a reality? And I'm going to give you an example. Okay. A number of years ago, I'm watching an Olympic hurdling match, and there's this American who is just absolutely supposed to take everything. The announcers are crazy about him. They're just going on and on and on like he's gold. Well, they get into the starting blocks, there's all that tension. They're ready to go. The gun fires. They bolt out of the blocks, and he produces a blaze.
At the end of it, he wins. He wins gold. He sets the world's record. The announcers during the whole time were talking about, look at him. What is he thinking? This is just amazing. He is the best. After the race, he's sitting there heaving, getting his breath back. The reporters come around him and they're excitedly sticking microphones in his face. And they're saying, what was it like? What was it like? What were you thinking?
And the athlete is kind of befuddled. They say, no, what were you thinking when you knew you were going to win? What were you thinking? What were you feeling in that moment? Share it with the world. And the athlete sat there and said, you really want to know what I was thinking? Yes, yes. The world wants to know. Well, he said, okay, I'll tell you. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, 3, Four. They said, no, no, no. What were you thinking? What did it feel like to know you were going to win? He said, 1234. 1234. 1234. That's the only place my mind was going to go.
They walked away befuddled. And then later, the athlete's at the podium, he gets the gold around his neck, he takes a trot around the stadium, and you can see the euphoria. You can see all that. He's later being inter.
And he talks about the external goals, the outcome goals that he and his coaching staff had set. All those goals were set around 1, 2, 3, 4. You had to synchronize the body, mind and spirit in order for him to perform in that moment like that, in order to accomplish the outcome of being the world's fastest hurdler. Do you see the difference there? It's not that he did not have external goals. He did. But he asked a more powerful question. He asked a question, who do I need to become in the moment of performance to accomplish those goals? He wasn't doing it by willpower, he wasn't doing it by perfection. What he was doing, he was saying, in this moment, what mind do I need to bring into this moment to produce the execution?
Just like trading, what mind do you need to bring into the moment of execution, to the performance of execution to be able to accomplish those goals of how much income you're going to be making or how much equity growth you're going to be having? That's the key. This December, when you're setting your plans up, I encourage you to put your external outcome goals, put them there so that you can measure your performance against them. But over here, I want you to ask a very simple question. How am I going to accomplish that? What mind do I need to bring into my performances.
To make those external goals happen? Friends, when you do that, you can discover that the head game of trading, once you have the knowledge of trading, is far more important than just knowledge. Suddenly you begin to see.
It is the mind that I bring into the moment of pressure, of risk, that is what is making the huge difference that, my friends, is a performance goal. It's all about organizing the emotions and facing your fears, mastering them, not trying to overpower them, but listening to the emotions, listening to your fears, listening to everything that the emotions have to say. And out of that, what you do is you produce a performance mind. Performance goals now match up with the external goals. Outcome goals. That's how you accomplish the big growth. That's necessary. And it doesn't happen until you decide to Change yourself.
That's 2015, friends. Let's go. Fart.
