A microhabit is a very specific pattern of thought, feeling, and behavior that you enact at a particular time. The key to success behind a microhabit is to make it highly circumscribed and perform it faithfully and regularly. For example, one of the microhabits that I've developed is writing for a few minutes in a personal journal each morning. I write whatever comes to mind and let it flow, stream of consciousness.
That's it. Each journal entry is short and unplanned. So it's easy to do no matter where I am or what I have scheduled later that day.
What happens with the microhabit is that it leads to unexpected consequences. For instance, writing the short blurb in the journal gets me in the mood to do more writing and stimulates me to work on related projects. Ideas that crop up in the journal writing inspire me to tackle a problem in a new way. Challenges that I've placed on the back burner come up in the journal writing and provide a fresh motivation to get them done.
In short, instead of changing from the top down by setting big goals, we can change from the ground up with small habits that reverberate across our lives.
What is a positive microhabit you might incorporate into your trading? How might that impact other aspects of what you do in markets? One trader I worked with made a slight change to how he enters positions, giving him slightly better reward relative to risk. That led to spontaneous changes in other aspects of his position management that contributed further to his profitability.
Perhaps, by achieving very small changes, we internalize the sense of being able to change, inspiring us to make other changes.
Maybe we internalize our self concepts one action, one thought pattern at a time.
Maybe who we are--and who we become--is constructed from the ground up.
This is a promising area of trading psychology that I'll be developing in coming posts.
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