Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Finding Your Peace, Finding Your Success

I'm writing this from the Chicago Traders Expo a couple of hours before my presentation.  One of the topics I'll be covering in my talk is developing ourselves spiritually as a way of furthering our life success--in relationships, in trading, and in careers.

Indeed, my next book will be on the topic of renewing our lives through cultivating our spiritual development.  That book is being written on a blog platform, which means it will be totally multimedia, totally accessible anywhere in the world where there is an online connection, and totally free.  Best of all, the book will enable readers to make comments and share ideas and experiences, which then become part of the book--along with my responses!  That way, the book becomes a dynamic entity:  it will be continually revised and expanded.

The book format is a nice example of what entrepreneurs have always known:  opportunity comes from doing new things--and old things in new ways.

In the ego mode, I want to write a best seller, make lots of royalties, and become a constant figure on the talk circuit.  Good enough is not good enough:  I want more.  In the spiritual mode, we find what most speaks to us.  Getting to that spiritual mode requires finding our peace and letting opportunity present itself to us.

As I will be discussing at the Expo, so much of trading psychology boils down to getting ego out of the way, finding an inner peace and quiet, and processing markets with an open, receptive mind.  I know from my own trading how easy it is to latch onto *my* view of the market and impose that view with a trade, only to have the market show me otherwise.  Looking back, I can only shake my head at how the market's behavior made perfect sense--but I was blinded to that sense.

It's great to have a passion for trading, to work hard at trading, and to follow markets intensively.  But all too often, those activities are ego-driven.  Everything becomes about P/L.  Market ups and downs become our ups and downs.

We'll never find our peace by succeeding at trading.  Succeeding at trading requires finding our peace, because that's the only way we'll be sufficiently open-minded to truly understand what markets are doing.  Finding fulfillment in our lives outside of trading is a wonderful path toward bringing peace to our trading.

Further Reading: