Update: During Thursday's session, Jeff reviewed with the group the chart of emotions that described four quadrants at the intersection of two axes: positive and negative; high and low energy. We also discussed the very center of the chart as our state of focus. The idea is that, when we're super focused on markets, we're not immersed in either positive or negative feelings. At that point, it's not about us. So the question becomes: how do we reach and sustain that center point? The first step is self-awareness: simply to know what we're experiencing in the present and to be an observer of our emotional state, not immersed in what we're feeling. An initial exercise in this direction is to write down what we're feeling when we're feeling it. By observing ourselves, we are exercising (self) focus. Next week we will build on this--
This Thursday, I will join the head of recruiting for SMB Capital, Jeff Holden, for a combined mentoring/coaching class with developing traders. What will be unique to the session is that I will be presenting and teaching coaching skills to the traders at the same time that Jeff presents and teaches best trading practices for that day's trade. To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first time that the skills of trading psychology are taught alongside the skills of consistently profitable trading in the context of a live market session. Once we've held the session for SMB students, I will share the specific methods we talked about in an update to this blog post. The goal is to go beyond coaching advice and provide specific tools for TraderFeed readers to coach themselves to trading success. As Coach K indicates above, the key to elite performance is hungering for excellence, not success. We can't always win, but we can always learn and learn and practice and practice excellent ways to play the game. Back in the mid-1970s, I had the honor of being part of the freshman basketball team at Duke. The coach ended quite a few of the evening practice sessions with an exercise where each player had to hit 10 consecutive free throws before they could go home. You can imagine, tired and sweaty and needing to get homework done, how the players desperately wanted to get home. That put real pressure on their free throws. Over the course of the season, they had practiced doing the right things at the charity stripe so often under duress that they didn't wilt when it came to clutch situations at game time. They achieved excellence by practicing under the emotional conditions of actual performance.
Now imagine that you couldn't leave your trade station after the market close until you had traded that day's market successfully in replay mode. Again and again, you'd replay the market and push yourself to stay in the right mindset and take the right actions. Day after day, those reps would eventually become part of you and you'd internalize sound trading psychology at the same time that you internalized sound trading.
Stay tuned to this blog post after Thursday morning's session with Jeff. I'll share the methods I discussed with the developing traders and I'll highlight how you can best rehearse these methods to coach yourself effectively. This should be fun--
Brett