8/20/2025 - One of the most powerful paths to transformation is relationships. A great deal of our development early in life is the internalization of relationships from parents, teachers, and other significant people in our lives. We know from research in psychology that the quality of the relationship between therapists and clients is the single best predictor of success in making and sustaining changes in therapy. The attachment to a mentor or colleague similarly helps us internalize their role modeling.
A major challenge for individual traders early in their development is the absence of role modeling relationships. Receiving teaching or coaching online can be helpful and informative, but it does not accomplish the transformation of a close relationship. We develop expertise first by copying the work of successful mentors and then by synthesizing the learning and turning it into our own. At the medical school where I teach, there are always multiple mentors in clinical training. No one learns medicine on their own, and no one learns it from videos and websites. We learn by doing, and we develop by learning from many role models in many settings. Each role model is a path for development; multiple role models enable us to develop multidimensionally and uniquely. This is why learning in teams is so powerful.
8/18/2025 - Sound trading is training in intentionality, the capacity to establish and sustain purpose. Quite literally, when we establish and follow trading processes, we train the brain to sustain purposeful action. The enemy of good trading is not emotion or lack of discipline. Those are the result of our failure to sustain the efforts needed to follow our best practices. Our enemy is distraction and the inability to guide our thoughts and actions purposefully. The small, repeated experiences referenced below are the ways in which we make efforts and turn those into routines. That frees our minds for yet other, further efforts. Process progress is measured in terms of taking purposeful behavior and turning that into reliable routine. What takes effort day after day becomes relatively routine week after week and a natural part of us month after month. We transform ourselves by turning our best actions into repeatable procedures and turning those procedures into reliable habit patterns.
If we're not building new routines and pushing new boundaries, we're stagnating. The emotions that impact trading and that we hear so much about are simply the result of our challenges overwhelming our ability to sustain our best practices.
8/17/2025 - In just a few months, the kitten we adopted has come a healthy young girl. She began her time with us frightened and has grown into an active, playful, loving friend. The transformation did not occur all at once. Quite the contrary. It was daily experience of feeding, holding, playing, and sleeping together that built a strong bond not only with us, but with our other cats. The psychological principle here is that the most powerful changes occur through small, repeated experiences. Doing new and different things--day after day--makes us new and different over a surprisingly short period--but only if those experiences are consistent and repeated many times per day. Transformation is not accomplished by one big act of will. It is achieved through sustained, consistent effort. Day after day of loving Nomi turned a frightened kitten into a loving family member. And changing our trading? That occurs one trade at a time, doing the right things the right way--again and again and again.
Doing new things renews us.
Further Reading: The Naomi Principle - Overcoming Trauma
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