The market simply acts as a mirror that gives us back the image of ourselves. If you have confidence, it is not because the market trusts you, it is because the beliefs and attitudes you have in the phase you are in allow you to move forward, feel responsible for your results and extract the dominant idea of the moment. You trust yourself because you are constantly learning. On the contrary, if you are angry or afraid, it is because you somehow believe that the market is responsible for your results and not the other way around.
If we do not hold ourselves accountable for our results, we may consider that we no longer have anything to learn and that we can continue to be exactly as we are. We will not develop or change. Consequently, we will perceive events in exactly the same way, and we will respond to ourselves in the same way, obtaining the same deplorable results. There is a definition of a winning attitude in the stock market that I love: getting rewarded for our efforts and accepting that the results obtained, whatever they may be, are a reflection of our level of development and what we still have to learn to progress.
Have you ever wondered why it is more painful not to take advantage of an opportunity than to have a loss? When we lose, there are ways to blame the market and not accept responsibility. But when we fail to seize an opportunity, we cannot blame the market. The market has done nothing except give us exactly what we wanted, but for some reason we have not been able to act appropriately. In other wordsit is not possible to evacuate the pain.
We are not responsible for what the market does or does not do, but yes we are responsible for all other things that result from our trading activities. From what we learn, as well as from everything we have not yet learned and still have to discover. The easiest way to discover what we need to be successful is to develop the winning attitude, because this is by nature a creative state. A winning attitude not only opens us up to what we need to learn but also creates the right frame of mind to make us discover something no one else has experienced.
Developing a winning attitude is the key to success. For many traders the problem is the following: Either they believe they already have it, without having it, or they hope that the market will develop the attitude instead of them, providing them with winning trades. We are responsible for our own winning attitude, not the market. The market will not do it for us, attitude comes first. All the market analysis will not compensate the development of the winning attitude, if we lack it we will suffer much more. Understanding the markets can give us an advantage in making winning trades, but it will not make us a regular winner because we will lack the winning attitude.
Traders with losing attitudes choose bad trades regardless of their knowledge of the markets. The result is the same: lose. On the other hand, traders with a winning attitude, and who know virtually nothing about the markets, can choose the winning trades; and if they know the markets well they can pick even better winning trades. If we want to change our experience of markets moving from fear to trustif we want to change our results from a jagged capital curve to a regularly rising curve, we must first of all feel responsible and not expect the market to give us something or do something for us. If we decide that from now on we will do everything ourselves, the market can no longer be our adversary. In this way we will be able to recognize exactly what we must learn and the speed with which we learn. Accepting one’s own responsibility is the cornerstone of a winning attitude.
What distinguishes the best traders from others is not what they do or when they do it, but rather how they think about what they are doing and what they think about when they do it. We must always remember that the solutions are in our mind and not in the market. Regularity is a state of mind whose core is made up of certain fundamental strategies of thought that are specific to trading.
I am passionate about cinema, and since today I have talked about the winning attitude, I would like to leave with a exceptional film with an impressive cast of actors: Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey…; the title is: Glengarry Glen Ross success at any cost. The script for this scene was personally written by Alec Baldwin and is the epitome of anti-motivation. Beyond the fact that you may dislike what the protagonist does with his vendors, I invite you to observe his winning attitude. I hope you like it. A hug and happy trading!
Video Glengarry Glenn Ross: Success at Any Cost (Sales Meeting) -Winning Attitude-
Duration: 7 minutes. http://youtu.be/S_h3hcI_UOA