Driving Force
For every decision you make, there's a driving force that executed by a chain of events in your psyche. Much like real-world physics, each driving force has a source of origin. When making any kind of trading or investing decision, this source can be a complex web of personal feelings, thoughts, desires, and experiences, all combined with factual data about the markets and the particular trade you're considering.
Everyone's driving force in each particular instance will vary depending on the person and the environment. For a trader who wants to improve his trading approach and methodology, it's key to carefully consider the constants that tend to comprise his personal complex points of origin for driving forces. If you reflect on your past decisions, you'll often find that the same feelings, thoughts, desires, and experiences keep repeating as reasons for decisions you've made. For example, you may find that you have a very strong desire for material wealth and that this has often served as an underlying reason for many decisions that you've made. It's also common to discover that most of the basic and recurring reasons come from childhood experiences and lifestyle.
It's important to be self-reflective in order to discover your most primitive values and emotions which will inevitably come through in every decision you make. It's by understanding them that you can recognize their effect on your current decisions. And through recognition, you can alter these thoughts and emotions or choose to discount them.
Once you start recognizing the source of your decisions' driving forces, you can use that information to stop your decision-making process and "replace" the source of your driving force with your trading plan. This will cause you to "recalculate" your decision. When done correctly, you will almost always find that you change your original inclination.
Most people might feel that they aren't able or wouldn't want to permanently alter the mental and emotional thoughts that serve as a basis to their decisions, and that's ok. The key in trading is to ensure that those values and thoughts don't serve as a basis for your trading decisions, which should be based on your proven trading plan. The process of self-reflection, evaluation, and "conscious decision resourcing" is difficult to achieve, but can expand one's capacities to make more objective trading decisions, and therefore yield immense profits.
Master Interview - Excerpt |
