Mastering the Monkey Mind in Trading
Trading is slowly becoming the most attractive career choice of our age.
Back in the time, it was impossible for "regular folks" to buy a stock of Apple or Microsoft. That privilege was reserved for few.
Luckily, things have changed and now we are able to invest straight from our mobile phones.
When you learn to navigate the markets, you get big financial advantages. That's why many today are dreaming of becoming top traders and living lavish lifestyles.
Reality is a bit different, and what few will tell you - trading is one of the hardest things to master.
Don't get me wrong, if you manage to double $1000 for 10 months straight you will become a millionaire, but that is where comes a whole another aspect to trading. Discipline.
How well do you know yourself? How well can you navigate your own mind in ways that benefit you?
What is for sure, you will meet yourself really good in 1 year of trading. The more you approach whole complexity of the process, faster you'll be able to level up. So what are your strengths, weaknesses? Are you patient, impatient, greedy, weak minded?
Trading will give you answers to all of this really fast. You just need to pay attention. From there, you can develop a strategy that suits you, with proper focus on your main weaknesses. The moment you succeed at negating your weakness, you will level up to a whole another reality.
I jumped off topic a bit, so I will write more on this in the future. The topic of this particular post is how to achieve mental mastery to become a better trader.
What exactly is Monkey Mind?
The monkey mind is the voice in your head, that is trying to be loud. Its always trying to get in control over real you. Its a part of egoic construct and as such, has a limited experience here and often identifies with wrong things. It tends to mess with your natural instincts.
Usually, the worse things go for you... it gets louder. Its the same incase of some big pumps on certain assets, it will get loud and try to convince you to buy the top. :D Long story short, it can make your life pretty complicated if you don't manage to control it.
This is a great video by a shaolin monk on how to train the monkey mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PkrhH-bkpk
He explains it in a really funny but serious way. The whole point of the training is, don't identify with the monkey mind.
There will always be various chatter in your head, sometimes it will intensify, but the key is not to identify with it. Breathe is the best tool out there to aid you with it. During any kind of FOMO or FUD event, remind yourself to take a few deep breaths and you will react better.
The monkey mind tends to make you bipolar, and as such unable to make clear decisions. It will make you jump from trade to trade, missing on great moves simply cause you couldn't stick with your initial plan.
You know that move that felt sooo good? But got manipulated on the way up. So your monkey mind persuaded you to sell it too early.
By acting in this certain way, we can miss many great opportunities of a lifetime. That's why it should be our great focus, to always master ourselves as much as we can. Identify least as possible, in order so we can recognize our natural born instinct.
This is most definitely not an easy process, but the ones with strongest wills shall be able to prosper.
Mindset is everything
And your mindset will truly define not just the outcome of your financial stability, but your whole experience of this reality.
You always wanna keep it balanced. First notice of disbalance should alert you to abort whatever you are doing, until you revert yourself to balanced state. :D
Not until we stop acting impulsively, can we truly control our mindset in our favor. But mindset truly is everything. you can't achieve basically anything without it. Even to grab a can of soda, you need a certain mindset, its just the more complex it gets you need to upgrade yourself as well. In every way possible.
I mean, if you can turn $100 to a $1 000, you should be able to to turn $1 000 to $10 000 and $10 000 to $100 000 etc.
But the thing is, the higher you go, its like a new terrain for you. It should be the same, but its not. Simply cause you are managing more money, the stress will intensify greatly.
It means that any kind of potential swing on your investments, will look serious and that's where monkey mind will try to get involved.
So we always get back to the mindset, how well can we control ourselves while managing more and more money. That should be the main focus. And we should approach it in a multidimensional way.
Things we shouldn't do:
- Procrastinate
- Eat bad foods
- Eat too much in general, eat late/early
- Play videogames
- Watch porn
- Use drugs
- Drink alcohol
- Have bad posture
- Keep poop in our colon
- Hang out with wrong people
- Be toxic
These things tend to impact your mindset in non-beneficial ways, and as such we have to treat them carefully. Reducing them will greatly help you to keep yourself in balanced, emotionally stable state ready to make the right move.
This is a complex game. That's why most will fail at it before even really tasting 1% of the game. Its not for the mentally weak, and it will challenge you to your fullest.
Some of the things to try and incorporate:
- morning routine
- exercise, stretching
- fasting
- proper hydration (juicy fruits MVP, juices)
- meditation
- breathing exercises
- visualization
- confirmations
- minimalism
- being present
- keep it joyful
All of these things will greatly impact your mind in a way that you'll be able to expand it and imagine unimaginable.
Its all about pushing the limits. Sometimes we need to push limits on our very selves mentally and physically in order so we can better ourselves and become the trader we wanna be.
Its not an easy task for sure, but by proper care of ourselves and investing our time wisely in the right knowledge (I won't say education ;D) it is possible for every single one of us to get out there and take everything we want.
Keeping your mind right most of the time will help you develop confidence in who you are. From that point you are able to do whatever you want, go wherever is needed. It doesn't really matter, only thing that matters is - you have full control of yourself. You are living your life to the fullest, by not being an NPC (non playable character) but rather consciously manifesting your reality for what you want it to be. It all starts from the mind, remember? If you can't think about it, you can't do it. Try it. Do anything without thinking about it. I dare you.
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