Taking Responsibility

The phrase “taking responsibility” sounds simplistic enough yet the concept is neither easy to grasp nor to put into practice. We have heard this expression literally so many times that it is easy to take for granted that we know exactly what the phrase means.  

Taking responsibility whilst trading and learning the appropriate principles of success are inextricably linked. You must understand with every fiber of your being, the ways in which you are and are not responsible for your trading success.  

To express yourself as a consistently successful trader, you must deactivate limiting thoughts, catalyze new empowering beliefs and work on your mental & emotional attitude. To realize your potential, your yearning must be to learn how to think like a consistently successful trader.  

The best traders think in exemplary ways. They have created a mental configuration that allows them to trade without fear and concurrently keeps them from becoming reckless or overconfident.  

If we work with the premise that to become a consistent trader, you must focus your efforts on developing a traders mindset, it is easy to see why most of us are not successful. Instead of learning to think like traders, they dissipate most of their efforts in thinking about how they can make more money by learning about the markets. It is nearly impossible not to fall for this, it is rudimental to assume that it is what you don’t know about the markets that causes your losses and lack of consistent results.  

However, this is a false narrative. The consistency you seek is in thou mind, not the markets. It is your attitudes & beliefs about losing money, being incorrect, along with the tendency to become reckless when feeling good that causes losses, not technique or market knowledge.  

It takes time to evolve this winning attitude & mental structure. The broad definition of an optimistic winning attitude is expecting a positive result from your efforts, with an acceptance that whatever results you get are a candid reflection of your level of development and what you need to improvise on. This winning attitude helps you move beyond your blunders and keep learning, instead of getting bogged down in negative self-criticism.  

Most traders have had the common experience of losing one or more fortunes before they ascertained how they needed to think in order to be consistently successful. It is a fundamental shift in attitude that accounts for their success, not some momentous realization about the market, as most folks erroneously assume.  

Taking responsibility warrants believing that all of your outcomes are self-generated; that your results are based on your own inferences of the market information & the decisions you make and actions you take as a result. 

Not taking complete responsibility sets up two major psychological barriers that shall block your success. The first is that you will establish an adversarial relationship with the markets, thus taking you out of the perpetual flow of opportunity. Second, you will mislead yourself into believing that your lack of success and trading problems can be amended through market analysis.  

From the markets’ viewpoint, each moment is neutral; to the observer or trader, every moment & price change can have inferences. These meanings are centered on what you have learned and exist solely in your mind, not the market. 

The market does not accredit meanings or interprets the information it generates about itself. Additionally, the market doesn’t know how to define an opportunity or a loss. The market does not seem to care if you perceive it as an endless stream of opportunities to enter and exit trades for both profits & losses at each and every moment, or as an insatiate monster ready and willing to devour your money at any given moment.  

Finally, learning endlessly about the markets only to avoid pain compounds your problems, because the more you know, naturally the more you shall expect from the markets, making it all the more aching when the markets do not do their part. This can create a vicious cycle where the more you learn the more feeble you become; the more feeble you become the more compelled you are to learn. This cycle shall go on and on until either you get fed up and quit trading in distate or you recognize that the root cause of your trading problems is your viewpoint, not your lack of knowledge.

Taking responsibility is the bedrock of a winning attitude.