ASK THE COACH
for yourself to see whether any of them are impacting you. For one trader I coached I asked him to write down at one hour intervals during the trading day a score out of 10 for stress, a score out of 10 for energ y and the emotion he was feeling at the time. The idea was to bring greater a wa r en e s s to these aspects of his trading. After
two
weeks we met again and he had noticed a very strong link between high stress, low energy and poor execution. To stay disciplined you need to focus on doing the right behaviour, you need to have good willpower, and this
is eroded by
stress and fatigue. Many traders who trade part-time in the evenings are already turning up to the screens with fatigue from the working day. As a general inoculation to losing discipline you can work on managing your stress levels, train your attention (see point 3 below), manage
your emotions and work on your physical energy management. Maybe devise your own way of monitoring these aspects both before, and while you are trading.
FX
build to 2 sessions of 5 minutes, before building to 10-12 minute sessions. Focused attention training
will help you to
improve your ability to sustain your attention for longer, get distracted and
more Additionally, less,
refocus quickly. the
impact of this form of brain training
will
also help you to develop
greater
in the moment a wa r en e s s which is key to discipline, enhance
and
emotional stress
3. If attention is a challenge for
you, then I would highly
recommend doing some focused attention training. This process is used very effectively by athletes, soldiers and traders to develop the
brains attentional
muscles. It can be as simple as focusing on your breathing , following the in breath and the out breath, noticing when your mind gets distracted away from the breath, and then refocusing it back on the breath. Start with 3-5 minutes per day, then
your and
regulation abilities. There
is great bang for buck to be had from a commitment to this type of training, and this is why I featured these types of approaches in my last book ‘TraderMind’ – you can read more about attention training and how to develop discipline in there.
Steve Ward Author of
“7 Professional Coaching Lessons”, “High Performance Trading” and “TraderMind”
FX TRADER MAGAZINE April - June 2016 35
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95