Resiliency in Your Trading Journey
If you have ever really attempted a pursuit that is incredibly challenging, then you will know a bit about the concept of resiliency first hand. As day traders, we Market Mamas definitely have developed quite an understanding of this trait. According to the American Psychological Association, “Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. A number of factors contribute to how well people adapt to adversities, including the ways in which individuals view and engage with the world, the availability and quality of social resources, and specific coping strategies.”
As a trader, there are multiple ways to aim to be resilient with your actions. Flexibility with your trade plan as data presents throughout your trading session enable you to adjust with every candle that prints and stay more in sync with the moves of your current session with Miss Market. It is also important to be flexible with your timeline if you miss certain goals you had set for yourself for success, for example, making 10k in time for the Christmas season, etc. Intraday, we always intend to be resilient coming off a red day, to stay focused to your larger trading plan. This is critical to being able to get back in the arena the next day with patience and peace. Being open-minded for opportunities and lessons in each loss will make you a stronger trader in the long run for sure. Focusing on what you can change moving forward is resilience and dedication to your larger goals.
To be a resilient person, try for optimism, or at least realism. And be grateful for what you do have in times of stress or potential worry. Focusing on the positive parts of your life can help us all recover quicker from something less positive, such as a setback in our trader journey. Ideally, we can keep our minds balanced and not persevering on any given loss or negative outcome for any longer than is necessary to learn the lesson and manage the situation. Once we’ve extracted the value from the adverse event, then we put it behind us and blaze ahead on our paths. That is being resilient as traders.
Staying present in each moment and with each fresh opportunity will also help us let go of things that don’t serve us and not live in regret. Moving forward and growing from each experience is ideal. Let go of past mistakes and manage what is at your fingertips at a given moment. This is where the real potential is, so that is where our attention must be directed.
“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”
~ Maya Angelou
Having great support from people in your close circle is invaluable with cultivating resilience. Because you have a person or two to really confide in with the good and the bad of each day, to get it off your chest and out of your mind. Your life partner, your accountability partner, your mentor, your community if it is a supportive, open and encouraging one, those are all great options. But fighting with internal demons in isolation is rarely beneficial and often leads to them festering into bigger problems than they need to be. So share, breathe, and then move on to your next ideal opportunity!
A major key to resiliency as a trader is having the strongest trading (or business of any variety) system and rules for risk management. Because this is preparation work that you do when you are in a calm, level-headed place. And so in moments of higher emotion and risk, you have rules and a plan to lean on to take some of the guesswork and emotions out of your trading. Defined setups, an understanding of key data points, an established risk within your instrument for your accounts; these are critical pieces of your trading business that you can work ahead on to make an arduous pursuit such as day trading a bit simpler when it’s go time.
What do you have in your life that provides you gratification beyond your primary driving work or business, such as trading for us. This might include family time, close friends, exercise, hobbies, or sports. Not allowing one life activity or pursuit (such as trading) to consume all your time and energy is beneficial to keeping you resilient because it offers other avenues daily for you to feel satisfied if one area is potentially struggling. This balance means that you don’t need to always win in every situation and opportunity to still overall have a feeling of accomplishment in life. A red day in trading doesn’t have to hurt your general confidence and peace. And your day can still be satisfying regardless of any one variable when they all average out in the end.
Every day, aim for a growth mindset. This will help you see the opportunities in every situation, not just the perfect ones. The quick easy trades often do not teach us as much as a hard loss that we had to study, ask our mentor about, replay and journal on. Seek to learn from adversity. In the long run, we will be more resilient for it. And resiliency is really a very powerful characteristic that will serve us all well!
Thank you to everyone who is subscribing to our podcast, reading our blogs, and providing us feedback! We are here to talk openly about everything that may help us all level up within our lives, be it day trading or otherwise. Take care!