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afraid to take action. To understand the virtue of courage then we need to understand the vice of fear, and how it works. |
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Before you can start to experience the feeling of fear, several things must first take place in your mind. In order to feel fear, you must either be remembering a similar event in your past that resulted in pain or you must be anticipating how much this current event might hurt in the future. In other words, for your brain to experience the emotion of fear, your mind must be reliving an event in the past or anticipating an event in the future. In both cases mentally you are not in the present moment. Consequently it is impossible for you to see the market as it is. |
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Once your brain reenters the present moment, it is incapable of experiencing fear. This is because it must make decisions, and is too busy to be anywhere except in the present. Do you remember an event that you were dreading, but then the fear disappeared when it came for you to take action? For some of us it was combat in a war; for others it was making a public speech for the first time. Others may have been totally scared when asking their spouse to marry; still others may have dreaded some sort of examination. The point is that the day before the event we were all scared and afraid, because of our fear. However, when we had to go into action our fear miraculously disappeared. |
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What happened? Very simply our conscious mind was too busy taking care of the present moment to worry about what might happen in the future, or what happened in the past. The courage that we used to overcome the frightening events of the past is also vitally important to us as traders today. In fact, it is even more important to us as traders, because in most cases we are the only ones who know when our trading methodology indicates that we should enter, exit, or wait for a trade. If we fail to follow the trading methodology that we so laboriously researched, only we will know that our courage was not enough to overcome our fear. There is no audience to judge our courage or lack thereof while trading. |
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Let me ask you another question: What do you think most traders are afraid of? Many of you will say being wrong and losing money, or leaving money on the table. Some of you will also say that the real issue is that most traders are afraid of being emotionally or financially hurt by the market. I suspect that the core fear of most traders is that they are afraid of themselves! |
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At the root of all fear is that the trader may do something that results in a lot of pain. The vast majority of traders do not trust themselves to make valid decisions. It is far easier to purchase the advice of others than to do the work necessary to devise their own methodology. The other major reason traders purchase the opinions of others is that when the trade fails to |
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