brimson25 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 10, 2018 4:33 pm
Maybe.
But I think it's at least conceivable that people self-sabotage.
For the purpose of this post I'm going to assume by self-sabotage you mean you're deliberately making mistakes. And like you've probably already heard, this game is about eliminating mistakes -- or, not losing [significantly]. So in this post I'll talk about how you should be going about doing that, regardless of whether or not you're self-sabotaging.
Sure, self-sabotage may be the actual cause of your demise, but
such psychological issues are very loosely in our control, meaning we don't have (or believe we have) much ability/likelihood to overcome these issues. Firstly I'd propose it's much more useful for you to blame something more tangible and in your control, for example, a
lack of organisation and
execution of that organisation.
e.g. "For me to avoid major mistakes, I must define my trading decisions based on logic to ensure I don't encounter mistakes, and not deviate from those decisions" - so that's having a trading plan and being able to follow it.
So this could result in 3 major camps:
A) no defined trading plan =
significant long-term loser
B) defined trading plan (not consistently adhered to) =
significant long-term loser
C) defined trading plan (strictly adhered to) =
slight long-term loser / break-even / profitable
(depends on edge)
If you're in camp A/B, there's no point worrying about if you have an edge or not, it's more beneficial to identify and eliminate any major mistakes you're
repeatedly making, as once they're all gone, your results will literally tell you what your edge is (you can analyse + tweak from there)
I think that believing psychological issues such as self-sabotage to be the actual cause for you being a long-term loser sets you on the path for guaranteed failure regardless of whether or not its true. By believing you're the victim of your own psychological issues, you're essentially saying:
"I keep deviating from my plan, and the cause is a psychological issue, which is out of my control"
...or perhaps more accurately:
"I keep deviating from my plan and the cause is a psychological issue which has formed gradually over many years and will likely take a huge amount of effort to change and may even be so cemented into my personality that it may never change at all
Can you see how these beliefs might be self-fulfilling? Dangerous stuff!
Instead, attempt to tie your losses to things within your control by attempting to identify triggers which set off whatever 'self-sabotaging' behaviour you think you might have (mistakes).
e.g.
"I keep deviating from my plan because I'm unable to stomach losses above £x"
The process should be:
- Trade
- Log your mistakes
- Analyse them outside of trading hours (calm, logical state)
- Identify trigger for those logged mistakes (guess if nothing is obvious)
- Implement a new behavioural change which aims to
avoid the trigger in the first place
Repeat until you've eliminated the mistake. Move on to the next mistake.
Realise that even if you truly are self-sabotaging, this will still be triggered behaviour, and is as such avoidable.
e.g. you begin to make mistakes (deviate from your trading plan) when you're up x amount in the day.
...In such a case you'd first seek to identify what the amount was (prudency is your friend), then come up with and implement a behavioural change such as
"If I ever reach +£x in the day, I will stop trading to prevent my self-sabotaging behaviour"
gl