Don't let the ego win (2)
Part 2
The ego wants to be right most. It achieves winning the battles through a lot of smoke and mirrors. What you wish to avoid most is debates, confusion, too much data, and anything that needs to be defined.
Be consistent!
The best weapon to not fall into emotional pitfalls is to hold onto anything in trading that you have control over.
This is mostly all evaluations before trade entry since everything gets emotionally more significant once your money is exposed, and price movement evokes emotions.
If you experience struggles with consistency like sabotaging, making a daily call every day or not keeping books on every trade, or, in general, not following your rules before entering, you should not trade.
Breaking your rules, like daily routines before trade entry, requires more accountability. This is a setup supported by the ego to allow for more rule breaks once in a trade, and if one can't measure success or failure through diligent process procedures, everything becomes much more emotional.
The ego loves these battles within oneself and feeds on these energies.
In short, anything you can control, you need to control, and there is zero room for emotionally directed trade behavior.
Best practices are investigative on why you self-sabotage in case this is your weak spot.
Many traders, like gamblers, are in the market for rollercoaster rides of emotional highs and lows, and gamblers typically enjoy the lows best.
If identified to this group, you can get your kicks much cheaper and should stop trading immediately.
A lack of accountability typically stems from a sense of self-worth. Installing reasonable principle-based process procedures and measuring their success in sample sizes before attempting paper trading is advised. These diligent daily tasks will grow self-esteem, and trading should always be measured in procedure success and not the size of financial rewards in the markets.
Another way the ego gets its way is by evoking overwhelm.
Typically overwhelm is data overload and confusion.
The best practice is to chunk complex tasks into smaller chunks and find individual solutions(rules) for the various parts to get out from under.
Zoom out from smaller time frames, reduce the variant of markets, make breaks within trading, trade smaller sizes, and practice in series rather than everything at the same time. Add tasks one after the other and, most of all, create a situation for yourself where an extended learning curve is allowed.
Set smaller goals and reward yourself. Trading success is not one of financial abundance. Financial abundance is a consequence of rule-based trading, and good trading is a consequence of multiple disciplined process procedures diligently followed. meaning you reward yourself for following the procedure correctly, not whether you find yourself in a winning or losing trade, which is random to begin with.