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🌱Weekly quote: We know what we're doing wrong🌱

🟢For many of us, our trading accounts are our cluttered homes. What we desperately need is to find our inner quiet; review our trades and trading statistics in detail and truly experience the horror of betraying our potential; and fully appreciate what we do well and embrace it with gratitude. Out of that energized awareness, we can replace the clutter with what is meaningful.

Our great enemy is routine. Many times, we know what we're doing wrong, but we keep making the same mistakes. Indeed, that is the way of life's curriculum. If we fail to learn from the first lesson, we get a second and a third and a fourth: one painful opportunity after another to commit to a different path. Is that failure, or is that something to be grateful for: a curriculum that is trying, trying, trying to teach us the lessons we need to learn to be successful?

🟢We've seen that gratitude is an essential component of psychological well-being. The grateful trader is not self-focused, absorbed in how much money they could/should make. The grateful trader is thankful for the opportunities coming their way. When we look heavenward with thanks for what we've accomplished, there is an essential humility to our perspective. It's not just about us. It's not just about profits and losses.

A great metric in evaluating your trading journal is to count the number of frustrated statements versus the number of grateful ones. A great metric in evaluating other traders is to count the number of self-aggrandizing statements with the number of humble, grateful ones.

🟢If losses are opportunities to learn and improve, we can sustain a grateful mindset even in times of adversity. A humble mindset is one looking to learn. A grateful mindset appreciates every opportunity to grow.
A life perspective that instills and strengthens humility grounds us in the awareness that there is always something more important than me. There is always something more significant than what is simply happening here and now. We cannot succeed in trading--or any life endeavor--if it becomes our end-all and be-all. Once trading and P/L are placed on a pedestal, they control us and our experience. And that is precisely what interferes with profitability!

It's great to correct your mistakes, but it's in your shining successes that you can find your path to fulfillment--and your future in markets. Hidden in your winning trades may be the key to your development as a trader.

🟢So many developing traders look for one edge after another, one market after another, one trading style after another--all in a frantic search for success. The reality is that our best trading is hiding in plain sight, when we explore what we're trading and how we're trading it when we're most fulfilled and successful.

Brett Steenbarger, Trading Psychology
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