 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, we are going to discuss how to embrace your weakness. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. All right, so let's jump into our discussion of how to embrace your weakness. If you've been trading for any period of time, you know that trading is obviously a challenge. And if you're listening to this podcast, you understand that part of the challenge is between your ears. It's the mental environment that you create that can be the roadblock between you becoming a successful trader versus being a mediocre or losing trader. So this whole notion of change, it's both a challenge and a trap. The challenge is that if we aspire to become a consistently profitable trader, it creates this ability for us to grow into something other than who we are. But it can also be a trap because it creates kind of a self-division within our mind. When we entertain the notion of change, we're basically dividing ourselves. We have the qualities that we like and we have the qualities that we don't like. Whether you do it consciously or subconsciously, you're basically telling yourself, here's what your strengths are and here's what your weaknesses are. Here's what you're good at. Here's what you're bad at. Here's what's acceptable and here's what's unacceptable. And once we make this division in our mind, it's only natural to embrace the good and avoid the bad. We simply dismiss our shortcomings as mistakes or bad luck or exceptions or some other type of excuse. And this is a defense mechanism that we all have that help us keep a better image of ourselves and keep those negative thoughts outside of our conscious awareness. So here's a personal example that I'll share with you just from a couple weeks ago. So it's still fairly fresh in my mind. And it's the way that I poorly managed one of my positions. And this is in our day trading live stream room. And I managed a trade to a point where the loss on the trade was larger than I wanted to be. So it exceeded my loss limit on this particular trade and it left me red for the day. Now, I had been on a nice winning streak. I think I had like eight green days in a row and this one turned into a red day for me. Now, I still finished slightly green on the week. So there's two ways I could look at this. I could say, you know what, I'm going to get that negativity of that red day out of my mind. I'm not going to focus on that. I'm only going to focus on the fact that I finished green for the week. And if I did that, which, you know, we talk about positive mindset, we talk about having a positive attitude while you're trading. And that's kind of what you're doing there. You're pushing the negative. You're pushing the bad day to the side. You're focusing on the positive, which was that we finished green for the week. And by doing that pretty soon, you're just going to forget about that loss. And so there is some value to that. Here's the problem. When you completely ignore your losses or you completely ignore the fact that you mismanaged a position, you don't necessarily learn from it. So what's going to happen next time? Next time this frustration hits or next time I mismanaged a position, it's simply going to be I'm going to repeat my earlier behavior and maybe even lose more money. Okay. And then it can kind of spiral out of control and you, you might have to take a break from the markets and come back with a positive mindset. But the reality is that you kind of, you really just return to denial. And once again, you remove those losses from your mind and eventually those shortcomings, eventually those issues catch up with you and you eventually have to face them head on. So if you only focus on positive thoughts, then you don't have to think about what you've done wrong, which basically means we don't have to be in contact with the part of ourselves that we don't like. It's kind of like the old adage of cleaning your house, right? If you just keep sweeping it under the rug, eventually that rug gets full and there's a big bulge of dirt under the rug in your house, right? So that's what happens if you don't really clean it out, if you don't really face your issues, your negative, poor position management, if you don't face it head on, eventually it's going to come back to bite you. You know, for all you parents out there, it's kind of like when you have a baby, it's like having to change a dirty diaper. Now, before I ever had kids, I always thought I would absolutely hate that. I'm never going to change a dirty diaper. Their mom's going to do it all the time. I just, I don't want to have anything to do with it, right? But the reality is, and maybe some of you can relate to this, maybe some of you can't, but I actually got to where, when I was my own kid and I had to change diapers, I actually didn't mind it at all. In fact, it almost becomes kind of a bonding moment between you and your child. Sounds weird, maybe sounds a little disgusting to some, but the reality is it is a bonding thing between a parent and a child. And so this is how you have to look at your own weaknesses. This is how you have to look at your own dirty diapers. Your weaknesses are part of you. And someone who loves you has to deal with the whole package, all the dirty diapers and all, right? And so if you love yourself, you have to deal with that by yourself. You have to deal with that internally. You have to face that head on. You have to treat these shortcomings as opportunities. These are opportunities to grow. These are opportunities for development. These are opportunities for you to become a better person, or in this case, a better trader. So if you've had a trade that you lost money on recently, or you had a day that you lost money, or a week that you lost money, consider embracing your flaws. Consider embracing this weakness. Every losing trade is there to teach you something. So here's what I want you to do. There's a little exercise that I'm going to give you here. A little bit of homework. All right, so at the close of today's trading, okay, start it today. Create a chart. Just write a chart on a piece of paper, or on a spreadsheet, however you want to do it. Create a chart with three columns. The first column is a description of the losing trade that you made. The second column will be what you can learn from the losing trade. And the third column will be how you will improve your trading the next day, based on what you learned. Okay, so let me repeat that. The first column is a description of the losing trade you made. The second column will be what you can learn from the losing trade. And the third column will be how you will improve your trading the next day, based on what you learned. So an example might be what you learned from the losing trade might be an insight into what the market did. Maybe it was a choppy or range bound day when you assumed that it was a trending day. Or what you learned from the losing trade might be something about yourself. Maybe it's that you should have cut your loss quicker, or you should have managed the risk more effectively. Whatever it is, whatever it is that you learned from that losing trade, it's never a total loss as long as you embrace it and learn from it. You know, this is why it's so critical to create, kind of call it what you want, a trading journal, a trading diary. You know, I know, you know, before every morning before I trade, I am constantly writing down how I feel, did I sleep okay? Is there any kind of outside distracting factors, any projects that I'm working on for work, for navigation trading, or any, you know, distractions? How would, you know, have I gotten in a recent argument at home? Is something with my kids bothering me? All these things I write out each morning. And it's not going to ensure or guarantee that you won't have losses, but it will make you more self-aware. And now I can find myself being self-aware during the trading day of if I'm making a decision that I shouldn't be making, I instantly become aware of it most of the time. Not a hundred percent. Doesn't, it's not, it's not perfect. We're so humans, but it helps you become more self-aware and help you to self-correct in the middle of it. And doing this exercise does the same thing. You're taking a loss, you're taking it head on, you're confronting yourself, and you're learning from those mistakes. The goal of every trader is to become consistently profitable, okay? But that doesn't mean that your account won't have some ups and downs. It's your account, the red marks and all. You have to embrace them. You have to make yourself stronger. And by, by reaching out to your flaws, by embracing your weaknesses, this will help you become the trader that you're capable of being. I hope this episode was helpful. If you want to become a part of a community of like-minded traders, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. It's free to join. We call it the trade hacker community. We've got hundreds of traders interacting with each other on a daily basis, not just about the mindset stuff, but also sharing trade ideas with the sole purpose of helping each other become better traders. We look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.