 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about why it's so important to never stop getting coached. 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 this topic of never stop being coached and part of this came from about a year ago, I guess. I hired a personal trainer and it was a personal trainer in the fitness space. So we meet every morning, every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 5 a.m. and it's really taken, it's all strength training. So it's all weight training. And so what I found is, A, not only does it keep me accountable to working out on those days, but B, it takes the intensity of the workout to a whole new level. And so by doing that, it's creating a situation where I've seen better gains in my strength than I've seen in years. I mean, when you're in your teens, when you're in your 20s, you've got all kinds of testosterone flowing through your veins. So, you don't necessarily have to work out that much and you can see significant gains. But now in my mid 40s, it's a little different, right? You don't have the same testosterone levels. You don't have a lot of the same things. So you have to work harder to see any type of improvement in your strength. And so I just found it really fascinating how much stronger and how much better I was able to get with a personal trainer, as opposed to just going to try to go to the gym and work out on my own. I just, I found that I never got a very intense workout. Sometimes I would just go in there and do a couple of things and then leave. So I didn't have the accountability. I'm not gonna walk into my personal trainer or do a couple of exercises and then say, I don't feel like doing it today. I'm out of here. You have that accountability factor and you have somebody who actually knows what they're doing, who's actually pushing you to go to another level, who's actually having you work muscle groups that you don't even realize that you have and all of those things together became a significant factor in the improvements that I saw. And so I took that. So how does that relate to training, right? You're probably wondering. Well, so I took that and I thought, man, the benefits that I see from having a personal trainer were so significant. How can I take that same concept and make my trading even better? And so what I've done is I've been, I've been actually searching and thinking about this, not really searching too hard, but definitely thinking about this for a couple of years of hiring a trading coach. Now, you might say, well, why would you hire a trading coach? You teach people how to trade already. You know how to trade. Why would you hire a trading coach? And as you might guess, based on the title of this podcast, the Trade Hacker Mindset, the mental side of trading is more important than any other aspect of trading that that's what I'm after. That's what I'm looking to improve. And I don't think that you can ever completely master your emotions. I don't think you can ever completely master the mental side of trading, but you can certainly continue to always be improving that. And so what I've done is I found an individual who is a trading psychologist and I hired them. And I'm not gonna mention their name right here because they're not somebody who really takes on a lot of clients. I had to kind of convince him that I wanted him as a coach or I had to convince him to be my coach. And I had to write a check for an amount that I'm not gonna disclose here either because it's almost a little sickening, to be honest. But here's the thing, I can't wait to get it. I have not had an actual session yet. We've had two preliminary sessions and then our main first session is not until the middle of December, 2021 here. Coming up, so a few weeks. But I'm so excited about it because if you ever get to the point where you think that you don't need coaching anymore, then you might as well probably quit what you're doing. You've either lost the motivation, you've lost your inspiration, you've lost your interest in that thing. And if you're not seeking to get better, if you're not seeking coaching, either you're just happy with where, maybe you're just happy with where you are. So it's not a bad thing. Maybe you're happy with where you are or it's just not something that you should be doing anymore. It's probably one of those two things. Well with trading, I'm always continually trying to get better. Even though I've been trading for 20 years and I feel like I have a very excellent grasp on the strategies that I trade, there are still things that I know are missing from a mental mindset standpoint that I think I can improve on. And so just to give you a kind of a little sneak peek into what we're doing with this trading psychologist is, so basically before our first official session, he sent me over a packet that I have to complete. It's gonna take me probably somewhere between 12 and 18 hours total of time to complete this packet. And essentially, it is a questionnaire that I have to answer all the questions to and it's a life history questionnaire, okay? And most, I haven't started really digging in and completing it yet, but I kind of glanced over just to get a feel for what it was about. And guess what? Very few of the questions that are being asked have anything to do with trading. Very few of the questions that are asked that he's wanting to know about my life history. Very few of the questions have anything to do with trading. It all has to do with my mentality around other things in life, my mindset, my emotions and my reactions and things of when I was a young child all the way to an adult and everything in between, it's all about figuring out what type of mindset or what type of emotions may be prohibiting me from taking that next step to elevate my trading. So I'm just, I'm super excited to get started with this process and it's gonna be about a three month process once a week, sessions once a week for three full months. And I'm just, I'm really excited to see what kind of light bulb moments, what kind of aha situations come about because I just, I know they will. And so part of the process of what happens, and this is coming from the trading psychologist, is that essentially what he does is he's going to find things that are creating a blockage mentally from going to that next level of trading and he's going to be deleting those things out of my mind and replacing them with things that will help me excel. So that's just kind of a picturesque way of saying it, but that's essentially what the process is all about. And so I would really encourage you, and not just in the aspect of trading, but in every aspect of life, is if there's something that you really want to do, whether it's lose weight or get stronger or get smarter in a field or whatever, I would really highly encourage you to find a mentor, find a coach that can take you to that next level. And it's not easy. And it doesn't have to be a one-on-one coach that cost a ton of money or anything like that, but I mean navigation trading is a phenomenal way to level up your trading, the community that we have. And I'm not saying just me and we don't do one-on-one coaching, but utilizing navigation trading in the community that we've built and the communications that we've built and the courses and everything as you're coaching is a huge deal. It always makes me laugh when somebody says, you know, well, I don't want to pay for that. Like they want to get better at something, but they don't want to pay for it. And I'm telling you right now, if we gave away our membership at navigation trading, if we just gave away all of our courses, we gave away our trade alerts, we gave away our community and all everything that comes along with our membership, if we gave that away for free, I would tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the majority of people would not take it serious because it was free and therefore they would gain no value from it. So one of the reasons that I am willing to pay a significant amount of money for this trading psychologist, this trading coach, is because I know that if I'm writing a check for that amount of money, that I am going to be much more intentional about everything that we do in every single session. If he said, hey, you know, let's just do this, we'll see how it goes, I'm not gonna charge you anything, what do you think my level of intention would be when we had those sessions? Probably very minimal or next to nothing, right? So there is a key component to paying someone for coaching or paying, I mean, even navigation trading, paying a fee for a membership, you're gonna be much more intentional about that than you would if it was just some free video on YouTube, right? Okay, so there's a very big connection between actually paying somebody for coaching versus seeking out free information. And this goes for every aspect in life. Think about the best athletes in the world. You know, think about Michael Jordan. Not only did he have Phil Jackson, but he had his own psychology coach. He had his own personal trainer. So the most, the people who are performing at the highest level in their field, every single one of these people has a coach. Every single one of these people has some type of individual or team of people that they rely on to continue to elevate them to the next level. Every single golfer on the PGA Tour has a coach, okay? These are the best golfers in the world. They know how to swing the club. They know how to do, you know, they know all the mechanics around golf. Why do you think they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars a year for their coaching? It's exactly what I explained with my personal trainer. It not only creates an accountability, but it's somebody that's gonna push you to the next level and it's going to be somebody that actually, you know, sees things that you don't from a perspective that you don't see them and it's gonna help elevate your game to the next level. So I just wanna really, really encourage you, never stop being coached. If you're passionate about something, always be seeking out somebody who has a different perspective or somebody who is on a different level that you wanna get to and pay that person to coach you, okay? Pay that person to coach you because here's what's gonna happen. It's going to elevate you too closer to that level and then at some point, you know, what they're saying or what they're teaching may no longer really have a huge impact because you've heard it over and over and over or you've accomplished some of the things that they've created for you and now it's time to go find another coach, okay? So never stop finding coaches. Never stop elevating your game. Never stop finding, looking and searching for that individual that's gonna take you to the next level. Trading is the ultimate game of mental discipline and mindset. And so even if you feel like you, maybe you're a new trader, maybe you're still looking to master a strategy. So, you know, let's use the Iron Duck as an example, one of our strategies that we've created at Navigation Trading. You know, maybe you're still trying to understand that. So, what you could do, instead of going out and hiring somebody, what you could do is you could just continue to dive deeper into the Iron Duck strategy. Watch the course that we've created on this step-by-step video course. Watch that over and over and over again until you can almost memorize and repeat what I'm saying on a verbatim basis and you can set those trades up in your sleep because you've done it so many times, so many repetitions and you don't have to risk money doing it. You can paper trade it. You can do it in a simulation account. You can just set it up in the Analyze tab and think or swim and do it over and over and over on different symbols and get to understand how different symbols work with different strike prices available and all the things that go into that strategy. And then you can post your trade ideas in the Trade Hacker community. We have a specific channel for Iron Ducks. You can start posting there. There's been some amazing conversations going on with some of the individuals about little tweaks and little things that they're doing with their Iron Duck strategies that they think could be a big benefit over time on their profit and loss. You know, it all started with one individual posting a question about the management of this strategy and then somebody else jumped in and then I jumped in and then somebody else jumped in and now it's become this thread of thoughts around different ways of laddering into the strategy and utilizing other strategies as hedges in conjunction with the Iron Duck strategy and it's created this whole other concept of how to trade the strategy and that's a form of coaching, okay? That you don't have to necessarily hire someone. I would suggest you pay somebody because like I said, it's gonna give you that even a significant more intention but one of the ways of doing it is using other people around you to help coach you to take you to that next level to see things that you don't see. Those who stop seeking coaching stop growing. Let me say that again. If you stop seeking coaching, then you stop growing in whatever field you're in and if you're at a point in life where you don't wanna grow in anything, well, then I guess that's okay, but that's just, that's not me. So I would really highly encourage you to continue to find coaching. It's, I can't be more passionate. I can't be more adamant about continuing to grow, continuing to coach because it just, it creates, as humans, we always feel best when we're in momentum, when we're growing. If we get to the point where we're feeling stagnant, we're bored, that's when things like depression or anxiety start to set in and there's so much of that in our society. And I think one of the biggest ways to combat that is to just continue finding things that you love, continue finding passion, continue growing in those different fields and that's gonna solve a ton of these societal issues with depression and anxiety. So I hope these thoughts were helpful. If you wanna be part of the navigation trading community, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. We call it the trade hacker community. There's hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis, not only about the mindset part of trading, but sharing trade ideas with the sole purpose of helping each other become better traders. I look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.