 What's shaking tradehacker nation? In this episode, I want to talk about why willpower does not work. 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 tradehacker mindset. All right, so let's talk about why willpower does not work. And if my audio sounds funny, I am in a hotel room in Des Moines, Iowa, getting ready to coach some baseball here for one of my sons. And I just had this thought and something that I've been thinking about recently and I thought it might be helpful for you all. And so what I want to talk about is willpower and why willpower does not work. Us as humans, we are not necessarily designed to do things that are uncomfortable, right? And so one of the things that I think we do to ourselves is we get mad at ourselves or we beat ourselves up about, you know, why are you so weak? You know, why can't you just do this thing that you know you should be doing, whether it's procrastinating or discipline in our trading or any other aspect in life. And this whole concept kind of came back to the front because I noticed a book on my bookshelf and it's a book that I read about 15 years ago, the author is Pete Greider and the book is called, the title of the book is called Following Through. And I actually, so I read this book about 15 years ago and I recently picked it back up and started reading it and it really refreshed my memory on some of the concepts that really helped me in a previous career to excel and it had to do with what you need to do to actually follow through on things that you're trying to accomplish and you cannot just leave it to willpower, you can't leave it to the old, oh, I know I should do that, I'm gonna start doing that someday. One of these days I'm going to follow through on that thing I wanna do, right? Because what happens is next thing you know, 10 years goes by and you still haven't done it. So the concept of this book is about changing your environment for you to follow through on something, for you to make a change in your habits, for you to make a change in your life, you actually have to change your environment, change your environment, change your life, change your environment, change your habits. You can't leave it up to just us as humans to make the change, you have to change the environment around you. Here's a pretty simple example of something that I did recently. So I have been very active working out, chasing my kids around, all that kind of stuff and really realized that I'm not drinking enough water. I was getting tired, I was feeling dehydrated and if you think about it, so I'm sitting there trading all day, writing, recording, doing everything I do with navigation, trading in the community, all this is happening at my computer, at my desk in my office, right? And so for me to get a refill of water, I would have to get up and walk all the way down the hall to the kitchen to get some water, right? There's a refrigerator there, there's a filtered water system, all that stuff. So I'd have to go there. Now, when I say that, you're probably thinking, well, that's pretty simple, right? I mean, just get up and go get some. What's the big deal? Well, it shouldn't have been a big deal, but the fact is that little piece of resistance of me just having to get up and lose focus in what I was doing, because A, when I'm trading, a lot of times I'm zoned in, I'm very focused, or if I'm in the middle of writing or recording or whatever it is, just that little bit of focus of getting up, going to get some water, coming back, trying to refocus, that can actually burn a decent amount of time. So by just cutting out that little issue of having to get up and go to the kitchen, what I did is I got my own water machine right there in my office, right next to the desk, it's one of those water dispensers with the big blue bottle, right? The Kulligan machines. And so that's sitting now right next to my desk. So instead of me, when I need some water, getting up and having to go down the hall all the way to the kitchen and breaking my focus, now all I have to do is reach over, fill it up, and I have a nice, cool, refreshing glass of water right there that's convenient for me. Okay, so just that one little thing has created a situation where now I drink so much more water. And the lasting effects of that, not only am I more focused, not only do I sleep better, not only am I more hydrated, but a lot of people don't realize dehydration is the cause of a lot of mental and physical health issues. And if they just drink more water, it would take care a lot of those. I'm actually going to do a podcast all about the mental benefits of hydration and some things that I've learned along those lines. But we'll save that for another episode. But that's just an example of how I changed my environment in a small way that's gonna have a huge impact just on my health and my life and my convenience and focus and everything else, okay? So that's one example. The other example as it relates to trading is how can you change your environment around trading to make yourself a better trader? One way you can do that that I think is a huge deal is to start journaling your trades, to start documenting every single trade you make and not only on a spreadsheet, just the, here's what I entered it, here's how I exited it, here's my profit, here's my loss, not just that, but I'm talking about documenting how you feel when you take the trade, your, how did you sleep the night before, and really documenting all the stuff when you trade. Now, I personally hate that stuff. I hate documenting, I hate journaling, I hate the aspect of spending all that time tracking trades. So what did I do? Well, I started navigation trading. That's how I changed my environment. So now I have accountability. I can't, I have a community of members, I have thousands of people visit our website where we post publicly every single trade that we make so that they see it. I did that, I mean, that's, I didn't start navigation trading just so I would journal my trades, but you can see how creating this environment, creating navigation trade and creating this accountability to make sure that I had to document, that I had to track every single trade, it created a whole new environment that now it's like, if I don't document my trades, it's almost like I'm not breathing, right? It's like, it's that kind of subconscious to where it's just something that I do now, whereas before it was something that I hated doing and I would do it for a few weeks and then I'd stop doing it. And I'd start again and then I'd stop again. And I was always kind of beating myself, like if you're gonna be a successful trader, you have to do this. And so what I did is I created an environment that made me do it. And when I first started, I was just posting, I was posting like on a blog and then I started getting people that I knew following and then other people found me and that's kind of how navigation trading was born because I started getting a following by just documenting and posting my trades. And that's how navigation kind of first was initiated and kind of started. So that was kind of an unintentional change of my environment, but it's a very good example of how changing my environment created a situation that allowed me to be disciplined in documenting my trades. One more example, so as a trader, you're obviously sitting in front of your computer a lot, which I was, so I'm writing, I'm trading, I'm recording videos for our courses and that's all done in front of a computer. And so I was literally sitting in front of a computer for eight, 10, sometimes 12 hours a day. And that's just not really good on the old back, right? I started getting a little bit of back pain, started to develop the, what do you call it, spare tire, developing some love handles around the waist area. And it's just, it's not good for your physical health. So what I found myself doing is I would find myself saying, okay, every 20 minutes, I'm gonna get up and go walk around or every 30 minutes, I'm gonna get up and do some pushups or do some jumping jacks or do something to get me out of that seat so that I'm not just sitting there for eight, 10, 12 straight hours. Well, guess what happened? Nothing, nothing happened, that never happened, right? I'd still just sat there, like I was talking about with the water thing, I would just get focused and forget and get lazy or whatever it is. So how did I change my environment to create a situation where I wasn't just sitting there all day? Well, what I did is I went and bought myself a standing desk. So now when I go in, it does raise and lower. So there are times when I lower it where I can sit down, but the majority of my day now is done standing. And you wouldn't believe the difference in how my posture is, in how my back feels, starting to lose a little, still got a little bit of love handles around there, but starting to lose them. And I just, I feel better, I don't feel, so I started to feel kind of hunched over, like I said, back pain and that kind of stuff. And so I've created an environment that's going to change my life for the better. It's going to change my habits and it's going to change my life. So the whole basis of this is don't try to rely on willpower. If you're struggling with something in your trading, if you're struggling with some type of discipline or some type of thing that you're trying to accomplish, whether it's maybe you keep taking position sizes too big or maybe you start keep taking trades that are not high quality setups or you start taking, you know, you're just trying to force trades because of some reason. Find a way to change your environment and you're going to change your results. Find a way to change your environment and you're going to change the habits that are going to relate and become better results. And so that's the message for today. I just, I had this on my mind. I'm rereading this book. I would encourage you to go get this book as well. Again, it's called Following Through by Pete Greiter and hope that's helpful because I think it's a huge deal when you can create something that's going to make a positive impact on your life going forward. And once it becomes a habit, then it just becomes part of who you are. You don't have to think about it. It's like blinking, it's like breathing. It's like, you know, it just becomes a part of who you are. And this is not just for trading. I mean, this could be for any aspect of your life that you're trying to improve, whether it's your relationship with your kids, your relationship with your spouse, running your business or your job or whatever it is. If there's something that you are struggling with that you keep procrastinating to do or something that you know you should be doing but you're not, whether it's your health or your finances or whatever it is, this can help in any aspect of your life. And that's what we want to do, right? We always want to be growing. We always want to be getting better. And this is one way to help you do that. Hopefully this was helpful. If you guys have any questions, please post in the community. We've got a community of trade hackers called the Trade Hacker Community and you just go to community.navigationtrading.com. You can join for free. There's not only hundreds of people and they're interacting every day about the mindset of trading but also sharing trade ideas with the sole purpose of helping each other become better traders. We hope to see you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.