10. Leave Your Ego At The Door
Beginning traders almost without exception come into the forex market with unrealistic expectations. Whether that relates to the profit they expect to make, how long they expect it will take to make that money, or the steps required before they will achieve the success they desire.
But soon enough aspiring forex traders find out they will not make as much money as they expect, and it will take longer than they expect, and the road to success will be much bumpier than they anticipated.
The primary problem is that our ego is attached to our expectations, our ideas and our projections of how we have succeeded in the past, and the market won’t act in a way that will support your expectations and projections.
What the market will do is show up your limitations, and it will mirror back your faults and prejudices. It will make you keenly aware that there are things about yourself and about the market which you don’t know, and it will often do it in a way that is demoralising.
If you approach the market with expectations (which is entirely natural), then you are bound to be frustrated and disappointed by the process. This is fine, and actually a benefit to trading the market, because it may be one of the biggest reasons a small percentage of people succeed in trading.
The fact is that if you are not willing to face yourself squarely and fairly with all your warts and limitations then you may not achieve profitability in trading.
Did you know you have over 14 cognitive bias that impede your logical perception of reality and the operation of your mind? If that is true then most of what you think you know is likely to be incorrect.
The market doesn’t exist to inflate your ego, or support your perceptions of yourself. If anything it will show you how little you really know. Just because you succeeded in your previous ventures, that doesn’t mean you will easily become the trader you wish to be.
If you leave your ego at the door and use the journey to challenge yourself, be humble and learn, then the trading journey will likely open your mind up to things which you had previously not known beyond the market.
Keep in mind that you cannot fight the market, and the market will not reflect your ego back to you. Rather it will most likely help you realise the folly of its ways.
You don’t even know where your next thought is coming from, so don’t expect that little identity you have constructed from all those random thoughts to be anything more than a plaything of the market.
