Enable Yourself to Become Aware

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.   Francis Spufford

If you show a stock chart to someone who knows virtually nothing about graphs and the financial markets, what do you suppose they see? Basically, they would see a confusing collection of lines, numbers, and so on and at most they would see some sort of wavy pattern. 

Your range of awareness is contextual. In order to be aware of anything, you must understand the nature of what you are dealing with. Your subconscious mind can only make sense of that which it is programmed to make sense of. That is why knowledge is so very important. In this example the subconscious will simply not take in very much information - it just doesn't know what to do with it. 

The biggest block to awareness is the often-inadvertent programming of our minds. If we instruct our subconscious, that something is unimportant, not to take in certain kinds of

information, then it won't. It will be impossible to be fully aware of what is occurring. When you aren't getting the results that you want, something is wrong - there is a contradiction somewhere in your mind blocking you. Probably the biggest block to achieving, is the limitations to awareness that we inadvertently place in our minds, through the acceptance of negative associations and beliefs. Conversely, positive associations and beliefs enable awareness. 

You and only you are responsible for the results you realize. Super-trader and trainer Dr. Van K. Tharp explains it this way: 

"The best thing and investor (or anyone) can do, when things go wrong, is to determine how he or she produced those results. Now, I don't mean that you should blame yourself for mistakes either. I mean that at some point in time, for any situation, you made a choice that produced those results. Determine what that choice point was and give yourself other options to take when you encounter a similar choice point in the future. Change the decision at similar choice points in the future and you will change the results you get. And by imagining doing so now you can make it easy to select those alternatives in the future." Dr. Van K. Tharp, The Psychology of Trading, from Market Wizards, by Jack D. Schwager 

It is extremely tempting to blame our mistakes, failures, and pain on other people or events. If, however, you continually remind yourself that they are yours and are a result of your action, then you enable yourself to become aware of what caused them. Mistakes, failures, and pain are a part of life, and we all want to avoid them. But you can't avoid them by denial. If you choose to accept them as a part of life then they lose their power over us. They become OK, acceptable, normal, even a positive opportunity to learn, and grow. 

In Reminiscence of a Stock Operator, Jesse Livermore said, "I don't mind making mistakes, what I don't like is being wrong." What I believe he meant was that making an error is okay, but what isn't okay is making an error, not admitting it, not learning from it, and continuing to do it.