Motivating Yourself

Always do your best. 
What you plant now, 
you will harvest later. 
Og Mandino

When everything is going according to plan and you are "on", you are in the most positive and highly motivated state you can attain. Your mind is set on it's path and you are in a state of total concentration and focus. Your mind is totally committed to what you are doing. The bad news however: This is not a state of mind you can just choose at will.

In any endeavor, the process of growth and achievement has four key elements: Goals; Actions; Awareness; and Change. Each one of these factors is crucial, but the foundation for the process is goals. Writing a few sentences or listing some things you'd like won't establish goals. Goals have no power until you experience them as real. You must experience them not as something you merely want, but as something you need to sustain life - like food.

Your mind is a supercomputer that you can program to experience a goal as a fundamental need. Then your mind (supercomputer) will do everything it can to drive you toward your goal, and the rest of the steps will follow much more easily: what you do, the output of your mind, it all depends on the input. The input is simply: what you perceive, how you process the information, how you look at reality with your conscious mind, and how you have trained or failed to train your subconscious mind to function. Free will really means that you can change the programming in your mind.

Emotions determine motivation. We are driven by two fundamental forces at the

emotional level, the desire to attain pleasure and the need to avoid pain. When we want something, is it the "thing" we really want? What we really want is the change we think it will cause in our mental and physical state of being, that makes us want what we want. People who desire to lose weight do not care much about the actual"fat cells". They want to change the way they feel about themselves. What they really want is to feel in control of their lives, to feel healthy and live longer, to feel more attractive to others, to feel more energetic and excited about life.

A profitable trading record can and often does have more losing trades than winning ones. If this is the case, then obviously the profits from the good trades must be larger than the losses from the more frequent losers. The most common error traders make is taking profits too early and allowing the loses to run to far. The reason is simple: at the time we are not motivated by the rules, we understand them but we don't realize them. Why do we do this? The need to avoid the pain of losing, and of being wrong drives us to deny rules we know to be right. To execute the rules is painful, but not executing them will increase your state of dissatisfaction and deplete your trading capital. I think upon self-examination, you will find some form of the pleasure/pain paradox is at work when you are having trouble moving towards your goals in your trading account and in life.

Just as we feed ourselves food everyday, we often need to feed our minds motivational food, to keep our focus, direction, and attitude. You can accomplish this with books, or very popular audio listening material. A Quote of the Day site might help as well