The Most Important Question You Can Ask Yourself as a Trader

The reason why I decided to name my Forex education business Disciplined FX is that discipline is the trading skill that leads all other trading skills. Even if you have an extraordinary knowledge of candlestick patterns or indicators, your knowledge is worth nothing if you can’t stick with a strategy or take your stop losses.

Thus, I believe the most important thing you can do to become profitable is to hone your trading discipline and learn to navigate the emotions that arise while you trade. Be sure to subscribe below for more trading discipline tutorials, prop trading tips, and lessons sent to your inbox every week! every week.

So for today’s tutorial, I want to share with you the most important question you could possibly ask yourself while you trade.

By asking yourself this question daily, you can start to see the flaws in your trading mistakes and discover a path to profit.

This question is so powerful that I can’t believe I’m freely sharing it with you here.

So, are you ready to learn one of the most psychologically impactful questions you can ask yourself?

Okay, here it is.

Every day you need to ask yourself: “What am I resisting?”

A long-form of this question could also be: “As I’m learning about trading, what advice am I resisting?”

<<want more trading discipline tips and strategies? Read The Seven Habits of Successful Day Traders>>

A 2-Step Approach to Apply This Question to Your Trading

You might be wondering what this means and how to use it.

I’m going to give you a two-step approach to putting this question into practice. By the way, this 2-step advice is not only your path to forex profits but also to overcoming any problem you have in life. Here, let me show you how to survive not only day trading but also the postmodern world:

1. find out what the people who have what you want did to get it and what they continue to do to keep it.

You need to stop browsing for information and start studying for education.

If you want to day trade indices, find people who successfully trade indices and learn what they learned and do what they do to achieve and maintain profitability on those instruments. If you want to pass a ftmo challenge, then find traders who have passed the challenge and find ways to trade similarly to them.

The important outcome of step one is that you generate a structure in your mind of what successful people think and do to achieve success.

2. Start turning the focal point back on yourself and discover what you’re doing that is preventing you from thinking and doing those same things.

Maybe your favorite trader is telling you to journal your trades or limit your trades to only one a day and yet you don’t want to journal your trades or you keep sticking around the charts to take a second or third trade in a day.

If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to keep getting the same results which is basically the same as saying that you’re not going to change or make progress if you hold onto limitations that aren’t serving you.

So what I want you to do is to start noticing the thinking and actions that you’re resisting. If you cringe at the idea of performing a backtest on the 5th strategy you’ve bought online, despite every profitable trader and their french bulldog telling you to perform a backtest, then you’ve found something you should lean into and start doing.

Usually the actions we resist involve some kind of laziness and fear about performing the action.

Fear that we’ll put in all this work only to watch the strategy fail.

To overcome fear, you need to wedge a space between the emotion and your impulsive resolve to avoid action.

Psychologists call this activity of externalizing and reflecting on emotions “cognitive defusion”. We want to start seeing emotions as something that exists independently of ourselves, something we can learn from and choose to deny if it’s not helping us. Instead, we can choose to replace the emotion with courage.

When this happens, counselors recommend handling fear by counting down to action. This means counting down backwards from five and on one you do the thing you don’t want to do. So if you’re trading and you don’t want to take your stop loss and your hand is being drawn to your computer mouse as if by some magnetic force, count down, 5 , 4, 3, 2, 1, and sit still while you let your stop loss order get filled. 

The other thing that this question does is that it helps you activate a thoughtful speaking voice in your mind that says YOU get to run the show – not your feelings.

By starting an internal conversation with your emotions, by examining them first instead of just acting impulsively, you create enough space to make a choice.

One of my favorite movies of all time is V for Vendetta. The movie takes place in a dystopian universe where the fascist government is forcefully hauling people away. Natalie Portman’s character ends up in such a concentration camp and while confined in a cell, she finds a note left by a woman named Valerie who was taken away and unjustly killed for having a relationship with another woman. In her note she writes, “Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An Inch, it is small and it is fragile, but it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away.”

Now, this feels a bit ridiculous to include such a powerful message in a comparatively inconsequential tutorial on trading discipline, but what Valerie means by protecting that inch is that we must never give up our integrity.

When you decide to become not only a responsible and disciplined trader but also a responsible and disciplined person in many aspects of your life, you need to be able to have enough integrity and choice over your values and intentions to put aside fear and do the hard but necessary thing anyway.

The way that happens is by not reactively acting on your emotions but instead creating a talking space in your mind where the best you can have veto power over impulsive instinct.

So by asking the question “what am I resisting?” you both examine the areas your fears have placed limitations and also begin the process of regularly reflecting on your own thoughts.

Reflection is the ultimate tool to be your own trading coach and learn from your unique trading experience.

You need to be able to ask yourself hard questions and act on what you discover, otherwise, you will never grow as a day trader.

So now that you’re fired up, take out a sticky note or piece of paper and write this down: “What am I resisting?” Place it somewhere you will see it when you trade, likely on your desk or computer screen. Ask yourself this question every trading session and you will discover far more useful information about yourself as a trader than anything I or other trading mentors can share with you on the internet.

I hope you can see just how valuable this activity can be. If you found this lesson motivating and insightful be sure to subscribe for more trading discipline tutorials, prop trading tips, and lessons on using mechanical strategies. I wish you all the best of strength and luck, and I’ll see you in the markets! Take care!