Goals.

Everything starts when we are kids. The way our parents educate us and deal with us, is the same way we will treat ourselves as adults. After our parents, another big relationship in life is with a lover. And although they don’t formally teach us as our parents did, we still learn lessons through loving and being loved. The significant personal relationships throughout the course of our lives all contribute to building us as people. And this person that you have become constantly talks to yourself the way you learned from others.

"Our self-talk is born of just such early life conversations: we internalize the voices from significant relationships."*

The way my parents raised me will never help me to be a good trader, to make money. And now as an adult I have a lot to wish for about my husband, that he could be more supportive while I work at being a trader, but trading is my choice. Everything we bring to our lives from our family homes and our lovers shapes us, whether it’s going to help us as traders or not. If you choose to be a trader you have to decide what part of your programming is good for you and what is not. Since I started to coach myself I’ve realized that this is the only help I can get. Work that I put towards myself is the best thing I can do to improve my trading.

"When we make goal setting an ongoing feature of our self-coaching means, we continually construct opportunities for powerful, self-affirming emotional experiences."*

Successful people usually have one thing in common, that they’ve gotten into the habit of focusing on goals.  A few of them were lucky enough to learn this practice from their parents or other loved ones, but everybody else has had to learn it much later in life. Goal setting for me was like understanding how to learn from losing trades. I finally “got” the idea of goal setting last year, but it was like pulling teeth to wrap my head around how it works. Why? Well, because I wanted to achieve something, but I wasn’t doing anything to get there. I didn’t know how to do it. I wanted to be a good trader so I suppose that was a goal, but I had no idea what to do with that goal.

"Your goals should set yourself up for success and a building of confidence."*

It is easy to say... a little harder to do. It took me a while before I started to set goals for the day, week, month, or even the year. It started, of course, all thanks to this book. I started to set positive goals for the things I would like to achieve, and I also started to check my progress with each part of my goals. This positivity is the key. A goal must be positive because it is meant to build confidence if you see progress.

But, the progress is not about money. They say, money will come, stay positive and focused, go with your plan and rules, and money will come. And this of course was not easy for me to get either. Simple goals like waiting patiently for your setup, taking notes consistently, and never trading before the news, were all small steps that got me started.  Similar goals can work for you as well as a platform for learning how to use goal setting.  Day by day I learned from my goals as I have learned from the relationships in my life.  Each smaller goal that I’ve set and achieved has led me to plan my next bigger goal, and they all continue to help me form and follow my trading rules to continue achieving these goals.

"It is not enough to set goals; you need ways of tracking your progress toward those goals and feeding that information into future goals."*

*LESSON 6 The Daily Trading Coach 101 Lessons for Becoming Your Own Trading Psychologist by Steenbarger, Brett N.