Trading on Target: How to Cultivate a Winner's State of Mind

HOW IT ALL BEGINS

Roy’s own confinement in the perfection trap happened so young that he never had a chance to escape. His parents were critical and demanding from the day that Roy gained consciousness. Roy could never please them. Regardless of how hard he tried to be perfect, his parents would always find something with which to find fault. To make matters worse, they also withheld praise and approval. The result was that Roy learned at the most critical point in the development of his worldview that the most important thing in life was to achieve perfection.

Here are six of the major paths by which traders arrive in the perfection trap:

1. Perfection-demanding parents This, of course, is Roy’s background. But it is a common one. The faces may be different, but the result is the same. Parents are fearful of their own inadequacy at not being perfect. Since they were probably raised in an equally critical and approval-withholding environment, they do not see the harm they are doing in repeating the pattern on their innocent children.

2. Fear of failure and loss Some traders arrive at the point of demanding perfection in their trading after experiencing the pain of loss. Rather than dealing with those feelings and working their way through them, they foreswear ever experiencing that kind of pain again. But, the only way to never again experience a trading loss is to become the perfect trader. Each time the trader experiences another loss he is even more determined to be less vulnerable ...