Preparing On The Sunny Day
"Here's a lesson to test your mind's mettle: take part of a week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantly in shabby clothes, and ask yourself if this is really the worst that you feared. It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead, for when Fortune is kind the soul can build defenses against her ravages. So it is that soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime, erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight and exhausting themselves under no attack so that when it comes they won't grow tired."
— Seneca, Moral Letters
Today's meditation certainly made me think about looking at this from a trading perspective.
Do you think you could spend one day per month, experiencing the effects of a bad trading situation?
Say you imagined that you had blown your trading bank (something I have done many times, mainly in my early trading years when learning and I'm sure most traders have done the same, at some point in their trading journey) and you only had a small £50 bank to try and re-build. Could you use a £50 trading bank one day per month, to feel how much more difficult and restricting it would be, compared to using the bank size that you regularly trade with?
That could be a challenge in itself and it could be needed at some point in the future, if you became reckless, over-confident, complacent, cocky, almost arrogant with your trading and ended up blowing your trading bank!
Perhaps using a small bank to trade one day per month, could be a timely reminder to experience what could happen if you don't stick to the rules/criteria for your strategies 100% of the time. If you fail to stay fully focused and "in the zone" every time that you trade, and fail to manage each and every trade fully to completion; it could turn into a reality!
Every day we need to be the best that we possibly can be! This means being fully prepared to make the right decisions as per our rules/criteria for our strategies and constantly practicing and striving to improve.
Would putting yourself in this kind of difficult situation one day per month, help with your mindset, patience and discipline moving forward?
"Preparing on the sunny day" could be food for thought!