A Journal For Your Thoughts : A Millionaire’s Habit
As a trader, you need a thought journal, apart from your trading journal, especially when you are just beginning.
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Emulating successful people has always been part of the journey for those aiming for success.
Many of the world’s greatest minds had a Thought Journal, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Thomas Edison to name a few.
Everyone needs a constructive way to process their emotions.
Writing about your thoughts is a good way to both let go of your emotions, and to reflect on how you are feeling at certain times, from feeling depressed to feeling euphoric.
Thought journals really help you by opening up your emotions, exploring them more closely and identifying the triggers so that you can learn to better manage your feelings.
Why a separate thought journal rather than just a trading journal?
Well in a trading journal you write specifically about your trades and your mindset during those trades and your entry and risk management, probably details about how you could have entered or exited a bit more efficiently.
In short, you are speaking mostly about everything related to your trades.
Furthermore, it’s a great way to collect data and plan ahead.
A thought journal that is separate from your trades is for you.
As a human being.
To not only assess the trading aspect of your life but every aspect of your mind and personality.
It is very clear that all successful people share a lot of similar traits when it comes to their personalities.
10 common personality traits of a self-made millionaires
1. Passion
They are passionate because they love what they do.
It’s as simple as that. If you love what you are doing, you are working toward your goals.
It’s not your job, it’s your life.
One of the most important ingredients of success.
All the people who are the best at what they do, absolutely love what they do.
It’s why they can spend hours doing it.
2. Discipline
Focusing their energy on the goal and skipping over obstacles that come on the way is very dear to successful people.
They have a routine which they stick to, which creates this very focused and clear approach to the goal.
Defining a clear set of rules and following them, consistently always leads to progress.
3. Determination
Failures are learning experiences which every successful person has.
It is the grit and determination to pick yourself after a failure and to learn from it rather than be bogged down by it, that separates the meat from the chaff.
Being focused on the vision and just carry on, no matter what, really helps confidence and helps the vision to manifest.
4. Creativity
It is said that our conditioning and the socially structured systems actually work very hard to kill any creative abilities that a human being actually possesses.
So in return the trait of creativity becomes rare and scarce.
Those that possess this trait and know how to wield it well are always able to wriggle their way out of any situation as they have the ability to think originally.
5. Competitiveness
Whatever it is you say, in the world of business and finance, it’s a dog eat dog world.
No matter how much progress you think you are making, there is someone always trying to get ahead of you.
It takes a very competitive nature to keep trying to relentlessly stay ahead.
You will never hear a story of a self made billionaire that did not have a strong competitive spirit.
Remember that ” Bulls make money, bears make money and dogs get slaughtered.”
6. Open Mindedness
Being open to new ways of thinking is definitely what keeps a successful person ahead.
Even if it challenges their own belief systems and they way they are conditioned to think.
The world, it’s trends and it’s demands are always shifting and evolving.
One of the biggest challenges is to stay in tune with what is going on, and what is required to stay ahead of the trend.
Having an open minded attitude really helps with that.
7. Confidence
There is a saying, doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
This is absolutely true in it’s entirely.
You will never meet a fearful and self doubting successful person.
Having confidence in your thoughts, vision and decisions is a key component to being successful.
Remember that scared money does not make any money …
Imagine your trading plan is a piece of glass that only exists in the realm of thoughts. Confidence reinforces that glass and doubt, puts cracks on it.
8. Curiosity
It is the mother of innovation and the root cause of discovery and growth.
Without curiosity the world would never have been what it is today.
Only your curious nature will drive you towards innovation and trigger our civilization towards growth.
It is only the curious nature that drove man towards innovation and our civilization towards growth.
Without innovation, stagnation begins to rule, so it is essential to stay curious and feed ones curiosity.
9. Communication Skills
Success has everything to do with unique, unreplicable ideas that bring value into people’s lives.
Yes the ideas are important but without a good communicator to transmit the idea to others, these ideas will never gather steam as there won’t be a team passionate enough that is resonating with the idea.
Good communication skills reflect clarity.
If you are clear about something you can speak about it for hours.
Being clear with your vision really helps you in manifesting it.
10. Positivity
Nothing exhumes success more than a persons way to turn every difficult and negative situation into a positive one.
This trait alone is the defining factor in whether you can really go far in this race we call life.
Positivity not only attracts a positive outcome for ones visions, but it also attracts other positive people. This aura of positivity is key to manifesting a successful future.
You should never allow you to fall into negative spiral, neither in a “lack of positivity”. You have to always be positive. At every moment of your life and of your trading career.
These are the attributes that you need to become truly successful.
For this, you will be able to analyze your current stream of thoughts, your strengths, weaknesses and the areas which you can work on.
The millionaire trader does not think about money
Most traders have a strong desire to get a grip on the market.
They cannot accept losing money.
But the truth is … a successful trader is not blinded by money.
He stays relaxed because he or she is committed and possesses a strong will to let the probabilities play themselves out.
Money has no impact on him and therefore does not paralyze him.
Trading is only about executing a trading system flawlessly.
Indeed, it’s well known that:
- Poor traders are money-oriented. Money and emotions make their decision making.
- Rich traders are process-oriented. They are not just slaves of money. They just execute their system considering the signals they receive.
The millionaire trader practices Emotional Discipline
You will have realized that real money is made through:
- intelligent exits: Never cut a winner too soon. Do not hold a position until the market reverses on you … Listen to the whispers of your trading system.
- your ability to make a decision based on technical analysis only. It makes you control the emotions of your decision making.
Your job as a trader is to be aware of your emotions and their effects on your decision making.
Fix the content of your mind to perceive reality accurately!
You start the healing process of your mind by realizing that your emotions are determined by the values you choose, consciously or subconsciously.
Thinking like a millionaire trader will make you a better human being
Earlier, we mentioned the need to work on self-development to succeed in markets.
Your “thought journal” is a strong tool to develop your internal learning by recognizing what you are doing, and when you are doing it.
Why? Just imagine the trader who fought a trend for a whole week. His frustration and anger make him lose a lot of money.
Now imagine he is using his frustration to examine his past through his diary, he will acknowledge and accept his emotions, giving them “shape”, a free expression.
Being aware of your emotions allows you to conquer yourself and take control of your inner dialogue.
Not only a trader but also a person.
Your new inner trader will ripple in every part of your life …
And you will be able to:
- let go of situations that triggered self-destructive thought patterns. In the markets, but also in life.
- Stay in tune with the market simply because you are balanced, you can observe greater objectivity.
- Create consistency by eliminating the emotions interfering with your trading decisions.
Millionaire’s journals literally created the modern age.
Thomas Edison was one of the most productive inventors of all time. Alone, he was awarded 2,332 patents. Many of them continue to affect our lives like the electric generator, storage battery, and motion pictures.
His inventions literally made our modern age possible. Without improved telegraph, telephone, and electric power systems and the ability to record, store, and transmit sound and images, there would be no Internet or computers.
Edison’s success did not come out of nowhere, and neither did it spring from a single moment of inspiration.
His success was the result of a deliberate approach in changing the world.
He made the choice to change the world. Like Edison, you can now make the choice to be a strong trader.
Throughout Edison’s life, journaling was a consistent practice, capturing not only the his inventions but also his mind at work. He wrote 3,500-plus journals with more than 5 million pages of notes …
Let your emotions go using emotional writing
Dr. James PENNEBAKER, a professor at the University of Austin in Texas led to research about therapeutic journaling. He explains that labelling emotions and acknowledgement has a positive effect on people.
Everyone needs a constructive way to process their emotions.
Exploring them more closely and identifying their triggers will allow you to get better with emotional discipline.
By allowing you to manage your emotions, you can ensure that you are aligned with a millionaire’s mindset. And that your thoughts are aligned with your goal.
In conclusion, writing is fundamentally an organizational system: “Keeping a journal, according to Dr Pennebaker, helps to organize an event in our mind, and make sense of trauma. When we do that [writing our emotions], our working memory improves, since our brains are freed from the enormously taxing job of processing that experience, and we sleep better.”
Some notes for your Thought Journal
You have a limited capacity for processing information.
Your thought journal acts as a repository for all the valuable information you analyse and process in your everyday life.
And you know that when you experience stress, your thoughts become less important.
Updating your thought journal will offload your “life-stress”. You will approach the market with a fresher mindset.
Here are a few examples of what it could contain:
- Your happiness level today,
- The quality of your sleep,
- The quality of your family interaction
- Whether you’re able to follow your workout routine,
- The external noise in your mind (no arguments with your family, all the bills paid,
- Your level of focus,
- The will to make this day a better day than yesterday,
- Being grateful,
- Some words about your food diet,
- Finally, a reflection towards the ideal life you want to live
Start a thought journal today. Thinking like a millionaire will help you to become one yourself. This is the path to trading successfully… Update your two journals as often as Edison used to do it. Be Edison in your life to boost your trading career.
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