If you want to overcome your fear and achieve success in trading, firstly you have to know and understand what fear is; and where this fear comes from.
Fear is simply because you are not living with life, you are living in your mind. Your fear is always thinking about what’s going to happen next. That means your fear is always about that which does not exist. If your fear is about the non-existent, your fear is hundred percent imaginary. If you are afraid of or suffering anything which does not exist, it amounts to insanity.
Most of the people are always suffering either what happened yesterday or what may happen tomorrow. So, your suffering is always about that which does not exist, simply because you’re not rooted in reality, you’re always rooted in your mind. Mind is – one part of it is memory, another part of it is imagination. Both of them are in one way imagination, because both of them don’t exist right now. You’re lost in your imagination, that’s the basis of your fear. If you were rooted in reality, there would be no fear.
What fear does is it puts boundaries around you. It is because of fear that you build boundaries for your actions to be taken all the time. These boundaries restrict you taking even right action at right time. Of course, boundaries are necessary to protect you from taking unnecessary risky actions for safety purpose. But what is the meaning of those boundaries which do not allow to take even right action at right time? Such boundaries are nothing but the hurdles in your path of life.
You must decide whether you have come here on this planet to experience life or to avoid life. If you have come to experience life, one thing that is needed is intensity. If you do not have intensity you will experience a meager life. The moment you use fear as a tool to protect yourself, your intensity will go down. Once it goes down, your ability to experience life is gone. In that case you become a psychological case. You will never experience anything fantastic and ecstatic because when you are fearful, you will not have a sense of enjoying feelings. You can’t sing, you can’t dance, you can’t laugh, you can’t even cry, you can’t do anything that to do in life. You can only sit here and grieve about life and all the risks of life.
If you are constantly aware that all the other things are passing things and I am fundamentally life, you will remain intense. There is no other way because life does not know any other way to be. Life is always intense. It is only full of thoughts and emotions, which are deceptive.
When it comes to looking at the nature of your thought or your emotion for that matter, any number of times in your life, it has made you believe so many things and after little bit of time it makes you feel like a fool for what you believed yesterday. Today your emotions tell you that this is the most wonderful man, then tomorrow your emotions tell you that this is the most horrible man, and both seemed to be 100% true. So, both your thought and emotion are tremendous instruments of deception. They can make you believe just about anything.
If you look at it carefully, what is fear about? Your fear is never about what has happened. It is always about what may happen. It is always about the future, which is yet to happen, but has not yet happened. That means, it is not in existence. So, being fearful means, you are suffering that which does not exist. You become fearful while taking actions only because you are thinking negatively for the results which are yet to happen in future, but do not exist at present.
Fear is not a product of life. Fear is a product of a hallucinatory mind. You suffer that which does not exist because you are rooted not in reality, but rooted in your mind which is constantly eating up on the past and excreting into the future. In fact. you don’t actually know anything about future. You just take a piece of the past, apply make-up on it and think it is future instead of present reality.
Of course, you can plan your tomorrow, but you cannot live in present as your tomorrow. And that creates fear. The only thing you can do about this is, you come down to reality. If you just respond to what is there right now and not imagine something that does not exist, there is no room for fear. Once the hallucination is gone, where is fear? You will not imagine something that does not exist, you will simply respond to what exists right now.
At its core, fear is rooted in uncertainty. Just think how you feel when you have complete certainty about outcome of your efforts. In that case, fear disappears, dissipates, and you feel calm and confident. If you act for some destination and fix the destination knowing the risk involved from what you already know, you are ensured that nothing new will going to happen. Either you catch the destination or you may fail. You feel calm in both the cases.
Imagine you are feeling fearful due to recent losses, but a magical trading fairy appears and informs you that you will experience some early losses followed by significant gains in coming days. Instantly, your fear vanishes, and you are excited about the prospect of profitable time to come. This is because you have certainty about what is going to happen in future.
In fact, there is no magical trading fairy. Confidence, self-confidence is that magical trading fairy. There are traders who incur losses, but do not experience fear. They have one common element: confidence. They are so confident in their strategy that they are not worried about losses. They have full faith that they will find a way to earn with their strategy adapting to the market conditions. They trade fearlessly because they know confidently that if their trade goes wrong and incur losses, they will earn in the next trades. They accept losses with smiling face and go ahead for next trade with confidence.
The main element creating fear by shaking confidence is certainty. Certainty is the antidot to fear, but it is not possible or practical to have complete certainty in trading. Instead, uncertainty in the breeding ground for fear. Uncertainty creates doubt and worry, and accumulation of all these doubts and worries results into anxiety and fear.
To overcome fear, you need to identify the questions that are causing uncertainty. These questions would be: why you are losing, what you are doing wrong, what your emotions are there while trading, what the level of ego you have for accepting reality. Some of these questions may be legitimate, while some may be flawed or presumptive. By digging deep into these questions and uncovering the underlying flaws, you can address well your fear and move towards success.
As a trader, you need to embrace uncertainty as a core element of your professional activity. But embracing uncertainty alone is not enough. You also need to identify and correct flaws that are proving hurdles for certainty which you have not yet attained.
To overcome the fear of failure:
Think about possible outcomes
Focus on what you can control
Perfectionism does not exist
Consider positive thinking.
Imagine the worst cases.
Try to visualize things
Start with small goals
Focus on journey
Accept the mistakes.
Learn from failures
