Options Trading – How to boost your Self-confidence!

“The highly successful trader is a person of extreme self-confidence.” All of us students of options trading have heard that and have read it every trading book we’ve read.

OK. Fine.

But what if my confidence is a bit tarnished? What if I’m not naturally a highly confident person? What if I STARTED out with confidence, when I began to trade options, but, because of losses, my confidence level has begun to erode? (That’s only a natural human phenomenon, isn’t it?)

For those of us that take pride in the fact that we’re such good options studiers and good options students, we note the fact that there aren’t any ‘confidence schools’ out there for which we can sign up!

So, how, exactly, does one increase one’s self-confidence?

Here’s the challenge: confidence gaining has a built-in ‘catch 22.’ If you don’t have it, the only way you can get it is by accomplishing great things. But in order to accomplish great things, you must have lots of confidence.

The answers to this riddle are simple:

First, accept the fact that confidence is most felt and enjoyed at the conscious level of the mind. That’s the THINKING level and the ‘voices’ that come from that section of the mind are saying, “You can do it! You can do it! You’re terrific!”

Second, realize that though confidence also exudes from the subconscious mind, the BELIEVING level, the ‘voices’ that come from that section can be positive or negative.

Finally, know that it’s the subconscious level that will determine our level of confidence when it comes to options trading!

Therefore, as serious students of options, we must concern ourselves with programming that subconscious level of our minds. You see, although it’s not doing any THINKING it’s, by far, the more powerful of the two. Thus we must do things to TRAINING it into BELEIVING that we truly are worthy of success and able to master any task.

Here’s the key to training any subconscious mind: provide it with a history of SMALL successes. Recall that it’s not the THINKING part of our brain. Since that’s true, it cannot distinguish between a large, significant success and a small, relatively insignificant one.

Thus the procedure to build self-confidence appears:
a. Perform a successful act, ANY successful act
b. Pour out the congratulatory thoughts to yourself over that act
c. Repeat and repeat many times, until the ACT of doing something successfully starts to become a HABIT of doing so and the subconscious mind becomes convinced that you ARE a person of high capabilities.

If this procedure sounds a bit simplistic to you, consider that MOST people are lacking in personal self-confidence in LIFE and when they come to the options trading table and it shows itself readily, both in the lack of accomplishments and in the portfolio diminishment.

If they continue along this path, they will become a statistics themselves – yet another options trader that didn’t make it.

We can take heart, ladies and gentlemen, that the self-confidence that we need to succeed in options trading (and in life) CAN, indeed be learned, it CAN be gained and improved and it CAN be the basis of our ultimate success.

All we need do is to do it on purpose.