Over the past year, I’ve been on a bit of a mission – a mission to find the 20-year-old man, filled with fitness and vitality, who I hoped was still lurking inside my body, beneath that middle-aged spread.
It’s not unusual for men of a certain age to do this – to sign their life away to the triathlon circuit, to spend too much money on pushbikes and running shoes … to develop a penchant for lycra …
But the process has been one filled with highs and lows.
It feels great to be able to run with that spring in my step again, to beat my personal best on the bike, and to feel my whole body buzzing from pounding the swimming pool for an hour.
But the injuries and the aches and the tiredness, and the days when I feel that my performance is stagnating, or even going backwards …
Like I said, it’s a journey of highs and lows.
LESSONS FROM THE SPORTSFIELD
The determination that’s kept me on track is the same determination that has seen me develop a career as a trader over many years, despite numerous set-backs.
Many newcomers to trading want to find the “holy grail” that will be the formula to their success, but the uncomfortable truth about trading the financial markets is that there is always a degree of hard slog in the training process and there will inevitably be some set-backs.
If we fail to push on through these periods, we won’t have a chance of reaching that point where we get “into our stride” and trading becomes effortless.
In my physical training, I’ve learned a great deal from trading psychology; and as traders we can learn a lot from sports psychology.
Most top athletes and coaches believe that psychological factors play as crucial a role as physical attributes and learned skills in the make-u of champions. When physical skills are evenly matched (as they often tend to be in competitive sport) the competitor with greater control over his or her mind will usually emerge as the victor.
Mental strength will not compensate for lack of skill in sport (or trading), but when it comes to the crunch, it can make the difference between winning and losing.
There are certain moments during competition that carry great psychological significance. These situations require athletes to remain completely focused and calm in the face of very difficult circumstances. Tennis players talk of the ‘big’ points during a tight match, such as a fleeting chance to break serve; for an athlete, it could be the final triple-jump in the competition after seriously under-performing; for a footballer, it could be how you react to a perceived bad refereeing decision or to going behind in a match your team are expected to win.
Think about times when things have not gone quite to plan and how you reacted. The journey towards peak performance is rarely a perfectly smooth road and we learn from our mistakes – or should do.
Do setbacks shake your self-belief and lower your motivation or do they act as a catalyst for even greater effort?
This “mental toughness” is key in being a strong athlete and a resilient trader.
Here are the key traits that we should be demanding of ourselves:
• to achieve relatively consistent performances regardless of external factors.
• to maintain a confident and positive outlook, even when things aren’t going well.
• to deal with distractions without letting them interfere with our focus.
• to tolerate pain and discomfort (in trading, this usually means a dent in our finances).
• to remain persistent when the going gets tough.
• to have resilience to bounce back from disappointments.
GETTING TOUGH
If you think you might not “have what it takes” there are ways of improving your mental resilience.
In tests done at the University of Hull, they observed a mental toughness increasing after exposing animals to cold-water swimming, electric shock treatment or injections over a 14-day period.
Don’t worry – I’m not suggesting that you attach some electrodes to your office chair!
What is used on human subjects is “stress inoculation training” – this gradually exposes individuals to more threatening situations within a controlled environment.
Tennis, like trading, has plenty of breaks between the “action” phases – these allow time for dwelling on past failures and self-doubt. There are a number of techniques that tennis players can use in training to help them deal with these pressures. An example would be to start each service game 0-15 down, to get used to the feeling of rebounding after losing the first point.
As part of my own triathlon training, I’ll start early morning open-water swimming this month – I’ll let you know if I see any marked improvement in my trading.
Until next week,
Mark Rose
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