There are many traders who are talented, knowledgeable, and skilled, but all of them do not earn at par with their skills and knowledge. Why does this happen? This is because when it comes to executing the trade, many of these talented and skilled traders flounder – simply because they cannot stand the pressure of losing one or two trades.
Now you may wonder that those who prepare themselves well would also be investing their time and effort in developing their emotional quotient and thus make themselves ready to face any kind of pressure they face at their trading desk. Well, that is my point in this whole article – most professional traders that I have met and known focus only on the very obvious and very important things related to emotional management. They either miss the small things or dismiss them thinking they are irrelevant or insignificant to their trading performance. But in reality, they are not.
Small things do have a decisive impact on your performance. A great name that comes to my mind when I think about this is none other than the greatest swimmer of all time, the most decorated Olympian of all time, Michael Fred Phelps II.
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Michael Phelps is a 5-time Olympian who has the unbroken record of winning 8 Gold Medals in a single Olympics!! Wow! That’s more than just incredible! He has won 28 Olympic medals in toto, 23 of them Gold! His achievements do not end there. He has 39 world records to his credit and was awarded Swimmer of The Year for 7 times in his career.
When asked about how he trained himself for the Olympics, Mr. Phelps mentioned the secret to his emotional balance – he and his team were very particular about the small little things that he needs to do during his training and the small little things that happen to him during the entire day of his performance.
When I ask my clients and budding traders to look into the way athletes train themselves and the like, what they usually say is that an athlete needs to focus only on one single event and that is pretty easy compared to a day trader who has to take multiple trades in a day. If one trade ends up in a loss, it will affect all other trades that he takes in the rest of the day. But this argument is wrong. There are athletes like Michael Phelps who participated in 8 events in a single day and still managed to win Gold in all those 8 events.
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Therefore, in this article, we will look at the “small things” strategies that Mr. Phelps and his team focused on to make a telling impact in his Olympic performance.
On the technical side of his performance, he got countless small things right – which included small turns, kicks, flips, etc. To quote him, he once said, “Those little small steps and those little small things add up to massive things.”
But he had no plans to limit his “small things” strategy to the technical side. To participate in 8 events in a day and give them his best shot, he needed to manage his emotions throughout the day. And that does not mean negative emotions alone. When he won his first event, he told himself, “This is cool; you’re starting really well!” But soon he recognized the perils of getting influenced by that first win and tried his best to put that win behind him and focus on the next event. Similarly, he also focused on maintaining his body as fresh as it can be throughout the day. To achieve this, he not only focused on the right diet and right amount of food, but also other things like where does he sit, what kind of small stretches he does, what kind of massages he gets and the time he gets them, and the like. This is because any small problem – either at the physical level or at the emotional level – can snowball into something big, ending up affecting the result of his performance.
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Therefore, the moment you finish reading this article, ask yourself “what is one small thing I can do today that can influence my trading performance?” And identify that and do that ASAP! It may be as insignificant as adjusting the cushion on your chair or getting the dust out of your laptop. It does not matter how insignificant they seem to be, but all those add up to great things that influence your emotions and thereby your performance. For instance, a small disturbance in the way you sit because of improperly arranged cushion will continue to play at the back of your mind (even without you being aware of it) and thus influence your ability to think sharp or execute your trading decision with full confidence.
Therefore, think like Michael Phelps – he once said, “If I can get 10% out of it, 10% is better than 0!” And there is no better way to sum up the entire message other than quoting the master swimmer himself – “Greatness is a lot of small things done well.”
