I’m sitting here really early this morning. The sky outside is a blazing brilliant blue, like the colour you’d find in a kid’s Derwent coloured pencil collection. The morning sun is ricocheting off the pool creating a rainbow of gorgeous moving water reflections on my office walls. I’m starting to get a bit nostalgic and a bit sentimental, so I thought I’d take a break from looking at my charts and tap out a little message to you.
You see – I’m feeling really grateful this morning.
I’m grateful that my terrific business partner, Chris Tate, and I share such a great sharemarket oriented friendship. I’m grateful to the fabulous traders that I’ve had the pleasure of training throughout the years as I’ve watched their lives transform before my very eyes. People like Kel Butcher, Justine Pollard and Stuart McPhee who are all now exceptional authors of trading oriented books. Also, traders like Rob McDonald, Colin Simpson and Caroline Semisi who have made careers from the market and they now live life on their own terms because we have helped teach and inspire them to find hidden profits in the sharemarket that they never knew existed. Plus, I’m grateful to a whole host of other wonderful clients I have trained in my Mentor Program, for providing an aspect to my own life that trading, (with all of its inherent loneliness), just can’t provide. I can feel my step lighten every time I think of them and everything they are achieving through trading for themselves as well as their families.
I’m grateful to the hundreds of thousands of traders who have received my free newsletter or bought my books and products over the past 20 years too. Even if many of them decided not to trade in the way that I trade, to feel that I’ve influenced their lives in some small way warms my heart. I’m even grateful to those readers who decided that trading isn’t for them, because they would have reached that conclusion through reading, without having to endure the sharemarket’s harsh discipline of extracting money mercilessly from the non-committed trader.
Are you still humble?
The longer I’ve been trading, the more humble I’ve been forced to become. I don’t consider myself to be a great trader. If I was ever tempted to feel this way then I’m probably likely to be on the brink of making a catastrophic trading mistake. Writing books is an interesting sideline for me. It’s not my primary source of income. (Popular novelists get paid well, good technical writers do not).
Above all though, I’m so damn grateful that I escaped my past life where I was falling into the trap of immersing myself in the corporate way of living, not realising that it was stripping me of my youth and melting away my enthusiasm for my own passions and goals. It’s just so easy to fall into the materialistic trap of buying heaps of things you don’t need to impress people that you don’t really like because of ‘my position in the company’. Futile and a waste of time – but more common than we realise.
A bit of ego is a good thing, but too much can poison your trading and lead you to self-sabotage. Read the section called ‘Ego, is not a dirty word’ for more on this.
All of these thoughts fill my mind this morning as I think of the day ahead. I’m bursting at the seams with awareness. I love times like this - where you get just a fleeting glimpse of your true purpose in life and where you get to see things oh so very, very clearly.
The point of this blog post is that even if things aren’t quite so rosy for you right now, think about what you have to be grateful for. By just spending a few minutes doing this every day, it lifts your spirits and puts you right back in touch with who you really are – including your passions, your priorities, and your goals for the future. Begin by setting realistic trading goals and the rewards will flow when you accomplish them. Spend some time realising how far you’ve come and all of the incredible things that await you, just around the corner, scattered ahead of you like emeralds on velvet – yours for the taking. Grab just a few minutes right now to consider what you have to be grateful for.
When you think about it, if you woke up this morning, you’ve got at least something to be grateful for, haven’t you?
Anyway, I’d better stop now before I lose my ‘hard-nosed-trading-chick’ image. This day is just too beautiful to waste and my pool beckons.
Get your free copy of Louise Bedford’s trading plan template from (www.tradingsecrets.com.au) and take your trading to the next level. Louise is Australia’s best-selling author of books on the share market and her titles include – Charting Secrets, Trading Secrets, The Secret of Writing Options, and The Secret of Candlestick Charting.
