I wrote a series of blogs on the strategic aspects of attaining trading success - The Essential Strategic Elements for Trading Success and the series on Routines and Habits starting with Routines and Habits . I am  ending with Routine and Habits VII (January 2008)

In this blog, I’ll continue the thread by examining the link between Pre-Vision stage and the Action as a pre-requisite to trading success (for that matter for any success).

There are two very good books on this field:

  1. Changing for Good by J Proschaka, J Norcross, and C DiClemente (1995) and
  2. Can Do! by Ben Tiggelaar (2008)

Both are available from Amazon. Of the two, Tiggelaar is the more practical for most readers because it sets out a roadmap ‘to get there’.

Unlike most books in this area, the two works lay out the importance of raising one’s commitment to success as a preliminary first step. Proschaka’s team called it the ‘Contemplation Stage’ and Tiggelaar made it the first exercise in his “Get Real” Phase.

Most success books will tell us how important Vision is in our quest for success. But my experience is that the Contemplation Stage is the one missing in our journey. In this phase, we envisage future results and translate that into present behavioural habits. To do this we need:

  1. To clearly envisage the end result: I find the NLP ‘death bed’ scenario ideally suited for the exercise. We are at death’s door and reviewing our lives. We see the immeasurable trading success we have had and ask: 1) What were the milestones? 2) At each milestone, who and what learning contributed to the result? 3) What problems and challenges did we face? 4) What steps (behaviour) did we take to overcome them? 5) What tools did we use (e.g. journals, visualization, etc)?
  2. Place into context, the relationship between the end results, the rest of our goals, our life’s vision and our value.
  3. Create some tentative goals and
  4. Select behaviour that are  Measurable, Active and Personal (i.e.within our control) - M.A.P (Tiggelaar). Then translate the behaviour into a series of routines.

All four steps comprise the Contemplation Stage. They involve the creation of a context for our Vision and Goals. Speaking of goals,Tiggelaar made an interesting observation. He argues that our goals include not only intent but also the environment (stimulii). We need to be aware that at times our behaviour is automatic (i.e. controlled by the stimulii) and at other times by our intent. Creating habitual behaviour succeeds when we marry the two. For example, let’s say we want to lose 20 lbs. We formulate a strong vision and goal; we create a well formulated plan of action; but we ensure that our fridge is full of ‘naughty goodies’ (ice-cream, chocolates etc). In this case the stimuli and intent diverge and we are unlikely to achieve our outcome.

Finally on behaviour (action), Tiggelaar confirms the NLP presupposition that action is most likely to occur when we clamp future action to previously experienced intense good feelings. We create new behaviours when we imbue them with good feelings before we start the action; and achieve this anchor through a process of visualization.

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