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Self-discipline is a word used to describe a process of learning how to take conscious control of your actions. It is not a personality trait or something you are born with. It is a specific thought methodology, a mental resource, that allows you to change a belief or belief system when it is in conflict with some goal or objective. Self-discipline is a more direct method of effecting some change because you would be purposefully acting in a manner that is in direct conflict with whatever you want to change. So I would define self-discipline as willfully behaving outside of the boundaries of some belief (dealing with the emotional discomfort your actions will produce) to accomplish a certain goal or task that is inconsistent with that belief. If you work outside of that belief long enough, it will eventually de-energize. The rate at which the underlying belief will deenergize is really not a function of time but rather intensity. In other words, the greater the intensity of our wi...

Every movement we make alters the physical landscape in some way. The more dramatic or expressive our movements, the greater the alterations. By the same token, every thought alters the mental landscape in some way. The more expressive our thoughts, in other words, the more energy we generate in our willingness to think, the greater the potential to effect some change. The change comes from what we are willing to think. Wanting to direct your conscious thought process toward a specific intent is what effects this change. I have found writing is one of the most powerful tools available to focus my thinking and effect some change I desire. When we write it is a physicalized version of what is going on inside of our mental environment. Your willingness to write about certain issues directs your attention and gives the rest of the parts of your mental environment instructions. What flows up or out of your consciousness is what is there. Once you find out what is there, you can then ...

Here are some questions you can ask yourself that will help you to identify some beliefs that may argue against your giving yourself more money. What do you believe about guilt? How do you know when to feel guilty? Under what conditions would you not feel guilty, even if someone else wanted you to? Is it possible to transfer those same standards to areas where you would feel guilty? What would stop you? Who or what out of your past says it is wrong and you can't do that? Is their assessment of reality any more valid than yours? If so, why? Do you find these beliefs useful? If so, in what ways? Do you find them limiting? If so, in what ways? If you could identify and change the experience that created the belief, how would you change it? What would stop you from changing it? For the following questions you can substitute the words "is true" for the words "do you believe." What do you believe about competition? What do you believe about taking money ...

Set a timer for 10 minutes. Write a series of statements that begin with "I am." Write as fast as you can and let every thought come to your conscious attention. It is extremely important that you do not censor any statements, especially the contradictory ones. At the end of the 10 minutes, look at the list and cross out everything that is a fact. For example, you would cross out statements such as I am a man/woman, I am blue-eyed, I am brown-haired. All the statements that remain are the beliefs you are looking for. The beliefs that contradict each other are of particular importance. Contradictory beliefs cancel your energy because you have a built-in mental conflict between the validity of one belief expressing itself only at the direct expense of another belief. What are some examples of conflicting or contradictory beliefs? I have to win./I may be undeserving. I am a winner./I am a loser. I am successful./I've missed my chance to be successful. I deserve more...

DIRECTING A CONSCIOUS SHIFT IN BELIEF SYSTEMS  Any new knowledge comes from those who question the status quo and have a willingness to go beyond and a willingness to accept the next answer. The wanting to is the how. To identify or change anything in the mental environment requires that you want to, because to want something you have to think about it, and when we think about something, we are generating thought energy.  It is important for you to understand that beliefs cannot be destroyed; once we have formed one, it will be with us for the rest of our lives. However, we can draw all the energy out of them. For example, a pile of wood set on fire will release the energy of the wood into the atmosphere as heat. The wood will be transformed into ashes. The ashes do not have the potential to produce any heat and, thus, will have little if any effect on the environment. Yet the ashes still exist. De-energized beliefs work the same way. They will always exist but no...

When we step through our fears to break some cycle of frustration and dissatisfaction or change the polarity of a painful memory to break a cycle of pain, we gain in wisdom because we learn all sides of an issue. Wisdom is not afraid, angry, intolerant, or prejudiced because there is a deep level of understanding, confidence, and trust, all coming from having experienced the full range of possibilities from extreme negative to increasingly greater degrees of positive. If we have experienced only the negative side of a certain type of experience, we feel fear. If we have experienced only the positive (never having had a painful experience in certain area), we won't have that particular fear, but we do develop an intolerance or even a disdain for anyone who has had a negative experience. Wisdom is the by-product that results when we retain a distinction about the nature of the environment without the negative energy or fear associated with that distinction. Wisdom is ultimately the...

Increased Sense of Security and Confidence  You will develop a sense of security and confidence knowing that you can confront conditions as they exist, identify what you need to learn to operate most effectively, and learn it. What better way to develop a sense of security than by learning how to develop the ability to adapt to the prevailing conditions to fulfill your needs satisfactorily. In the mental environment the memories of our experiences don't change over time, but the physical environment where our goals are fulfilled does. Trading doesn't have to be painful and devoid of fun. We make it that way for ourselves because of our mental inflexibility and inability to adapt.  Increased Levels of Satisfaction    To keep on learning we need to adapt. Learning is a primary function of our existence. When we fulfill this function, we are rewarded with feelings of happiness, well-being and satisfaction, all of which are by-products of the quality...

If we think destructive thoughts, we will be adding negatively charged energy to intensify the wound. If it is possible to manage mental energy for destructive purposes, it must also be possible to manage it for constructive purposes. The key concepts here are willingness and purpose. The willingness is to consciously direct our thoughts toward a specific intent to change something on the inside that isn't useful. Everyone instinctively knows that if we allow ourselves to think about something, the thoughts have the power to change the way things exist inside of us. And once things change on the inside, we know we will perceive and experience a different outside. Change is the result of, first, a willingness to think. Painful life cycles begin with and are perpetuated by painful memories. Healing emotional wounds is something that we have to learn how to do by learning how to manage mental energy. Before a capability becomes an ability, it has to be cultivated into a sk...

Difficult roads often leads to beautiful destination

Traders put on trades and then take them off when they choose. That decisionmaking process is the result of the sum total of all the mental components interacting with one another. We make up all our own rules when we trade. No one forces us in or out of the markets, unless a position is liquidated by a brokerage firm for lack of margin. In any given trade, there are a number of possibilities to take profits or cut losses. What we decide to do in each instance with respect to each possibility will be the result of our perceptions and all the internal components affecting those perceptions. What we actually end up doing will be the result of what we decide and our ability to execute our decisions, which again will be determined by a number of mental factors, all of which contribute to our sense of self-valuation. As individual traders if we want to give ourselves more and more money out of the markets, we have to learn how to value ourselves more and more so that we believe we d...

If you operate out of the foregoing assumptions, you will begin to recognize how every moment becomes a perfect indication of your state of development and what you need to do to improve yourself. For example, let's look at a hypothetical trader whose goal is to make money from his trading. He perceives what he believes to be an opportunity to do so and puts on a trade. However, he is operating out of a fear of being wrong. As a result, his fear will act on his perception of information to block from his awareness any evidence that would indicate that he is wrong. Remember that fear is a natural mechanism to warn us of threatening conditions so that we can avoid them. Now what is threatening about being wrong? In this case, as in most all cases, it is all the accumulated pain and humiliation inside of him from his past experiences.  If the market—or anyone else for that matter—presents him with any information that conflicts with what he wants, his fear will cause him to d...

To adapt, we need to choose not to resist learning and change. This requires a willingness on our part to think outside of the limitations established by our beliefs, associations, and memories and a willingness to learn how to manage mental energy so we can release ourselves from the negative effects of our painful memories. When we learn how to change the polarity of a painful memory, it isn't painful any longer. When the memory is decharged or drained of the negatively charged energy, it will no longer have the potential to generate fear. Fear always limits the number of choices we perceive as available from the environment by the way it causes us to focus our attention on the object of our fear. The net effect is we end up creating for ourselves exactly what we are trying to avoid. It is important for you to note that, when we change the polarity of a memory, it doesn't actually change the structure of the memory. In other words, we don't forget the experience, so we c...

The extent to which we fulfill our needs and achieve our goals with any degree of satisfaction is, first, a function of our being able to recognize our needs and formulate our goals. This is not as simple as it sounds. Our natural sense of curiosity and our attractions are very powerful inner forces that create a state of need or put us in a state of imbalance with the physical environment until the needs are satisfied. Any differences between what we wanted, expected, desired, or needed and what we got is simply an indication of the degree to which we haven't learned what we needed to know or evidence that we don't have the appropriate skills to do what needed to be done. Included as a factor in the first category—where we haven't learned what we needed to know—is our ability or lack thereof to objectively (without illusion) assess the availability of what we wanted or needed from the environment's perspective. In other words, what we wanted may have not been avail...

Besides the cycles of dissatisfaction that our current set of limitations locks us into (what we know blocks what we haven't learned yet), there is an even more practical reason for learning how to adapt. All of us are forced to interact with a constantly changing physical environment to fulfill our needs and achieve our goals. The way we interact with the environment, what choices we perceive in relationship to what is actually available from the environment's perspective, and what we do in relationship to what we perceive are all a function of what we have learned. Now, if you will recall, everything that constitutes the physical environment is in constant motion. Anything that is in motion (which includes everything made of atoms and molecules) is also changing over time. So change is an automatic function of the physical environment. However, the mental environment is composed of positively or negatively charged energy that carries information about our experiences, what ...

Obviously, acknowledging there is something that we need to learn is not as easy as it sounds. In fact, acknowledging that we don't know something or that what we do know isn't very useful or effective presents us with one of the major paradoxes of life. The dilemma we are confronted with is how can we know what we don't know when what we have already learned will block our perception of what we haven't learned yet. For example, once we learn that trading is easy (the first few quick winning trades will establish that belief), it will block our perception of information to the contrary, that trading is probably one of the hardest endeavors one could choose to undertake. Each of these beliefs—that trading is easy or trading is hard—would result in the perception of completely different choices as being available from the environment, resulting in very different outcomes based on the choices perceived and acted on. We don't question the usefulness or effectiveness o...

We aren't born with the knowledge that we need to operate effectively in the physical environment to fulfill ourselves. However, we are born with the need to know. This need to know operates as a driving force in our lives coming from the innermost depths of who we are. Our natural sense of curiosity compels us to explore and learn. Boredom acts as an inner force compelling us to look for something new to discover and learn about. Attractions also act as an inner force, compelling us to move through the environment to discover and create experience. To learn a skill, we usually have to break the skill down into a series of small steps and concentrate on each individual step until we can put all the steps together into a series of effective movements. By concentrating on each small step, we narrow our focus of attention to the point where we are oblivious to anything else going on in the environment. Without this characteristic of our nature, where our skills drop to an uncon...

There is a direct relationship between our ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions and the level of satisfaction we feel about our lives. To adapt to the changes occurring in the outside environment implies that we are changing ourselves as we learn more and more of what the environment has to offer in terms of distinctions about its nature. The more distinctions we can make between the various components of the environment and how they act as a force on one another, the more information becomes available to us through our perception. As we expand our perception of information available, we will gain a deeper level of understanding and insight into the cause-and-effect relationship that we have with the outside environment, that is, how the environment has the potential to act as a force on us and how the environment will react to the force of our behavior. The deeper the level of our understanding and insight, the more effectively we can interact with the environment to...

 Fear (high degree of negatively charged energy) has a profoundly limiting effect on the range of information that we can pay attention to. It causes us to narrow our range of perception to focus our attention on to the object of our fears. The purpose of fear is to help us avoid those things in the environment we have learned to perceive as threatening. However, when we couple our painful memories with our natural propensity to associate and group environmental components together— instead of avoiding the object of our fears—we will actually create the very experiences we are trying to avoid. What we focus our attention on in the environment is what we will usually get. Remember that all fears act on our perception as a warning mechanism to help us avoid what we believe to be threatening. One way to avoid the object of our fears is simply to refuse to acknowledge the existence of threatening information. Another more subtle way that will create some real blind spots in our p...

Beliefs create definitions, make distinctions, and shape our perception of environmental information by programming our senses to hear, see, and select information that corresponds with what we believe. Our experience of the environment will correspond to the choices we make, and these choices will correspond to the information that is perceivable. People think of their beliefs and subsequent experiences as a fact of reality instead of a belief about reality. The perception and the experience have to match up because we can't experience something that we don't know about yet, unless we are open to the possibility that what we believe might be very limiting in relationship to what the environment is offering. Beliefs define the parameters in which we perceive environmental information. All definitions by definition create boundaries. Beliefs will manage information in various ways to maintain a balance between the inner and outer environment. Any perceived imbalance will r...

The energy that determines how we feel (love/hate, happiness/ anger, confidence/fear, etc.) in many circumstances and situations does not come from the environment. These feelings and emotions are already part of us, and we will automatically feel them when there is a matchup (perception) between what is outside in the now moment with what is already inside of us as a result of our past experiences. When we are in a learning mode we open ourselves up to learn new distinctions and alternative meanings to expand what we know about the nature of the environment. Our experiences shape our meanings and then the meanings shape our experiences of the future.

Distinctions make separations in environmental information where no previous separation existed. A child won't make a distinction between a spoon and pencil until someone teaches him the difference. Otherwise, he will instinctively put both in his mouth, until the information stored in his mental environment acts as a force on his perception to distinguish between the two. Environmental objects give off information about themselves, but the information that is perceived already exists inside of each individual, unless it is a first-time experience. The spoon and the information about what it is create an energy loop between the inside and the outside, where before the distinction was learned the spoon and he pencil would fall into the same category as something to put into the mouth. Anything we don't know, but exists in the environment as a possibility, is a distinction that we haven't learned to make yet. If we haven't learned to make the distinction, we won't per...

Associations seem to be a natural characteristic of the way in which we think. That is, our brains are wired in such a way as to link similar forms of environmental information together automatically. We do this in basically two ways. First, there is a natural propensity to label people and objects based on some prominent characteristic and then categorize them into associative groups. After we categorize the groups by sex, hair color, skin color, profession, economic status, educational background, and so on, we then associate whatever experience or knowledge we have about the group with everyone and everything that has those same characteristics. For example, if we have a painful experience with a person who has a skin color different from that of our own, we will automatically associate everyone with that skin color with the qualities of that one experience. The second way we associate is by linking extraneous sensory information with some event. We will automatically associat...

From the moment we are born into this world, our existence acts as a force on the physical environment. We take up space that cannot be occupied by anyone or anything else. And, in turn, the physical environment acts as a force on our physical senses, creating a cause-and-effect relationship between ourselves and the environment. It is important for you to note now and for the rest of the book that I am defining the physical environment in the broadest sense possible, as everything outside of ourselves, including other people. Now, at the most basic level, we create experience for ourselves by the mere fact that we exist. To exist implies that our senses are alive and that we are interacting (acting as a force) with the environment, altering its makeup and consistency as we move through it. For example, our movement and behavior set off an endless series of chain reactions that alter the landscape in some way, shape, or form. And even when we aren't actively changing or manipulatin...

Energy Is Nondimensional As we already know, energy doesn't take up space in the physical environment because it doesn't displace anything that does take up space. This "no space" characteristic of energy gives it a nondimensional quality. In other words, anything that doesn't take up space also won't have any tangible dimensions of height, length, width, or circumference, at least not in the ways in which we would normally think of these properties. This nondimensional quality is probably the hardest concept to grasp about the nature of energy, because even though energy is nondimensional, it can take some form that is visible to our eyes. And anything that is visible should have dimensions that we can measure. It may seem like an obvious contradiction to say that energy can take a visible form and yet still not have dimension, but it is not.  Speed   The second characteristic the mental environment shares with energy is speed. Energy travels at ...

Anything that goes on or that happens on the inside of you would constitute your mental environment; all your experiences and memories of those experiences, all your beliefs, all the emotional energy attached to those beliefs, all your feelings, needs, wants, expectations, and goals, and all your thoughts, regardless of whether or not you have expressed these thoughts into the environment, make up your mental landscape. Positively Charged Emotions: Love, happiness, joy, confidence, peace, acceptance Negatively Charged Emotions: Fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, disappointment, confusion, impatience, stress, anxiety, betrayal Illusions: Denials, rationalizations, intellectualizations, distortions Beliefs Intents: Goals, aspirations Expectations: Wants, desires, demands Needs Dreams: Sleeping dreams, daydreams Thoughts Attractions Memories Creativity Intuition WHAT EXACTLY IS THE MENTAL (INNER) ENVIRONMENT?   Beliefs are formed and meanings get attached. The mental ...

The first step in this process of adaptation is recognizing the need to adapt. If you can't manipulate or force the markets to change in a way that suits your needs, then you will need to learn how to change yourself to suit the conditions. The next two steps in this process are to learn how to (1) identify exactly what changes you need to make to function successfully in the trading environment and (2) how to effect any mental changes that are necessary. Manipulating the physical environment is as easy as moving a chair from one place to another because that's where you want or need to sit. However, to consciously change yourself to function more effectively in a market environment that will not respond to your attempts to manipulate it will require a thorough understanding of the nature and functioning of your mental environment. First, you will need to learn some sophisticated mental skills to adapt yourself more readily to the constant changes with which the market ...