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The Steps to Success

Self-discipline is simply a mental technique to stay focused on what you need to learn, or do, to accomplish your goals.There will be times when you won't have the resources to function effectively relative to the external conditions. Other times the resources you do have will be in conflict with both the conditions and your goals. So to accomplish your goals, you will need to adapt. In other words, you will need to change the way you interact with the environment. To change your behavior and how you experience the environment (feelings and emotions), you will have to change your perspective. To change your perspective, you will have to change the mental components that effect your perception of environmental information.

To be a successful trader you need to trade without fear. As you have already learned when you use fear as a resource to limit yourself, you will create the very conditions you are trying to avoid. Or to say this another way, you will experience your fears. You also can't learn anything new because fear will force you to perceive the environmental "now" from your individual past. You will experience that past regardless of the opportunities the environment may have to offer in that same moment.Your individual history will repeat itself until you change your history, which will then allow you to learn and experience something new. Evolving beyond your fears is also the best way to learn how to predict market behavior. The more fearful traders are, the fewer the choices they perceive as available to themselves and the easier it is to predict their behavior. You will be able to recognize this clearly in others when you recognize it yourself and work your way out of the condition where you trade with fear.

However, you will need some resource to limit yourself so that you don't get reckless. Getting reckless is exactly what people have a tendency to do if they don't feel any fear, especially if there is a potential for thrilling results, as there is in trading. The resource you need to limit yourself is self-trust. You will gain that self-trust when you establish a set of rules and guidelines to trade by and know that you will always follow those rules without hesitation, regardless of the temptations to do otherwise.
Once you trust yourself to always do what needs to be done, there will be nothing to fear because the markets won't be able to do anything to you, as a result of your inability to respond appropriately. Consequently, with nothing to fear, you are then free to observe the markets free of distortions. There won't be any need to avoid certain categories of information because of how that information will make you feel. The less reason you have to avoid or distort information, the more you make yourself available to learn about the nature of the markets.   

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