Focused Thinking: Eliminate Fuzzy Thinking
Information overload…
Feeling unsure about your next steps…
Jumping from one strategy or tactic to another…
Lacking the confidence and certainty you need to achieve your trading dreams…
Being unclear about when you’ll reach your goals…
All of these issues (and many more) can be traced back to one of the biggest challenges struggling traders face: a lack of focus.
It’s called fuzzy thinking.
Fuzzy Thinking Stems from Neglected Critical Knowledge
Too many traders are missing critical information. Not having this information inflicts incredible damage to their chances of success. Because it makes the path to reach their dreams remain out of focus, fuzzy.
And you can’t follow a fuzzy path. So traders bounce around, get confused, become overwhelmed, and attempt to purchase short-cuts… But the path that’ll lead them to ultimate success still remains out of focus.
What’s worse is that most online traders are unaware that this information is absolutely essential. They don’t realize it’s missing, so they never track it down and think it through.
In order to go from fuzzy thinking to focused thinking, you need to know the answers to three questions…
What exactly do you want?
What’s the absolute minimum necessary to have it?
What’s the fastest and easiest way to get it?
Fuzzy thinking can be traced back to one of these questions not being clearly answered.
Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. Think about it for a moment… If you knew exactly what you wanted, the minimum necessary to have it, and the exact steps that would get it for you in the fastest and easiest way possible… wouldn’t you ALREADY HAVE IT?
Answering these three critical questions is necessary for your success.
Now, don’t be fooled by the simplicity of this solution. Answering these questions – especially question three – requires heavy-duty thinking. And nobody can give you the answer; you have to think your way to it. Which means you can’t purchase it or copy it. That’s why most traders never follow the fastest and easiest path to their trading dreams: they don’t realize they have to develop it themselves.
When you shift your thinking from fuzzy to focused, you’ll know the specific steps you must take to dramatically reduce your efforts, reach your dreams faster, and make a lot more money than you do now.
Many traders are so emotionally invested in their dreams and the difference it’ll make in their lives, they are unable to think as clearly and as focused as they need to.
They mistakenly believe that since they want something bad enough, they’re clear enough about how best to achieve it. But they’re not.
Do your best to look past the emotional attachments you have to your dreams. Pretend you are your own coach, and your job is to ensure your client is clearly focused on the outcome they desire in trading, knows exactly what’s required to achieve it, and understands the steps they’ll take to reach it.
You want to accurately assess the answers to the three questions I mentioned above.
Let’s take a closer look…
What Exactly Do You Want?
How do you specifically define the success you’re seeking?
It’s rare I meet a trader who’s got a well-thought-out answer. Sure, you want money and freedom. Who doesn’t? But what exactly do you want your trading to do for you? And what does that look like? How can it be objectively measured?
If you’re unclear about what you’re striving for, you pay the price for your fuzziness daily. Why? Because unclear goals make it impossible for you to know which actions will produce the best results. You can’t distinguish between the essential and the non-essential. You can’t distinguish between worthless and worthwhile tasks.
Without clarity, your day becomes a series of haphazard steps designed to deal with symptoms produced as a direct result of fuzzy thinking. Symptoms like over trading, not trading at all, over analysis paralysis, etc.
All of this leads to a common symptom for struggling traders: Confusing activity with accomplishment!
Consequently: If you’re not crystal clear about what your trading success looks like, you’re wasting a massive amount of time daily.
Worse, your chances of success are slim to none.
What’s the Minimum Necessary to Have It?
Once you’re clear about what trading success means to you, the next question is just as vital:
What’s absolutely necessary to getting the trading success you desire?
It shocks me how many traders can’t answer this question. If you’re not absolutely clear about what is necessary for your trading success, then guess what? You’re also not clear about what’s NOT necessary. And once again, that’s a big problem.
What’s the least number of ways you need to know to exit a trade? Of all the ones available, which ones are absolutely necessary for you to achieve the trading success you desire?
How about which currency pairs to trade? Of all the pairs available which are the most ‘reliable’ and sensible to trade?
How many systems do you need? One, two, perhaps three or four? What time frame do they need to be based on?
If you’re stumped on any of these questions, you’ve got a problem. Your thinking is fuzzy. And your thinking cannot get focused until you’ve got the answers.
I often tell clients, “Before you focus on ‘how-to,’ you must first focus on ‘what.’” But opportunity seekers and struggling traders make this mistake all the time. They buy a program based on its promises… overlooking the fact it isn’t necessary in the first place. Wasting their time, their effort, their money, and all the while diminishing their chances for success.
In fact, this is one of the chief causes of failure in online trading. There are simply too many options for every essential element of currency trading to employ even a fraction of them. All these options make it easy to go off in a million different directions at every turn unless you know what’s absolutely essential to your success. And that’s exactly what happens when your thinking isn’t as focused as it needs to be.
In order to piece together the fewest elements that’ll produce the trading of your dreams, you need to make many decisions. Decisions that require: (1) you have a general knowledge of what’s required, and (2) you’re familiar enough with your options to choose a few amongst the many alternatives.
What’s the Fastest and Easiest Way to Get It?
Say you’ve got a clear trading goal and you know the minimum necessary to get it. There’s no doubt you’re already making progress. But you’d like it if success came faster. Who wouldn’t?
For successful traders, impatience gets channelled into searching for the fastest path to their goals and then acting with urgency. For opportunity seekers, this impatience gets channelled into a search for immediate gratification, desperately believing the hype, and buying multiple “magic bullets” with big promises.
There is almost always a shortcut. A faster path to getting the trading success you desire. But you won’t find it in a box or an online course. It’s just not that simple.
What it requires is thinking. Not daydreaming. But real mental effort. The type that leaves you exhausted after doing it for an hour or so. And you can’t even engage in this level of thinking until you first have your answers to exactly what you want and the minimum necessary to achieve it.
Now that we’ve covered these three critical questions, answering them must become one of your top priorities.
Once you have your answers, most of the issues you’re struggling with right now will disappear.
Stop and think about it for a second. Think about how different your day-to-day experience would be if you were already 100% confident that your answers were spot-on to these three straightforward questions.
You’d know exactly what your #1 objective was at all times… You’d know the exact steps you need to take to immediately move closer to your trading goals… Information overload would be a problem of the past… And you’d never struggle with a lack of motivation ever again. Instead, you’d be stoked to get the very next task done because you knew exactly what it would do for you.
If you’re struggling at all, I hope you see the contrast between your current situation and the one I’ve just laid out for you.
And the difference is simply knowing: (1) what you want, (2) the minimum necessary to have it, and (3) the fastest path to getting it. That’s exactly what replaces fuzzy thinking with focused thinking.
Cheers,
Chris.
