#781 - Go Beyond Outcomes And Focus On The Process

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to be talking about why you should go beyond outcomes and focus on the process. This is something that I talk about often with coaching clients and especially with our Pro and Elite members here at Option Alpha and it's this idea of focusing really, really hard on the process and not so much the outcome. Now, this doesn't mean that you totally reject the outcome of what you're doing. It just means that the entire weight of what you're looking at when you analyze your trading and your strategies, your mentality in trading should be more focused 80% I would say on the process of trading versus the outcome of what you see and this is true in pretty much every other discipline. I'll use an example here which I think will help out, but if you're looking to lose weight or be physically fit and healthy in the New Year, then you should focus on the process of eating right, of reducing the amount of processed foods and sugars in your body. You should focus on the process of going to the gym and having a strict workout regimen and a system or workout plan that you follow, right? Those are all process oriented things. Now, you are not going to feel amazing the first couple of days that you get on the treadmill and run again. I don't think anybody would say that it feels great and the pounds just fly off their body their first 30 minutes on the treadmill, but it's the process that you focus on because you know if you work the process and you work the system correctly that the outcome will come, right? That's why we all go to school anyway because we know that we don't have all the knowledge that we need, so we go to high school, then we go to college, then we go maybe even to a secondary school after that and get some specialized knowledge because we believe that if we go through the process of getting an education, then the outcome, i.e. a higher job and better salary, better benefits, better pay will come in the end, right? We do this intuitively all over the place in our entire life, but for some reason, when it comes to trading, what we do is we do the opposite. We focus on the outcome of any individual trade or string of trades rather than the process of trading itself. And so, what I see traders do all the time and it drives me insane is this relentless focus on the outcome of any one particular trade that month. Any one particular trade that month has no bearing on the process by which you are using to trade because if your process is good and if you have a great strategy that you're starting to deploy, then at random, you could just have a string of bad sequencing trades here or there that really start to throw you off track if you focus on them way too much. If you hone in on the process and you stay true to your rules and risk management techniques, the strategy that you're using, the outcome will eventually come. It might take three months, four months, six months, two years potentially to come down the road, but it will eventually come because the outcome of working out and going to the gym is that you're going to be physically fit and lose weight. The outcome of going to school and getting an education is that you're going to have potentially a better job opportunity. And so, those outcomes will come, but with time and so, if you focus on the outcomes now, you start to derail yourself into this bad sense of mentality where you are demeaning yourself, belittling yourself, self-sabotaging yourself because you didn't get the outcome you desired immediately. If you start focusing on the process, the outcome will take care of itself. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.

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#781 - Go Beyond Outcomes And Focus On The Process is an episode from The "Daily Call" From Option Alpha: Options Trading | Stock Options | Stock Trading | Trading Online by Kirk Du Plessis.

This episode is 04:29 long.

This episode was published on Nov 12, 2019.

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