You're going places...whether you know it or not.

Most people sleep walk through life...

A buddy of mine is a touring professional golfer. He’s had the great fortune of being able to work directly with a renown mental coach. This coach has worked with Olympians, major championship winning golfers, the South africa cricket team, football clubs and elite businessman.

He once shared a story about his meeting with Darren Clarke who at the time was a talented but underachieving tour pro. He asked Darren where he saw himself in 10 years to which Darren said he didn’t know. He then asked Darren to delve into his lifestyle, detailing his practise routine, his diet, vices and social circles. He then showed Darren back his notes to which Darren realised that his future was not so unpredictable! He had in fact been creating it all along. The problem was that he did not know it because he was going through the motions without giving it any thought.

This is how most people live. Most people sleepwalk through life, going through the same motions, every day, year after year, hardening opinions, thoughts and habits unconsciously. This would not be so problematic if you are happy with where you are going. Unfortunately for most people, their actions do not serve them. Most continue with their routine and when disaster strikes, they blame fate or luck when the reality is they were creating their luck all along!

If you eat poorly and do not exercise your body, you will get ill. Either slowly, or ‘suddenly’. If you spend most of your waking hours at a job you hate, you will become miserable. It will mould your personality. If you do not get golf lessons and continue to swing the club incorrectly, you’ll engrain bad habits until they ‘feel’ natural. You’ll likely tell yourself a story that you were never talented enough to get to the next level. If you spend more than you earn, you will go broke at any income level.

Your thoughts, words and ultimately your actions are the driving force behind your results. 99% of the time, these things are done on autopilot. Whether you’ve learned to do something correctly or incorrectly, it’s become second nature. Nobody is ‘thinking’ one foot infront of the other when they walk. Nobody is measuring the depth of each stroke when brushing their teeth.

Monitoring these actions mentally would be extremely cumbersome and exhausting. Not to mention unnecessary. But to consciously step back and think about what you are saying, thinking or doing is the first step to reversing any habit.

Consciously catching yourself thinking or behaving incorrectly is tiring only in the beginning. Like any new habit, the process becomes easier until the new thought or action become second nature.

When Darren Clarke visited Mike Finnigan in 2011, he was 42 years old and a write off by most peoples estimate with regards to winning a major championship. Darren’s social circle added further weight to these negative thought processes and his lifestyle was also not congruent with that of a champion, despite his desires. Mike convinced Darren that not only was winning the Open championship possible, but very probable and together they formulated a plan that would align his actions with his thoughts and words. Lo and behold, he captured the title.

You are not necessarily going to become a billionaire or major champion. Most of you do not want that. But everybody wants to 10x their results. There is no greater joy than succeeding effortlessly. That is the game of life. Most people work like a donkey with little to nothing to show. The effort should be spent figuring out what needs to be done to take you where you say you want to go and then by greasing the right habits, you can get from A to B seamlessly.

Unfortunately, most of us are trapped by our own erroneous thoughts, words and habits and there is nothing harder than self analysis. Very few people are fortunate enough to have a mentor. Self analysis is hard because we are so biased when judging ourselves. Outsiders can analyse our behaviours more objectively.

For us not lucky enough to have a mentor, you can work around this by journaling. Write down everything about yourself. Your routine, diet, social circles, thoughts, words and everything that defines who you currently are, what you do and what level you are operating at. From there, write down what you want and where you see yourself. Do your daily thoughts, words and actions align with this new version of yourself? Are your habits going to take you where you say you want to go?

If not then formulate a new plan. Stop using limiting, negative language. Start believing a future, better version of you is not only possible, but inevitable. And finally, write a plan of action that will take you there.

This new you will be exhausting to live up to. But if you can grind through the break in period of constantly monitoring your thoughts, words and actions, then hitting goals will be inevitable.

I can attest to this. For years I had a destructive habit of crossing my pre match trading over to my in play trading. I am an efficient pre match scalper and I’ve blown more bankrolls than I care to remember. It was a habit so deeply engrained that it felt like a demon I could not shake off. It is a habit that has probably cost me 10s of thousands in profits and probably cost me over a years worth of compounding.

It wasn’t until I started journaling that I finally rid myself of the habit. The destructive habit began with an error in thought. I’d set lofty, profit ‘goals’ whereby I would keep trading until I hit it. The sponsoring thought behind this was from ‘greed’ or lack of ‘abundance’: in other words, I traded every market as if I wasn’t going to get this opportunity again. This scarce mindset directly manifested into over staking and over trading. To counter this, I under projected the volume of markets I would trade and underestimated my profitability in order to remove pressure. I also watched the match live and exited all positions around a minute before the market went in play. I even closed the market to remove temptation.

Another destructive habit was rushing to trade a market. Some of my worst losses have come from rushing home, tired and unsettled and firing in bets straight away due to FOMO. Again, a habit stemming from a scarce mindset.

To counter this, I made it a habit to shower, freshen up and take my time to feel and understand the context of the situation before trading, no matter what phase I enter.

I also take days off, no matter how good an opportunity is. Trading is a skill where it pays to be a control freak. Taking regular days off and spontaneous breaks is a great way to control impulsiveness. This is a profession that can easily become addictive. Being infront of the price ladders, least amount of time possible keeps you on your toes.

My trading schedule and profit projections are low yet in line with my living expenses so almost every good period feels like a bonus since it always surpasses my projection. This level of detailed planning removes all temptation to stretch my staking or take on any unnecessary risk. By out earning my projections, it feels like I’m performing ‘better’ than I am and helps build an abundance mindset.

It took me weeks of journaling in order to find out what was really triggering me to making such catastrophic decisions. By explicitly detailing my desires and the emotions that were baiting me into erroneous thought processes, I begun to connect the dots. As aforementioned, us regular Joe’s may not be fortunate enough to have access to a high flying coach, but if you’re able to set your ego aside and spend enough time becoming introspective, you’ll uncover the truth about why and how you are self sabotaging your results.

From there, you can spend time detailing, as succinctly as possible the person you want to become and ultimately formulate a plan, a set of habits that will take you where you want to go.

Some things in life are too grand and mysterious to understand. It is very difficult to understand how one’s thoughts, words and actions could ever result in winning the lotto, or being hit by a brick falling from the sky, or getting killed by a drunk driver. But this isn’t a reason to chalk the rest of life up to fate. Because when you start to feel responsible for all your fortunes as well as misgivings, you give yourself the power to change all of it. By consciously thinking about your deeds, you can predict your future. From there, you can decide which parts of you you wish to change. Do not wait for disaster to strike before you wake up. Sleep walk through life long enough and you may wake up when it’s too late. Take control of the wheel and steer yourself in the right direction.

Speak soon.

AT