Beyond Achievement: The Path to Sustaining Peak Trading Performance
How to Sustain Trading Excellence While Living a Vision-Aligned Life?
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Achieving a big milestone is one thing. Sustaining peak performance for the long term… is a whole different ball game!
Just the other day, I had a meeting with one of my clients—a seasoned futures trader who had a stellar March.
During our usual monthly review, we talked about what had contributed to his success and action plans to sustain those behaviors. He was undeniably proud—nobody could take that away from him—but he confessed: "Now that I've set the bar higher, there's this fear of slipping up next month. The pressure feels even bigger than before."
Now, he had more on his plate; March's profits had become ingrained in his new sense of Self, his ego, and he was holding it tightly.
This scenario isn't unusual among the traders I work with. The drive to achieve is fueled by a deep hunger to prove themselves, push boundaries, and sometimes prove doubters wrong. There’s fear, but the desire to get there overpowers it. They make insane efforts to get their processes right.
But when they hit a significant milestone they had been working for so long, the fear of failure hits harder than ever: imposter syndrome creeps in, there's a fear of regressing, the fear of loss intensifies, and something shifts: they start to play it safe… maybe too safe.
Instead of taking advantage of the momentum to push forward, they let fear take the wheel. They start to fear pulling the trigger, believing they're being more selective. They start to take profits just a little earlier and are risk smaller than usual. Before they know it, their performance has taken a hit…
We tend to assume that achieving is the toughest part of the job, and once we've done it, all we have to do is rinse and repeat, but a new, completely different challenge arises: to sustain peak trading performance for the long run.
The Achieving Culture
We mostly hear about ‘achieving’:
Finding the person of our dreams
Building rock-solid abs at the gym
Graduating from university
Reaching peak performance in trading
But what about sustainability?
We have the guidelines to get there—books on ‘how to achieve’ sell—but we lack the support to sustain greatness.
When you achieve something for the first time, it’s never everything you have to prove. A new horizon opens, showing a new world of possibilities and challenges.
The girl who found her soulmate finds herself bored and missing the fire without effort to nurture the connection.
The guy who finally achieved those enviable abs falls into complacency if he lacks a solid plan for maintaining them.
The college graduate who lands a job may lose motivation if he fails to invest in self-improvement.
The trader who had the month of a lifetime risks giving it all back to the market without a solid plan to manage the capital.
Mental barriers become too evident when there’s more at stake. Traders fail to sustain peak performance because what propelled them to the top isn't enough to keep them there. Something else is needed…