Thursday Trader's Tip: Hyper-accountability VS Fault-defame
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How do you perceive mistakes?
This week, we’ll discuss the two opposite extremes in perceiving trading mistakes and how that defines the quality of your performance.
Some clients notes:
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— Jarrod, Texas, USA, ES futures trader
Related reads:
Embracing Discomfort: The Path to Trading Mastery - how you can develop the superpower of surrender to sustain peak trading performance.
Mastering Trading Resilience: Dealing with Trading Mistakes - how you can become a master of spotting and overcoming your trading mistakes as quickly as possible.
Written Version:
There are two types of people when it comes to perceiving trading mistakes: the hyper-accountable and the fault-defame type.
These two ways of perceiving mistakes lead to different internal and external responses. The fault-defame trader accepts zero responsibility for their mistakes. The hyper-accountable trader gets stuck in a cycle of self-blame.
Though, they lead to the same outcome—an impediment to learning from mistakes.
This is because, to do so, you need to be nonjudgmental about yourself and the external situation. While the hyper-accountable can’t be nonjudgmental, the fault-defamer doesn’t even consider the situation—their brain, protecting their egos, is incapable of absorbing the information.
Let’s examine each style more closely.
Hyperaccountable Style
The hyperaccountable style must remove the internal clutter—the blame, guilt, shame, and regret—to reach a nonjudgmental view.
An important realization to make is that the market doesn’t care about your perceptions or how regretful and guilty you feel.
You’re doing it to yourself!
To be able to mentally reset after each trade, you need to be able to achieve two essential skills:
Self-compassion: You’re human, and there’s always a way forward. This is a performance skill, and you’ll keep on making mistakes, so you must adjust your expectations. Mistakes actually funnel your way to success.
Imperfection Acceptance: After a mistake, don’t stay stuck trying to understand the “why” behind it. Focus on *how* you’re feeling. Where’s the tension in your body? What are your thoughts? What narrative are you creating around the discomfort? See it, don’t believe it—different things.
Fault-defame Style
We tend to think the hyper-accountable style is a little better than the fault-defame style because at least the former acknowledges the mistake, but both are toxic.
The hyper-accountable style must share some of that self-blame with the fault-defame style, which lacks responsibility.
An important distinction this style needs to make is that fault isn’t the same as responsibility. As long as you manage your trading account and click the buy and sell button, it is both your fault and responsibility. Then, we have those incidents when there’s a power outage or, let’s say, slippage in the market that gets you a worse entry than expected. These situations may not be your fault, but guess who will have to deal with them moving forward? You. Because the trading account matters to you and anybody else. The market couldn’t care less.
Avoiding responsibility is a usual coping mechanism for not having to deal with failure. “If it wasn’t my fault, then I don’t have to process the emotions coming from the mistake.” Ironically, this comes from heightened shame, which means that both hyper-accountable and fault-defame styles suffer from the same problem, just with different coping mechanisms.
First, you must know the deep root of your problem, then work to change your beliefs about failure. I do this every day with the traders I coach.
If you’re ready to take your career seriously, unlock your full potential, and start a high-level coaching relationship, use the link below to see if you qualify for 1:1 coaching.
Peaceful trading,
Sara
Related reads:
Embracing Discomfort: The Path to Trading Mastery - how you can develop the superpower of surrender to sustain peak trading performance.
Mastering Trading Resilience: Dealing with Trading Mistakes - how you can become a master of spotting and overcoming your trading mistakes as quickly as possible.
so we need to become a Buddha I got it :)