Members login
Specialty Skills Article: The Power of Practice
Written by article default Tuesday, 15 June 2010 19:16
Mastering anything involves learning, incessant practice, and being willing to fail...a lot. Failure is the secret key to success. That may sound contradictory on the surface; however, true achievers and champions will tell you that before they enjoyed the sweet smell of consistent victory, they tasted the brew of failure. Actually, failure is where the most important lessons are learned, and that is where strength, endurance, perseverance and persistence are built. In other words, you must create consistency in your diligent pursuit of protocols (trading strategies and setups) that are supported by effective routines, which give way to habituation...and that is skill-building. And, this process is supported by employing mental and emotional tools to keep you focused on follow-through. Creating consistency in doing the right things habitually will get you the right results habitually...and that means you'll develop capacity and enlarge your comfort zone in order to tolerate the negative emotions like anxiety, fear and greed associated with bad trading behavior. So, you've got to practice, practice and practice some more. But, it's not just any practice. In this article, I'm going to share with you a specific kind of practice; a practice that's not really practice in the normal sense, but a step above. If you do it, it will ramp up your learnings and your results.As children, you learned to model by observing your environment and using all of your senses to gather information. From this observation, you began to develop strategies to get the results you want and, in many cases, these strategies are developed intuitively. But the higher and more complicated your objectives, the more important it is that your strategies be conscious in order to optimize the structure. And to do this, you must consistently look for and be receptive to feedback from your environment to: a) Determine what strategies you are using to get a result; and b) Modify or change that strategy if you're not getting the results you aimed for.
One of the ways to increase your chances of modeling or tracking successful behavior is to use a template to lay your modeling structure on. One way to do that is the Test Operate Test Exit method or TOTE. The principle underlying TOTE is that your behavior is driven or motivated by an outcome. You recognize when you have achieved the outcome by a unique set of evidence criteria (i.e., what you will be seeing, hearing, and feeling when you have achieved the outcome, the vision of success). You are constantly comparing your present state or reality to your desired state or future reality to find out if they match. When they do match, you know you have reached the exit and have achieved your outcome. If the present state does not match the desired state, you must complete another operation to discover if that makes a difference.
You are running TOTEs throughout your life, comparing where you are with where you want to be, taking actions to bring you closer, and eventually to, the exit itself. Examples of this in everyday life include:
* Learning to walk - you try and fail, changing this and that until you are successful
* Riding a bike
* Learning to play a game
* Learning a subject in school
* Trading
Another example from modeling successful traders is that successful traders keep going until they have reached a successful TOTE match (their desired state of both the trade and their internal focused state match), in other words, they are focused on doing only that which will create consistency in keeping commitments and following rules. Whereas others - those who do not naturally excel at trading - abandon the TOTE before they get the match and experience a distinct disconnect between their desired state, or trade result, as in trading their plan and following rules and the frustration associated with commitment breakdowns. This may be due to fatigue, anxiety, distraction, distortion, fear, greed or loss of confidence in their own ability to follow-through and achieve the outcome.
When I was in college, I knew a guy, Kyle, who was a great basketball player. He did not begin as a great b-baller. In fact, he did not play much his freshman year. But everyday he would watch the older, more accomplished players. He studied the way they moved, the way they practiced, the way they held the ball, the way they dribbled and played defense, the way they hustled, and the way they talked with passion. He studied how they stretched and how hard they worked out. He saw himself going through practice as if it were a game; moving as they moved. With every play that he learned, he imagined himself going through all of the steps. By feeling the leather of the ball, hearing the swish of the nets, feeling how his body felt when he dribbled through the defense for a lay-up, or charged the basket for a rebound, seeing the wholeness of the court and sensing a balance of where everyone was, he would feel the passion for playing, the excitement of each step. By breaking down and "practicing" or TOTE-ing this strategy, he became a great player.
When Kyle became successful from modeling his winning team members' strategies, he was running a TOTE. He tried, failed, modified, tried, failed, modified, tried, and so forth. You get the picture. He tested, operated and checked for a match in desired outcome (state) vs. outcome (state) attained. If the outcomes, or states, are not equal and do not match, then back to operation #2, test again. If no match, then operation #3, then test and so on until they MATCH, then exit.
When Kyle's basketball outcomes, i.e., dribbling, passing, defense, and shooting, all matched the desired outcome, he exited the TOTE for that time, only to be repeated when he identified another level of outcome of state to achieve. At that point, he would again run the TOTE until he achieved the match. Furthermore, TOTEs can exist within TOTEs. For example, dribbling can be a TOTE, passing can be a TOTE, and so forth. Some TOTEs run every few minutes, some every few hours, days, weeks or years. Another word in our lexicon for TOTEs is practice; however, it is important to understand the concept of TOTEs because the level of specificity greatly supports the system alignment and effective coding of the successful strategy. To just say "practice" is to leave much of the process incomplete. Essentially, the TOTE is a feedback loop designed to prompt you to find what you need to achieve your desired state. Key skills for successfully navigating the TOTE in order to be able to model are: Sensitivity to what is happening, a willingness to learn from feedback, and the flexibility to do or learn something different when what you are doing is not working.