How To Program Your Mind for Success Using Daily Affirmations

Mind Over Markets - A podcast by George Papazov

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In today’s episode, we are going to be speaking on affirmations and how traders can benefit from adding this daily practice into their routines so as to help build a mental edge for optimal trading performance.  You will walk away from this episode with a better understanding of what affirmations are, how they work, as well as how to craft your own powerful affirmations. Stay tuned.  What are affirmations? Affirmations are a powerful tool that many successful people in business, professional sports, and many other professions use on a daily basis.  They are short statements that help you become the trader and more importantly, the person that you want to be - said differently, they are an assertion that something exists or is true.  Now you might be wondering how speaking a bunch of statements out loud might help you make better trading decisions and I don’t blame you.  It goes back to that old saying from Napoleon Hill  “What you think, so you will become” and nowadays, science confirms this to be true. The Science  Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s potential to create new neural pathways and to reorganize itself  Science has proven that the brain is a dynamic organ that constantly changes as we develop new knowledge and go through new experiences.  The more that we use a certain area of the brain, the bigger and stronger that area becomes while the opposite holds true for less frequently used areas of the brain; they become weaker and less effective  Neurons that wire together, fire together! What does this mean for you? Many of us constantly engage in negative self-talk and we don’t even realize it consciously because these thoughts are programmed at a subconscious level.  So when you engage in negative self-talk, you are effectively manifesting these negative thoughts into your reality. Some examples of such self-talk for traders would include the following : "I can't buy myself a winning trade"  "The market is out for my stops"  "I am a horrible trader"  "I can’t do this" When we deeply believe in something, our behavior is often aligned with that belief, so every time you tell yourself you can’t do something, you are creating a feedback loop for your limiting beliefs and strengthening that neural pathway.  If you keep telling yourself these negative things, then you will start to believe them and ultimately, you will manifest them into your reality - but on the flip side of that coin, if you start to tell yourself “I can” then your behavior will follow in line with that statement, and you will create a new feedback loop that will be reinforced and strengthened the more actively you practice these statements.  The reality is this... if you aren’t getting what you want in life then that is the major clue that you might have a negative program running your life on autopilot.  It's never too late to start utilizing positive affirmations to neutralize and replace your limiting thoughts and beliefs with empowering and serving ones so that you can reframe your focus from negativity and scarcity to positivity and abundance. This will take some time before you start to get noticeable results - after all, some of these beliefs and values have been running since you were a child. Repeating affirmations over weeks, months and years will retrain your subconscious mind to think a different way.  At the end of the day, we use affirmations in our daily lives without even knowing that we do, so why not put them to good use and train your brain to a better way of thinking? Now that you know what they are and the benefits of affirmations, let’s discuss how to write powerful affirmations for trading!  There are 3 steps to this process:  Step 1: State your affirmations in the present tense as if it has already happened  Your subconscious mind cannot tell difference between vivid imagery and something that’s actually happened. If you keep