The most important aspect of this exercise is the experience you gain in understanding the process of changing beliefs. Each time you set out to change a belief or set of beliefs, youll gain a resource that enables you to do it again. Each success you experience will help develop another set of beliefs that allow you to change more beliefs if and when it suits your purposes. You will establish a new definition of yourself that says: "I believe I can identify and change any belief about myself that may be in conflict with my conscious goals."

For this exercise to be effective, you must keep a few rules in mind.

First, start the exercise with a task or goal that is truly insignificant and has little meaning in your life. The objective of the exercise is learning how to manipulate your inner environment consciously and direct your conscious focus of attention. The goal you decide upon as the object of the exercise should not have a lot of value attached to the outcome. If it does, that would be an indication you may be taking on some very powerful and entrenched belief systems. This is something you definitely want to avoid until you have developed the necessary skills and resources.

Then, recognize that from the moment we are born, we are taught how to manipulate the outer physical environment; however, you may not have the resources to be even minimally effective at manipulating the mental environment. As a result, it is extremely important that you do not judge your ability to execute the schedule you set up according to the standards of performance you expect of yourself in the physical environment. If you expect too much and judge your ability harshly, it will only negate your efforts and set up a fear and inadequacy cycle. The less you expect of yourself, the faster you will progress. An expectation can easily become a demand that it be fulfilled. Demands usually generate a certain amount of fear that the demands will not be met. When you are working in the inner environment, fear will always negate your positive efforts unless your intent is to identify the source of your fear.

Finally, not having any expectations from your efforts to carry out your plan will also have the secondary benefit of helping you to learn to accept whatever you accomplish as being all right. Any step, no matter how small, is a step. Just deciding you want to do this exercise is significant, even if you dont follow through with it right away. You may come back to it some day when you have more of a "sense" of the power you will acquire from the ability to manipulate

your inner environment consciously to be consistent with your goals. So, to keep yourself from having any expectation about how well you should do at this or any other exercise I offer you, I suggest you consider yourself an infant in a brand new environment. You will have to learn how to stand up before you can begin to walk or run.

SELF-HYPNOSIS

Self-hypnosis is a relaxation technique that allows one to bypass the reasoning process of the conscious mind to make it easier to accept some message. So it is an excellent technique for establishing new beliefs or collapsing old beliefs. For those of you who are interested, I have a self-hypnosis tape specifically designed to make it easier to learn how to cut your losses, reverse yourself, trust your intuition, and value yourself more. For more information, you can contact me at Trading Behavior Dynamics, Inc., in Chicago or through the publisher.

POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS

When you are in a trade and start to experience anxiety about what is happening in the market, you will likely take those anxious thoughts and start running them through a negative loop-like thinking about money instead of the structure of the market or what the market is doing to you. Eventually you will run enough thought energy through your consciousness that it will cause you to act in a way that is not in your best interests. A positive affirmation will work the same way. Formulate a positive affirmation of some trait or characteristic of the way in which you want to be. For example, you may want to become a more patient person and wait for the market to give the signals to act. With an affirmation like "I am becoming a more patient person every day," you will eventually become that person. In other words we will behave in a manner that is consistent with the affirmation, if we run enough thought energy through that affirmation. Eventually, the affirmation becomes a belief with enough energy to affect our behavior.

10. I trust myself to become consciously aware of these beliefs in many different ways. Once I become aware of these beliefs, I can just as easily let them go to make space for new beliefs that are more consistent with my current goals.

11. I believe that changing and expanding my awareness and comfort zones are a necessary aspect of my growth and

survival, and I welcome these opportunities to identify old beliefs and consequently grow and expand. 12. I feel an intense desire to succeed and achieve my goal of

--Consequently I have an intense desire to

clear my inner path of any resistance or obstructions that stand in the way of the fulfillment of my goal.

The following are affirmations that, once turned into beliefs, will be very effective resources in helping you to work in your inner environment.

1. All beliefs are about reality, and are not necessarily predominate characteristics of reality. I will examine and question my beliefs in relationship to their usefulness in achieving my goals.

2. I believe in the power of my conscious mind to make available to me all the information I need to know.

3. I have the power to change any belief in a way that would make it more useful in achieving my goals of happiness, harmony, financial wealth, and being more productive.

4. 1 believe I am free to change the way I feel about any past experience.

5. I believe I have the ability to examine the contents of my mind.

6. I trust that all my beliefs about the way I trade will become known to me.

7. I place no particular importance on these beliefs about trading other than the fact that they exist.

8. I have chosen these beliefs at certain points in my life and accepted them as true at the time. As I examine them, I realize that they may not be particularly useful or true for me now. I accept this and I feel free to change all those beliefs that are inconsistent with my current goals

9. My first and immediate goal is to identify all my beliefs that may be in conflict with my long-term objectives of

PART IV

How to Become a Disciplined Trader