All of the successful traders that I have known have had one thing in common.

They are supremely confident in their ability as a trader.

However, if you are not yet a successful trader, how can you gain confidence?

The answer is that you need, starting today, to believe with all of your being that you are the successful person you intend to be.

When I first began trading on the exchange floor, eons ago, I looked at the other traders and thought that I was as smart as a lot of the traders who were very successful. Yet, they were successful and I was not.  

What was the difference?

The difference was that they believed in their ability as successful traders based on their long term success. 

I had no such history of success, but I had read as much as I could by Napoleon Hill, Og Mandino and W. Clement Stone and I believed, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, that:  

            “We become what we think about all day long”.

To control my thoughts and establish a belief system that included my being a successful trader. I wrote down three affirmative statements on a 3″x5″ card, put the card in my shirt pocket and read it to myself several times a day.

Recently, I found one of the first cards I used 30 years ago when I cleaned out a drawer at home. I remember reading the words hundreds of times. My card said:

• I am the best broker in the pit.
• I make $500 a day
• I deal from a pedestal of calmness.

Now, you may ask, was I the best broker in the pit? The answer is no.

Did I make $500 a day when I was telling myself that I did? No again.

Did I deal from a pedestal of calmness? Not exactly.

What I did do, was progress in the direction of these goals.

I repeated these lines over and over until I believed them. In the end, I had the confidence of someone who believed himself to be a success. Programming myself to be confident in my trading prior to actually achieving success was crucial to growing from an also-ran trader to someone able to earn a living trading.

In the thirty years since I wrote my first 3×5 card with the affirmations above, much has been written about how affirmations work and how best to use them.  The current theory as to how affirmations work is that by repeatedly telling your subconscious mind that you are, say, confident, your repeated declaration of confidence in time causes your subconscious to believe that confidence is your reality.  Once you are convinced of that reality, your outward actions will, then, become consistent with that belief.

Further, your subconscious mind is a wonderful problem solver. 

You think of a problem and, in time, your subconscious suggests a solution. 

I often lay in bed right before I go to sleep at night and think of a problem that I would like to solve.  Many times, the solution occurs to me when I awaken in the morning.  It is not something that I can force and it does not work every time, but very often the solution will seem obvious after I have let my subconscious cogitate on it for a day or two.

Therefore, today, the best way to use affirmations is to state them as a question that presumes that you already possess the quality you want.  In this way, you will be both convincing your subconscious of this reality and asking its help in leading you to it. So, if I were to re-write my affirmations given today’s thinking on how best to state them, I would say:

• Why am I the best broker in the pit?
• How am I able to consistently earn $500 a day?
• Why do I deal from a pedestal of calmness?