The Pillars of Excellence
The four principles that drive elite performance in any profession are finding your sweet spot, acquiring the necessary skills for success, attaining the ability to perform under pressure, and achieving continuous growth in your industry. Mastering these four pillars for excellence will help you to grow personally and professionally in your career and set you apart from the rest of the competition. If you follow and trust this process you will reach your career goals and achieve all that you desire in your life professionally.
Find Your Sweet Spot
To achieve elite performance in an area one must first locate their sweet spot. In other words, to reach top performance in something the goals you are striving to attain in life must align with the qualities and characteristics that make you unique. You can think of your own sweet spot as your fingerprint, as it is something special and exclusive to you alone. Therefore, everyone has their own sweet spot and to get to impeccable performance in a field, you must choose an occupation that is right for you. To get to the top you must first work to identify your own strengths, interests, and values.
To pinpoint your individual assets, think back in your life where you have previously excelled at something and had a high responsiveness to training, so that you can find something that you have an innate skill for and are able to progress in as well. Next, you must find your own interests in life. This is a bit similar and basically comes down to choosing a job or occupation that you enjoy. Simply put, if what you are doing is a bore and does not bring you fulfillment, pick another career. Lastly, you must choose a company or profession that resonates with your core values. So, if you value autonomy, find a profession where you can work for yourself and vice versa if you value structure and working for others.
Practice Makes Perfect
Once you have found your individual sweet spot and identified your strengths, interests, and values, the next step in achieving elite performance is to acquire the necessary skills for success. To obtain the proper tools with any profession, including trading, you must first gain a comprehensive foundation and master the basics of your job. The best traders in the world do not do something special or have a particular skill that others do not, they just do ordinary things extraordinarily well and avoid making costly mistakes.
Once you have learned the basics the next step you need to take is to practice your skills to hone and perfect them. Practice beats theory and knowing how to do something and having the ability to do it are entirely different. A great way to practice your skills as a trader while avoiding losses is to use simulations. This way you can still practice using your newly learned trading strategies and techniques in a market without the fear of losing your money due to inexperience. Then once you’ve sufficiently practiced, you’ll be ready to earn big in the real market. Lastly, to perfect your skills you also need to challenge yourself as a trader and put yourself in uncertain situations.
Many people don’t realize that the path to success is not a straight line, but exponential with dips along the way. To reach the peak you need to make breakthroughs and challenge yourself mentally. Furthermore, you must understand that at times you may fail in your trading career but learning from the mistakes you make will take you to the top of the slope and help you to achieve elite performance in the industry.
Overcoming Pressure
After finding your sweet spot and learning the skills necessary to succeed in your profession you must then learn to perform under pressure. The job of a trader can be extremely stressful and mentally taxing filled with high highs and low lows. To reach elite performance in trading, and any career in life, you need to be able to take what you have learned in training and output into your career daily.
As a trader, you must be able to successfully produce profitable trade ideas and decisions to progress in the field regardless of the pressures surrounding you. Additionally, as a trader, you must be able to keep your emotions in check regardless of how the day is going.
As traders, we must remember that our emotions are our own and we can control the feeling we create. Your emotions can cloud your decision-making and result in avoidable mistakes and losses, so it is vital to keep your feelings out of your trade ideas and focus on your practiced, learned game plan.
Achieving Continuous Success
Lastly, to reach elite performance one must be able to have sustained success in their field. You need to avoid being complacent and be continuously improving in whatever you are doing. The best get better because they don’t stop reaching for the stars.
As traders, we should always be conscious not to fall victim to continuity bias. Once we have reached success and become profitable as traders, we must remember to never cut corners or take shortcuts, or we will fall right back to the bottom. You must always remember the past and steps you took to get you where you are today and continue the same process to achieve sustained growth and excellence in your industry.
The Keys to Peak Performance
Trading is an extremely competitive and difficult career to pursue. To reach peak performance as a trader you must first figure out what style of trading works best for you and identify your sweet spot within the market. Next, it is vital to practice the skills necessary to be successful and profitable in trading.
Once you have located your strengths and perfected your techniques you then must be able to perform under pressure and not let emotional stress impact your trade ideas and decisions. Lastly, once you have gained these 3 abilities you need to be able to have sustained success and not get complacent or cocky after you have become profitable as a trader.
Summary
The path to elite performance is exponential and there are four main steps to get to the top. First, you must identify your sweet spot and start working towards something you have a natural skill for. Next, you need to train and perfect your skills in the field to ensure you are ready to take on any challenge that comes your way.
After you have passed these two steps you need to then learn how to handle yourself under pressure and not let your emotions get the best of you in your careers. Lastly, you must be able to have sustained growth in your industry and master how to have long lasting success in your life.
