Rande Howell shares how you can avoid blowing up your accounts as a trader by making better trading decisions.

I am here with Rande Howell, author of Mindful Trading.  We talk often, in terms of successful trading, that traders have to confront the tendency to self-sabotage.  What a terrible thing to do.  How do traders confront that?  What is it?  How do they deal with it?

Oh, great question.  Self-sabotage for most people is literally a fear of their own success.  I will work with a client who is working with a six-figure account and every time he bumps over into seven figures he blows it up and he’s back there, and finally what he’s realized is that his sense of worth is really tied into the number of zeroes that he’s trading.  Suddenly all of the sudden you see it is okay.  Inside yourself there is this self-saboteur and the real key is how do you begin to isolate it and actually to see it before it self-destructs you.  That’s the power.

Does it have anything to do with what we as traders decide we’re worthy of?

Yes.  There are four self-limiting beliefs that all traders are going to deal with on a core level to go from inconsistent trading to consistent profitability to professional trading, and the first is a sense of inadequacy.  That’s when you see those guys who have perfectionism and they have to win every time, that’s inadequacy.  The sense of mattering, you know I’ve got to prove myself.  I’m going to be the world’s best trader.  I’m going to prove to you.  The other is worthiness.  Many traders have a sense of unworthiness particularly about having to work hard for money and they think oh gosh I’m not working hard for my money, or in their families they’ve learned that I’m only worth this much, and the moment you go out of that comfort zone it starts dragging back and you see that in trading by blowing yourself up in self-sabotage.