How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs

Dealing with limiting beliefs, especially from early childhood, is something that I dealt with for most of my life. By sharing my story and how I overcame some of those obstacles and negative beliefs I hope to inspire you along your own trading journey.

Childhood Beliefs

I had a tough childhood. My parents divorced when I was 4 years old. At age 6 while living with my mom, we lost our home and we became homeless. We lived out of a seedy motel for about a month. The kind Norman Bates might run…

Eventually my mom had enough and called my dad to come get me.

She called in the middle of the night. He drove over 2 hours to come rescue me, though I didn’t see it as ‘rescuing’ at the time…

Knowingly or unknowingly, she built him up to be a monster.  I heard things like he’s cheap and clings to money. He’s a drunk and cares more about his booze than he does me… True or not, at 6 years old, I believed all the things.

Later on, the seeds that were planted by my mom sprang into weeds. It wasn’t hard for me to make the leap that if he cared more about alcohol than me, then I must be worthless and of little value.

I held that belief for years…

Your Environment

As children, we absorbed things from our environments like sponges. We’re not questioning a whole lot, especially when it’s coming from a parent.

Negative beliefs are like weeds that refuse to die unless we get to their roots.

So later on when I decided I wanted to be a trader, I had A LOT weeds to pull!

Conflicting beliefs about money and how it can change people for the worst aren’t exactly the kind of beliefs successful traders can hold! They’re weeds that strangled my profits for years… And I didn’t even know they were there!

If you have poor beliefs, trust issues, bad money beliefs, how do you think that you would perform as a trader?

TERRIBLE! And that was me for the first 10 years of my trading.

Digging Deep into the Problem

I finally realized I needed help. I learned various trading strategies and found a few that made a lot of sense. But I still had trouble putting it together and I couldn’t figure out why? It wasn’t until I started to dig into my beliefs, both my trading beliefs and my money beliefs, that I realized what was at the core of my trading problems.

I questioned all of my beliefs and I didn’t have a clear answer for what my goal was with trading. Initially it was make money, just like everybody else, but what does that mean?

So I dug deeper.

I wanted financial freedom.

What does that mean?

I didn’t want to have to do work for anybody else. I wanted to be able to sustain myself and my family.

Okay great. What do you mean by ‘sustain’?

I want to be able to live right here in the house we have in Massapequa, NY. Pay for all of our living expenses. Take family vacations. And have time to spend with and enjoy my family.

And why is that important to you?

Because it’s everything I lacked when I was a child.

Now finally I understood with clarity what my trading goal was and why it was so important to me. And with that wisdom, I was able to start to tack dollar numbers onto this. Getting clear on my trading goals and then writing down like all my beliefs around trading, like beliefs from early on, beliefs that I still had about trading, helped guide me toward better success as a trader.

Questions ARE The Answer

The answers didn’t come to me overnight, but it was a start. I took this to the next level and started asking myself more questions:

  1. What did my trading rules say?
  2. Where did these beliefs come from?
  3. How are they serving me now?
  4. How are they helping me achieve the goal that I’m trying to achieve?
  5. Are they helping me achieve those goals? And if they’re not, am I willing to let them go?
  6. How am I able to somehow reconcile these beliefs if I can’t let them go?

I proceeded with doing the same exercise for my money beliefs, but the big difference between trading beliefs and money beliefs is that we tend to opt into our trading beliefs. For example, you read a book or you take a course and say to yourself, “Oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I think I’ll do that.” And then you start making that your belief.

Money beliefs are a little different. Many of our core money beliefs come from our childhood. Look at your parents, grandparents, and others who may have cared for you as a child. What were there money beliefs? Are your thoughts similar? How so?

If we have money beliefs that are in conflict with our trading beliefs we’ll hit a wall. Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance” and it needs to be resolved lest we stay like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights.

So how do we unravel this mental knot?

Start by doing the exercises we’ve laid out in this blog post. This alone will begin to help. If you want more exercises, grab a copy of The MARA Mindshift Guide. 

Impact of Negative Beliefs

If you have negative beliefs, you may try to brush them aside and not pay attention to them. It’s kind of like telling a child to just sit down, be quiet, sit in the corner. It doesn’t work very well.

You may also try to bully yourself. You may keep telling those negative thoughts: “NO! I’m not listening to you.” It may work for a short period of time. But un-reconciled, it festers and eventually bubbles to the surface.  That’s when you end up exploding and making really bad decisions in your trading.

And if you do experience a big blow up, those undealt with negative beliefs could be the root cause.

Getting our beliefs on paper literally takes the internal and makes it external. It’s far easier to be objective when this way.

I know this isn’t easy. If you’d like help, I’m here for you.

Get on our free newsletter and send me an email.

Here is the Full Video on Overcoming Limiting Trading Beliefs from Childhood:

check out the following MARA blog posts:

The Four-Walled Prison of a Trader’s Mind

A High-Value Trading Process Sets You Up For Life

4 Trading Tips for COVID-19