The Best Model for a Trading Mentor

It turns out that we now understand from the advances in neuroscience that the most effective learning comes with effort. That’s right, effort. If we work at learning a new skill, the fumbling
around no matter how awkward it feels, provides a better platform for long­ term skill development then if we are just shown what to do.

It is also fairly obvious that if we try to adopt someone else’s map and model of the world in order to imitate their success, that the adoption of those new behaviors is quite difficult.

So what does this mean in terms of creating the best relationship with a trading mentor?

The best function of a mentor is to set it up so that the client can safely and confidently create new experiences for themselves that feel better in the moment, support their values and get them to their goals.

By set it up I don’t mean that the trading mentor will design the path. What I mean is that the mentor will provide a higher level of self­ awareness so that the trader will be able to see, feel  and experience each choice clearly. This higher level of awareness will allow the client to get clear feedback on the impact of their choices and make better and more intentional choices faster and faster.

This means that a trading mentor has the most difficult job of knowing the best behaviors but also allowing the independent trader to discover the answers for themselves. Working through the problems and creating the new behaviors one step at a time with continual clear feedback creates a repeatable pattern of more profitable trading behaviors.

This process can feel frustrating to the client because we all want easy answers. But these easy answers do not provide the process of creating new neural circuits in our brain that are the foundations of new intentional behaviors that serve us better. Without these new neural connections we tend to lapse persistent trading errors.

As a result many of us will select to trading mentors that provide the answer to our dreams rather than giving us a chance to do the hard work of working on the problem in a way that is solvable and sustainable.

As parents, teachers, friends and spouses we can also use the same model for those we care about. Especially as men we have a tendency to want to “fix things.” Can we be not just trading mentors but life mentors for those we care about? Can we set it up so that those around us feel our support and at the same time be allowed the frustration of finding their own path and creating the new neural connections necessary for sustainable behavior?

This is not an easy problem to solve. However it is more important to solve the right hard problem than the wrong hard problem.