We here at kakiforex.com have always stressed the importance of deliberate practice to improve your forex trading skills.
Deliberate practice refers to the mindful process of repeating tasks to improve your skills.
Take note that the keyword here is mindful. That is, unlike regular repetition, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is designed around specific goals.
Deliberate practice can be broken up into three primary stages: action, feedback, and incorporation.
The action – whether it was successful or not – gets broken down into parts and is analyzed in the feedback part.
Then, after identifying your mistakes and exploring avenues for improvement, you incorporate your learning in your next actions.
If done correctly, deliberate practice can not only help speed up your learning process but also help you identify your weaknesses and open doors to other techniques that might work for you.
Observing deliberate practice is no walk in the park, however. Here are factors that could diminish, if not defeat, the purpose of using deliberate practice to improve your trading skills:
1. Mindlessness
Remember that deliberate practice is built around mindfully repeating small tasks to look for ways to improve.
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to assume that you’re making progress just because you’ve done something a bajillion times before.
Repetition and experience don’t necessarily mean progress. Focus on correcting errors and finding opportunities for improvement each and every time you perform your tasks.
2. Inconsistency
At the beginning of your process, consistency is necessary to identify areas that need improvement.
Then, as you proceed, consistency is needed to make sure you don’t fall back to your old habits. After all, what’s the use of tracking errors if the same ones keep popping up now and then, right?
3. Not tracking your progress
Just like athletes track their stats and chefs have their recipe books, it’s also important to religiously track your progress.
How else can you know how far you have improved and what processes need more attention?
It might seem boring and tedious at times, but in the end, it’s the numbers that will give you focus in your deliberate practice.
If you haven’t done it yet, go grab a trading journal and start tracking your trading stats. Trust me, you’ll be a better trader for it.
4. Pride
The main purpose of using deliberate practice is to tweak your existing processes to improve your trading game.
But if you tend to shrug off feedback in favor of adopting an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, then the benefits of deliberate practice will be lost on you.
Take care not to hold on too tightly to what works. Instead, open your mind to possible opportunities for improvement and see if they work better for your trading personality.
At the end of the day, you’re the only one who can set the pace of your trading progress.
Deliberate practice is definitely one of the best ways to speed it up, but it requires discipline, dedication, and consistency if you want to reap the full benefits of the process.
