Maintaining Your Progress
There are different cycles that you go through while working on your mental game. It’s very rare that mental game progress follows a straight line upwards – even in an ideal world you’ll still go through peaks and plateaus. Or, as traders see in price action, periods of expansion and consolidation.
During this consolidation, or maintenance phase, mental game progress can easily start to fall off if you are not paying attention.
Your mental game, like a car, is easier to maintain than it is to fix a problem. With a car, you get your oil changed regularly, pay attention and replace your tires as necessary, and address many other little things in order to prevent bigger problems, which can consume a lot more time, energy, and money. Regular maintenance has its advantages.
Some of you, however, don’t know how to maintain mental game progress. You’ve never been in that position before, so not only is it new, you didn’t even know it was necessary. Or, you’ve been here before but haven’t quite had enough punishment, in the form of losses, problems, and emotional chaos, to motivate you to keep working at a time when it “seems” like you have everything under control…but actually don’t. When you stop maintaining progress in your mental game, you give an open invite to your previous problems to come back and affect your performance.
Here’s an example of how it can happen:
A trader, poker player or golfer successfully makes progress from their mental game work, including creating/using A to C-game Analyses, Profiles/Maps, and Mental Hand Histories, and as a result of that work, they’ve built up some momentum. Their fierce engagement, or regular attention, produced distinct improvements.
Sustaining that progress feels easy. So they skip a cool-down one day, short cut a warm-up another day, and fail to analyze a big mistake on a day where they still won or scored well. Their diligence steadily gets worse, but there are no immediate consequences. The momentum of their previous work hides the erosion beneath their feet.
It doesn’t seem to them that they’re working less, but the truth is they don’t have the same energy/motivation around it, there’s less consistency with their approach, and progress has firmly stalled out.
Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there are more emotional ups and downs and they’re shocked by bigger mistakes that haven’t been seen for months. They either take a few days off to figure out what happened, or they barrel their way forward, scorching a fiery path of chaos.
Avoid the Drop-Off By Aiming Higher
I get it. When you’ve already put in a lot of work and see results, you don’t want to have to keep working. You think you’re done. That very common, yet subtle, problem is an illusion of learning and it has tripped up more clients than I can count…even when I warn them of this likely fate.
Instead, after a phase when you’ve worked hard to produce gains, you must consolidate those gains – almost like a forced plateau – with the intent to create a higher base from which the next expansion/progression in your game can take your A-game higher.
Move on from that too soon, before the base has had a chance to solidify, and your progress will erode. Solidifying that base is akin to mastery, and mastery takes far longer than most people realize.
Mastery of the necessary corrections allows you to be full in command so you don’t have to fight against FOMO, revenge trading, and overconfidence, in the same way that you were before. You want to be able to move on to the next set of concerns and opportunities to keep improving.
To do this you must successfully move from the Conscious Competence stage to Unconscious Competence. Ironically, that doesn’t take a lot of effort. You already put in the hard work. You just need to keep the momentum going longer enough to gain months of evidence that show you’ve reached mastery. Don’t just blindly assume you’ve reached that point.
Find Your Version of Maintenance
To be clear, if problems that you’ve worked on in the past reoccur, that means you haven’t resolved them and you need to keep working the system.
If you have made progress using my system, you have likely relied on the worksheets and tools I’ve developed. One litmus test on whether you have a solid maintenance plan is how often you update these worksheets.
If you completed an A to C-game Analysis, Map/Profile, or Goals Worksheet once and never revised or updated it, you might not be as on top of your mental game as you need to be. (Sidenote, I think of the Mental Hand History a little differently because the work there is in response to a very specific problem as opposed to the overall mental game. You don’t have to keep updating those, just remember it exists and use it as needed.)
Determine what maintenance looks like for you. It’s fine for it to be less aggressive than when you are actively resolving issues. But you want to be engaged enough to both prevent previous problems, and respond quickly to subtle new ones as well.
Remember, if you are doing this all correctly, your inchworm is moving forward. And if your inchworm is moving forward, your previous assessments – the map of your emotions, the A to C-game analysis, the goals you’ve set – are out of date. And if that data is out of date, you lack clarity, which puts your progress at risk of stalling.
If you had an organized plan where you were making a deliberate decision to ease up on efforts to see where your skills were in the continuum of reaching mastery, I would be delighted. I would applaud the robustness of your strategy. But far too often it’s really a byproduct of complacency and the illusion of learning.
Mind you, if your focus, energy, and engagement have not waned at all but you just haven’t updated the worksheets – who cares? Not me. I don’t really care how you get it done. Just get it done. If my system has worked for you in the past, then keep using it. It’s designed to evolve with your game. So refresh your worksheets, set your sights higher, and keep working.
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