Guest post by Sohrab Alborzian
About the author: Sohrab Alborzian trades commodities full time and plays competitive tennis.
This article is written for anyone who desires anything and needs to perform well in moments of great pressure. Whether you are a business man or athlete, you want to follow proven strategies that enable your success. In this article, I’ll provide a simple strategy to tackle big moments at work.
Strategy: Something that we all think we need so badly but once we are given the strategy, so few of us have the discipline to use it.
A couple short stories to explain the uselessness of strategies:
1. I recently read a book called, “The way of the turtle”. It was about a very famous group of 13 commodities traders who learned how to trade in about 1 month and went on to turn a little over 4 million dollars into 30 million dollars within 4 years. The teacher who hired these students was named, Richard Dennis, a very well known commodities trader. He equipped them with 1 single strategy to trade the markets, some of the traders in the interviews completely failed and 1 of them, Kris Faith, went on to becoming the best performer of them all making millions of dollars on top of the initial investment. How did some of them fail if they all had the exact same strategy? The traders who failed didn’t follow the strategy and were convinced that Richard Dennis had given Kris a secrete strategy. This wasn’t true though. The truth of the matter was that Kris followed the strategy step by step while the other students started using their own opinions. In hindsight you would wonder to yourself, why on earth they would do that, but in the moment we all know we could be guilty of it.
2. Similar scenario…If you took 10 obese people and gave them a strategy to weight loss, how many of them do you believe would end up with great results? Probably 1.
The moral? Strategies are a dime a dozen and useless unless you execute them. Another important note is that there is no BIG BANG to a strategy. In fact, once you have a strategy that works consistently, it is quite boring because you become like a robot just repeating the same steps everyday.
Here is a simple and easy strategy you can apply today and effectively produce results.
Conscious breathing
When examining the psychology of “moments that matters”, things like fear and stress are bound to surface. Desire often evokes the feeling that something is currently missing and the emotional body automatically generates stress and anxiety. Ever notice that the harder you try to get better at something, the less flexible and fluid you become? Soon as a goal becomes intensely important, a relaxed state of mind turns into uncontrollable emotions.
The practice of mindful breathing on a consistent basis automatically releases stress. This is the essential function of yoga and meditation. There is no yoga without a focus on the breath. From personal experience, I noticed that after just one session of breathing, the following day, the same chaotic situations in the commodities markets seemed to be a bit more tolerable and I was able to make more clear decisions. It is the little changes that yield big results and conscious breathing is among the most life-changing practices I have added to my routine. Maybe this is why ancient texts often reveal pictures of people meditating. It is just a stress release routine that allows us to perform much better in mastering our craft.
There you have it. A strategy that is making me more money in the commodities markets and winning me more matches on the tennis court. No illusory magic, just a simple exercise to help you become more relaxed and focused in moments that matter.