4 Factors That Can Sabotage Your Deliberate Practice

We here at BabyPips.com have always emphasized the importance of deliberate practice to help you improve your forex trading skills.

Deliberate practice refers to the conscious process of repeating tasks to improve your skills.

Note that the key word here is is CAREFUL. That is, unlike habitual repetition, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is designed around specific goals.

You can also be nice and modest about it, but that’s optional.

Deliberate practice can be divided into three stages: action, feedback and embedding.

The action – whether it was successful or not – is divided into parts and analyzed in the feedback part. Then, after identifying your mistakes and exploring ways to improve, you incorporate the learning into your next actions.

Read more about deliberate practice in my previous updates:

Deliberate Practice in Forex Trading Part I

Deliberate Practice in Forex Trading Part II

If done correctly, deliberate practice can not only help speed up your learning, but also help you identify your weaknesses and open doors to other techniques that might work for you.

Practicing deliberate practice is no walk in the park, however.

Here are the factors that could diminish, if not defeat, the purpose of using deliberate practice to improve your trading skills:

1. Numbness

Remember that deliberate practice is built around careful repeating small tasks to look for ways to improve. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to assume you’re making progress just because you’ve done something a billion times before.

Repetition and experience do not necessarily mean progress. Focus on correcting errors and finding opportunities for improvement each time you complete your tasks.

2. Inconsistency

Early in your process, consistency is needed to identify areas that need improvement.

Then, as you go along, it takes consistency to make sure you don’t fall back into old habits. After all, what’s the use of tracking errors if the same ones keep popping up time and time again, right?

3. They don’t track 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 much you’ve improved and which processes need more attention?

It may seem dull and boring at times, but in the end, it’s the numbers that will give you focus in your deliberate practice.

If you haven’t already, get a trading journal and start tracking your trading statistics. Trust me, you’ll be a better trader for it.

4. Pride

The main purpose of using deliberate practice is to change your existing processes to improve your trading game.

But if you tend to reject 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.

Be careful not to cling 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 are the only one who can set the pace of your trading progress.

Deliberate practice is certainly one of the best ways to speed it up, but it takes discipline, dedication and consistency if you want to reap the full benefits of the process.