In golf, I’m convinced almost all mental breakdowns come back to over-concern with outcome rather than staying with the process. It’s why we look up before we’ve even hit the ball, or try fifty quick-fixes in a bucket of balls instead of a single high-quality move repeated fifty times. 

And I have these same suspicions when it comes to trading.

If your trading plan includes some prices where you’d consider taking a trade, and others that will be completely forbidden to you, then you will be waiting for the market to come to you. You will be in control of your reactions to price movement, instead of chasing after trades while at the mercy of your emotions. In other words, planning helps take the emotion out of the equation.

As you will come to find out, for the past 28 years I have been teaching golf to over 17,000 students. And the part of all those lessons that intrigued me the most was how our brains misbehave when we need them the most—for example, our practice swings without a ball are usually relaxed and wonderful, our swings at the range are iffy, and then on the golf course all hell can break loose. That’s all mental...