Is It Too Good To Be True?

My whole life I was taught to work ridiculously hard to earn a bigger paycheck.  Now, I am not intending to say that trading is not ridiculously hard because it is.  It is just a different kind of difficult.

The way I was taught to work was to sacrifice myself for my paycheck.  Yes, I found it rewarding to help other people, but I found it to be a large sacrifice to do so in often pretty bad conditions.  From my first job as an adoption counselor working in an office with a boss who smoked pot and obtained her babies from I am not sure where, and was thus reported, all the way through to several other crazy scenarios that don't need to be rehashed here.  I think that I began to drink the Kool-Aid that earning a paycheck meant working in run-down buildings with floods, broken pipes, unsafe neighborhoods and as you have already read unhappy bosses.

So, now, as I sit here, still paper-trading, in disbelief at the money I have made in paper-trading, I am conflicted and confused.  Is it possible that I can really sit in my own home, comfy and cozy, with the sunlight coming through the window and the sounds of the birds and wind chimes outside, and make money?  This seems a little too good to be true, and in my upbringing I was taught that anything too good to be true is NOT true.

Yes, it has been a lot of work to get here, to get to this place of understanding the market and my strategy, and I know I still have A LOT more learning to do everyday. And, yes, I quit my job and have lived on a single income with my husband for months, but this has all been a great time of learning for me.  It has all been a great time of introspection, not really a time of any type of sacrifice at all.

Everyday I learn more and more that conquering my fears of the market are really about conquering the fears in my own head - ending I think with this one - that this is now too good to be true.  I wonder if anybody else has had this fear?  I have heard other traders share that they have fears of losing all of their money, but I have not yet heard anybody share that they fear that they may now be in a life that is just plain good.

The question for me is why I would fear that.  Why would I fear a good work life?  Well, the answer I came up with today, while watching myself not enter a perfectly set up trade and once again watching money race away from me, is that I have an association that when things get too good, they end.  And, they don't just end with a hug and a party, they end with a tragic stab-in-the-gut, knock-you-to-your-knees blow.  Now there is some awareness.  So, it seems, to follow this illogical logic, that I feel fear because I think that if I start trading and am successful then it will all come to a crushing end.

As I have felt all along, the feelings and psychology of the market are also our feelings and psychology about life.  So, this means that perhaps I have been hesitant in life as well.  Thank goodness for this book that a great clinical and trading mentor recommended to me - Trading in the Zone.  Without this book I would not be learning what I REALLY need to know about my trading, and as I am finding out more and more, about my life.