I can't stop breaking my rules

There is a reason why you can't stop breaking your rules.

Imagine two glasses filled with a polarity like a battery in your brain.

One glass full to the top with red liquid representing a hard-wired response like "fight-flight," and the second glass half full of green liquid representing the opposite polarity, describing the amount of your desire to follow a "rule" set you created against the hard-wired "fight-flight" response.

It is like saying I will hold my hand for 15 seconds into a burning fire rather than retracing it as soon as the flames hurt me.

If your desire (green liquid) is one drop more than the intuitive response (red liquid), you will follow your rule in principle.

Here is one way to achieve that goal.

Take a piece of paper and section it into three columns.

Label the columns as follows:

A: Rules I adhere to religiously

B: Rules I break rarely

C: Rules I break consistently

Now read through columns B and C and pick a rule you have the desire to improve your hit rate on, of not breaking it, and choose a rule where you have high confidence that you can master the task.

Refrain from starting with the most complicated rule. It is a multiple-step program to success.

Ask yourself the question: "What would be a good process to condition the newly desired response?"

People are vastly different; some are motivated by rewards, some are driven by pain avoidance behavior, and so on. So there is no uniform step-by-step methodology.

What applies to all is you must reduce the trading size to an acceptable risk that you are willing to tolerate ten losing trades in a row and promise yourself a ten-try sample size.

The goal is not to break the rule you have picked but to integrate it into your execution.

If you fail, get back on the horse and finish your sample size as best as possible.

Do not focus on p/l or monetary rewarded trading and so forth. You have done great as long as, from sample size to sample size, you have improved your goal of staying within your rule.

Reward yourself for improvement.

If you cannot improve your tries, chunk the problem into smaller bits. Ask yourself what it would take for you to follow this rule.

If this rule you picked isn't working out at all, even with this conditioning program, select another.

The goal is twofold. Ideally, you can integrate more rules as effective ones that you can follow and build confidence in your integration process itself.

Once this journey has started, even though responses can be conditioned. With various conditioning tools available, you're getting close to your ultimate goal of smooth execution skills.