Duality occurs in every part of our lives yet most people don’t recognise and understand this. This lack of understanding leads to too much significance being placed on one side of the duality equation which causes imbalance and disturbs equilibrium. There are positive and negative poles on either side of life’s equations that we deal with every day.

Polarity is good/bad, hot/cold, up/down, in/out, win/loss, tall/short, big/small, beautiful/ugly, dark/light, bright/dull, long/short, rough/smooth, rich/poor, happy/sad, love/hate, fear/faith, clever/stupid, healthy/sick, action/apathy, active/lazy, calm/anxious, fast/slow, pleasure/pain, mountain/valley etc etc. Without one pole the other pole would be indefinable. Each pole must exist to give the other meaning, credence and legitimacy.

The positive sides are not necessarily the right states all the time and, if so, cannot be attained all the time. For example, feeling sad when losing a loved one is a normal human reaction and a necessary process to experience but too much sadness for too long is not necessarily a good thing. However, feeling hatred at any time can cause imbalance in our lives as can anger or frustration. There are times to be fast and times to be slow.

This brings us to relativity. Very seldom, if ever, is there total positive (love) or total negative (hate) but degrees of each and where we see events, ourselves and one another on the scale depends on our perception of where we are relative to others or relative to what we define as good or bad through our value system. For everything that we are involved in, we anchor ourselves somewhere on the scale and everything else is relative to our perceived anchor position.

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(100% -ve)                    (Our anchor)                                             (100% +ve)

Where we are relatively anchored at any given time is not necessarily good or bad, it just is. This is our universal truth. We continually judge our perceived relative anchor position and thereby attach relative meaning to our current position, individual events and outcomes. We then react to the self created meaning by thinking certain things about ourselves, mostly negative things, which causes inappropriate responses. The challenge is to create positive thoughts and appropriate responses that empower and motivate us into positive action to move our anchor in the direction that is “good”. A good starting place to discover what is “good” can be found in the Bible, the laws of your land, reading about highly respected people or their biographies etc. Such input creates our boundaries and should play a major role in defining our value systems.

With respect to trading, we need to understand and fully accept the duality and polarity of winning and losing and their relativity to each other. One cannot exist without the other and each requires the existence of the other to define it.

When we lose, the challenge is to ensure that we improve the way that we perceive the loss such that it doesn't affect the way that we should execute the next trade. Equally, when we win the same challenge exists. We must execute the next trade the way it should be done without changing our process.

The challenge is to work out a process that embraces both winning and losing in a way that achieves your trading goals and moves your anchor in a direction that improves how you feel about what you are doing. All the time we must recognise that duality exists in all we do.