Face to Face

“No matter how fast we click from place to place, it will never replace face to face” - Joel Bauer. Is that how you learn best? Face to face? There are many ways you can educate yourself in trading. The first one is Home Study.

You buy the materials, books, CDs, DVDs. It is full of information. You read, you study, you watch and you listen. You do the recommended exercises in the materials. You play with the software a little. Are you ready to trade? Most people aren’t, yet.

Then you go to a seminar. You ask questions, you listen. You do more exercises, you understand more. You interact with likeminded people and compare notes. You find out about their experiences, their brokers, their commissions, their systems, their joys and sorrows. Now there is an added dimension to your trading education. Are you ready to trade? More people are ready at this stage. Others need more hand holding.

Now it is time to get serious and get your hands dirty, so to speak. The next step may be more home study and more seminars. Maybe a computer lab or a webinar is how you prefer to add to your learning. It is important to keep the variety element in there. In this day and age, you get bored quickly. Not many are content sitting in a corner reading hour after hour, day after day. Seminars, workshops, software, webinars, CDs, DVDs, iPods, interactive media all keep your senses bombarded with information.

Scientists say you receive 2,000,000,000 (yes two billion) pieces of information every second of every day of your lives. That includes the words, sounds, tunes, colours, brightness, images, shapes, smells, tastes, temperature, pressure, texture and weight. Over your lifetime this adds up to 94,600,000,000,000,000 pieces of information. Your brain is capable of storing all of it and more. How much of this do you retain? About 1/500,000th of it. What makes retention easy is if the input involves many senses, intensifying the memory. Add to it emotional content, now you have locked in memories. If you are at an event and you hold yourself back (pulling back on emotional involvement), the retention is less!

You may now understand why you feel so good after a seminar or a workshop: many senses, face to face, emotional involvement. The very same reason is accountable for this enthusiasm and contentment fading away after the seminar. You no longer have a face to face, multisensory, multidimensional experience. How do you retain this level of enthusiasm? The answer is repetition.

If you want to lock in your learning experience, diversify how you take in the information, include as much face to face as possible, get involved emotionally and repeat the experience. Let me repeat my opening line from Joel Bauer, a very prominent public speaker: “No matter how fast we click from place to place, nothing replaces face to face.”

Believe, achieve

Sinan Koray