The pen–paper–candle exercise (self-questioning to self-heal)

Core idea

An exercise in talking to yourself in the form of guided meditation: sit in a quiet, dark room, with only one real candle, hold a pencil, write out a question, and let your hand answer it on its own. The point isn't to "find a trick" — it's to pull out the answers that are already inside you, the ones your daytime rational mind usually avoids. The teacher calls this a tool that can solve almost any problem — as long as you ask the right question and are honest with yourself.

Details

1. Why self-questioning, not going to ask for advice

The nature of going to ask other people usually isn't looking for advice — it's looking for agreement: advice that matches what you already want, you praise as smart and do right away; advice that goes against it, you find "doesn't fit my situation" and drop. Meaning the answer is already in your head — the only issue is whether you're honest enough to look straight at it. This exercise forces you to face yourself instead of borrowing someone else's mouth to validate what you already wanted.

2. The required setup (do it exactly, don't improvise)

• Evening / late at night — your mind has settled, no daytime tasks left to handle, a quiet space. Evening is chosen for the calm and quiet it brings, not for any spiritual meaning.
• A dark room, alone, no one to disturb you.
• Turn off all electronic devices, not a single electric light. Light only one candle with a real flame. A flickering flame in a dark room has a psychological effect: it pulls emotion out from deep inside, the kind you normally wouldn't even dare face. (This is a psychological effect, not a spiritual one.)
• A pencil, not a pen. Reason: a pencil doesn't fear mistakes and glides very fast → it keeps up with the flow of your thoughts and emotions; a pen makes you afraid of looking messy or wrong, so you keep pausing to cross things out.
• A sheet of paper to record the whole process.
• Getting to the actual issue usually takes at least ~30 minutes.

3. Mechanism: the pen is you asking, the one answering is also you

Write a question on paper, then write down whatever thought flashes into your head, no filtering, no cleaning it up. The pen is literally yourself asking; the one answering is no one else but you. Because only you know about this conversation, it forces honesty — lie to yourself here and the exercise means nothing.

4. A sample question chain (leading from diagnosis → action)

The teacher demonstrates with the topic "being good at trading," but the question framework applies to any problem:

1. "Am I actually good at this yet?" → answer honestly (if not, write "not yet").
2. "Why am I not good yet?" → list every reason that flashes up: haven't been diligent enough, haven't put in enough time, don't understand the system yet, haven't gotten the discipline / psychology / tactics right yet…
3. "What do I need to do to get good?" → this is the step where you find a solution for each reason above. For example, if you used to only spend 1 hour/day, increase it; if you're busy until 7pm putting the kids to bed, stay up an extra 1–2 hours, and if you're sleepy the next day, get up and go for a run to wake yourself up.

The principle running through all of this is cause and effect: however much effort you put in is however much result you get back. Putting in 30 minutes a day and demanding to be as good as someone who does 8 hours a day goes against natural law — and when you self-question honestly, you can't lie to yourself about that.

5. Not just for "curing laziness" — use it on any level of problem

The exercise isn't fixed to one topic. When you're just starting out, ask "how do I get good at the system"; once you're already good, ask "was this trade right or wrong," "what should I optimize for profit this phase," even non-trading problems in life. Even a trade that's wrong on pure knowledge grounds should be examined this way: why was I wrong, what's the root cause, how do I fix it (see how to "find the ringleader" in psychology lessons from students).

6. A daily short version: WRITTEN SELF-DIALOGUE

You don't always need the full dark-room-plus-candle ritual. A lighter version usable every day: open a locked notebook (or notes on an iPad) and talk to yourself in writing:

— "How are you feeling right now?" — "A bit lazy, should I go work out?" — "Go work out, you'll feel better afterward."

• The teacher admits he can't fully explain why this works, he just says: do it and you'll find out. The underlying reason: understanding yourself is harder than understanding other people, and dialogue in writing forces honesty (the same mechanism as in point 3 — the pen is you asking, the one answering is also you).
• This is also a cure for the loneliness of the job: "You're lonely because you won't befriend yourself."
• Pairs with the "discomfort → act now" switch in the four circles of progress: self-dialogue is where you spot the discomfort; the switch is the action that responds to it.
• A real example from the study group: emotion says "I worked so hard this week, why haven't I made money" — reason answers back "I saw you watching YouTube, I didn't see you practicing." That exchange only happens once it's written down.
• A side note the teacher still stresses: an unstable home makes it very hard to trade — he's even assigned the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus for students to read.

7. Origin & nature: STEP-BY-STEP MEDITATION

• The teacher learned this exercise from Tony Robbins — a mentor to many exceptional people (the teacher says he's never seen him visit Vietnam). Study groups that took it seriously call it "the miracle exercise"; it applies to every field, not just trading.
• At its core it's meditation, but guided meditation, step by step — so anyone can do it right away. Sitting in empty-mind meditation to control the flow of thought, the teacher reckons it takes daily practice for 5–10 years; an ordinary person sits for 5–15 minutes and their mind is already scattered (thinking about the neighbors, work, the kids). Pen + paper + candle steers the flow of thought almost 100% without needing to sit cross-legged, without needing breathing technique.
• An added mechanism: the writing hand = the rational part, while the brain runs mostly on emotion → writing forces those two parts to sit down together. That's why you have to write the question out first, then answer, and answer without filtering.

8. The biggest use: BUILDING A 5-YEAR VISION

Don't just use this exercise to fix a bad trade or cure laziness. The use the teacher stresses most is building a clear financial goal / vision — the thing that holds discipline together for an entire trading career (SMART goals in trading, psychology is only kept in place by discipline).

Sample question: "By [this exact date + 5 years], what do I want my life to look like?" → then write it out: which house (which area, what color, what interior), which school for the kids, what car, how much income, what lifestyle.

A sample script for diagnosing your job: "Is the work I'm doing right now good?" → "not really" → "What's holding it back?" → and your hand will write out on its own things you'd never say when someone else asks: no KPIs, coffee in the morning, drinks in the evening…

(A case the teacher tells: one student did 30 minutes and soaked the paper in tears — realizing their marriage problems traced back to themselves.)

Putting it into practice

1. Fix one evening a week (or after every significant stop-loss) as a "pen–paper–candle session."
2. Prepare the exact set: dark room, one real flame candle, pencil, paper — phone off.
3. Write question #1, let your hand answer on its own; don't drop any flash of thought, write everything down.
4. Follow the chain: diagnosis → cause → action. It must end with a specific thing to do tomorrow.
5. Clip the sheet of paper into your trading journal so next month you can check whether you actually did what you promised yourself.

What the teacher stresses / common traps

• Do it exactly, don't get creative, don't change it — especially the real flame candle and the pencil, because every detail has a psychological reason.
• The biggest trap: not being honest with yourself → the exercise turns into self-soothing, useless.
• For someone who already knows how to meditate, meditation gives a similar result; pen–paper–candle is a form of meditation for someone not used to meditating, helping bring them into a focused state.
• This is a lifelong practice, not a one-time trick: this job is a continuous process of looking at yourself and fixing your mistakes.

9. Change the question, change the answer

This session answers the most common question about the exercise: "what exactly do I do with pen-paper-candle, it's not as concrete as running or reading." The answer: this exercise has no fixed content because it isn't a task, it's a way of steering the flow of thought — and what steers it is the question you ask yourself.

The origin of the idea, as the teacher read it: "life changes when you change the way you ask questions." For the same event, changing the question completely changes what you see:

A four-step chain you can use right away: am I good yet → why not → what do I need to do → what will I do differently next time. The condition for step two is no blaming — blame it on something outside and step three has nothing to answer.

Two voices in your head, and the phone-screen-time test

The teacher describes the correct state for this exercise as two people talking to each other on paper — like a devil's-advocate making excuses and an angel telling the truth, like Tom & Jerry. The person who understands you best is yourself; people who fail usually know they're being lazy, they're just ignoring it, repeating their comfort zone.

A way to catch the excuse-making voice red-handed — a test with a number, one you can't argue with: open Settings → Screen Time on your phone. The teacher reckons about 8 out of 10 people use it 5+ hours a day. If you write on paper "I've been reading on my phone" but the screen shows 3 hours of TikTok, 2 hours of Facebook, that line is the excuse-making voice, not fact.

An example the teacher tells: one student photographed their self-questioning sheet — the first line reads "I've been diligent," and the second line, written by that same person right after, says: "I don't see you being diligent at all, you're still on TikTok and YouTube." That's the exercise running correctly. Someone sitting with their chin propped up thinking but writing nothing down is stuck in the blaming state — they haven't started yet.

Two small additions to the setup

• Noisy house, no private room ⇒ go hide in the bathroom. The teacher learned this trick from Tony Robbins. The only real requirement is being separated from other people and from devices, not a nice-looking space.
• Even without lighting a candle, just writing your analysis on paper already cuts emotional interference significantly — because your hand writes slower than emotion moves, so what actually makes it onto paper is the part your reason had time to approve. This is the minimal version for daily use, see point 6 above.

Why no one else can do it for you

Everyone has a different situation, so only you know the answer that fits you. General advice like "you have to work hard to succeed" is true but useless because it doesn't point to what to do tomorrow morning. And the mandatory last step: after writing, you have to act — a sheet of self-questioning that doesn't lead to a concrete change within the week doesn't count as having done the exercise that day.

Careful: The teacher also adds a passage of social commentary (an era of getting rich through luck/connections that has passed, now it's an era of knowledge). Recorded to preserve the flow, but this is a personal opinion, not a usable part of the exercise — don't put it into a write-up.

Related lessons

• SMART goals in trading — the "what do I need to do" question only has force when it's tied to a clear goal