2016 02 09 16 31 Getting Past the Fallacy of “Almost There” What it REALLY Takes to Create Success

Welcome, everyone. My name is Randy Howell, and I'm with my trader state of mind, and we are here to have a good time today. Ultimately, a number of months ago, I started noticing about how many traders talked to me, and they kept talking about they were almost there, they were almost there. And what I realized is when I asked them about their trading account, the growth of their equity and all that kind of good stuff is they weren't almost there. They were still trapped. And I began to recognize that, you know, as far as the knowledge base of trading goes, of course they think they're almost there. The problem, though, is they're stuck in a stage. And what we're really going to be looking at today is how do you step back out of that and how do you say, you know something? I seem to have fallen into a perceptual trap and believed that I was almost there and prosperity is right around the corner. But the truth is, apparently I was stuck. So that's what we're going to be looking at today. Now, just a couple. Okay, just, just. Just to be on the safe side. Can everybody hear me? Just a couple people. Type in some yeses if they can hear me. Because I figure if you can't hear me, you won't hear to put in no's. Okay, so there we go. Let's see. Nobody's responding.

Help me out with that. Yep. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. So traditionally, I hold questions to the end of the session. That's what I'm gonna be doing today. However, if you have a question, whether or not it's actually to me or if it's more operational toward Dolores, go ahead and type it in. We can get to it, or Dolores can. Dolores will be on the keyboards talking and communicating with people all through the hour. So go ahead and just start there. Okay? But let's get on with this, folks. Let's get on with this. Let's do this and go. You know something?

People work so hard to learn how to trade, thinking that they're going to get the hang of it. You start, you know, you start in and you go, wow, you know, I can do this. I can do this. Yeah, I can do it. They keep waiting and waiting for the magic moment to arrive, and it doesn't. But there's always a hitch. There's always an excuse. There's always an explanation about how you can almost get there. The question here is, how long do you have to stay there? This is a gigantic. In trading, there is a gigantic shift from having knowledge of Trading to actually being able to trade. And that is something that most people miss. They think as long as I have a bunch of knowledge and a bunch of gizmos that ultimately I'm going to learn how to trade and I'm going to beat the odds and, you know, I'm special, I'm going to do something. And the truth is, you're not. What you get used to is that the sobering facts, well, facts, assumptions, is that 95% of traders lose money and the vast majority of traders blow out the capital in two to three years. That's the hard, cold reality of this game. So what you're looking to do is you're saying, you know, how do I go about, how do I go about moving from a novice to an experienced trader? And it seems so natural. And then the problem is the experienced trader gets trapped thinking that his knowledge is going to work out. It doesn't work that way though. It doesn't work that way. Learning to trade seems linear, just like these steps, okay?

And as you're acquiring knowledge, it just seems like, you know, it just seems like a linear progression. The more I learn, you know, the, I'm going to finally get better and I'm going to be there. And the thought of being able to use that knowledge.

Not produce results, never occurs. You know, you don't see it as a potential problem.

It just doesn't register how few people make money in trading and how most traders blow their capital so soon. And you think that what, I'm not like them? And yet there you are. Particularly if you're, if you're, if you're like the vast majority of traders who work with me, they come to a moment where they pass that two year bent. They've been there, oh, five, ten years and they're going, you know something, I've been almost there long enough. There's something wrong. And the only thing that wrong can be is me. And ultimately you come to the moment where you realize that I'm either going.

To be the problem in my trading or I'm going to be the solution. That's when things really, really begin to catch up. But ultimately what happens, the student of trading comes to this plateau called almost there. And literally, just like our good buddy here, prosperity is just around the corner. Prosperity is just around the corner. You keep telling yourself that. And traders assume.

That they're simply going to pass through this prosperity.

Hold and they get to the other side where everything's good. And that's where they get stuck. They don't Realize no one tells them. That's actually a typical stage that traders get stuck. They're certainly not told by most teachers, particularly not brokers. There's no motivation there because you get stuck, you're staying there. And the jump from being stuck in a certainty based mind to a probability based mind, friends, that's a gigantic leap that very few make. So ultimately, what you discover very quickly is this.

Everything in them leads them to believe that they should have it together. Yet they're stuck in this box, like this guy in this photograph here. And yet something is missing. They can look around, they can see it, they hear about other people making good and stuff like that. They also know that most of them are lying. If you have ever been in a trade room and you're listening to all these guys talking about how they're hitting home runs and how they're making money and stuff like that, understand this. 90 to 95% of traders are losing money and blowing their capital in two to three years. What you're listening to is bravado and looking good. You're not looking, you're not really seeing being good. Big difference. So you know that something's missing and you're going, okay, I know how to trade. Technically, if this very gap between the knowledge and performance, that should be telling you that there's something wrong, you know that there's a gap there. And then what you're saying is, you know, you talk to other people, other trainers and say, yeah, I can help you, I can help you. You go there, you get more and you find out the gap still there. You get all, you get all excited and say, you know something, I figured it out. And there it is again. And there it is again. And you start realizing, wow, there's a big gap. And friends, I want to tell you something.

There'S a good reason there's a gap there. But what happens is, you know it's there because your trading account isn't happy. You keep looking, you keep looking, you keep looking for an outside source of the problem.

Finally, by process of elimination, you finally wake up and you realize that, you know, you're the one keeping yourself stuck at this current level of performance. Friends, that's a big, huge day. And that's a time when something really can happen.

You've realized that it's not out there that's the problem. It's not all the stuff you have, it's not all the teachers, it's not running around looking for the holy grail because you start recognizing that you yourself are The Holy Grail. But even here there's a very big piece of confusion because.

Most people have been taught if I work hard, I have a positive energy. I am just going to throw myself into this and I'm going to will it to win, I'm going to make it. But the truth is you try that and you try that, you try that, you, you don't get it. You work really hard and you have a positive mental attitude. And in theory, this should be working. You've got all the visualizations, you've got all the affirmations, you got all the tapping, you got all that stuff going and you're looking for the cure.

Okay? You'd love for that cure not to have to be required.

To change.

To change fundamentally. And so you don't want, you don't want to see it. It doesn't make sense. By all accounts of all the success theories that you've ever read about and been participant in, you know that the hard work and just literally the positive attitude and thinking right should be producing it. Yet the trading gods just don't seem to care what you project onto them.

Ultimately, what you discover is the problem is the very mind that you're bringing to the management of probability.

You know, it's actually really tough when a fictional character has to tell you the truth. Here's Jack Sparrow. The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem. Do you understand? And the truth is most traders don't, they don't understand is the very mind that you're bringing to the problem is in fact the problem. Okay? It's not that it's a bad mind. It may have been very good in business and corporate, in athletics or whatever you were doing before trading. It's just that in trading we're where there is no certainty, where there is only probability. And your feeble attempts to control outcome mean nothing to the trading gods that you discover. Hmm. I've been bringing a certainty based mind to manage a world governed by uncertainty. Friends. That's why you lose, that's why you stay stuck. You're trying to use Newtonian physics, major particle physics on quantum mechanics, small particle physics, completely different set of rules. And until you get that, until you make the leap and change, you can't see the world in possibility and probability. You see the world through a sense of wanting to control outcome and certainty. Okay, so here's the sticking point.

You know, ultimately this is the classic.

This is the classic huge gap between success and failure in trading. Is that the mindset that the amateur brings to trading is based on certainty and control. Okay, think about all the. I was talking to a trader trainer the other day and says, yeah, Randy, I get these people coming in all the time and what they want is they want a 90% success rate. And he says it's, you know, I can give it to him. But the thing is, is the margins are so razor thin, it's not like they're going to be making any money yet. They are driven.

By need to have 90% certainty, you know, when in fact, if you're at 50%, you're pretty good. I know people who make good money in trading, winning 40% of their trades, they're losing.

The majority of the time. It's kind of like baseball hitters, man. If you're hitting four, if you're getting on base, by base, hits four out of ten times, you're gold. If you're getting, if you're getting hits three times out of 10, you're hall of fame. If you look at it from one end you go, well that's not high probability. Well, it's probability. That's the point. And what happens is that probability is enough to win baseball games. Same thing here is with a probability mindset and knowledge of trading, you can win ball games, you can win consistently, profit profits out of the markets. Okay, so here you are, you know where it is. You know, it's the mindset now between certainty and control and mastery of the mind that you bring to probability. That's the big deal, is that the truth is until you develop the mind that can engage uncertainty, you are not a traitor. You're a wannabe, but you're not a traitor. Ultimately, the amateur has knowledge but cannot apply it under the pressure of not knowing. Ultimately for him, the brain is a certainty seeking machine which has been good for survival. Okay, it's been very good. We're a very dominant species on the earth. It's been a very, it's been very good for a lot of success formulas.

However.

Trading mind requires comfort and the ability to embrace uncertainty. Instead of running from the question mark, instead of running from the, the unknown, you turn toward it. So literally, and this is the big thing that nobody tells anybody as they come into trading, is that you're asking the brain to do something that it was of designed to avoid at all costs. And now God knows how much money you're into this thing. No, God knows how much time you've got into it. You need to make it work or you need to get out and you need to decide, you know something, if what Randy is saying is really true. And what I do is I say, look, don't believe me. Believe your trading account. Ask your trading account. The current mindset that I'm bringing to the management of uncertainty, working to produce consistently profitable trading and go from there. So then you're going, okay, what do I need to do? Ultimately.

Understand this. There's a concept called perceptual certainty. The brain chooses perceptual certainty, knowing certainty. And it will believe that even though there are no facts to support it. And it's really the self preservation drive of the emotional brain, it really, it wants certainty even if that's wrong. It wants that because in the short term it's better. And the truth is the brain will lie to itself just to feel certain. Okay, so you get it. That the short term feeling of certainty is far more important than to the emotional brain, than the long term results of dealing with probability. And this friends again, this is not psychological. It will become psychological, but it's inherently biological evolution. Okay? And this is what you have to trip up because ultimately what you discover, what you discover is this, is that your brain and your mind would much prefer a reassuring lie.

There's just no such thing as climate change, okay? To an inconvenient truth. We believe the lie rather than change for the truth. And you can get away with it in the world that we live in, times so darn slow, but you can't get away with with it. If you're in trading, particularly intraday, okay, it comes back and slaps you up really so fast that you begin to really see the cause and the effect that staying in the deception of control, the deception of certainty that there's certainty out there. Rather than saying, I need to build a mind that engages uncertainty and manages it rather than hides from it. That's the big deal. The problem is when you decide to do that.

It'S going to fight you. The survival brain interprets the unknown as threat to its existence. Just like this shark, you know, it just, it triggers primordial sense of fear and avoidance. And this is never going to change. The point is you have to become intentional in working with this bias of the emotional brain. Your body, it's not wrong, understand? It allowed us to become the dominant species that we are. At the same time, it's enormously limiting in the world when you move from short term survival to a world of long term probability. Because that's ultimately what a trader is. He's working with long term probability. No trade matters. In just one. But the thing is it's a statistical analysis of it. And you have to be able to say this is all probability. Not talking the talk everybody talks about, you know, everyone's read Mark Douglas knows that. The point is, is can you apply that? You have to train the brain to do that. And ultimately.

While your brain, your left brain tries to rationally approach uncertainty, something's got to give, okay? And what happens is it's your wits that give long before the survival brain.

The key is to understand this is trading truly presents the very antithesis of what your brain was designed to do. You're only a few evolutionary years away from your ancestors that lived in caves and lived on the savannas in Africa and were hunted with saber toothed cats. Understand? Saber toothed cats were with us 12,000 years ago. That's not much change from the, from the genetic lottery. So what you have here is you have the brain short term survival goals and for the need for long term focus on probability. That's ultimately where we're going here. And it is not easy. It is not easy. And you have to learn to kind of control work with that hominoid that lives in your brain. You may be sitting there, a really modern human, you may be sitting there at your computer thinking all these abstract thoughts, but ultimately a hominoid that existed on the African savannas and even Homo sapiens erectus, who have to deal with the big cats and bears, that ancestral history still lives in you. And every time you expose it to uncertainty, that's what's triggered, you're still carrying it with you. A brain whose mission was to seek certainty of survival in an uncertain world. And it's not going to go away. That's why you have to really train yourself. It's not going to happen just because you say, I've read a book.

6 to 7 million years, really more like 60 or 70 million years of evolution could care less whether or not you've read a book in the last 10 or 15 years. Okay, but ultimately.

What you're looking at, yeah, you went one task, what you're really looking at is this, is that what you're looking at in this picture, this diagram? This is what really happens on a brain, on uncertainty. What happens is the amygdala and the hippocampus evaluate, make an appraisal of the situation, the it's a life and death situation to it and it bypasses higher order thinking or just simply cuts higher order thinking out of the deal completely. And all of a sudden this Guy who thought he was being rational has a rhinoceros just pulling him one way or the other, okay? This is what happens every time when the logical left brain is being hijacked by the primitive survival drives, the emotional brain, okay? Happens every day. And until you solve this problem, okay, you are going to start developing psychiatric, not psychiatric, psychological manifestations of this biological drive. And, you know, we'd like that. We call those different things, but I want you to understand this is all rooted in the brain's mandate to produce certainty, control of outcome, a feeling of knowing whether or not you really know or not. And suddenly when those are taken away from you and trading will definitely take them away from you, definitely you. All sudden you start getting these classical fears of trading. The fear of loss, the fear of entry, the fear of missing out, the revenge trading, the fear of losing all that stuff and giving it back. That over trading thing. I've got to do it. I've got to do it. I've got to do it. Are fears not otherwise specified, you know, the whole gamut. I used to name nine of them. And what I realized is that once you get all of it down, what you're realizing is you were talking about a brain that is built to produce certainty and uncertain times even, it has to lie to itself is at the base of it. And it manifests fears to keep you from acting, keep you from doing something, something stupid. So ultimately.

Understanding the fears and desires behind your brain's need for control and certainty, that's where it begins. Then the brain runs into the machete. That's the trading. The gods of trading just don't care. No amount of huffing and puffing, no amount of anything is going to give you the strength to muscle your way through the trading gods, okay? So ultimately, what you discover is this. The professional trader has truly overcome this connection between fear and certainty. They've learned it either through.

Learning by psychological education like mine, or they've learned it through just simply being exposed to this over and over and over again and being very persistent, being smart psychological consumers of what they're learning. Okay, but it's this glitch, you know, is that ultimately amateur traders saw the limb that supports them. They don't understand. They're doing it to themselves. They rather believe the reassuring lie than to say, you know something, I need to turn toward this truth I've been avoiding. But ultimately that's the big thing. It's the adaptation to uncertainty that's the key, okay? And my promise to you is this.

Until you learn how to master the emotions of uncertainty, you do not know how to trade. Read that again. Until you learn how to master the emotions of uncertainty, you do not know how to trade. You may have great knowledge of trading, but in the clutch you cannot apply that knowledge effectively and repeatedly. Okay? Knowledge of trading does not equal skill in trading and managing uncertainty. This is where the big thing blows. Nobody wants to say, you know something?

I really like the feeling of certainty. I like all these books I've read, all these courses I've taken. And if the weight of those books and courses could be my badge of courage, I should be trading. Well, it doesn't matter. That's just knowledge. The thing is, can you convert a brain designed for certainty and another time and another place, can you convert it into a probability based thinking organism that allows you to work with the uncertainty and probabilities of trading? That's really the key, friends.

And what you discover no one back and what you discover very quickly is this is emotional intelligence is far more important than knowledge. Knowledge is wasted under stress, okay? And what you get is that knowledge is only useful when the emotional brain is managed well, not controlled. You don't, you don't control emotions. You don't have. There's no such thing as control of emotion, but there is freedom of emotion. The uncertainty of trading will always be there. The challenges of uncertainty, of the unknown are always going to be there. What your skill, what makes you different so is that you can actually manage the mind. That's going to engage uncertainty. And you have to want to do that because it's not going to be natural to your evolutionary history. So ultimately you're going to have to learn.

There you go. You're going to have to learn how to master the probability mind. Okay? It's not about you, it's not about your worth, it's not about your virility, it's not about your testosterone, it's not about your mattering. It is about managing yourself while exposed to uncertainty. About recognizing that you really don't know if you're going to be right or wrong. The truth is in trading you can do everything right and still be wrong. You know, you can do everything wrong and still be right. You can make up all sorts of explanations of how the fish got away, but the truth is, is that when you walk in, what you look at is you look at a higher probability of winning than losing. Okay? That's what you're looking at. And often what you're doing is you're really managing loss because that's the part of trading that you have to get used to. This is probability, it's not certainty. So this is the, this is it. This is where you go, well, you know something? How do I go about doing this? Well, the first thing you're going to have to do is you're going to have to become very comfortable with discomfort. Okay? It's kind of like voluntary discomfort. You have to recognize that the brain mind that you brought to trading is not going to be the brain mind that's effective trading. You learn toward, you learn how to turn towards your discomfort. This is where you learn how to embrace uncertainty, running from it. I was actually talking with the trader today and that's what's happened is, you know, I was asking her, well, do you know if your methodology is accurate? She's, well, you know, I think it is. I paid a lot of money for it. I said no, when was the last time? How do you, how do you go and decide? Do you any do any sim training? Oh, that doesn't excite me at all. So you don't have a way of testing your methodology without risk. And what you discover is she's scared to. In her live trading, she takes on notes, but what she doesn't do is she doesn't go back and study her losses. Okay? And what you're getting is that it's studying your mistakes, your breakdowns. That's where, that's where your trading accounts trying to help you friends. And to do that though, the very first thing is you're going to have to get used to voluntary discomfort. That's where emotional intelligence becomes really, really important. And you realize that, okay, I'm going to have to learn how to regulate emotion. I'm going to need to cool them down.

I'm going to need to. I know the ones that just absolutely throttle me. The ones that just absolutely, you know, I go crazy and I don't know what's happened. But I'm also going to have to get to. I'm going to have to learn how to recognize the emotions I don't recognize. Like, for instance, feeling good. What we call confidence, overconfidence is actually in my language is something called euphoria. Euphoria is dangerous. It's like being on cocaine, okay? And you are not capable of making strategic risk decisions because you think the good times are going to roll on forever. So it's even, it's even recognizing I can't allow myself to get into euphoria, overconfidence, feeling good, because that's not the mind that manages probability. Well, it's easy to see the fearful ones, but it's harder to see the ones around euphoria and overconfidence. Because doesn't everybody want to feel good? Not when you're trading friends, not when you're trading. You want to feel disciplined impartiality, you want to feel good, Then what you're going to say is, the very first stop is you learn how to regulate the intensity of the emotion. And this is where you learn a lot about emotions in my programming is you understand that you know something's emotions are us. You don't have emotions, they're having you. And until you get that, you understand that there is no control over emotions. If you don't have emotions, you're dead. However, you do have the capacity of managing the intensity of the emotion and changing the emotion that you're bringing in to manage uncertainty.

Emotional regulation from the breathing and the tension reduction. What you discover is that all emotions have a signature to them. And what you're doing is you're learning how to disrupt the attack avoidance, cool it down so that it doesn't sweep your mind away, so that you can still have a calm, patient mind to trade from. That's what you're learning with emotional regulation. But even there, the third thing that you're going to have to do is you're going to have to develop mindfulness. You can't say stupid friends. You can't stay mindless. You can't keep doing the same stupid things over and over again, expecting different results. You're going to have to step back and you're going to have to say, what in the world's going on?

One of the major things is that you discover in mindfulness, or what I call the awakening, the observer, that you and your thoughts are not the same. In fact, you aren't having those thoughts that are running in your mind. They're having you even more. What you'll notice is there's in the background, there's always this chatter, this noise that you're choosing to ignore. And it's killing you. It's killing you, keeping you stuck in a particular place. By not recognizing it, you're giving it enormous power to enter and creep into your mind during performance.

So you get there and you realize, wow. The other thing that you discover in mindfulness is that all reality is observer generated. And you have to start asking, well, what's the observer I'm bringing to the game here? And what most people discover is that they've been asleep at the wheel. And they've just been bringing the mind that got designed for them by their environment in the formative period of the brain. They're not bringing a probability based mind to the game. They're not, they're not professionals, they're rank amateurs trying to play where only professionals really ought to be playing. And then even there in this mindfulness stuff, you start really discovering that the brain itself.

Is a complicated organism.

It's actually a community of rival emotional programs that has organized you into a particular self for survival. Okay, this is what you're learning to control, is that if you recognize that the brain is literally. It's these emotional programs using different parts of the brain to organize into a particular cocktail of emotion that meets and greets the day. You're beginning to recognize that you know something, I need to be very careful, very intentional about what emotional states I am producing to meet the uncertainty of the day. What you're learning to do is you are disconnecting fear from uncertainty. Uncertainty is the rule. Better not bring fear to it. So that's what evolution has produced. It's a link between fear and uncertainty. You're going to have to teach them differently, otherwise you're going to produce an internal struggle like this donkey and this elephant that we have in the United States political system. Okay, you begin to realize the mind that arises out of these emotional programs is where these voices are given mind. And suddenly you realize that your mind is actually a committee composed of rival forces duking it out.

And then as you say, well, you know, I can, I can deal with the discomfort. I can look and I can begin to see. I've been avoiding the historical dialogue going on inside my head. And you begin to realize, oh my God, where in the world have I been? I have an out of control board meeting going on here and it's managing me. I need to take a lot more control about the me that shows up, the observer that shows up to trade. This is where you realize that no, I have to become a real player here. I have to quit ignoring and avoiding some of the inherent weaknesses, things that cause me discomfort. And I need to turn toward them because, man, that's where the action's at. And the next thing though, once you do that, you get this internal dialogue and you realize this is. Oh my God, this is the, this is what's been keeping me small. What you also recognize in the redesign of the mind, you recognize that you have enormous latent potentials in the same way that fear and judgment and grandiosity can live in you as programs that just whack up your trading. So do discipline, so does self soothing, so does courage, and so does impartiality. And what you discover is that each of these are emotional programs that in fact can be tapped and they can be brought into working awareness Rather than having the historical ones, the default programming, show up and do things for you. You can become intentional about what emotional programs show up and start working. Now, in my work, you discover there's a link between the emotional programs of the brain, okay? And what is known as the archetypes of the mind.

Archetypes simply are representations, symbols that represent the emotional programs of discipline.

Of courage, of self soothing and impartiality. So suddenly you discover that not only is there an inner critic who going to criticize you and judge you, and the fear of an orphan living within you, that really needs to be nurtured, really needs to be mentored. Besides those, there is also a ruler within you. Imagine what the world would be like without Winston Churchill, okay? Imagine he was the glue, the bulldog that held free world together. Without him, we're speaking German, okay? And the Germans are no longer these great people that are allies of ours. Now, you also need the courage of a warrior. And I want to tell you, friends, courage is not the absence of fear.

Courage is acting in the presence of fear, okay? Valor, by the way, is being fearless. Completely different emotional state. And I don't recommend it for trading, okay? The key is you're recognizing is that, wow, these programs and their symbols exist in my brain, in my mind. Yes. And you can conjure them up. You can also soothe the fear of the orphan rather than beat it up and cause it to hide deeper inside you. Harder and harder and harder to get things right. In training, when you do that, you cool things down. What you discover is there is an impartiality. There is this clear thinking that can take over called sage. And that's who you want doing your trading. You begin to see this link between the emotional programs and the symbols that create the committee in the mind. And this is when you start going, wow, you know something? This is really possible. Yeah. And I use a highly specialized process of, I call it memory enrichment of where you're actually using actual experience and you're recoding that experience to get at the emotional program. Powerful stuff. So you get that. And this is possible in my group courses and in my individual work. This is stuff that everybody's doing. This is nothing special, but you do have to work at it, okay? To change the brain to change the mind requires work. Okay, now, but then what you discover.

Is this.

Is that the challenges of uncertainty are going to always be there. When you take a look at this boat, don't you know that these fellows realize that.

This is a challenging situation? But what you're looking at is people with great knowledge and they have organized their mind as a team that work together, that engages that uncertainty. And all of a sudden you begin to realize that how powerful the Latin saying is, is the future favors the brave. Okay? You begin to realize that you're not embracing the future uncertainty from a position of fear. You're embracing it and trading from a position of discipline, impartiality. This is the mind that manages uncertainty. It's the one that embraces uncertainty, it's the one that doesn't.

It looks to how well am I performing this execution rather than saying, oh shit, did I win or lose? Completely different animals. So now you're going, okay. And what you really begin to recognize is that uncertainty as you go through this training is no longer engaged with the collective mind rooted in fear.

That's default programming, and it was a useful programming for.

Much of our ancestral life. But in trading, it's the kiss of death. And suddenly, just like this quote, fall in love with uncertainty and she will never cause you harm. Resist her and you will be tossed and turned in her waters and you will no longer breathe.

Ask any, suffer that, any surfer that. Okay, so what you're doing is now you're beginning to recognize is that no, you can't control destiny. No, you can't control outcome. But what you can control is the mind you're bringing to engage that uncertainty, that challenge. That's what's needed in trading, friends. And ultimately this is all about changing the observer. Okay?

Most people don't even know there's an observer. When I first start working with them, it's like, what? And all of a sudden they start recognizing, oh my God, there is, there is an awareness outside of my thoughts. There isn't. There is the ability of being able to observe the markets rather than from a certainty based program to a probability based program. This, this the difference maker, friends. It's training the observer to recalibrate what it's going to see.

As the emotional programs, what it wants to pull forward into the mind to work. You bring them into working awareness. This is the difference between an amateur's mindset and a professional trader's mindset. This is the thing, is that they realize that this can be done and it's going to require to get to successful trading. You're going to have to face the fears of uncertainty, convert those fears into concerns, and then recognize that this is all about the management of uncertainty. There was nothing ever certain. And you engage it and you embrace it. And ultimately.

This is where most people are when I first meet them. They have the knowledge. Okay.

The key is how do you learn to apply what you know under game conditions? Okay, and what you're looking at is an image of the American cougar. It's a very interesting lion. Is that it? It's very different hunter. He's not a stalking hunter. What he does is he climbs trees, he gets on a rock ledge and he knows where the white tailed deer comes. He knows the white tail, tails.

All those patterns that you see. Do you see the setup? He sees the setup. And he waits very patiently, Waits very patiently. And if you were to look at him, you would be thinking that he must be asleep. He's not working, he's working very diligently. He's an apex predator, one of the best in the world. It's just the work of trading is not about busyness. The work of trading is about patience. And when that moment comes, seizing it.

That's the task of a trader, to kind the cougar, to find the cougar within you, let it hunt. Or as another guy in Australia says, the crocodile, they're also, they're also stealth ambush predators. It's the same thing though, okay? This is how you get to the accept the risk and take action. And the truth is, is you don't. That's all it is. It's like, do I execute well? And by the way, when the cougar misses a hunt, misses a kill, it just simply goes on to next. It doesn't chase, it doesn't do anything. It just minimizes the loss. It moves on because it's, it knows that it's a probability game. Same thing in trading. So how do you apply this man? How do you, how do you, how do you produce this change? Well, you know, when you go to my website, there's some free stuff. You know, get that free book, start looking around and read all the articles, watch the video. You can spend hours reading the articles and watching the videos. I know people who, it's just crazy to me, but it's a good part of the education. You start there and then you start going, you start working up the ladder, the chain, and you realize, okay, there's the book, there's a workbook that goes with it. There's guided meditations that go with it, there's all sorts of things. But ultimately it comes down to two basic options when you're ready to really change. And that's the group course and the individual course. Now we have a group course starting in March and basically what it does is it teaches all the skills that I just talked about.

But real experientially teaching, not textbook teaching. And it's two months long.

We meet five times as a group, we talk, you ask questions, we work, we send homework. You go to a virtual classroom there, all the MP3s, all the MP4s, all the stuff you need is in that classroom and you learn.

Yes, it's 10 weeks long. And ultimately what happens is I created that course when a number of trader trainers came to me and says, Randy, we need to have a course that allows me to take in these people that can't afford the individual course. Can you do something? This is the course that I did. It is an enormously successful course. It starts in March. And if you're thinking about, if you're thinking about it, I would encourage you to sign up early because we have about a third of the people who do our group courses that sign up early and they get a month or two month head start before the course starts. And believe me, those are the guys who are achieving. The second one is the individual course.

Fundamentally the major difference between the group course and the individual course is that you end up with 10 sessions personally with me on Skype over a period of three to four months. It is also more comprehensive, there's more to it and it's also highly more personalized. Is that you really get down to where the demons are. It really gets down to where the fears are. And we work together in a mentoring relationship to overcome those. To build the mind of uncertainty. That's the big thing. And it's something where you know something if you want, if you want real change to happen. Having a mentor, an individual mentor is one excellent way of doing it.

Yeah, the individual course, literally it can start at almost any time. It just when we see a transaction occur, the downloads and also you get all the materials too. And it's a gigantic graduate level course. You get materials and there you go.

Now. And if you're really interested in this.

You can also get a free consult with me. My preference is that you be really interested. I don't really take kindly to people just, hey, I'd like to talk to Randy Howell. No, I'm interested in serious students of trading. That have been around. They know that there is a gap in their performance and they figured it out that it's them. I would encourage you to read my book before you meet with me simply because people who do that have a lot better questions. They have a much deeper depth to them and it's powerful. So, friends, it really is a big deal that you can do this. If you have questions, type them in right now. And we'll take. And we'll take. We have a few minutes. I'll be happy to answer a few questions.

And of course, if I have just explained things so gloriously accurate that you don't need them, then.

Dolores and I get to take off early and have an earlier dinner. Okay. What I will say though is I want you to recognize from the beginning is that this is not the change in the shift in the mind to move from certainty based thinking to probability based thinking does not happen naturally. If it did.

The numbers of 90%.

Not making money and two to three years of blowing all your capital up would not be there.

Here's from Ned. The cougar is the only great cat that cannot roar. Hence the BYU mascot. There you go. I didn't know that it couldn't roar.

But I'll tell you one thing it's.

It's really interesting is I used to track cougars when I was in my 30s. And interesting is all the time that I tracked them and I tracked them for fun. I didn't, I wasn't trying to hunt. I just was fascinated by the creatures.

My buddy and I discovered numerous kill sites. And what was always really spooky for us is the area that we would go into snowed a lot. So we would be having boot prints going into this logging road. And it was very common for us to be coming out. This is like 3 o' clock in the morning. We would be coming out and you would see cougar prints inside our boot prints. The cat was that quiet, that curious, that close that we never knew it was there. Really interesting animal. We have some questions.

Okay. No.

The free book is a compilation of about five or six articles that basically are ones that are no longer being circulated. And so they're new, they're fresh, and they've been chosen to get at the basics of the psychology of trading. My ebook. There's also a large compilation of articles that's for sale as an ebook. But my ebook, Mindful Trading. No, it's. It's not free. And it is. I would. There's a printed book and there's also the Ebook. What I find that happens with most people, they buy the ebook, they will print it out on 8.5 x 11 paper and what they will do is they will read that thing from COVID to cover, they will highlight it, they will make notes all over it. And I used to have a film.

On my website of a person that says Randy, I just wanted to give you, show you a film of what your book has become. Anyway, he did is.

It'S just incredibly marked up book with all sorts of different highlighters, different pens, different stuff like that. But I recommend people read the book three times, two times, back to back.

Okay. Randy says something in the latest post on YouTube dealing with uncertainty about traders.

Who, who are on the autism spectrum have an easier time dealing with uncertainty. Why is this?

It's simple, is that they're not, they don't have the same emotional wiring as typical populations. Okay. And as long as you're in the high functioning area, it can be very, very helpful.

The movie that's out right now, what's the about the shorting the market.

The big short, that movie, the guy who did that.

If you've read the book, you discover that he's autistic too. The key though is he was not nearly as swayed by the emotional currents.

As say, a typical person. Okay. And what you'll discover if you ever, when you start doing a lot of, when you start getting around a lot of really great traders, what you'll discover is that, yeah, they're really great traders and all they ever want to talk about is trading. They don't want to talk about anything else in their lives. And you discover most of them have a really rough time with relationships. Okay? So you see that, you see that it helps. And I'm not plugging that everybody should become an Asperger's syndrome human being. Okay? And I'm not doing that. I'm just saying that the wiring of emotion is so different that it can help them with managing emotion, which is really when it comes down to the higher levels of trading, that's really what trading is all about. Everybody's got knowledge, everybody. The real key is can you apply that knowledge under pressure? And you know, personally, I know plenty of people who learn how to apply that knowledge under pressure with kind of training that I give where you have emotional regulation, you have mindfulness and you are really intentional about the mind that you're bringing into the management of uncertainty.

Oh, we're also going to be sending you an email with a recording link and it's going to be Posted on our. It'll be posted on our homepage on our website. And obviously it has to render and I have to get it out there. Okay. Another question. I have read your book and many articles.

Hold on a second.

I have read your book and many articles in the. And see the need in my own trading. Could the workbook really do the trick? Money for group course.

The group course is $11.95 and. Or $239 five times every two weeks. And I've done that to try to make the darn thing really accessible to almost anybody.

It's a really good course. Let me. What I will say about this is I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you what I get in email feedback from people who buy books and the workbooks is. I can't tell you how many times Dolores and I open our email and we have another person saying, I really want to thank you for your book and your workbook. It has helped me turn the corner. Okay. Now I listen to that and I'm actually fairly incredulous. I am a guy who believes that you really have to change neural biology to actually affect change. I'm not a guy who believes that, that you can read a book and change.

That's my own personal bias. It's not right or wrong, it's just a bias. And at the same time, I'm reading from heartfelt communication coming back to me that the book and the workbook together in particular have made a difference. And I also provide guided meditations on the website. They're retail oriented. They don't have the necessarily the kind of depth that my course guided meditations do. But a lot of people put those together and they write and say it has done wonders for me. Okay.

But I would not, I personally would not put that on the same level as the group course or the individual stuff. I really wouldn't. If I was serious about trading and if I were going to make it a career.

I would consider you need to do. You need to read the book. Okay. And all the videos, all that free stuff. But ultimately you need to get yourself trained. You need to get yours and you need to understand what on earth is actually happening to you when you're trading. That's what nobody's explaining and it's what I explain. Okay. I've been working on the breath meditation kichong Taji for many years. Practical work on stress and managing response to stress using those tools. I suspect the course has to do with using similar tools. What does the course have to do beyond that a lot. First of all, what I've discovered is the stuff that you've talked about, I call it the yoga studio. People will do all these things.

And as long as it's. But you're not learning the skill in the environment you're going to be using it in. And when you're using my relaxation and stuff like that, the way I train emotional regulation, you are learning it in the environment that you're going to be using in. Yeah, you do the training with the guided meditation, but it is very specific where you start using it during the stresses of trading. That's one of the things that. Things I say. I have plenty of people who have done years and years and years, all sorts of meditation, all sorts of stuff like that, and they still blow up trading. The truth is, is that it is only. The skill is only good if it is trained in the environment you're going to use it in. Keep it in the classroom. Otherwise.

The courses, both the group and the individual, go far beyond that. That to me is a fundamental skill. The next fundamental skill is observation. And it's very similar to what is taught in Zen Buddhism, except that I also start the place where it departs and where I turn. Typical observation on its head is, I am not interested in thoughts arising, having a life and then disappearing. I am interested recognizing that the thoughts that arise are coming from emotional programs and that I want to know what emotional programs are forcing arising thoughts into my mind. And what I'm doing is I'm teaching you how to detective back down to see what's firing and to be able to recalculate the calculus of what emotional programs are producing the thought.

Content that you're observing. Okay, that. That's huge. Okay, that's huge. And then I teach you to become very intentional about that. About what thought process, where these thoughts are coming from, what emotional programs are coming from under stress. And that's just not taught any other. I've never seen it taught any other place. Okay, but that would be the major difference. And the, and the, the other part, the departure would be in the emotional enrichment stuff is that we are actually looking to train you to pull forward very specific emotional programs and then tie them to symbols that make them real. Okay. So it goes far beyond what you've been talking about. Okay, here's another one. Hi, Randy and Dolores. Randy. Hold on, Dolores. Randy, when working with one in the individual course, could you please elaborate a bit more on the process of how you work to redesign a trader's mind? Thanks. Good question. Gosh. It starts with. It starts with.

The organization, the curriculum itself. It is built where the very first thing that we're doing is. I already know that going in that under stress that you're breathing and detention, your body is absolutely throwing gasoline onto a smoldering fire. Okay. And the first thing we're doing is we're getting at. And retraining that. The next thing is that we're getting at awakening the observer and where you are literally producing a sense of, oh, my God, I'm learning how to observe. And I had a client today, and I were talking about this. She said, you know something, Randy? It's really interesting is that what I've recognized, there are thoughts sitting in the back of my mind that I recognize are there, but I push away. And what I've recognized is that it's more comfortable to push them away. But then what happens when I push them away? They come back with a vengeance and really disturb my trading. And in observation, she's learning to see literally the nature of that. But the most important thing is once you get past the observation, you begin to ask, let's find out about these emotional programs. Okay. And I.

I specifically use memory of events that you have already been involved in. And. And I'm taking the way the brain has initially organized the experience into memory. And what we're doing is we're deconstructing it and reconstructing it in a way that allows you access to these emotional programs.

That's where a lot of time is spent in enriching that and getting that. And then the symbolic representation is when you are finding symbols that relate to those emotional programs, and you learn how to pull them up and become highly intentional. And then probably one of the big things in the individual course is that you learn how to prepare the mind for the day, but then you learn how to micromanage the mind. Where I have a section of. Literally, what we're doing is we're looking for the moments where you have most difficulty, the tendencies where you have most difficulty. And we're pinpointing it, and we're going into the psychology of before you even get to that moment and shifting that, changing the whole ordeal of the engagement of uncertainty. That's the big thing. Okay. Okay. Hi, Randy. Could you give an example of how the caretaker caregiver should take care of the orphan sphere? Yeah.

Actually, there is a.

There is a former student of mine in this class right now that I would like to use his example. And this is outside of Hitesh. I Won't mention his last name, but Hitesh grew up in India in a very, very professional family. And he was one of those prodigy engineer guys who was trying to get into one of the top universities in India. And India has just as good of engineering universities from mit, Caltech, and it's highly competitive. It's highly competitive. And so what happened is that, you know, from morning to night, you know, he got home from school, took a small break, and suddenly the proctor was there, and there was all this teaching and mom's jamming food down, and it's stressful life. What he remembered was this. He says, you know something? I remember being in bed, waking up in the morning, and the way I woke up as my grandmother would simply soothe my forearm, it seemed like she was the only one who really understood that I needed to be calmed down. Okay. What he ultimately did, and I have no idea how he practices now, I know that he said hi to Dolores and I earlier, earlier today. But the thing is, is ultimately he was able to take that and put it into practice of taking that symbolic representation of that soothing action. Okay. And he was able to produce that calming thing of. Rather than saying, you've got to do it, you've got to do it, you've got to do it, you've got to do it. It was more breathing. Calm down, calm down, it's okay, I'm here with you. And he used the symbolic representation of one, the feeling, the tactile feeling on the hand. But he also used the symbolic representation of his grandmother. That's how. There's other ways of doing it. But, you know, I just saw Hitesh's name, and I said, oh, wow, I haven't seen him for a while. And I remember his because it was so poignant. Okay, okay. Does the process somehow reach the unconscious mind to enable it to embrace uncertainty? You know, what I'll say is this, is that I don't often use the word unconscious. I really talk about mindlessness, and I talk about the unawareness. And what we're doing is we're pulling. What we're doing is we're considerably pulling in information that through usually fear that we have pushed out of conscious working mind, and we're pulling it back in. Okay. That's what this example that I gave you of this woman I'm working with, where she said, these thoughts. I discovered that these thoughts are sitting in the back of my mind, and I've pushed them away. You can say that's unconscious. I would say that it's out of Awareness. And what she was learning to do through observation was pull those back into working awareness where she can do something about them. That's the trick is can you do something about them? If they're going to sit out there in the unconscious, no, you're not going to be able to do anything about them. And what you'll discover is that the notion I use orphan.

Is the big, huge subterranean basement that nobody wants to go into. And you're good. And in my training, you ultimately walk into that basement and you walk the child, that childlike part of yourself that's so fearful. You walk them out of the basement into the light of day. So yeah, you pull up a lot of material.

Are traders living a double life? Daily lives certain and concrete versus trading world probability and uncertainty? If so, what happens to these people's psychs in the long run? First of all, there's an assumption that you're making that I believe is just really off, is that I consider life itself to be uncertain. I consider the brain to be evolved to seek certainty. But what I discover is most people who take my work discover an enormous impact on their personal lives. Once you accept and embrace uncertainty and you realize you know something, obviously you know, everything's really.

It's kind of like this. Schrodinger, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics.

Made an observation in his science lab. And what he discovered is the very act of observing an experiment does in fact change the course of the experiment. Okay, there's biases whether or not you like him or not. What happens with the mind that you bring to uncertainty? You're learning to embrace uncertainty and you're learning how to work with it much more effectively than, than people learn in this world where they think they're going to win by doing.

What happens in trading, you're learning that work is really about patience and timing. And you begin to recognize that. My dad smoked Camel unfiltered cigarettes for 52 years and nobody could convince him that it was killing him. He didn't see the death right there in front of his face until it was too late. Trading, you're forced to see the consequences of your actions almost immediately. Like instant karma. So I would actually say that the kind of training that people go through my, my work actually give them a leg up on engaging life. Much more, much more effective. Okay, last one, folks. Are there any other activities we can engage in in our daily activities other than trading that can help train the emotional brain to detach fear from uncertainty? Yeah. Get in your car and drive into an urban area, okay, Anything that exposes you to challenges, okay, Anything, I mean, understand is that life is challenge. I actually have a saying that life is struggle, suffering is optional. And honor the struggle. The key is that there are always challenges going on.

Jesus Christ once said, you know, hey, you don't have to worry about the future. You have enough trouble today, okay? And it's the same kind of thought is that, you know, what you're doing is you're recognizing that uncertainty is going to manifest, challenges are going to manifest. And so no matter where you are, you can practice.

Deconstructing fear from uncertainty. But understand, even when you do that, you're deconstructing it to a position where you need to be concerned. But you don't need to be so concerned that you activate the fight flight response of the autonomic nervous system. You want to be alert, you want to be ready, you want to be focused so that you're concerned. You're there, but mentally you're prepared, but you're not activating the fight flight. And what you're doing is you have, then you have higher order thinking. Being able to think in probabilities and possibilities rather than fear based or anger based thinking or overconfidence based thinking. So yeah, take a drive in your car.

Around here, get on the road with all these.

Locals that I live in and around on my property.

You know, engage with your spouse with an argument, you know, try to raise your children.

Try to make sense out of your corporate career, out of customers. There's enormous opportunities where you recognize there's nothing certain here and what happens is. But when you manage the, when you manage the mind that you're engaging with that uncertainty, you are given an enormous edge. The way probability shows up. Same thing in trading, except in trading it's a requirement in life. It's just a really good idea. Okay, folks, I want to tell you something. You guys have asked really great questions and I love you. You know, I hate it when you get on and you talk your heart out and you really are there and nobody asks anything. You have asked really good questions. I appreciate all of them. And my view is this, is that no matter what, I truly hope for you prosperity. I hope if trading is your journey, my hope is that you do find a way to transform the mind that you brought to trading into the mind that can produce success in trading. I really do.

If it's not right, then my hope is you find that out earlier rather than later. You have the capital to go out and do something else. With your life. And at any rate, I do hope that you engage life.

With an emotional management of the emotions that you're bringing to engaging that uncertainty. Anyway, take care. If I can help you, please get let us know we're here, okay? And we will see you later. And meanwhile, bless you. Take care. Bye bye.