2016 12 08 16 31 Turning Fear and Aggression into an Asset in Your Trading

Welcome everyone. My name is Randy Howell. With my trader state of mind and this I am excited, I am very happy and delighted to see you here. And the one thing I want to get is.

This is really my work I've really discovered is really more about self development. It's very specific to trading because ultimately what happens is in trading the, the thing that's important, the truth meter that really cuts the truth apart from the BS is your trading account. And ultimately what you discover very quickly there is a construction of mind that has to be achieved, that has to be brought to be able to manage probability. And it's very different than the mind that manages certainty, the mind that manages the fight flight situation that most human beings are basically embedded into. Here we're going to be looking at how do you go about, how do you go about using the basic emotions of fear and aggression? How do you use them as an asset in your trading? They can be, but it's going to be very interesting the way we look at this thing and first what we want to do. Well, first thing is before we get started a little bit. The only house cleaning that I really get into that I hold questions to the end of the session. Okay. You can write the questions in and if it's a technical question, Dolores can answer it. If it's one that really revolves around trader psychology, I'm gonna hold it toward the end. Feel free to ask the question though. Okay, but, and then I will have a section that at the end that is open basically for you to ask questions and really get this work deeper. So what we want to do is how does this happen? Ultimately where it starts is that traders really have to get, get the idea that they're stuck in an endless loop and they keep doing the same thing over and over again. And they don't know why and often they don't know that they're in a loop. They just know that they're not living up to their potential.

No matter how much they would like to convince themselves they are. Their trading account tells them no, you're not. And ultimately in the way I work, we use the trading account as the barometer of how successful you really are. We recognize that there is no truth of the market. We recognize that you're projecting your colored interpretation of the market's all the time. And what we've discovered is that the trading account is going to tell you how effective or ineffective that projection you're doing really is. Most of us stay absolutely in these loops for lifetimes for many, many years and they keep working harder, they keep trying buying more equipment, they kept doing all sorts of things and don't realize that they're actually in a perceptual loop that locks them into a certain level of performance. And they keep doing the same thing over and over again. Okay, but the key is, is to recognize, and I'm asking you not to necessarily look at yourself and say, I'm stuck in a loop. I want you to look at your trading account and your history with that trading account and ask yourself, what is my trading account telling me? Is it telling me I'm stuck in a loop? Okay, and that could be that I've. I keep crashing and burning, I keep bleeding slowly or I'm stuck at a particular profit area. The thing is, what I'm asking you to do is look at your trading account and let it tell you the truth. Are you stuck in a loop? If you're like 95% of traders, you are. And the question is, are you going to be one of the ones who break out of that loop and go to higher functioning? Are you the ones who are going to keep staying in that loop and get stuck and burn out your capital, burn out your time? It's really, you know, the trading gods don't care. The only one that cares is you. And you have to make a decision, is do you like the comfort of that loop or do you want to become something more than the containment of that loop? Okay, that's what we're looking at during today. And ultimately you have to start asking the question, well, why keep things keep falling apart when they should be going accurately? You know, I get stuff all the time, Randy. You know something? When I'm not trading live, man, I can predict the market. My analysis is dead on. The money, you know, it's just, it's just great. But then something happens when I actually start putting putting live money at risk in the market. Something goes on and suddenly things don't look so pretty anymore. Why do they keep falling apart, Randy? Why can't I do the same thing in simulation that I do in live trading? Well, the truth is very simple, is that in your brain, in your survival brain, when you're in simulation, you're not risking capital, you're not risking life, okay? That's the way the old brain thinks. In live trading, you are risking capital into the old brain. You're risking biological threat, completely different animals.

So the thing is, just because you have knowledge of trading does not mean that you're an effective trader. It just means you have knowledge of trading in a classroom. The real key is, can you apply that trading under the conditions.

Of capital at risk? That's the deal. And the truth is that's where the vast majority of traders, they don't have that skill set. They're locked in. If I only have enough knowledge, if only have this, if I only have that, if I only have the holy grail, if I only have. And they stay there stuck in that loop, if only. What I'm asking is, are you ready to break out of that loop and are you ready to live at a different level? Okay, so we know this until survival emotions are mastered. Knowledge is always compromised under pressure. And you're like this jogger, it's just falling apart as you're moving toward your outcome goal. Okay? The question is, how do you keep it stable? It's the mind that engages the uncertainty. That's the core that we need to be looking at. As a matter of fact, what you discover very quickly, it's this mind that you bring to the management of uncertainty. It's rooted in emotion and belief. This is the foundation.

Of how to manage probability. Your brain was never, never, never ever built to manage uncertainty, to manage probability. It was built to manage controlling the environment, controlling outcome. Yet at the same time, that's not the foundation emotionally or belief structure wise that's going to produce success in a probability based environment. If you want that, if you don't want to change, go back to the certainty based environment that your old brain is organized to work in.

And be at peace with it. But if you want to find success in the world of trading, understand the very foundation of the way you understand emotion and belief. It's going to need to change because ultimately your beliefs.

Are reflected in your trading account. They're going to tell you exactly what's going on. So ultimately what we're saying here is that your trading and performance is only as strong as your foundation. How many times have you heard the parables of building houses on sand? And the first time real tempests come along, the house is blown away. How many times have you heard building it on rock? Storms may come, it's on solid foundation or the three little pigs. Do you build a house out of straw or wood when there's a hungry wolf after you that can blow the house down? Or do you build it out of brick? It's totally after you. But the thing is, your job is to build firm emotional and belief foundation for you to operate a mind for in the environment of probability. That's trading friends. Okay, now What I can tell you is this, is that your brain is not going to cotton up. It's not going to like this idea. Your brain is built for survival. Your brain is built for controlling an environment, keeping you alive so that you can breed into the population and extend the species. That's what it's for. And in this, what you discover is that what you want is you want this high functioning brain of yours, the one that can think and stuff like that, the neocortex, you want that training. It's the perfect thing. It's the rational, impartial mind that you need that can engage probability and stuff like that. Unfortunately, it is a slave to your emotional brain, which is built for survival. It's the mammalian brain, it's the emotional brain. It's the one that is, that's where your survival instincts are. And what you discover is there's lots of communication cables going from the emotional brain into the thinking brain, but there are very few communication vehicles coming back into the limbic system. You have to really learn to maximize what you can do with your thinking brain. If you want to learn to manage, manage that emotional brain, it's a loop. Then you discover this brainstem, what is often called the reptilian brain. That's where you start. That's what controls that heart rate. The moment that you find that, oh, I'm under stress and all of a sudden it bumps up and your breathing changes, all that stuff, that's survival mode, friends. It's also with the part of the brain that keeps you stuck in repeating and repeating and repeating and repeating the same conditions of the loop. And if you look over to the right, you begin to see this more functionally. What you're seeing is evolutionarily what happened is you started out with this brain stem, this reptilian brain, and what you discover is an emotional brain started growing around it. That's the mammalian brain. That's what made us so deep different than anything that had ever existed. Then you start noticing out of that emotional brain started growing this neocortex, friends. That's what's made us so phenomenally different than any other animal that's ever lived. And what makes us so different. Yet the thing is, is that all thinking out of that neocortex is emotional state dependent from a primitive survival instinct. Emotional brain. Do you see the need to learn how to work with emotions to be able to.

Really empower the kind of thinking you have under pressure? Absolutely, friends.

What has worked for survival has become default programming. It creates those loops you're stuck in. It doesn't know that you can think. It knows that it's trying to survive in an environment. And suddenly when you start risking capital, it starts interpreting that as risk to life.

This.

Is the problem that has to be solved to be able to have a mind built for long term management of probability. And there's no exceptions. That's the key. And you make any do anything you want. Here's the deal and here's the magical thinking that you discover that most traders are really focused in.

Your powerlessness to control outcome. Okay? That's the whole deal is you have to learn how to become a really good loser so you minimize loss, okay? Instead of triggering to either fear or aggression at that moment. It's just, it's what has to be done. Yet at the same time your comfort zone doesn't want to change. You resist change. All of a sudden like this cartoon, you start asking the question, what if we don't change at all? What if something magical just happens? Friends, that's what people in trading are doing every day. You know, you go to a new trade room and you know, some of these guys that run trade rooms are really good. They know what they're doing. They have a long, long track record of knowing how to trade and knowing how to teach trading. Traders get in there and think that there is some sort of magical formula that they're going to learn from these guys that make them the whole trader they want to be. When in fact what is missing.

Is that they don't want to. They don't want to. They don't want to have to deal with their caveman brain. They want to pretend that's not really there. The truth is it's there. But your trading account is telling you point blank. It's triggering. If you find, if you trigger to fight flight, if you freeze, if you have problems getting into trades, if you have fear of missing out, if you over trade, if you revenge trade. That's the aggression. What you're seeing is that your limbic system, your emotional brain and your reptilian brain are in control of your, of your thinking brain. Friends, that's what has to change. It's not going to change by wishful thinking or by the way our visualization of where I'm going to huff and puff and I'm going to have visualize what I want and it's just going to show up by the law of attraction. It's not going to show up because you've got a mantra that you're repeating to Yourself. I'm a successful trader. I'm a successful trader.

It's not going to come because of some NLP trick. It's not going to come because of some tapping thing that you do. Ultimately, you're going to have to learn how to emotionally regulate the triggering of the loop. And then what happens is you're going to have to learn by technique how to go in and change the very foundation of belief that you have about your interaction, your capacity to interact with uncertainty. That's how it's done. And a little later, we're going to show you how to. How to do that. But there's one other really great problem.

Everybody's heard of the tortoise and the hare. Do you remember how overconfident that hare was about winning the race?

Just laughing soft. Here's Bugs Bunny just laughing. Ultimately.

One of the biggest deceptions to the traitor that you cannot live with is the feeling of confidence. Not confidence as competence of action, but you feel good. And this is like. This happened today with a client of mine. He finally got past fear. And all of a sudden he said, you know something? Oh, my God, I am. Hey, I can trade now. Wow, I'm on top of the mountain. I've gotten past fear. I know how to. I know how to do this. And then he fell off the side of the mountain. What happened is he got past fear and he didn't see that overconfidence, or what we call euphoria, is just as dangerous as an emotional ground for the trading mind as fear. So ultimately, when you're saying, well, I feel confident, I'm gonna tell you something that's dangerous. Friends, what we're looking to do is that ultimately what a trader has to learn when they experience this euphoria is they have to learn that no friend, feeling good is not allowed while you trade. The only emotional state, this is where you have to get really good at managing this is discipline, impartiality. That's the mind that can manage probability. The moment that you get into euphoria, overconfidence, you're thinking, hey, man, the good times are going to roll on forever. No, they're not. But that emotional state starts contaminating your thinking. In the same way that fear contaminated, you're thinking about, oh, my God, what's going to happen in the future. Somewhere in an equilibrium you're looking at where you're not in fear, you're not in. And you're not in euphoria. You're in this controlled emotional state that allows you to think not from fight, flight, survival, but from probability.

Wow. That friends, is when you begin to do it. But this, this what Bugs is doing here. This sense of overconfidence is what's behind ever trading. And then you fall into revenge trading trying to get make up for the prior losses that you got from being in overtrading. But the thing is is it starts with emotional state management. And friends, the good news, this can be taught and you're going to learn more about that. Now here's the deal.

I want you to read this. I'm going to read this quote aloud from this Buddhist sister, this Buddhist monk, she says something very, very powerful. The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.

Practically every person that has gone through self development courses and has learned how to produce success thinking they read this and they're horrified or they're thinking this is bullshit, this is not the way it is. Yet what you discover is people who go through all that training, learn how to walk on coals, learn how to have this positive thinking, learn how to use these affirmations, have this positive attitude about the future, future. They get into trading and discover that the trading gods really don't care.

About that. What you have to learn how to do is acknowledge and accept and embrace uncertainty is all you have.

That is the kicker friends. Yet at the same time your problem is that your brain and mind are built to control environment and outcome. It doesn't want to accept uncertainty. It would much rather accept I am going to maintain this comfort zone of being able to control the environment no matter what. I'm going to outthink it. I'm going to outthink it. No you're not. Go find another profession to work in where that kind of thinking works. Sales and marketing. Okay, so we've gotten this. We know that you're going to have to get past this default loop program programming of your survival instincts. No matter how useful it's been, it's useless. In this brave new world of trading and probabilities.

Most people find it very difficult. And many people end up getting out of trading because they're really, really not willing to accept what this person is saying. But the true trader understands very clearly is yeah, uncertainty is all we truly have. Now what Mind, here's the kicker because when you accept that, well, uncertainty is all we truly have, you're giving up on controlling outcome and controlling the environment and you're saying well what is it? I can control.

Plenty. As it turns out. What you can control are the emotions in the mind that you bring.

To embrace and work with the uncertainty of trading. That's what you can control, friends. That's the power. And this is what separates struggling traders.

With professional traders. It's workable, it's doable, it's learnable.

But only when you say, I accept this, I get it. And I know that I realize I have to change the paradigm that my brain and mind have been organized around. And I'm ready to do that.

That's the ticket right there. If you decide that a new world can open to you beyond the loop you're stuck in, until that time, you're stuck in the loop. It's a matter of whether or not you really want to be successful in trading or whether you want to be right. Okay? Because I don't know very many people who survive in trading. I don't know anybody, as a matter of fact, who are, by doing it, proving they're right. They, what they do is they prove that the truth is, is it's really uncertain out there. And what happens, I have ideas, I have guesses, I have hypotheses. But I'm very clear that the markets can unprove me. And when that happens, I need to get out of the trade. I need to move on, I need to survive to trade another day. And when my hypothesis work, I'm going to take, I'm going to take what the markets give me. This is where we're going. So ultimately.

From our earliest hominoid humble beginnings to modern man, uncertainty and the potential loss are encountered. The brain's default programming is always for short term survival. That's what gets the dopamine rush, you know, like for instance, you know when, when you get a winner, you know that rush that you get that says, whoa, I won.

That'S dopamine. And what happens is dopamine produces euphoria, that feeling good and suddenly you're like an animal who's feeling good and going, whoa, whoa, look at me, look at me. That has to cool down, that has to calm down and you get back to emotional stability. In the same way that happens with endorphins is that if you sit there and you're sitting there and you're looking at a setup forming and you start getting confirmation, you ask for more and more confirmation and you just, you're kind of scared to get in. You're scared to get in, in that moment. And what happens is that you don't pull the trigger. It's like the trade slides on by and there's a moment of relief.

That's endorphins, that's good opium, okay? Is that you're getting. You're from the reward center of your brain. You're getting a short term reward for a short term survival action. Meanwhile, you've messed up long term probability, okay? And you, you're out of probability. You're no longer trading methodology and doing your rules. You're back into short term strategy. It is a powerful pull that will and it wants to keep you in that loop. It wants you alive. It wants you breeding into the population and creating, and creating the new world. Okay? That's the deal. We're looking to step out of that loop, okay? And I want to give you an example of this loop. This is actually one that we diagrammed for a trader the other day.

Okay? Here he is. He's having anticipation of the trading day, okay? As he's thinking about the trading day. And what I want you to do is do this, exercise yourself. When you're thinking of the trading day, what happens? Unbelievably many traders end up having dread and anxiety about oh shit, what's going to happen. And then what they do is they push that down and what they do is say, no, I'm not going to have that man. What I'm going to do is I'm going to replace that, that negativity with positivity and I'm eager to engage the markets. I'm going to see what I can take, how many have done this and then what happens? In that kind of thinking, fed by either the fear or the euphoria, that confidence of eagerness to jump and chase after a trade, you get default programming avoidance or urgency to act. You're sitting there. Now, depending on who you are, you're sitting there already. Default program looking for reasons to not take that trade. Or your default program looking for reasons to jump into that trade.

And particularly if you're a perfectionist, you're looking for reasons not to get in the trade so you can't be proven wrong. Or if you're an Alpha who's used to winning, what you're doing is you're going, I'm going to chase. I'm going to make things happen. That feels good. It's dangerous.

So out of that default programming you start acting from fear overconfidence. And then one of two ways happens. Either in a short, you get short term relay release in terms of fear. That's those endorphins, okay? And the, in the overconfidence you get short team short term dopamine, by the way, that's kind of like cocaine, okay? And you get a rush of overconfidence. You feel that and you start thinking, oh my God, I can do this, I can do this. Very bad for the trading mind. Really good for the survival mind. Really bad for the probability mind that needs to have a stable emotional thing that stays present in the here and now. They're not thinking in the future winning. They're not thinking of losing in the past. They're here in this moment, managing probability, managing performance. Then what happens is that if it's fear, you have this sense of missed opportunity or the euphoria of conquest, of winning, okay? Or trauma. You know, you work with a guy who blows up 80, $90,000 several times over a couple years, and I promise you that that euphoria starts getting preloaded with trauma based and all of a sudden you're hyper vigilant and you start being fearful of winning. Powerful stuff. Anyway, that missed opportunity euphoria goes into short term survival reloads. Now you're reloading that. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat of that loop, okay? And ultimately it creates an unfit mind anticipating the next trade. And there's your loop. You anticipate the trading day. Do you see in this case how the trader. Actually it's a couple traders, how the traders had an unfit mind that pretty much guaranteed them to stay stuck in the loop of the way they performed in trading. Occasionally they'd get lucky, but luck is dangerous in trading. You know, the thing is, is you make some money and you've done something stupid, you still get the dopamine squirt and you start doing stupid things over and over again because it was successful at one time. This is the way people stay in the loop. They're not managing the emotions or the belief behind those emotions that keep them stuck in the loop of their performance.

There's got to be an answer of this. But before we get to that answer, a little bit more so what we have. Ultimately you discover that the human brain has a death fear of uncertainty, okay? It will do anything to get out of the feeling state of uncertainty. It will fake a feeling of certainty to get out of the real uncertainty. That's the fear, okay? You will develop several. You say, well, yeah, okay, Phil. Of uncertainty. Well, Randy, mine is really about more about the fear of losing. That's what people have when they don't want to get in the trade. And they don't get in the trade, they don't get in the trade. And what happens is they miss the trade. But boy, they sure did miss losing, didn't they? Haha. Then you end up with fear of pulling the trigger. If I never pull the trigger, I can't lose. Do you see the perfectionistic thinking in that? I've got to be right, I better not be wrong. And then how about the fear of missing out? Oh my God, I'm missing out on all these profits. I've been acting from fear, but I'm missing out on these profits. I need to get in. I need to get in. Do you see the fear just absolutely messing up the ability to take a sober mind into the managed probability so necessary. And then for the guy who's gotten in messed up, then there's that urgency to make up for losses. You know, I've got to make them up. I got to make them up. No you don't. What happens is you're trading one trade at a time, one setup at a time. And what happens when you start linking it to all these other trades? What you're doing is you're setting yourself up to stay in the same loop. What happens is that other trades gone, you're only trading in this moment. You're not trading all these other trades at. They're not, they're not together.

And those of you who have the fear of not being right, well, what if I'm not right? Well, I promise you that many most really good traders are wrong at least 50% of the time and they fully acknowledge it and they minimize the loss. They go in with a hypothesis and they know it's only a hypothesis. And their fragile ego is not attached to being right or wrong. It's attached to being a fear. Effective, big difference. And to an effective trader, you know, oh yeah, if I'm wrong, I'm getting out of this trade while it's still small. I'm not sitting around and, and letting this thing suck dry. I'm gonna keep my, I'm gonna keep those losses small. But there's also the fear of inadequacy.

So you end up going, okay. The fear of self sabotage. Oh my God, what if I blow myself up? Well, that's a good way to set yourself up for doing it. The fear of change. I want to stay in my comfort zone. I want the trading world to change. I don't want to have to change, but I just want to start winning. That's the loop. This is how you begin to recognize that if you, if you recognize these fears, you recognize that you're not going to get out of the loop you're in until you change that whole thing. We have to create a mind that engages uncertainty as normal.

Not as something to be avoided, not as something to be attacked, but to be used. You got it? Okay.

So here we go. If you're really beginning to get it, what you're beginning to recognize is this, is that there is a place on a scale challenge, okay? And believe me, the thing about uncertainty, the thing about stress is stress literally is you facing the challenges of life. The real question is, do you face them from anxiety or anger, fight flight, or are you over here bored? And rest, digest. That's the. That's the parasympathetic nervous system up there with anxiety and anger. So this, I mean, the. I'm sorry, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic down there with the rest, digest where you. You calm down, what happens? Somewhere there is a zone that takes anger and fear at a lesser level where it's not triggering the body into action, but it creates a focused, ready, prepared mind. Okay? That's the empowered mind that is very fit for trading. It can accept uncertainty. It engages uncertainty and feels comfortable being able to manage uncertainty.

That's what we're looking to do. The emotions are not too hot, not too cold, but they allow you to produce a mind that's empowered, that can manage the probability rather than the certainty. Everybody wants certainty. It's not found in trading. If you can't. If you're not willing to.

Build an empowered mind for the management of uncertainty, then you really just simply ought to get out of trading. It's nothing personal or anything. It's just that that's the mistake that keeps people locked into these loops of unperformance. So now we're beginning to recognize that there is a skinny little place in there somewhere between aggression and fear where there is an assertiveness and there is a concern. But the body has not been triggered to fight flight yet. This is the zone, friends. This is where we want to be. And this is how we have to start asking the question, well, well, tell me something. How do I go about mastering the survival instinct of the emotional brain? How do I do that? Because, Randy, I'm beginning to get it, is that it's keeping me in this comfort zone, this loop that it, you know, and I ultimately have to get out of that in order to be able to trade on a higher level. Yeah, you do. How do you do that?

The rest of this course, the rest of this webinar is about literally how we teach you to do that. And it's a step by step process that I want you to stay tuned to, okay? Because ultimately, you have to understand how emotion and thinking are intertwined, how they have to work as partners with one another. So ultimately, what you discover first and foremost is the emotions are not optional, okay? And by the way, you don't have emotions as long as you have a body. They have you. Emotions are biological. They are literally. They are built to work with your interactions, your dance with the environment, okay? They're biological action potentials that they trigger automatically. They don't have time for thought. They're happening automatically. You're reacting in nanoseconds to the environment rather than microseconds. And that means life and death, okay? And ultimately, though, is that as you learn to master emotions, you master the mind that comes from those emotions that you apply to probability into uncertainty, and you no longer have to decide yourself and to believe that there is actually certainty out there. Okay? So now we've gotten that, and then we start noticing the big thing. One of the hardest things that traders have to recognize is they're not in control and the emotions can't be denied, and that control is an illusion. When you take a look at this little cartoon, you take a look at a person walking in a field and you see that figure projecting onto that feel all the negative things that can go wrong. She's already working from a state of anxiety, giving rise to worried, anxious thoughts. Can you imagine where performance goes? Meanwhile, her dog is sitting there in the moment and recognizing just what's there. The only thing that that dog is controlling is the moment they're in. What happens as a human being is out in the future or in the past, reliving the past or projecting into the future when it hasn't even arrived yet. Outcome. Meanwhile, the dog is in the moment, into the performance of the moment. This is what we want to do because what we know is survival. In sync motions are going to erupt simply because the brain can't tell the difference between biological threat and psychological discomfort. But it can learn, okay? So the first thing is you have to learn how to calm the emotions down before they absolutely wipe you out. Much like what's happened as you see this airplane putting fire retardant on the potentiality of a fire. They're prepared, preparing that forest where it hasn't burned so that it will not burn. They're calming the potentiality of down.

And what's really cool about emotions, if you realize they're biological, they're embodied in you and they have a signature that includes breath, tension and heart rate. You can use those as being able to say, well, I noticed my. I'm not breathing anymore. Well, that means that I'm revving up. The emotion is triggered and I'd see that it's fear. Ah, well, I'm really tense. Okay, that means that my body is preparing for fight flight. Ah, I start hearing my pulse skip a beat. Oh, that's telling me that I'm revving up and I'm about to lose the ability to think logically. I'm going to start thinking from fight flight rather than the logical mind. That zone, that sweet spot I was showing you, that's the first thing that has to happen. And of course, either in the individual course or in the group course, that's the first thing that we're teaching. We're asking you to retrain the way you breathe, retrain the way you hold tension in your body to become observers of it so that you catch the emotion before it spins out of control and that you can have, you can keep it and maintain it within a particular range that you can think clearly. That's the first thing that happens. But the thing is, is emotional regulation is not going to change. You're trading. But what emotional regulation does is it gets you to the door of the mind. And there, friends, what we do is you have to learn to observe body and mind first. It's a lot easier to observe the body, that tension, that breath, that racing heart to let you know, oh, there's an emotion and I know which emotion now I need to start calming it down. But with mindfulness, it goes further than that. You learn how to step back out of thought and recognize you and your thoughts are not the same. You and your beliefs are not the same. That the organization of self that you are is simply one potential organization of a self that could be. And this is the default programming that occurred to your brain when it got born into an environment and adapted to that environment during your formative period. And rarely is that going to be a good mind. The management of uncertainty. And you're going to. I need to step back and I need to reorganize that because it was good for survival back then. It's not good for trading in the here and now, though. Okay, so we're not, we're not saying that it's a bad mind. We're just saying it's not functional, effective in trading. So you're learning to observe. And this is powerful because you literally Start recognizing, oh my God. I, I have had very little to say about the organization of mind that I am. And you've discovered that the brain.

Functionally is a community of rival programs that has duked it out and has some have claimed victory and has pushed others away. And it is easy for the fear or the aggression component within your mind, within your body to, to take over because it's highly effective for short term survival. Yet it's bad for probability management. Usually what traders find out is their worst enemy is living between their own two ears. Okay? Because the mind is where all those emotional programs are given voice as your thoughts and your dealers that you're going to have to reprogram, you're going to have to re jostle that mind, that community, into an effective mind for the management of uncertainty. Usually what happens is people have got a fine mind and brain for the management of survival. Not good enough. In trading friends, completely different animals. And ultimately you become your own worst enemy or you become your own best friend. That's the first thing most traders discover. They have been their own worst enemy. And that's the start of a new mind. Okay? That's what you have to discover first. And ultimately you start going.

You know something? I really have to.

I have to open the book and I have to redesign the mind so that we're all on the same page for probability management. And suddenly you start realizing the mind is like that. There are many different emotional programs that are acting as forces in the mind that you need to recalibrate. And when you produce the observer, you first wake up. And it's like waking up in a committee room and realizing that all hell's breaking loose. And you as the CEO of this committee, of this company have been asleep at the wheel and you need to wake up, you need to take charge and you need to start making sure that a different team is managing how that company interacts with the marketplace. Same thing here is you're having to wake up. You're saying, you know something, I'm organized poorly for the management of uncertainty. I need to reorganize it. And that's what we teach you how to do this program is that reorganization. And what we're doing is it's all about moving from survival instincts to working with the unknown and getting comfortable with it. So ultimately this is where you change the reactive loop, okay? And ultimately I was asking professional trader the other day about this and he said, you know what I really like about your program? You actually teach actual techniques that allow you to get this from your breathing stuff, from your mindfulness stuff, to the memory enrichment that you use to get at these emotional programs and pull them up and start working with them. You're not using like visualization because it doesn't work. You're not using. You're not using things like that. You're using stuff out of actual experience that can be demonstrated. But ultimately, you're building a mind rooted in discipline as a program and impartiality as a program.

To be able to trade from. You're also developing a sense of self compassion to calm your fear down. The fear is real. You can't ignore it. You can't pretend it's not there. You have to calm it down. You also have to have a protectiveness that confronts the destructive conversation going on within everybody's head.

Everybody has a destructive internal struggle going on. And until you learn to deal with it, it's going to bite you. So ultimately, what happens is the original organization of your mind was about survival. Here what you see is that progression to where the organization of the mind needs to be about probability. Instead of having a mind run by what I call the orphan, your fear or your aggression and the inner critic, that's all that judgment going on inside your head telling you how worthless, how you don't matter, and how powerless you are and how inadequate you are. You're going and going. You know, I'm finding a totally different way of organizing this. I'm examining things, I'm questioning this, and I'm bringing forward new programs and I'm building that into the new normal. And we teach you specifically how to do that. That's the power. So ultimately, this is where you change the loop of the inherited reactive behavior into the new mind. You ultimately recognize that you can act from a new emotional cocktail of discipline, impartiality of self, compassion and impartiality rather than fear or wanting to win, an impulse to win, needing to prove the self. This is something that you learn to do. You develop the skills by specific techniques and you move forward. And ultimately the challenges of uncertainty do not change.

You're still challenged by uncertainty. You still don't know what's going to go on. But what happens is you brought a very new mind. You have a new observer. You have a new way of leading that mind into an engagement. That's what's taught in both the group and the individual courses. You know, unfortunately, you can read about it. You know, I've got lots of materials, a lot free, a lot inexpensive. But ultimately, if you want to get at the bottom of this, if you want to get at what are the techniques, what are the things that I need to do to actually restructure this loop into a higher functioning mind? This is what's got to be done. Okay? So ultimately.

The work is really about redeveloping your potential. The potential is really great for where you were and what you were doing. You had to decide whether or not you want to develop the potentiality of the brain and mind to manage probability. That can be taught friends.

And your trading account. It's a truth meter, okay?

As you become observer of the potential, you learn how to bring forth that potentiality into form. That's the power of observation.

So ultimately, what happens is that this work really equips you.

With the tools that you need to change mind, to change your potential. And it's a step by step process. This is a process.

You literally go from one step to the next step to the next step to the next step. And when you get to the final step, you can look back and go, oh my God, this started with emotional regulation. Look where I am now. And ultimately, you're moving toward a mind built from probability management. So the key is, are you ready to become the change? Are you ready for that? By the way, for those of you who ask about this particular photograph, this is Table Rock in North Carolina. It is stunning and beautiful. The key is the group course is for people who are curious. They want something. They want it to be highly cost effective. It's meeting in January. Right now, if you sign up for this, you get a free emotional regulation section and you can get access to the entire course. We have people right now who are already on the third lesson. So that when in January, when they get there, man, they are. They are hot. They're ready to rock and roll. They're prepared. They've already had extra time to get with this stuff. And it meets five times over 10 weeks. You end up in a virtual classroom where you have all these materials that you listen to that you work with, and you have access to it 24, seven powerful stuff, okay? So look at that free gift. And you know, if you're looking at it going, you know something, this is really interesting. Give yourself a Christmas gift, one that keeps on giving, the one that actually prepares the mind for all this dang knowledge and stuff you've got. The next thing is the individual course. People take the individual course because it is. It is a mentorship between you and me. We take it step by step. And it is, it gets deep, it gets Deep into the pattern of not achieving what you want and breaking it and reorganizing it into higher function. It comes with 10 consults with me personal on Skype. That's the power of it. Okay. I encourage it. And it's for people who are dead serious about developing the mind for trading. They're just not, they're not, they're tired of playing around.

It's, it's a and plus you own the course, it's powerful and it's a three or four month course, whereas the group course is a two month course. Both are good. It's just really depending on what you're looking for. If you're looking for that, you know, if you're looking for, you know, I'm a big fan of mentorship. If you want to change, find a mentor who knows how to produce that change. I have never been a good self learner. I do better finding a mentor who knows how to show the way and teach me. That's the same thing here. But they're both cost effective. Anyway, there's lot, there's also books. Get your free gift. And if you're serious about this, go to the website, get a free consult with me, hit contact us, ask for a free consult. Doris will organize us so that we meet and we'll have a session on Skype and we'll look deeply into your trading. We'll look and see what's happening with mind and trading and we'll see what's best for you. Okay? So anyway, any questions? This has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed this and I'm really interested in what observations and what.

Okay, this is from Christine, but how to prevent. Oh, you talked about overconfidence in trading. A person needs to have confidence in their trading plan. But how do you prevent that from turning, from turning into overconfidence of trades in your trading? The thing is this, it's really interesting is that you begin to catch yourself. You begin to catch yourself in overconfidence, which is really hard to observe, Christine, because initially what happens is almost everybody. And if this is Christine, I think it is.

Okay, but the thing is, is that ultimately, okay, ultimately what happens. You spend so much time working with fear and trying to get past fear is. You don't recognize that euphoria is just as dangerous. You start going, oh my God, I'm there, I'm there, I've got it. I know how to do this. I know how to do this, Christine. No, you don't. What? You know how to do is you know how to produce a mind that engages probability. You don't know how to control outcome. And what you do is you, you literally come to the moment of recognizing and you start looking. Like with vigilance, you start looking for overconfidence. You start looking, am I adhering to the same trade management? Am I preparing my mind in the same way? Or am I cutting out steps? Am I taking breaks? Am I taking shortcuts in the management of the mind that I bring to trading? Because ultimately the moment that you spot overconfidence and it's that feeling good and you have to start recognizing is feeling good is dangerous for trading mind. You know, after you finish trading, go and whip it up and feel good all you want. But when trading feeling good, euphoria, your enemy. Okay, follow up. Not having a consistent trading plan combined with not having the mindset one needs to trade makes this doubly difficult. No kidding. What do you suggest for something like this? Well, first of all, I really like working with traders who are working with a trading professional who knows how to teach methodology. And I really like, I often will get traders when they start getting their mind together, they realize they don't have a working methodology that really has an edge. And then what happens? They need to go find a trading coach that teaches methodology. Okay, so the first thing I'm looking for with people is are you well trained? Does your, does your methodology really have an edge? And generally what I look at there is that if you're, if you're trading in sim.

Are you successful? If you are, you know that you have a methodology that works. And then when you shift to live trading where there's risk involved, you see yourself fall apart at that particular time, you darn well know that it's that it's the psychology that set at the base of the problem. So I like people to have two, three years or more. Most of the people I work with have enormous, more experience than that and have gone through and have had, they've done their, they've done their tour duties with trading coaches and they have a methodology they've determined works. And often toward the end of the course, they discover that they need to tweak that methodology based on what they discovered about themselves. Okay, awesome stuff. This is so essential. Thank you, Rob. And it is, and it's the foundational stuff.

See, in the group course, do we have interactions with other members of the group, Joseph? I certainly hope so. What happens is that we have, you have a choice is that Google groups are set up are Yahoo groups, and we encourage people to interact with them. We have had groups that just absolutely are still going on today.

We have other group courses where nobody ever organizes group and functionally works. It's just the damnedest thing in the world because what happens is that you are learning a particular language and you're learning how to interact with one another. And man, oh, man, if you can get a group of people who has a common language of psychology, they can become enormously helpful to one another in coaching each other as they go through and grow as a trader. That was. That's the intent of the. Of the groups that we have. But some people, like I said, some groups create these interactions and they become. We certainly provide the opportunity. Okay. And we certainly encourage it. So, yes, we're hoping you have interactions, but we can't make people talk if they don't want to talk.

Okay. This is from Garrett. Garrett. Okay. If you are able to find a methodology that has an edge and very strict mechanical rules, and you find comfort in absolutely adhering to those rules without exception, is this not a way to keep emotions from influencing your trading? Yeah, if you can do that. That's exactly right. I just don't find people who can do that. Okay. If you're adhering to it. And that's to me.

I know lots and lots of people every day who say, I'm going to adhere. I'm going to do my trading plan. I'm going to do. I'm going to trade my plan. I'm going to plan my trade. And they don't do it. If you can do it, good for you. Okay. Most people can, as a matter of fact. I just don't know any people who can.

Okay, please put the five meetings offer as a link here, please. Thanks. Dolores is working on that right now. That's actually a good idea. We oughta, you know, we oughta. I see that we have it in the thing, but yes, you're right. We need to put it in the chat box. And I think.

Sometimes we're not as competent in the manipulation of this as we need to be. But Dolores is trying to do that right now. And let's see what we're gonna do. If not, we'll send it to all you guys. Okay. Okay, we have a couple minutes left. Are there any other questions? Any other observations that you have of me? Okay. There's your link. Okay. Send to all. So we've just sent everybody who registered a link to that five session, the group course. Powerful, powerful thing. Do you have A discount price? No, I don't. Basically the people that I'm interested in have finally come to the moment that they've never really received a discount. What happens is when you see all this stuff that things have been discounted by this thing, what you discover is that.

That it doesn't work that way. What we have done is we have priced these things very affordably. We want people being able to work with this material. We want change. And the truth is. Yes. What happens is you can take this group course over and over again. Well, no, I have. Correct. What happens is that when you take the group course, you have access to it for infinite period of time. Okay. For the virtual classrooms, you also have access to take another course. Okay. You can, you can take. You can take it one more time. Okay. We have that. We have that happen all the time. Okay. So. Yeah, but the thing is that you have access to the virtual classroom for virtually everywhere. And also what you're doing is you're getting recordings of the classes, okay. As part of the course. They're coming to you. So you already have the course and as you work through it. And like I said, I know people who work this stuff. Gosh. For. We have people going to the website for years. So. Yeah. Okay, we have time. Are there materials and print off to read? There are lots of print materials. Okay. There are. They're journals that you're gonna be. That are on the site that you can, you can print or you can have. Yeah, you can print the slides. Yes, the journals work that way. Okay. There are also. If you get on the website, you discover there are enormous amounts of articles that all this stuff really dovetail in. Most people. Most people copy my articles and there's just simply part of their reading curriculum, their self development curriculum. Okay. Okay, here's Derek.

Hey, this is our last question. How do you deal with the situation where your fundamental analysis shows an overbought situation? You put on a very measured trade against it, but the market keeps going against you. And all your analysis is all your indicators. Fear begins. First of all, what happens is that you don't get what it is to lose. A really true professional trader recognizes that all their analysis is a hypothesis. It only presents one potential possibility. And that what professional traders do is once they get into a trade and once they realize their hypothesis is wrong, they get out. They're not. They. They do not have ownership at all of being right. They don't have ownership of being wrong. What happens, they recognize this is probability, what you're talking about. Right now is you're speaking from a certainty based mind. And this is what has to change. When you talk to a professional trader, they will literally have a probability based mind where they recognize that, you know, the truth is, yeah, I have an analysis and it may or may not hold up. If it doesn't hold up, I'm getting out of this trade. I'm not going to gamble. Because once you discover your analysis is not accurate and you stay in, you're gambling. Okay, so the thing is, is you, you, that's the whole point is that you go in with analysis, you go in with only an hypothesis that may or may not be right. And what you're looking to do is you're looking to see what the markets telling you, is it accurate or not? And if it's, and if it's not accurate, let go. You know you don't have ownership, you know you were wrong, get out. And hopefully you're, if you're right 35 to 50% of the time and you minimize losses, you're gonna make a lot of money. But the truth is really great traders, often you'll look at them and they're only winning 40% of their, their trades, they're wrong. But what they do is they're getting out fast because they recognize they're wrong and it's no big deal. Okay, I want to thank you and I also want that if I don't ever see you again or hear from you again, I wish you a great holiday, I wish you a Merry Christmas. I gosh, it's a really great time. And what I also ask you to do is during this time, as you start slowing down your trading, with all this slowness that goes on around Christmas in the markets is I really ask you to reflect and say, you know something? What is it I really need in my trading? And take a look at the psychology you bring into the moment of trading. This isn't about outcome. People most the time they're focused on winning a trade. You can't do that. You have no control of whether or not you're gonna win or not. What happens is what I ask you to recognize. Imagine if you went into trades and your entire focus was on your performance. You let go of the outcome, okay? And what you did is you simply manage your performance. Friends, that's what winning traders do. That's what we teach. I ask you to really think about this and decide whether or not you really step up and you're ready to go. And saying, you know something, I really need to do about. I need to do something about this mind. I'm bringing trading. You know, it's time. I'm tired of getting stuck in this loop. I'm ready to get out. I'm ready to establish something else. Meanwhile, I wish you a Merry Christmas. Have a great holidays. And hey.

Have a good one. Take care. Bye. Bye.