Achieving Emotional Control in the Midst of Trading Uncertainty

Emotional control seems so simple, such a simple concept when we look at it from out there, rather than being inside uncertainty and looking out, we read about it, we know how to trade. And you go in and you go, okay, I'm ready, man. I have been in simulation for a long time. I can think through this. I know this methodology. I know what to do under various circumstances. And then we get into trading and we start risking capital live rather than on paper. Suddenly the paper profits are no longer just running wild. What happens is suddenly emotional control is thrown out the window, okay? And yet at the same time, you're bewildered because you don't know why.

The truth is that it is enormously different when you're doing just a mental exercise when you're trading in simulation. But when you're trading live, risking real capital, you're engaging the emotional brain. You're engaging it in an enormously primitive way. And until you learn how to work with that emotional primitive brain, it's going to take out thinking every time. It's really difference between talk, talking, trading and effective trading. Lots of people talk trading and it feels good. As a matter of fact, that feeling of good, you know, you know, if I could only, you know something, if I could only talk trading. I mean, I can nail this stuff all the time. People listen to me, I can predict moves, I can do that. But when it goes live, I can't. What's going on. One of the problems is when you're talking, trading, it's producing the feeling, state.

Of confidence. You start feeling confident. The problem is that you've produced the chemistry of confidence and you're confusing that chemistry, that feeling of confidence with actual performance confidence. Huge problem, okay? This is the place where you go in and you see that, okay, they talk the talk, but they can't walk the walk. Ultimately, the trader has to learn to be able to walk that walk. The big deal is this is the brain does not want to change internally. It wants to be able to manipulate objects in the environment and control them. That's what it wants to do. It wants to be in control of environment, it wants to be in control of outcome. And yet you get into trading and you discover, oh my God, that's not the case. It's not that way at all. Ultimately, it's not external control that you can have in trading. What it points to, as you start looking at your trading account, it starts telling you that the internal control is what you really need and how to go about it. How do you do that? Well, it starts with understanding that you're an emotional being, you're not a rational being, okay? As a matter of fact, you're a rationalizing being. That left brain, that rationalization business, all it's doing is it's creating a story that supports what your emotional brain has already decided. You want to see that in action? Take a look at the last time you messed up. Whether or not it's at entry where you're getting scared and you find all sorts of reasons not to get in, or whether or not you're in a trade and you end up doing really something stupid and adding to a bad cause, or whether or not you get out early, all those things make sense in the heat of the moment. It's when you wake up later that you realize that your left brain truly has produced a rationalization about what the emotional brain has already decided. You have not been rational. Okay? So what we want to be able to do is recognize, well, this emotion, what's actually happening first. We don't understand emotion. They're biological. And you do not have emotions, friends, they have you. And if you understand that, you begin to say, hmm, you know something? So I can't let go of emotions and trade without emotions. No, a lot of people try that. It's what everybody tries to do. It's why people lose so much money, lose their livelihoods and everything like that. In trading, however, what you can do is you can have freedom of emotion. You can choose what emotions are going to meet. The uncertainty of life, the uncertainty of outcome, that's what you can do. You can take the evolution that has produced the fight flight response and you can change it. You can change it from, oh my God, I'm losing, I need to freeze. Short term survival is going to dictate that, you know, if I freeze and don't get in the trade, it's actually a win for the emotional brain. You live another day. At the same time, you don't get the probability of what winning could do for you. So you're looking at that and you're going, okay, the very first thing I'm going to have to do is this emotion is going to fire anyway. Particularly fear. Particularly fear and aggression. And what we're beginning to recognize is that both fear and aggression at the base of it is a generation of vulnerability.

And a long time ago, in a place far, far away, when we felt vulnerable, there was real danger. There were saber toothed cats who really chewed on us. There was danger everywhere we looked. And we had to be able to make very razor fast decisions that's where the emotional brain learned to bypass thinking brain. The moment that we felt that short term threat that was there, that's emotional nature. You can't stop that, it overwhelms you. And in trading, what happens is your brain's not going to be able to tell the difference between the discomfort, the vulnerability of risking capital and not knowing the outcome and danger to biological self. That's what you have to really start working. So you have to manage the emotion. You realize that I can't bring fear there. It needs to be more of concern. I need to be in control of the emotion that meets the moment of uncertainty. Instead of triggering to fight flight. I need to trigger to curiosity and to concern. I need to be elevated. I need to be ready, focused and alert. But I don't need to kick into fight flight, which is what happens with traitors. So you're sitting there and you're going, okay.

Ultimately, once you understand a little bit about emotion, you begin to realize that your mind is a place of emotional drama. If you don't believe it, just watch yourself trade. Ultimately in this drama, if you begin to see your mind as a committee, okay, composed really of emotional programs that have duked it out before and have created a winner and that winner has created a story call you. There is no true you trading. There is an organization of a self, this committee of the mind that has emerged from the victors of the emotional programs, okay? That's the big thing that you can change.

These emotional programs are inner resources. It just really depends on whether or not you develop them and can use them in the moment of heat, of the moment of uncertainty, or whether or not they trigger to fight flight. This is what you're working to do. And ultimately what you're doing is you're looking at going the fight flight is all about short term survival. But the mind that you need to develop is all about long term sustainability. Completely different opposing things. You have to design that mind.

And I want to give you a way of envisioning this. This mind is a committee. I want you to imagine that when you're in a group of people around you. Ultimately that group is a fractal of what's going on in your mind. These emotional programs are the characters that create the different forces in the committee of the mind. This internal struggle. You have experienced it. If you've ever, like when again going back to the freezing or the hesitation. If you'll notice there is a conversation in your mind that's going something like this, oh my God, you Could lose. What if you lose? What if you lose? Just get more confirmation. Get more confirmation. What you're listening to is your fear. And then you're listening to, oh, you're not good enough. You're going to lose. You're going to lose. That's the internal dialogue going on inside the mind. What you've done is you have basically an untrained mind engaging uncertainty. That's the default programming that you learned in the formative period called your childhood. That's not going to work. No matter how successful it was back then, it's not going to work in the trading today. Okay? It just needs a new mind. You need to move from fight flight, you need to move from short term survival strategies to long term thriving. That's the big deal. Now if you get this thing as a fractal is your mind is producing through these emotional programs, literally a committee. In the same way that you would have an external committee. Okay, and if you begin to go, well, who's running my committee? And this is where traders really blow it. They don't spend time developing their mind. And then when they are alone and they're left alone with uncertainty, they're by themselves. They don't have a committee around them, they don't have a group that they belong to. And what they hear is this inner critic. They don't hear the support, they don't hear the discipline, they don't hear the courage, they don't hear the soothing. Yet it's built into our very biology. If you take a look at chimpanzees or if you look at a well trained platoon in the army, what you discover is when they're on patrol and something there is a break in the continuity of flow, a breakdown, some vulnerability shows up. What you'll see, both the chimpanzees and the humans turn toward each other, eyes lock onto each other and what they're doing is going, we belong together. We're stronger together than we are apart. And they face the danger together rather than alone.

That's how the human as a social mammalian is built. Yet what we do, we ignore the fear. We don't reach out.

And connect with these inner resources that can allow a more powerful mind to show up in uncertainty. And by having pushed those away and ignoring them, what we get is we get this inner critic. And you know, the inner critic, it's the one that criticizes you. It's the one that says everything's, it's the Chicken Little, that everything's going to go wrong. It's the temptation to jump in where you know you shouldn't be. When you're in a sane mind without developing the other inner resources, that's what you get. Okay, you get stuck with default programming. Here in the coursework and the work that I do, it's all about redesigning the mind. Taking a look at these emotional programs, particularly of discipline, of courage, of self soothing and of impartiality. The very first thing is when you feel fear, you don't ignore it. What you do is you turn toward it. You reach out for help, you soothe it. From an internal standpoint, you find that there is this soothing part of yourself that can talk that fear down and calm it down. So that other programs, discipline, courage and impartiality can show up and trade or at least show up in working the uncertainty. Completely different outcomes come out of that. It's thinking from fear versus thinking from a disciplined mind. All of them are emotions, even discipline. Discipline is not the lack of emotion. It is an emotion that manages other emotions and makes sure the right ones are there to create the mind that engages uncertainty. Imagine learning how to do that. It can be done. I see it happen all the time. My encouragement to you, if you really want to become a trader and you really want to get your head screwed on right, to be able to use that wonderful knowledge that you've learned, understand you're going to have to do self development. You're going to have to develop the mind. Because the mind that you arrived with in trading is not going to be the mind that works in trading. You have a survival type of mind that's very short term oriented that you bring to trading. And you need a long term probability based mind that doesn't mind losing. It's on a threat of death. It takes it and can realize this is only probability. This is probability. I can manage the loss as well as manage the win. That's what you're trying to develop.

Most people start with my book. They end up graduating to the to the group courses and to the individual work. It does take a lot of work to retrain this brain. It's not something that you're going to click your heels and suddenly have Toto and you no longer in Kansas. It's going to be something. You have to turn on these programs and exercise them and build them up and you have to be able to turn toward your fear. You have to learn how to reach out and establish a stronger mind. One that's suited for the management of uncertainty. So what I encourage you to do, go to the website, do the free stuff, get all the videos, read all the articles, tons of guided meditations, lots of stuff to read and to look at. Then start really looking, get the book, then start really looking and seeing about. You know something? I now get it. I'm going to have to redesign the mind that trades. It's not an option, it's a necessity. And as long as you're into feeling good about certainty, about your confidence, it's going to fall apart in the moment of judgment, of the moment of being able to be challenged. And when you're challenged, that judgment machine, that inner critic, is going to show up. And do you have something besides that to lead you through greater probability? Come and see friends, go to the website, look at the group course, look at the individual course, really start studying this stuff. Because man, this is. If you're going to trade, you really have no option but to redesign the mind. From short term survival thinking, which evolution has given you, and most likely your psychological developments around, to probability based thinking, it's a big jump for you. This work can help you take a look and have a great year and come and see us. Thank you.

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