Awakening the Empowered Trading Mind and Trading in the Zone

Practically every trader has experienced it. You know that moment when it all seems to come together and suddenly you're in a flow moment. It's effortless. You're in the zone and you go, wow, I get it. It's like you're no longer fighting yourself. You and the markets are just one and it works out really great.

And yet it's so hard to get there. It's like you showed up at this site, this zone, this place, and yet you don't know how to get back. What and what you discover is that no matter how freeing it is, and no matter how much you see what your potential is, what it would really be like for you to act as your best potential, you realize that empowered traitor living within you only had just one moment of view and then you're back here going, well, what happened? How do I get back in that zone? Well, what you've discovered here, this is one, you have a talent. You've got it. That, yes, you have a talent for being able to produce the zone, to produce the mindset, for that trader state of mind to be in flow with the markets, to be just absolutely there, present, no fear, nothing. Just absolutely disciplined impartiality. And it's just flowing. Now we know that that's a talent you've experienced once or twice, maybe more, but it's up and down, it's like a roller coaster. The question is, how do you make it a skill? This is the deal. When you take a look at really talented athletes. I'm a big fan of college football and I like to watch recruiting, where they're going in and recruiting these highly touted athletes and what happens? You go, wow, they're so good. They're that five star business. Yeah. And yet when they get to college and they're playing for a major team, what you discover is they have to be developed. They're not good enough where they are. They have to be developed over a period of four or five years so that they're achieving at the best of their potential. The same way, the same way with trading is that you come in with knowledge, you come in with an ability to perform at a particular level. And yet when you're in paper, that's fine. Because the truth is there's a reset button. You're not really risking, you're not turning on your instinctual fear of loss skill sets that are built into the caveman brain of yours. What you're doing though is you're realizing, well, I have the talent, I can see that. But at the Same time, what happens is when I face, when I truly face that big, huge decision of where the money's real, suddenly it becomes scared money. And that empowered trader just disappears. What you have is a talent. Developing it into a skill is going to take work. And when you get around the professional athletes like a Russell Wilson, the amount of time and effort that they go into preparing the mind to play for 60 minutes is really incredible. They know that that mindset, that psychology of performance is the big deal. Otherwise, all the talents they have, all the knowledge they have of the game is for naught. So what we're doing is we've got a sleeping giant talent and we're saying, how do I move it into where it's active? It's actually working on a continual basis anytime I want to pull it up. Well, friends, it starts with a recognition that what you're doing is not working. Doing it over and over and over again was Einstein's definition of insanity. And by the way, for me, it's my idea of normal traders do it all the time. They keep doing the same thing over and over again. They keep falling into the same patterns and they never bring forward their potential. That empowered traitor. So the first thing is noticing that it doesn't work. And then you're saying, okay, now what? Well, it's always core down to the emotion and you're looking at it and going, what's happening? When I'm not in flow moments, that stops me from getting in flow moments. Well, on an instinctual level, you built to control outcome, win and not lose. To your caveman brain, losing is to forfeit your life. So there's a lot of skin in the game at that moment. What we're asking here is to actually notice that you're a social mammalian first. And until you can master that beast, okay, as it's exposed to uncertainty, then you're not going to get at the highly evolved empowered mind for trading.

Instinctually. It is all about not losing. It's all about winning. Yet winning means you survive another day. It means you live that moment. You feed your family, you feed your clan. Losing means, no, you forfeit your life. So you understand is that it was a dangerous place that caveman. Our ancestors walked in and you had to make sure that you had your act together, that you survived.

That caveman brain was never built for the probability uncertainty based model that we operate in trading. It flips it out, in fact, to the caveman brain that you got, that would be the emotional brain, that would be the social brain that would be the mammalian brain.

You could not have conjured up a worse nightmare than trading. It's literally the worst thing you could imagine for that emotional brain. And it flips out and it takes over thinking and there you go. The very first thing, therefore is you have to be able to learn first what an emotion is.

It's not psychology, friends, it's way before psychology. It colors psychology, but it's. You're responding to automatically to the cues that trigger in the environment, okay? And the mother of all those is fear and its cousin, anger. So your instinctual brain is going to react all this stuff, particularly when there's money online, because the caveman doesn't know about money. What it knows about is if it loses money, it loses power. If it loses power, it's dead. So, yeah, it's fighting for its life. When you, when you are doing something like trying to get the money back, trying to get the money back, or what happens is it's going, I'm going to have the whole family, I'm going to have everything, I'm going to feed everybody. And euphoria, taking down the big, huge woolly mammoth. Well, you have to change all that to put that beast aside and to say, okay, now what I need to be doing is I need to develop the capacity of bringing a mind not based in fear, but based in disciplined impartiality. You begin to say, oh, the biology works this way.

Discipline is an emotional program.

You can learn to call it forward, to engage uncertainty if you regulate, calm down the ancient circuits, that has to happen first. When you calm down those circuits, what you do is you calm down fear from taking over mind. So quickly and suddenly as a human being, you begin to have access to the emotional programs that you bring forward. Okay, what's important about that? If you understand that thinking is emotional state dependent, what you discover is mostly in trading there's scared money. However, if you become designer of that self, what you're doing is saying, no, I don't want my instinctual emotional nature reacting when I run into uncertainty. What I want is, I want a higher, more trained emotional programs to be there and friends in trading. That's discipline, that's courage, that's self soothing and it's impartiality. Those are emotional programs that can come together to create a mind that trades. That's what I call the probability based mind. Now the key is that right there as you trained that what you discover is now you are beginning to move from the talent of a flow moment of being in the zone to the skill of making it reproducible. Yeah. The really good traders, before they start trading, they're putting themselves in the zone in the same way a Tom Brady is preparing that mine for 60 minutes of football. He's not trying to win, he's performing. Does he want to win? Yeah. And he knows he's going to get there. By performing well, that's going to give him the edge. Okay. And the highest probability of winning, that's the game in trading is with a disciplined, impartial, calm mind. You get to think clearly. Okay? The instincts are held back. And what rises is this empowered mind rooted in the discipline of a ruler. Maintaining order under pressure of courage of a warrior. Turning toward your fear and protecting your fear. Okay? And then calming down, keeping yourself calm, soothing yourself is the big skill missing with most traders. They didn't see it modeled well and they don't have it there available all the time. And the last one, if those three are done, you get the impartiality of a sage. Clear thinking. That's what you want under pressure. Even the empowered mind's there. And if you viewed it more like a committee that governed, you'd recognize that you, the CEO of you, the trader, basically, have been asleep at the wheel. And what you have is you have a ruling board that the forces are out of whack and there's a mutiny going on. And what you have to do is you have to reorganize that mind, the players, the forces in that mind, that governing committee, so that it produces that empowered mind. Friends, that's the way it's done. That empowered mind is rooted in discipline. It's rooted in courage. It's rooted in self soothing. It's rooted in that clear thinking. That's the empowered mind. That is where the CEO, that ruler has gone in. Reorganize the mind fearlessly, I might add, and with a lot of. A lot of compassion, but very getting it ready for what traders do. Risk capital to uncertain futures.

If you leave it to the beast, it's going to flip out. So you have a choice. You can either every once in a while, get lucky and land there, or you. You can decide to say, what I'm going to do is I'm going to produce the mind that gives me an edge and allows me to extract the edge. Because what I now know is this. I do not control the markets. What I control is my mind. And I haven't been controlling it, but I control the mind that I bring into the moment of performance, the uncertainty. That is what Gives me the edge. That is the empowered mind. It can be taught friends. It has to be practice. And the bottom line is, once you started really achieving that, you discover the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. It's not one and done. Once you see the pathway of getting there, you have to maintain it, you have to set it up, you have to practice for it. And you would never think of trading without getting that mind right. That's bad trading if you don't have the mind right. And so you can see this, that empowered mind sitting there waiting to be developed. And occasionally it shows up. That's talent. A lot of people have talent. But to go from a five star in high school to a professional athlete, all that has to be developed and honed by really good coaching, by good mentors. And as you learn how to do this, what you discover is where you thought you had control in your life. You realize that truth is we have to become managers of probability, of uncertainty, the challenges of our living. It's a lot bigger than trading. But trading becomes the way the teacher. And if I can help you, let me know. I want you to check out my website, check out the programs, get the free book, all that. But the main thing is get this message is that the empowered mind's there, the empowered trader is there. But you're going to have to mold it. You're going to have to shape it into being instead of it occasionally showing up. It requires some work. I hope you're ready for it. Have a great one.