Belief, Trust, and Faith The Integral Foundation of the Rock Solid Trading Mind

Hello everybody. Thank you for coming. I'm delighted you're here. And this is going to be really interesting. You know, what on earth can belief, trust and faith have to do with trading mind? Aren't traders supposed to be all about logic and reason? Well, maybe not, maybe not. Maybe there's some deeper purposes here, some biological and psychological pieces here that we really need to understand in order to open the door to higher level trading. That's what we're going to be looking at today. And as usual, for those of you who know me and for those of you don't, I hold my questions toward the end of the presentation because what I want to do is I want to get a consistent concept to you. And then after the, after the presentation, I'll answer any questions that you want. You can type in your questions now. Dolores is here, she will record them, get them ready. But any rate, that's the way we're gonna work. And so let's go, let's go. Okay. You know, people really get excited about trading. They can see the upside of trading. They can see all that financial stuff and they can size up and they can go and you know, the sky's the limit and they know that can be realized. And all they need do is go in and just absolutely knock it, knock, knock it down, really go in there and be successful. Unfortunately, during this romantic courtship that people get into with trading, no one asks the question.

What kind of mind is best suited for trading? It's not even on the radar screen at that particular time. And you go, well, you know, the thing is it's always about this. And when you dream of success, you realize that you know something, if you work hard and if you make things happen, this is the foundation of success. You feel confident you're going to be able to make this happen. It's like this thing says, it's not luck, it's hard work. You know that you can invest in your future. You know that if you work hard, really be diligent and make things happen, that why shouldn't you defy the odds, unlike all those other people that fail in trading and you become the trader. Why not? Why not? So we've got this thing, we bring this hard work ethic. And then the thing is, is that you get into the trading because you really truly have success before. You know what success looks like, you know what it feels like and you just feel, feel, I want you to hear that word, feel that given time and experience that you're going to be confident that you can produce Success. And you believe that the same attitudes and positive thinking that produced success in the past are directly applicable to trading. And that is the flaw. Okay, Nobody thinks about, you know, really what is the difference between working in a business, working in a corporation, producing success and working with trading and producing success. And I wouldn't ask that, but just feel as though you're going to be able to, you know, what's that old saying that, you know, win friends and influence people. You have the right attitude, that positive attitude's gonna make all the difference. And you bring that to trading and then.

And then.

You go live and you start experiencing something very different. What worked before.

Is not working now. Somehow in the success equation.

Somewhere in that success equation, something's not working. So what do you think? A hard worker, a guy who thinks hard work can solve the problem. You try harder, you try harder, but all of a sudden you start really doubting your confidence and you start really going, you know something. Suddenly you start having this self doubt and you just go, what's going on here? What's going on? Because truly self doubt and second guessing begin to plague the trader. You look at something, you look at a setup and you go, well, you know that I talk myself out of trades, I talk myself, I talk myself out because, you know, it could be better, it could be this, what if this is what if, that's what is that. And all of a sudden you realize, you know, what happened here, man, I used to nail this stuff in simulation. What's so different now? Now that I am trading live and it's real capital at risk, what's going on? And then they find themselves questioning themselves somehow. They don't trust themselves under pressure. What's happened here, man? You know, it started out so good. A little hard work, it'll go a long ways. And all of a sudden you get here and there's real risk, there's real uncertainty and suddenly everything starts falling apart and you're going, wait, am I the same person who produced success before? What's going on?

And is it the trader skills? Is it the platform?

Is it the methodology?

Okay, traders bounce around from trainer trader to trainer trader from God knows how many different kind of indicators and signals and feeds. And they're just looking for that holy grail that's going to take them to the next level because they are confident that their mind knows how to produce success. Okay, but they're not asking the question, yeah, but am I, do I have the mind that I need to produce success in trading? No, that's not being asked. He also discovers that he really does not have faith in his trading to weather the storms of uncertainty and ambiguity that he has to endure. That's the rub now, is that before you could control outcome, you could make things happen by taking action or by not making mistakes. But now you come into uncertainty and no amount of manly bravado, no amount of perfectionism makes really a huge difference. This is about managing uncertainty, managing the unknown. And the skills that were so successful in another career when applied to trading fall apart.

And then you start really going, you know, with this belief.

Is that with all this stuff, you know, I should be protected from feelings, feelings of vulnerability in particular. But that's not the case. Uncertainty and vulnerability.

Are linked together at the hip. Suddenly what you really discover is.

Is that trading forces you to experience vulnerability, which is a biological phenomenon of saying, oh, I'm exposed to threat, I'm not so sure about what's going to happen. Is that a saber toothed cat behind that tree or the vulnerability to go, okay, what shows up when you experience vulnerability? The vulnerability caused by uncertainty. And it just so happens that your biology and later your psychology evolved to avoid all this vulnerability. The last thing that a caveman wanted to do was feel vulnerable. He wanted to feel assured that everything was going to be okay, that he was going to be able to overpower the mammoth, overpower the saber's toothed tiger. But what happens? What happens if all that's taken away?

This is where it really starts getting really interesting because ultimately.

You have to have internal courage, okay.

To face your vulnerability that's exposed by trading. There's a lot of people who have never turned toward their vulnerability because they just don't want to deal with that. The other day, one of my clients has been trying to talk another guy into working with me on a personal level. And the client was saying, man, it's made a huge difference in my trading. I want you to take a look at this equity curve that since I've started working with Randy and I think the same thing could happen for you. And he just said, he just went, no way, I'm not going there.

And my question to this guy is, well, is he a successful trader? And my client said, no. What I want you to see is that his fear of uncertainty, his fear of vulnerability was so strong that he's letting it stand in his way of finding success in trading. Ultimately, you have to believe that you have the inner strength to face how little control you really have over outcome. And to face that, you know, what is it I really control? Okay, because all your life you've avoided this vulnerability business and trading, it's here, it's now, and it's inescapable. So what do you do with the vulnerability that flows out of uncertainty, out of ambiguity. And you look, you know what I mean? You have felt it. It's, you know, when it's ambiguous and you're sitting there, you know, I really don't know. I can talk myself into saying this is a good setup and I should enter. I can talk myself into, this is not a good setup. It's missing some criterion. I don't need to be in it. All of a sudden you're going, you're finding yourself going one, then the other and the other. And you, and you feel that in your gut. You feel that and you feel the oh my God, man, I don't know. I don't know. Suddenly there's the powerlessness, the sense of like, oh my God, I can be overpowered, I can make the wrong decision. That's the vulnerability.

And out of that, fears are showing. All these fears we talk about in trading, they all come forth out of this vulnerability. So you're going, okay, this is what I really have to do. And I've, and I've gone, well, what if I don't face it? What if I don't turn to face those things? Well, what happens is you're pretty normal to the emotional brain.

It succeeds when you don't enter the trade to it with its bias towards self preservation in the short term, if you don't get in a trade, then obviously you can't lose, okay, on a biological threat level. In the same way that if you're in a trade and you finally get into black after that things been whipsawing around and all of a sudden you start thinking, get out now. Take the profit while it's there before it's taken away from you. To the survival brain, that's a victory. It has no reason to change. And there you are trying to force, force, force it. And the more you force it, the bigger the gorilla gets. And all of a sudden you find yourself jumping out of the trade, taking a small profit and your broker fee eats well, but you're left with marginal money. So there you go. What we know is that your default programming, when exposed to, when exposed to uncertainty and the anxiety that comes out of it and vulnerability that comes out of it, the natural default programming is to run from that threat. Okay? That's what everybody, that's what has to be Retrained, you plan to be able to trade in probability management. Most traders, most retail traders, developing traders, are trading from fight flight. If you're jumping into trades, chasing trades, not being able to get into trades, falling apart in trades, that's all fight flight. And the caveman in you is absolutely having a good time because it looks at itself as producing survival.

In response to stressors in the environment. Okay, this is, this is the way most people trade, okay? So ultimately.

This very thing, this is what separates developing traders from professional traders. Until you can trust in your skills under pressure, risk and uncertainty, you do not know how to trade. Okay?

You may have knowledge of trading, and it may be a lot of fun to talk about trading. And with no risk, you can trade in simulation. Well, but that's not trading, that's fake trading. You know, simulation trading is really good.

For learning methodology. It's really good to see how you get a feel of this, but it's not very good at all about training you, your brain and your mind.

To be able to engage uncertainty. That's the piece that's missing. That's the piece that you're going to have to learn how to do if you really want to grow and prosper as a trader.

So ultimately, traders come to a fork in the road.

In their evolution.

Into trading, okay? And you come to the fork and you make a decision. Do, do I change or do I stay the same and pray for a different result?

The emotional brain is going to want you to stay the same, except it's going to want you to escape any threat. And suddenly when you take a couple losses, then you get traumatized and then you've got a real traumatic response to loss. So you can begin to see how this builds and builds and bills at the same time. There comes a moment where traders really have to make a decision. And often that decision is made from them because they run out of capital. Understand? It's notorious. 90 to 95% of traders are losing money. They burn through their capital in two to three years.

Friends, that's normal. And the reason they do that is because they refuse to face their vulnerability. They refuse to learn how to engage vulnerability and uncertainty differently. They keep wishing that something would change, but they're not doing anything to produce the change in them that engages uncertainty. Can you see the flaw here? So ultimately, what you get.

Controlling outcome, at least believing you can, is an ingrained bias in the human nature, but it has no business in trading. It might have done very, very well for you in another career, in another time. But ultimately the big deal in trading, you come to the mountain and finally you understand is that you have to let go of control. You have to let go of the control over outcome because you realize that it's an illusion. You never had control over outcome. You may have in another career. I'm not going to talk about that. But in trading, this need to control outcome, the self preservation instinct simply is not possible. The trading gods really don't care. The markets are so vast that you are just not even a drop in a bucket. You are a molecule within a universe.

The truth is, your primitive brain will never learn to trust higher brain function if you insist on trying to control what cannot be controlled. So you have to start saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean? I mean I really want to predict what happens. The truth is you can't. You know, a prediction is a prediction. And you start developing all this equipment to help you make better predictions. Then you discover that you have so much equipment to help you make decisions that it clutters your mind and you're not fast enough and swift enough to be able to make the kill. That's what most people happen is traders really gain in maturity. They really start simplifying their systems. They realize that a lot of the other peripheral stuff they had, which is simply slowing them down and not letting them get to the decision making, and it was the increased predictability just simply wasn't worth the cost. So ultimately just letting go of control stuff.

You know. But wait, wait, wait, wait. If your brain was designed for survival in the moment, this is a dilemma. Until this primitive survival brain trusts higher brain function, your mind will always revert to caveman thinking under pressure. I mean, how many times, how many times have you got impulsive? How many times have you over traded? How many times have you thrown good money after buying? How many times have you revenge trade? How many times have you not been able to pull that trigger? There's your caveman. You know, you're sitting there thinking, this is a game of probabilities. And I am thinking in probabilities. I am using my left brain. I am in logic and I am in rational. Why does this caveman keep showing up, getting scared, getting angry, and responding with anger or anxiety to a threatening situation. Why does he keep doing that? Because it's a caveman brain. It's a mammalian brain. It's a survival brain. It's only doing its job. And the one that's not doing the job is you. Is that your job is to redesign the mind that you bring to trading. Because what you're discovering is, is the mind that you brought to trading, no matter how good it was at other tasks, is not built.

For managing the uncertainty.

Of trading. So you get there and you go.

This is what has to happen.

Where you engage the uncertainty and you recognize the truth is that I have a prediction of what's going to happen, but it may or may not be wrong or right. And the truth is, is that when I get into the trade, even when I'm looking at a trade, I can look at it, There's a probability, a high probability of it happening. But the truth is, is I don't know.

And I'm comfortable with that. Caveman doesn't show up. So the thing is, you're not avoiding your vulnerability. What you're doing is you're turning toward it. But suddenly into that vulnerability, you are managing the emotions of curiosity, impartiality, and discipline. Suddenly, a very different mind can be trained to meet that uncertainty. It doesn't have to trigger to the vulnerability of being threatened. It turns to the vulnerability of this is uncertain. And the truth is, is that I have no control over the outcome. I can't make things happen. But what I can do is I can control the mind that I'm bringing into the performance of that moment.

And if I do, that probability is on my side.

The other thing that really has to be contended with is that your brain and your mind really seek the feeling state of certainty. It feels good. I mean, it feels really good. Isn't it nice to think about how certain things are? And, you know, I feel certain I've got a positive attitude, and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do that. It's easy to talk trading, but performing trading requires embracing this uncertainty. And this is a quote from Voltaire. I mean, this is stuff that was known centuries and centuries and centuries ago. Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. That's the vulnerability stuff, okay? But certainty is an absurd one. To believe that there is any and any certainty in trading is to already show that you can't trade, is that you can't handle risk. And trading. You're recognizing I'm letting go of that certainty business. And what I need to do is I need to develop a mind that's comfortable and engages uncertainty, not avoids it. This is where it gets really interesting. And so then you go, well, this is really falling down. And good, I've got all that survival programming. Oh, my God, it has to be rewired. Yes, it does. It has to be rewired. You know, if you look at your brain as organic circuits, you would have a much better understanding. It's got voltage, it's got electrical current running through it. You can take magnets and you can just absolutely change the heck out of it. But, but the point is this is now what you finally come to a moment.

It's a big moment in a trader's evolution that you realize that the mind that you brought to trading is not going to work. No matter how uncomfortable that makes you believe and think, you go, I have to rebuild this mine. There's really no way around it. And again, what you're going to see is the vast majority of retail traders never come to that moment. That's why they burn out of capital. That's why two to three years is about it. They're not willing, they're not capable. Maybe they don't know that. The brain has to be rebuilt from a survival certainty based mind to a probability based mind that recognizes that this is all about.

Maybe, maybe not and making sure that you're minimizing losses and just, and accepting winners when they come and having an edge in the management of uncertainty. That's where it happens. Or you know, what happens is. Well, I should say how do you go about doing, how do you go about doing this? Rewiring the brain. The first step is motion regulation. You have probably, you can probably appreciate this sine wave sitting here is that this is what most traders do. This is their lament. You know, you end up, you end up your greed buys high and then what happens is that you sell low and you keep, repeat, you keep repeating until you're broke. That's what happens. That's the emotional caveman cycle of letting certainty thinking take control of the mind that trades. So what we want to do is learn how to manage emotion. Okay? We know that it's really easy. We trigger to fight flight all the time. That's what this sign curve is indicating. And you see it in your trading all the time again. Every time, every time that you hesitate, every time that you bail out of a good trade, every time that you just lose your stuff and just go crazy every time or sit on the sidelines and don't get in. You understand that? And what you're doing is going, I'm tired of staying in reactive cycles. I know that I'm going to have to start with emotional regulation. And you know the really good thing about emotional regulation is this, it's not that hard. Is in both my group course and My individual course, what I do, that's the very first thing you're either going to spend two to three weeks learning emotional regulation skills. And ultimately what you discover is that emotions are biological. Okay? They're not psychological at all. They take over psychology. So what you're going is, okay, if it's biological. There has to be a signature to this emotion. And there is. All emotions have a breathing signature, an attention signature, and a fixation signature. And what you're doing is when you learn to diaphragmatically breathe and to release tension, you are literally taking gasoline off the smoldering flames of anger or fear. The fight flight program. Okay, so you're doing that. You're going, okay, I can cool the emotions down. You know, I'm working first time with a trader right now. And what he's done, he says, randy, this is like a miracle is that I am now I'm training myself to spot the impulse. When I start getting tight, I start. I stop breathing. And what I've done is I'm trained. I have now trained myself. This is in, in the training I do, I've trained myself to catch that tension. And I start, I step back out of that and I'm calming myself down. And I am not getting in. I'm not. I've had. He said, I have not had one impulse trade this week. This is good news. So that's the first thing that happens because ultimately what you're doing is emotional regulation. What we know is the emotional mind and the rational mind have to work together to produce trading mind. Okay? Wise mind.

Learning to manage emotion allows you to integrate emotion and logic into whole brain thinking. That's what we're looking for here right now. Most traders have been taught only logical thinking, left brain thinking. And then they get into trading and realize that they have a completely untrained right brain, which means they have no control over emotion. They want to stuff it. They want to make it go away, pretend it's not there. That's not control, that's denial. And ultimately under stress, then all the emotions bail out and there they are and the logic circuits are blown out. However, if you train yourself, you end up saying, okay, I don't have to trigger to fight flight. I can trigger to an emotional state that has curiosity, discipline, impartiality. I can calm my fear down and I can also face my demons. This is the trading mind friend. And when you do that, what you realize is that until you calm the emotions down, you don't ever get to mind. You're hijacked long before you get to mind. But even there, what you really begin to do.

When you get the emotions under management, you can approach the mind. And this is where a lot of people, this is where the kind of teaching I do really starts rocking. Because what you discover is the brain really is a community of rival programs. They're duking it out. They're highly competitive with one another. They are also, they also build coalitions together. These are emotional programs. Okay, And a good, good illustration would be in the real world, there's a photograph that I used to use of a crocodile.

With its mouth open with all its teeth exposed. And there is a bird inside the crocs mouth pecking out food particles. Okay, that's cooperation. They are cooperating. Yet if a wildebeest came down to the riverside, you would find competition. You would not see that the wildebeest wanted anything to do. Like stepping into the open mouth of a Nile crocodile. You begin to see, okay, now. And if you take a look at the movie.

Inside out by Disney Pixar, you begin to see this thing where you see the emotional programs coming into like a control room and a control table and they're duking it out. They're forming different coalitions and they're moving around. And what you're seeing is those emotions create the emotional soup that produces the mind that acts. This is when you start getting interesting because ultimately the next thing you need to understand is this, is that the mind.

Really is where these emotional programs are given voice as your thoughts. And like in my teaching, you start learning to discern. When you say, oh, well, I beat myself up or you know something, I talk myself out of that trade, you'll quit using language like that and you'll start saying, you know something, what happens? There were these different emotional programs and they were really duking it out. They were very competitive with one another. One wanted me to stay in, the other wanted me to get out. And we were having an argument about, you know, goal attainment versus biological threat. And you begin to go, okay, now I'm beginning to understand. Also within me there's this part that just, you know, gosh, it just wants. I think it wants me dead. Yeah, it's really interesting. So now we're beginning to see a very different. You begin to see that the mind is in an enormously complex place where there are a number of emotional programs duking it out for control of what I call the committee of the mind. And unfortunately, because you've been asleep at the wheel, you haven't seen this internal struggle going on. And you didn't want that internal struggle anyway because it made you feel vulnerable. Now you're waking up and saying, man, I need to attend to this. Yeah, you better attend to this. And then what you're doing is you're saying, okay, now I'm going to use this new skill that I've been hearing about mindfulness to start looking inside the mind. I'm going to see what's driving the decisions that I'm making in the blink of an eye, what's going on in here. And it's interesting always to have a good roadmap, to see how you do that. And what I'd like to give you a good example is that everybody experiences mindfulness or the observer people just simply don't know how to use it. There was an interview a number of years ago by George Soros, and he had just made a couple billion dollars on this housing fiasco that most people just really lost their shirts in. And in that interview, he said, you know something? What happens is I have learned how to observe the markets. I step back out and I've begun to realize is that markets are like nature. There's bubbles everywhere. I've learned to. I've trained myself to observe for the bubbles and find the place in the bubble where I start betting against the bubble, because I know that it's going to. It's going to burst. He said, the problem, though, is that I'm learning to observe, but I'm not a pure observer. I'm also a participant in the. In the market, so that I can't be pure observer. I'm also reacting to the market.

Understand he is actually an active observer, watching himself making his decisions. Ultimately, that's the goal of mindfulness, but also I actually teach that. And what you also finally discover is that you and your thoughts are not the same. Okay.

However, with mindfulness, with metacognition or the observer, you actually get to start observing for the emotional programs that are sabotaging your trading.

The programming are simply the established emotional programs that give rise to the quality of the mind that you're bringing to manage uncertainty. So you begin to see how really important it is to be able to manage the emotions, not just cool them down, but to manage what emotions that you're bringing into the game of trading. This is where you move from unconscious to conscious and you begin to realize a big fact.

You begin to learn to observe your most primitive beliefs and you begin to understand something. It's the truth is, in the Eye of the beholder. In neuroscience, what we would say is that you have never experienced reality in trading. We would say you have never experienced the markets. What you have experienced is your brain creating a virtual representation based on your beliefs that you are projecting onto the markets. And the only reason that you don't stay in certainty believing that those beliefs are the right beliefs and are seeing the right things, the right market is your trading account acts as a litmus test of how accurate your belief system that you're projecting onto the markets is at extracting capital from them, from the markets. If you have got good set of beliefs about managing uncertainty, it's going to show up in your trading account in a positive way. If your beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty really.

Aren'T really there, are inaccurate or are not very good, you're going to see that.

As drawdowns in your trading account. So you have a barometer and you're beginning to recognize, well, what beliefs am I projecting onto the, onto the markets? There is no truth out there. I'm creating the truth I'm seeing with the observer I'm using. So you begin to see, wow, this is really important stuff. And what you realize is that everybody experiences what this guy's experiencing. If you've ever had self doubt, if you've ever beat yourself up, this is what you're experiencing. Everybody experiences this internal dialogue. This is the historical internal dialogue that you struggle with. You don't want to see, but you must face if you're going to train a mind for trading. Few talk about it because they don't want to be seen as weird. But ultimately what you're going to discover is that in your head, in your mind, there is an inner critic. That inner critic will judge you harshly, will criticize you, will tempt you. Okay, think about it. Think about the last time you got suckered into trades. Think about the last time that when you were beating yourself up, you heard yourself saying to yourself, you know, what in the mate? What in the world made you think you could trade Baba, all that stuff. That is not you. That is the inner critic. But because you have been so asleep, you have not seen it operating right there out in the open and just absolutely taking over the committee of the mind.

So this is where you're at. You realize that, oh my God, I need to pay attention to this drama going on inside my own head. Because what happens is it's messing up my trading. Yeah, that's exactly what it's doing. And you have to learn to observe that. And of course we teach that. We teach you how to really get in and go, wow, what's actually going. What programs are on board here? What programs have taken over the mind? How do I reconstruct the mind so that higher functioning programs are running the mind that manages uncertainty?

So.

Then.

There is this need.

To stay in the comfort zone of the certainty based mind that need to feel certain. Okay? The truth is all the extra stuff that you get to try to hedge against not knowing what you discover is that it really slows you down. You want to make. You want to predict the future, okay? But the thing is then you discover that really the truth is, is you have the best guess. You're not predicting. You have a best guess about what's going to happen. And when you get into trade, you might find out that your best guess was it wasn't good or it was good. The truth is, it's not about you at all. It's just simply that this is the best guess. This is uncertainty. The truth is I can be right all over the place and still be wrong in trading. But this whole notion of trying to avoid risk by controlling outcome or not making mistakes fundamentally is a certainty based mind that you brought to trading and it has to be dropped. It just doesn't work. So.

You can't, you can't control.

Outcome, but you can control the mind that engages risk and uncertainty. This, this is the key, friends. This is the place where you realize knowledge is pretty useless without, without emotion. And you have to use the emotion well and you go, you know, I have to learn a lot about myself, what makes me tick, and I have to develop areas that simply didn't get developed very well, okay? And I need to. I need to. I need to reorganize how my mind operates. So then you come and you go. Well, you either.

You either get default programming or.

You train yourself to respond differently to uncertainty and vulnerability. You know, default programs of Fight Flight, they're so easy. They are just so easy to access, just experience uncertainty. And you already have a wiring between uncertainty and fear. What we want to do is change the response from uncertainty to concern.

So that fear is a biological threat to self. And that's the caveman scared of that tiger. What we want to do is train for a probability based mind where the caveman's not there anymore. What's there is a program that accepts not knowing what's going to happen, but has an edge in what could happen. Big difference, man. Huge. This is what we're doing. This is where you're going. And this is something you can train yourself to respond to when you experience uncertainty. That's the really cool thing. And suddenly what you discover is that instead of fear or control governing the mind, engaging uncertainty, you begin to have a very calmed down mind, a patient mind, okay? And suddenly what you do is you start noticing is that much like, you know, it's really interesting, a hawk helicoptering over a field looking for the mouse at 300ft can see the individual hairs on that mouse and then makes a decision about attacking or not. But what happens is that it has waited fatefully for the mouse to show up in the trap. In the same way that a cougar waits in a tree or on a rock stand for the deer to show up, it does not stalk the deer, okay? It's a terrific hunter. It gets hurt very rarely because if it makes a mistake, it simply minimizes that mistake. It doesn't get gored, it doesn't get kicked. The deer just gets away and the cougar simply climbs a tree, waits for the next opportunity to show up. So that's what you can learn. These are all emotional programs available to build a mind from. It's a matter of learning to build a new mind. That's the key, friends. That's the key. And ultimately.

It becomes a choice, really.

It becomes a choice of staying the same and wishing that you had a different outcome.

Or retraining how you respond and rewiring that. And uncertainty is never going to go away. But you can control the mind that engages the uncertainty, friends. This is the difference. If you have a calm, patient, disciplined, impartial mind that has soothed the fear down.

And has the courage to face uncertainty. From an empowered mind, you have an enormous advantage over all the traders who are, who are trading from fear. Professional traders depend on retail rookie traders not being able to manage their emotions. Well, as one said it this way, it says, randy, I really don't trade charts like a lot of people talk about. I trade blood. I trade about where I see traders being, being. They've jumped into something and I'm waiting for him to get cornered and get scared. That's when I'm going for the blood. Understand the difference in mind that he's doing. So we know that this can be trained.

What kind of training moves a certainty based mind to a probability based mind?

Well, first.

There'S some theoretical understanding of emotional intelligence. Okay? You need to have a different understanding of the mind so that you begin to see that in the same way that the brain has neural plasticity and can change the mind as a response to neuroplasticity produces a different mind and you begin to say, you know something again, I can't control the uncertainty, but what I can control is the mind that I bring into the moment of management of performance. That's the first thing. The second thing is you're going to have to learn emotional regulation of reactive patterns. Emotional reactive patterns. They are default programs and they will show up if you do not learn how to respond to them differently. They continually show up. And these are not ones that you learned as a child. These are ones that we have intergenerational transmission through our traits for untold generations. They're burned in there, they're hotwired in there. So you're going to have to learn emotional regulation skills. The third thing is you're going to have to develop mindfulness. You're going to have to be able to learn to step back out of thought, recognizing that you and your thoughts are not the same. And that fact, what happens is that you are, what you call you or I is just one potential organization of a self that got put together by these emotional programs who are duking it out for control of the mind. And what you're doing is you're recognizing. As I step back, I realize that identity is fairly fluid and that I can literally change the mind. Okay.

Then.

The fourth skill, you begin to deconstruct the historical dialogue of certainty thinking. That's that orphan fear nature of the impulse or the fear of getting in. And that inner critic nature of judgment, of temptation and of criticism of everything you do. You begin to say, oh yeah, okay, I got born into that. And it was already in operation before I started even talking. Yep, it was there. And what you're doing is you're saying, okay, now that I can observe, I realize that I need to take control of the ship of my mind. I need to take this thing, I need to clean the committee of the mind out. I need to reorganize it so that it's not. So there's not a mutiny going on inside my mind when I trade. I need to have a very cool collected mind when I trade. And I can build it. The fifth thing is you begin to construct an empowered mindset for probability thinking. And that's when in my work I train. Not wishing that you had discipline, wishing you had courage, wishing you had self soothing, wishing that you had impartiality by affirmations and visualizations. I teach you how to go into experience.

That has actually happened. But the Brain has encoded differently. And I teach you how to deconstruct that and reconstruct and find the discipline in a challenging moment that you really did experience and the courage and the self soothing and the impartiality. And you begin to recognize, oh, these were emotional programs that did in fact fire. I saw them fire. And I've experienced what they feel like. And then what you're doing is you're no longer wishful thinking. You're going, no, no, I'm extracting the feeling state out of there and I am designing the emotional cocktail that produces my mind. Powerful stuff. And ultimately what you end up with is an intentional mind. You bring an intentional mind, you bring an intentional mind into performance. Like when you take a look at this guy, do you think this guy is thinking about outcome? Okay, my bet is his mind is focused on the moment of performance.

Friends, this is the difference between a developing trader and a professional trader. That's why the professional traders eating your lunch. And nothing is stopping you from redesigning the mind that you bring to trading but you. And it's really a decision, do I want to focus on performance that I can control or do I want to focus on outcome that I cannot control? You put yourself in a helpless situation trying to control outcome that you can't control, but you can control performance. That's what gives you the edge in probability.

So how do you learn this?

How do you learn this? I would suggest that you actually become the change.

We're going to be starting a group course here in June. And what it does is it teaches the exact things that we've talked about here. It actually teaches you how to do them rather than just impart knowledge. You know, that's what people have always said about my work versus a lot of other trader psychologists. What they'll say is other trader psychologists tell you what the mind ought to to look like, but they don't have a clue about. How do you build that mind? What I do is I teach how to build a mind in this group course. It's five sessions an hour each, every two weeks. And there's a curriculum. And you literally start out with emotional regulation, mindfulness, the historical dialogue, applied mindfulness, and the whole thing, okay? And it's built out of a virtual classroom that's open 24 7. So as much as you want to read, as much as you want to practice guided meditations, as much as you want to watch the videos, you can and what very smart people do. We've already had three or four of these. Do this with the upcoming one, they say, I want to get in early, I want to get this, I want to get this motion regulation stuff down and I want to get started before the class starts. That's a smart person. I encourage you to think about this. It's a powerful course. The basic things, the skills you need to be able to actually build this new mind are taught in this course.

There's also an individual course. It's really for the person who says, you know something, I realize that I really want a mentor and I can afford it. And that individual course is more comprehensive, it's far more personalized. You know, you get into some, you get into, you get into some stuff. When you get into that, you really begin to see the underpinnings of your reactions to uncertainty. And the key is, is that with it you end up with 10 one hour consults with me and we use Skype. So we're just looking at each other for three or four months. And here's what I really encourage. First of all, you have to come to the moment where you realize that I really am going to have to build a mind. I'm going to have to find some way of doing it. And I recognize that reading books.

Is not going to bridge the gap between knowledge and performance. Okay, you can have knowledge, but until you, until you can manage the emotions, that knowledge is pretty useless in tight situations. So what I'm encouraging you to do, go to my website.

Take a look at it and if you really want to look and explore this stuff, get a free consult with me. Okay, they're free. And Dolores will schedule it, we'll take a look at it. And then what I'll also say, say is this is on the. The group course is an enormously efficient course that is highly cost effective. And if you go ahead and actually sign up before Friday, June 10th, what you do is we're going to give you $199 package of emotional regulation training for free. So it's a bonus. You can also break the group course into five payments or you can pay it at one time. It's really, you know, ask some questions and we'll find out. What I want to do is I want to thank you for being here and I really truly hope that you're taking the performance mine and really thinking about it and realizing, you know something, this is, this is, this has got to happen. This. I have to take the performance mind and build it for the rigors of trading of uncertainty based thinking and probability based trading rather than certainty based. So if You've got questions, type them in. And we have one. What is the best way to get rid of self sabotage and hesitation?

Boy, the start would be take some of my courses. Because you have self sabotage basically is usually about a sense of undeserving, where you know something, I feel good. Look at me, look at me. You know, I don't necessarily deserve this. Or, or what happens is that when you start winning, you allow yourself to start feeling good. And that feeling good you don't recognize as euphoria. And euphoria causes you to make horrible mistakes in calculating risk. So ultimately what you have to do is you have to. The very things that I just outlined of coming to a very different understanding about how patterns are formed, how emotional intelligence works, has to get there, but you have to emotionally regulate. Then you have to be able to observe that internal dialogue that's causing the sabotage because there will be part of you that doesn't believe they deserve or they get so excited that they finally won and they think it's going to go on forever. And professional traders don't do that. Professional traders look at winning as, oh, I landed on the right side of probability that time. Yay. When they lose, they go, I landed on the wrong side of probability. Huh? Okay, let's move on. I did everything right. Okay. If a trader has come to a point where they only take their well defined setups and they can accept a small loss.

Because they have a belief in their statistics, does it really matter if they get a little more emotional.

Than ideal during the life of a trade? If you're doing all those things, then, you know, if it's working for you and if your equity growth is moving up and you're out of micro lots and actually trading size, then I would say your trading accounts answering you. Okay. My question to you would be, you know, are you able to manage the emotions through the entire course of a trade?

And if you're able to stay locked in on them and your body's calm and cool, then after you say after you take a win, okay, and you feel really fun, joy and all that stuff, Yay, yay, yay. The real question is, do you take that, do you take that confidence back into looking at the self, at the, at the setups? What happens with most traders.

They don't do that. They think if they can just get past fear, everything will be good and I want to feel good. But then they start feeling good after win, then they go back into setup looking and what they discover is that euphoria truly Is not the mind that they need there to be able to trade. And I have seen plenty of professional traders fall into that. Where they start going, you know, I'm getting pretty good at this. Hey, yeah, yeah. And then they fall apart. One of the best ones, best examples is the whale from a couple years ago at JP Morgan who evaporated $2 billion.

Thinking that he could trade when in fact he was drunk on testosterone and dopamine. Okay. Have you heard the phrase infinite patience produces immediate results.

In trading? This is enormous. This is like the example I use of the cougar. They have infinite patience. They will sit and they will wait because they darn well know in their bones that the deer is going to walk into the setup. When that setup happens, then they're ready, they're alert, they're focused. So the thing is that infinite patience you're talking about, I hope you define it greater because what I have found in trading is there has to be a certain level of readiness, a certain level of arousal, but it has to be a patient arousal. It can't be where it's kicking you to get into trades. But that infinite patience has to have a readiness component in it to act.

Can the self critic be overcome by calling on the caregiver? That's a fairly technical question. I'll answer to the inner critic. You confront the inner critic from your courage, or what I would call warrior. Okay? The caregiver, that self soothing that self. Compassion is directed toward the fear.

Not toward the inner critic. Okay? What you're doing is you're calming from self nurture the fear of the orphan, that fear of the amygdala. So inherently what you've got is you have a part of yourself that has the courage to face down this self loathing, this critical part of the self, and to confront it. Whereas you have another part of the self that is going to this fear, childlike, fearful part of the self and calming it down. Because when you calm that fear down, that gives you the ability to think from impartiality, or what I would call.

Sage. Okay? But the. The inner critic will always be there. Okay, let's see here. Sorry, did I miss the cost of the programs? Group versus individual. Yeah, I didn't actually say them, so. Good question. Thank you. The cost of the. Of the group is.

1195 and or five payments of 239 over a period of every two weeks. A lot of people take that option so that it really breaks the cost down over time.

And if you sign up early, you get a free gift of $200. Okay. The individual program is $3,500, but understand it is far more comprehensive and personalized. Or three payments of $1,200 that would occur once a month, so over three months. So that's. That would be the answer to that. And you go to the website and there will be enormous descriptions of both courses. In fact, you will see the group course laid out of what you're learning on a, on a per session basis. Okay.

Can you explain the difference between developing trader state of mind and the ignite course? Well, developing. Well, first of all, the major thing that most people look at is the cost is that the group course is far cheaper. And a lot of people, if you're trading small trading account and you can't see a guy who's looking at the individual course, looks at it and says, oh, I can easily lose $3,500. Well, I'd pay $3,500 not to have to experience another $3,500 stupid loss. But the, the group course occurs where a group convenes and I speak and work with a group. Okay. You can ask questions and we work and we work the program and you go to a virtual classroom for all your lessons. Okay. And it's a two month process where you meet five times during that for an hour. The individual course, you own the materials and there's a lot of them. It's a lot, like I said, it's like a graduate level course. And you're also meeting with me.

10 times for at least an hour over the course of three or four months. And most people, I don't like the course to go too fast because toward the end it's very subtle. The things that you're working on, I tend to like to see that course last for four months. So you're seeing that the individual course is probably going to last two more months.

Than the group course. And some people transition from the group course into the individual too. So it works that way. A lot of people recognize that the stuff that they need to deal with just can't be handled. The context of a group course, they really need individual mentorship. And I guess really that when it comes down to it, the difference is the individual course has individual mentorship with a lot more comprehensiveness to it. And the group course is teaching the basic skills that you need. Okay. But it's depending on you to do the work. You know, you know it. They're very different. But the thing is, is that I had a number of.

Trader trainers saying Randy, we just don't work with people who are going to take your individual course. We work with people who can afford a group course. So if you would create one, we'd really appreciate it so that we can start getting our traders trained emotionally. That's the big deal. What is the best thing to do while waiting for a setup? Avoid getting bored and being alert when the setup is ready. The thing is, is what most people do, what I train is you practice patience and boredom is just simply to me, if you're being bored, what's this all about is that patience is part of the animal called trading. So you're looking at patience and you're practicing patience and what you're doing is at least I train it. You will be learning how to calm what I would call the arousal level, your physiology up to a degree where.

You'Re hitting where you're not in the parasympathetic stuff where you're all rest, digest, you're not in, you're alert, you're ready, you're focused, but you haven't triggered the body into fight flight yet. You're sitting there poised, ready, and what you're doing is you're practicing patience, that's what you're doing. And that's.

That'S what people, that's what I trained. That's what people discover really works for them. But you have to practice the patience.

Are there any guarantees or ability to continue with you if not achieving the desired results? You know, I'll tell you.

Let'S start with the continuing is a lot of people continue with me from either they will move from the group course into individual work or when they do the individual work, they discover that when they get what I call the big four working, that a whole new world opens for them like sizing up and doing things like that that they want continued relationship with. And I mean I work with people I've been working with for a number of years and they work with me not because they need me, but they know that what happens is that I keep them rigorous. They know that I'm going to ask the same things. And so they, they stay prepared rather than letting their skills lapse.

But yeah, there's always a continuance ability to continue working with me because and right now I'm designing an intuition course where you discover that people who finally learn how to trade well, trading a plan and planning the trade, finally get to a moment where they realize there's all this ambiguity and intuition can be used if properly taught, to bridge the gap in ambiguity. So there's lots and lots and lots of stuff that goes in the work with me.

How much to upgrade from group to individual. You get a $500 discount. So that would mean the group course would be $3,000 rather than $3,500. This is Joseph. Remember you were working on a heart rate monitor of some kind of. What is that progressing? Well, I'll tell you, I actually I was working with heart rate variability and skin conductance and what I've done is I've spent money with, with a really brilliant group and I'm waiting to ever get my first, my first watch out of it. What I've done in the meantime is I'm now training people.

Using a heart rate monitor that measures basically what you're looking at. When you see heart rate fluctuation, you're actually seeing emotional arousal going on. And what I train people to do is to use the heart rate as an indication of where an emotion actually triggers. And I train them specifically for micromanagement purposes of you catch the emotion before it just overwhelms you. You catch it long before then and you train to that tendency so that you see that you'll see it, you'll see your heart rate just absolutely bounce at a particular moment and you will see it consistently bouncing at those moments. And that's telling you it's a very simplified version. Maybe I've ended up using just heart rate because it has proven to be highly effective. I mean I have a guy right now, literally, you will look at his chart and he is he literally between our last session and the next one, he is training himself based on where his heart rate showed him he was having an emotional basically attack. And he's training himself to get that under control in a very precise moment in time. It's, it's literally once he hits his first target at that particular precise moment, he is then now watching. He saw his heart rate jump, which means he's, you know, he's, he's, he's, he's no longer in traders mind. And what he's doing is he's training for that particular moment. The thing is with the heart rate monitor measuring arousal levels, you can go in and you can train. Oh my gosh. Infinitely tight.

What if we already have. Well, what happens if it's the heart, what if we already have a heart rate variability? An app to read heart rate variability. Heart math I used to use. Yeah. Oh, the polar heart rate monitor, an elite HRV app.

Well, I would assume that you're also using the strap around your chest then? Because I have a couple traders that use the polar heart rate monitor and it's really good. But I have not seen the heart rate variability and I would, I would have to ask whether or not the heart rate variability is in real time or whether or not it's in studied time. That's, that's the. I'm a runner. There you go. You would, you would have a reason for it. He is too. Yeah. So, first of all, congratulations. And I want to tell you right now, you, man, that is that polar is enormously accurate and is very fine, fine machine. The problem is I have trouble convincing traders to put a strap around their chest. You know, it's a Fitbit just sitting there right on your hand and you can feed it to your smartphone and you can get a digital readout over your heart rate and have it right there up against your screens. And you can literally see where you are in a chart where, where you are in a trade. And you can see your emotional, your emotions move up and down. And the problem I had with heart math was that their heart rate variability and the way they trained for coherence, they got you too calm to trade. Okay. And you really have to have a focus, a readiness that's going to show up in heart rate and heart rate variability. In the same way, when Mark talks about the zone mentally, there is a zone physiologically that correlates to the performance mind. And the thing is, you've already started with that. You can really drill down on that. That's a very good one. Okay, friends, that is it. I thank you for your time and I thoroughly encourage you to really think about it. Saying, I'm at, you know, I am at this fork in the road. Do I move to learn how to train the performance mind, or am I just going to wait and see what happens? If you decide to train, I totally encourage you to check out the website and to look at these two courses and see where we go.

Oh, the recording will be available to you tomorrow. Send them the link and we'll send you the link tomorrow. We have to render this thing, then we have to upload it to YouTube. So you'll get that tomorrow. So no matter what, folks, I wish you well. I wish you prosperity and may God bless. Take care. Bye bye.