Building a Successful Trading Psychology by Mastering Failure

Welcome everyone. My name is Randy Howell, and it's just before we get started. Let me know if you can see me, and let me know if you can read the screen. Building successful trading psychology by mastering failure. And I have to bring the Q&A up first. Hold on, hold on a second. I Q&A. Okay, now I will actually be able to see stuff. If you will please write in a Y or an N. That would be really great. I would appreciate it.

In the Q&A box.

In the Q&A box. Okay. TG.

Okay.

Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, folks, we're here to have some fun. Uh, one of the major things that I've always been blown away by is that how strongly Traders do not want to lose. They do not want to fail. Okay, because there's this concept they need to be winners, and a lot of it is from our society and stuff like that. But the key is, is what we really want to do is we want to say, you know something, is that really fair? Is that really a fair way of saying it, to say that, um, you need to be able to fail and learn how to fail? In order to be able to become a successful trader? For the vast majority of us, the answer is yes. There are a few— there's a few people who become traders and they're successful in 6 months, and then it just goes in rockets and stuff like that. And you wonder, how did they do it? Well, we're not here for the people who won the genetics lottery. We're here for the tried and true people who are looking at this as an opportunity. They got into trading and found out that there was some information they didn't understand about uncertainty, the brain, and trading. Because ultimately, this is really all about a brain that was designed to avoid uncertainty, which meant death. This is our caveman days. And suddenly you're asking that brain 6, 7, 8 million years later to go into trading and look for volatility, which is another word for uncertainty. And so it, it often flips out. It just gets to the moment of where you go— you would know it as tilt, or just absolutely going and getting an emotional hijack. That's what we would say. And we want to be able to look at that and say, how do we, how do we, how do we go about doing this? Okay, so what we want to do is ultimately recognize that traders, many traders, come into trading with a winning attitude. They've been in business, they've been in athletics, they've bought the whole thing, and they tend to be probably more fans than they are actually the people who actually play football. One of my favorite teams on a collegiate level is the Georgia Bulldogs, and when you really And they're very well coached. And what you discover about them and many other teams that are that high championship quality, they don't talk about winning and losing. They talk about performing. Okay? Winning and losing is out of their control, but what they can control is their performing. Even when the performance ends up in failure, failure really tells them a lot, but First thing you have to do, you have to get past that money stuff, that money being tied to winning and losing and being tied in particular to your inherent worth. And out of that, what we've really discovered is that, okay, you honestly, you've had this success and of course you're going to be able to do it. And then you get in and you find out that the trading gods didn't— weren't informed of the laws of success in business and everyday life. It's a different probability game. So out of that, what we really want to do is once we grasp a very important truth: you do not control outcome, and you're going to fail frequently, or you would never learn. The point is, is particularly about controlling outcome, is we as a culture, as a world, as a people, as a species, are built to control and predict outcome. That's from our Serengeti days, and it hasn't changed a bit. And what happens though, these old ways— and understand, those old ways that became state traits that were genetically migrated through the generations, they were good for us. They allowed us as a species to compete on a higher level and become the species that we are now. The problem is that was before trading. Okay, BT, there we go. But the thing is, is suddenly when we went to trading, the rules changed. It's the difference between classical physics and quantum physics— big particles and little particles. The world— the worlds are completely incompatible. So now what most traders find out very quickly Is that working harder is not going to work. It's not going to produce the success that you're seeking. But if you start focusing on understanding failure differently than perhaps you learn now, okay, failure becomes a completely different animal at that particular moment in time.

Questions?

Oh, and by the way, if you have questions, type them into the box. And I will, I will answer them at the end of the, uh, end of the ride. But go ahead and type some in as you come across these. And I hope you do ask some good questions because, you know, ultimately I'm, I'm showing you stuff that is very contrary to a lot of success models that are around today. So the deal is this, and here's the big deal, and this is from an emotional intelligence perspective. Is you do not learn from success. What success does, okay, is it locks in a habit into place. And ultimately what you'll do is if you, if you have a particular habit that you keep repeating and you say, you know, I know I shouldn't do this, but you know, I know what I'm supposed to do, but then I get out there and then I end up doing the same dang thing over and over and over again, but expecting a different outcome. That, my friends, is the result of success on a biological evidence, uh, biological position. You're sitting there and you're going, okay, what I've done is I have found short-term success. And then what happens is the body locks it in through dopamine, the dopamine reward system. And as it does that, the behavior habituates. That means it is cast into kind of like concrete. It's cast into, into basically a pathway, a neural pathway. And the more success there's been, the more that is just built solid, solid, and it will not change. Then you come along and you fail, like don't win or lose, and you say, well, you know, I really need to change that. And then you try to, try to, but the pattern is so hardly focused. That it's hard to break. That's why Wilt Chamberlain very famously said, be careful of the habits that you develop, because after you develop them, they're going to be creating you. This is the same thing here, is what we are going to have to do is undo a lot of habits that we brought with us into trading, and we're going to have to construct new habits that are at the very base At the very base of that habit is a belief, and emotions drive that habit. That's what you're going to have to learn. So, and if you've ever wondered why you keep doing the same dumb stupid thing over and over again, this is why. It's gone to habit. It was successful—

In another world.

In another world, in another time, but it's not successful in the world of trading. But you keep doing it because it was successful, and it's resisting change because it has a history of success. This is the difference. Again, this is the difference when you begin to recognize that trading, the world of trading and seeking out volatility, is alien to your caveman brain. And caveman brain makes a lot of your decisions once you get cranked up. So we've gotten there and we were beginning to realize a very important piece here is you do not learn from success. It locks in a behavior, locks in a way of responding to the world, and it becomes automatic and is resistant to change. It's like a bureaucracy. After a while, a bureaucracy is no longer there to manage a business. It is simply its own entity, and the business supplies it. So we've gotten to that point, and then here's the deal. Your brain, our brain learns from failure. Now, in another time, in another place, you might call that failure adaptation. And you wouldn't say it's, it's basically you're being exposed to experience. The brain is learning from that experience and organizing it. And as long as you can keep it kind of, it's an open beginner's mind. It's reorganizing itself. And so, but we get stuck in those habits. And so what we want to do is say, oh, I need to really develop a different attitude about my losing because that losing, it's not about me. Like, oh, I hate being a loser. I don't want to be, I don't want to be seen as a failure. You're actually recognizing that, hmm, trading's where the brain-mind must transform itself from a certainty-based probability And to probability itself. Okay, this is the whole thing. You're asking that caveman brain, that ancient part of you, to change its ways. Friends, this takes a lot of work, and we're going to have to start saying, how does it do it? So ultimately, this is the way it would work. You know, the problem is that you have to change the meaning that's associated with it. Okay, it's just like you have a caveman. What happens is that eye sees danger. And what happens is the brain also tells the heart, et cetera, to get ready for action. Now, at the other thing is that emotionally intelligent failing teaches you how to succeed. You're looking at a person who's gonna find a habit and is going to escape that animal. At the same time, does it even need to escape that animal? How does it approach it differently? For it to become part of the diet. This is what we're talking about. You're going to have to change the meaning, change the belief that sits behind the failure. Okay, that's what we're looking for. Then out of that, you discover something: you fail your way to success. You're not successful by your attitude, your hard work, and stuff like that. No, you're successful because you're learning from your failures. You have a mind that's open to learning from failure. Okay? In my own case, it's really interesting is a number of years ago, before I became a therapist, before I became self-development guy with traders, is my wife and I owned a business that eventually cost about $2 million. Okay? And we were blown away. It was a huge failure. And I just knew that my wife's going to be leaving me and all that kind of stuff. And the truth is she didn't. But what happened is she ended up asking a very powerful question. Well, Randy, if you could do anything you wanted to do now and start over, what would you learn from your failure? I said, oh, that's easy. I would want to become a therapist and help people as I have been helped. That was the beginning of a whole new relationship with failure. I began to see failure as, boy, what is the learning experience here? What can I learn from here? What can I learn to reorganize the self that I am so that I am more competitive? I am more capable of working with uncertainty. That is when it gets really interesting, because ultimately success in trading is not about winning; it is about failing yourself to success. This is the way your brain learns. If it gets success, it just piles on a little bit more dopamine, solidifies that thing. But when it fails, it steps back. And depending on your attitude, if you have an attitude of, I hate failing, I hate losing, then you're going to have a problem. Okay? We're looking to say, what am I learning from this experience here that can make me more adapted to being successful in the environment? So, and we would need to— and it has to happen on a neurological level between synapses. That's where it really has to happen. So now we get this idea that brain learns from success. When have you seen that? This is a photograph of Thomas Edison. He's the dude who made the first incandescent bulb. He's also the dude that, um, Created a massive company that took light and brought it through the United States, brought it to the world. And what he said— and he said it this way— I failed my way to success. Friends, Thomas Edison and a lot of different people have a very different understanding of failure. And I'm asking you, what is your understanding of failure? In Thomas Edison's case, it was his teacher. This possibility could also be yours. You're no longer resisting change. What you're doing is you're saying, where do I need to reorganize myself? Where do I need to change in order to be a more competent trader? And it just so happens there's a couple really big places that you can have to change. Your relationship to uncertainty is going to have to change. We know what you're wired as, that your, your brain is either going to want to avoid uncertainty in the first place. It wants to see danger at a distance and walk away from it so it doesn't have to do anything. Or if it's confronted with danger, it, it's gonna take that threat and kill it. That's what it's gonna do. So what happens, you see these 2 extremes of fight-flight. But Thomas Edison and people like him and successful traders have said, you know something, there's something more than fight-flight. There is also approach. The approach is curious at failure. The approach method is no longer thinking, oh my God, what if people find out that I've lost? What if they— what if they find out I don't matter, I don't have power, I don't have prestige? No, past that. What happens is, from an approach standpoint, what you're learning is that you're curious. You bring a curious mindset to the engagement of uncertainty, and suddenly uncertainty unlocks and is able to reveal how you can learn to work much better with uncertainty. That's what we want. We want that little light bulb to go off. Just like it did for Thomas Edison. Excuse me. We are asking for a brain that is short-term survival focused to stay calm, and particularly when it's viewing engaging uncertainty as a threat to its existence. We want to be able to calm it down so that we no longer have to see it. as threat to our current organization itself, to the bureaucracy that we are, but we see as an opportunity of growing and adapting to the world in a more powerful way. And so it's not a threat to your existence. And at that particular time, capital and you really change things, is that capital and having problems become— how do I become a wiser user of this capital in this particular context? This is why you didn't want to fail and you want to win, because you, you don't want to— you, you know, it's hard to change that habit. That habit has the, has the force of, as humanoids, 6 to 8 million years, as social mammalians, for about 30 million years. It's got— it's a big force there. Of course you want to be scared of a bear and, you know, do something about it. But the thing is, is that, um, most likely, you know, we saw a film on bears and basically people do exactly the wrong thing in working with bears in the field. And if you've ever been to Yellowstone and see people walk up to a grizzly bear and take a picture of it and want to put the kid on top of the bear, you understand that there is There is some habits that need to die. Okay, so we've gotten that. And here, this is right here. This this image comes out of the Pixie Disney photo. It's inside out, and this is anger. This is the way they this is the way they looked at anger as a as a an emotional program, and they built a way of um. What represents anger? And it's this little critter right here. Okay. The major thing is, is that often your brain is going to have a fear-based brain for managing probability, causing you to fail. What happens is whether or not fear is something of avoidance or fear turns into its cousin anger and it attacks the source of the threat, it really doesn't matter. You're working with, you're working with the trading gods. They don't have the same rules and regulations that we folks in the everyday world do. And what happens is our anger is misplaced in trading. Again, what you're looking to do is not become angry and then try to attack the threat as you understand it, because understand your brain, that one you inherited from the caveman. Sees uncertainty as a threat or something to avoid. This is one of the emotional programs that will automatically trigger, as will anxiety and fear. So you've gotten this thing, you realize this is all adaptation, and that the truth is failure is showing you is the way you have adapted to this world is no longer working in trading, and you need to learn to adapt differently to uncertainty. There is no certainty. Certainty in trading is an illusion, and what you discover, it's an illusion in life too. So the deal is this: under, under stress, survival instincts will hijack rational thinking unless you retrain the mind that engages uncertainty, okay? And where do you learn this? First, you learn of the need for readaptation of the brain and mind for uncertainty through failure, through your losses. So in fact, they're not really bad. They are showing you something that you really truly need to understand. And you know what's really amazing is that how, how have you How have you gone about trying to fix this problem? Okay, you know all that positive mental attitude, where has it gotten you in trading? Because ultimately most people talk a game, but when, when confronted with uncertainty and loss, their game changes to a completely different thing. That mental attitude just absolutely blows apart. Visualizations and affirmations— the unfortunate problem with both those is they, they start falling apart under stress. The more you get to that, you know, as long as you can be calm and cool and stuff like that, everything's fine. But the thing is, you need to build automatic responses to changes in the environment of trading, okay? A lot of people will try Hypnosis, mind over matter. There's all sorts of tapping. All that kind of stuff has been tried. And what happened? The thing is, is ask yourself, for you, if you've tried it, and it's okay if you have, who hasn't? Did it really work under pressure? Did it really work? And then you ask the question, well, what does work? What does work? What we want to do is take a look at that and say, what does work? Well, I want to give you a model of success in trading. This is the American cougar. Um, he's the apex predator, and he hunts not by chasing, stalking deer. What he does in that left frame, what you see is you actually see a cougar hunting. He's climbed up a tree, he's up about 20 feet. And what he also knows, he knows the, um, he knows the patterns of the deer. Deer create highways in the forest where they, they— everything, it's— you might as well have stop signs, okay? And what he does is he finds out one of those places where They congregate. They always pass this particular area. He climbs up the tree, the rock ledge, and what he does is he practices patience. Okay, he's not trying to take anything. He is waiting patiently for the market, for the forest to give him something. He's not making something happen. Urgency to act is not part of the cougar's hunting style is he's an ambush predator. The deer never sees him. He's up 20 feet. The deer can't crane his neck, and the cougar drops on him at 225, 250 pounds. That's quite a hit. And either he snaps the neck or he catches the esophagus, collapses it, and the, the game's over in 15, 20 seconds. If it doesn't go right and the deer gets up and runs, the cougar does not chase. What he does, he accepts the failure. He climbs back up the tree and produces patient mind again and waits for the forest to give him another opportunity. You are patiently waiting. To see what the markets will give you, and then you strike. I actually have people who have, have gigantic posters of a cougar that is resting in a tree, and you would swear that he's, he's sitting there sleeping. But no, he's not. He's produced a zone of watchful waitfulness. He's not bored the way a lot of humans would get. They have to end up getting into something. No, he's sitting there and he's learned. He's adapted from failure to practice this patience. In that patience, he know he knows that the forest will be giving him something to eat. Okay, so this is the model how you would see it. The deal is that cougar. If you took an American lion, I mean an African lion, and brought him to the United States. He'd starve in the forest. He's not adapted. And I might add, the cougar would not exist very well in the plains of Africa either. They've both adapted to a particular kind of hunting. It just so happens that the birth rate of the cougar is not anything like the birth rate of the African lion. They have capital. They're recreating capital all the time so they can lose bodies, which happens when you When you try to bring down some of the, the animals that they bring down. With the deer— I mean, with the cougar, it's different. He's not chasing. He has a surprise attack. It's an ambush, and it's over before it even gets started. Friends, this is the adaptation. If you want to find success, you're going to have to decide that being a cougar, a North American cougar, it's not maybe as sexy as an African lion, but it's a heck of a lot more successful given the environment of the markets. That's what we now know for sure. Now, how do you go about transferring the urgency to act into patient discipline? Because to be honest with you, a lot of traders have that problem, is they sit there and they get bored and they, they just get squeamish and stuff like that, and they want to be doing something. Because they have a belief and a habit that says you have to be doing something to be doing something. And yet at the same time, in trading, the trading mind, what you're doing is patiently waiting. That is the work of trading, whereas in a lot of other areas, the urgency to act and do and do and do is what produces success. Here we see that we're going to have to change brains. We're going to have to redevelop the brain. And first and foremost, what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to decide, okay, you're going to have to decide that you really need to do this, that the patient mind is the winner of probability rather than the urgency brain, brain that you developed and have used most of your life. It's not that it's a— it's not like the old brain's a bad brain or anything like that. It's just not effective in the world of trading. In the same way that if you took the cougar out of his environment and took him to the African savannas, he'd die. If you took the African lion out of the savanna and put him in the American forest, he would die. So you're looking at adaptation. And remember, Charles Darwin did not say it's the smartest that succeed, it's the biggest that succeed. What he said was it's the most adaptive to the environment that succeeds. That's what we're looking for. Now, it's not the winning and failing that is so important for success. It is the Personal self-mastery of the mind you bring to the moment of uncertainty. This is the success of trading, and as long as you don't want to fail, you're not going to have the mind that can learn from experience and adapt to the conditions of trading. This is evolution, and we need to see that we're— a lot of the traders are not going to make it. 95% of traders are losing money in about 3 to 4 years. They're going to lose their capital, or they're going to decide this just— this, this, this is too crazy for me. And ultimately what you discover is the very first step after you decide that, you know something, I want to be producing successful mind for trading— the very first stop is that you're going to have to learn to deal with fear very differently than you have. Here, this may be an overly dramatic image. I don't know if I would do this. I, I figure Photoshop did a great job right here. But what you're doing is the woman is calming her very natural fears down in the presence of a predator. Okay, because ultimately the thinking knowledge that you have is going to elicit fear, and what we want We want the personal self-mastery of the mind that you bring into the moment. This is the success of trading. It's not making things happen, it's waiting for them to come to you like the cougar has figured out. We're asking you to adapt from failure and build the mind that trades well. So how do you do this? Um, we personally teach a, a 5-step process, and you could say there's more to it too. The very first thing you have to realize in a change process for trading mind is that you're going to have to recognize that what you've been doing has not been working. It's a failure, and you need to find out very first that emotions are a lot different than you think they are. Emotions are not feelings. Emotions are not those things that you go, oh, that pesky— that's— but emotions are biological action potentials. They're not psychological at all. And they are built to trigger when there is any change in status in the markets for the trader, any status, any change of status in the environment. And an emotion immediately fires. And what it's there to do is to take the organism and give it its best chance of survival in that moment of uncertainty. We're going to have to change that. We're going to have to learn to say we need to regulate, emotionally regulate that emotion. But first, we need to have a definition of an emotion that makes sense and we can work with. The second thing is emotional regulation. If you begin to grasp that you are the embodiment of emotion, Anytime there's a change in status out there, there's automatically going to be emotional response. So you're working, you're working with volatility. And so there's all sorts of changes in the environment, so it can easily be triggered. And until you can regulate the triggering of an emotion so that you dampen it and it, it stays calm, you can use that emotion. Okay, that's the very first thing. The second thing is mindfulness. You're going to have to learn that this profound lesson that a lot of people just are blown away by is that you and your thoughts are not the same. You and your beliefs are not the same. In fact, you do not have thoughts and beliefs. They're creating your experience. Okay. That's when you go, oh my God, I'm not nearly as cool as I thought I was. I'm just, I'm just a guy who needs to learn to readapt his mind for the rigors of trading. Yes. Then after you learn mindfulness and learn how to produce an observer stepping back and observing, not as all these thoughts is who you are, but as all sorts of historical information being embedded into you for the last 25 million years. And also the family of origin. And what you go looking for is a historical internal dialogue. There you're going to find what you have been avoiding. You haven't been avoiding your fears. You have been avoiding this voice inside your head that keeps saying, are you sure? Are you sure? Do you think you're going to really win? You think you're going to be able to make this? That's called the inner critic. Then the 4th thing is you end up learning how to develop Your empowered nature. You have the internal resources that you need. You're a human being. You can actually— you're not stuck in being like my dog is stuck in being a dog. I can become a very different human being than I was, say, when I was, um, even 10, 15, 20 years ago. So this is the whole point. Then you become intentional about the mind you bring to trading. There's going to be discomfort. There's going to be challenges. You know, you're you you are dealing with uncertainties, so there are going to be challenges. But the thing is, is you are going to become intentional about what mind you bring to trading. That, friends, is what you can control. So out of this, in step one, emotional regulation, you're learning to manage the emotions before they take over the trading mind. What you discover is IQ, the thinking quota that tells you how smart you are, uh, is— has about 10% of the influence on the brain. EQ, most of the— most of the 90% or more of your brain is operating independently of thinking. Okay, and you're going to need to develop the EQ, the emotional intelligence, to be able to use how that ancient brain operates. And to be able to build a different mind. You can do it, but it starts there. Emotional regulation is not going to be the solution. However, if you cannot regulate the intensity of the emotion, you're never going to get to the mind, okay, which is where all the fun begins. Emotional regulation is necessary. It's been around 4,500 years. It's not like I'm teaching it cutting edge, but It's cutting edge because most people just simply don't know you need to be doing this. It needs to become habit if you're a trader. Then the very next thing is, um, what does the emotional state see? Here we have a guy from, uh, I think the movie was A Million Years BC. What you're actually looking at is an animal looking at another animal And what happens is that the fear of death, the fear of uncertainty is really making an impression upon this young caveman guy. And that cat is just simply probably trying to see if he can smell him. Okay. But this is the way your emotional brain sees a trade going against you. Okay. It's going against you. You have a saber-toothed cat right in your face. Okay, so this is what we want to see. You want to be able to take off reactivity, calm things down so that your rational mind has a chance of doing that. That is what you're going to have to solve. So then you're going to have to really truly manage the biology of the emotion because ultimately What we're doing, if you begin to understand this, is that what you call mind is all emotional state dependent. That means whatever emotional program cocktail is there, it's going to produce the mind that you bring to the management of uncertainty in trading. What we want to do is produce a calmer mind under the pressure of risking capital. We want to be able— in this particular case, we want discipline and as an emotion. We want courage, we want self-soothing, self-calming, and we want impartiality to be the emotional programs that give rise to the mind that engages uncertainty. We don't want fear and anger and anxiety or lust or urgency to be the ones that are compelling the mind to act. This is the way we work. Okay, now then. The second step, mindfulness. You're stepping back out of thought and you're recognizing in particular not only that your thinking is not your own, but the beliefs— you and your beliefs are not. And at the bottom of every emotion is a belief about your ability to manage uncertainty. Okay, the ones you inherited from our ancestors, from our family of origin, from our culture, from circumstances. You've been projecting your hidden beliefs onto the markets forever. And the truth is, the markets in your, in your trading account, you're going to see the effectiveness of those beliefs on display. If they're effective, you're going to be extracting more capital than you put back in. If they're ineffective, you're going to be putting more capital into the markets than you're taking out. So you're recognizing, okay, I need to produce this mindfulness. I need to be able to step back out of me acting in the markets and producing, saying, how can I— what is making this participant in the markets— that's you—

tick?

How do I go about helping to reform it so that it sees a different way of engaging that market? To move, moving from someone who's constantly on the move trying to make things happen to someone who can sit in a tree and wait. For the markets to give you something. This is where you go, the hidden beliefs. Ultimately, if you recognize that your brain is actually a committee of rival emotional programs that give rise to the thoughts of the mind, and when that mind occurs, what happens is that those emotional programs are really truly given thought. And suddenly your mind becomes a governing committee. And the question becomes, who are you populating that governing committee with? Often it's the inner critic. Often it's your orphan nature. Often it's just not the one who needs to be there managing uncertainty. And this is where a quote I use from Thomas Jefferson— he made the statement, the price of freedom Is eternal vigilance. You have to manage this mind. You have to understand that your brain cannot produce an exquisite mind for more than about an hour and a half at a pop. It takes a lot of energy to do that. But within you are multiple personality types, parts of the self, like it's demonstrated in this photo. And by the way, that's me. Okay, so the thing is, what you're realizing is that You have enormous numbers of emotional programs that give rise to thought that you need to learn to be able to organize into the cocktail that gives rise to the mind that engages uncertainty. That's what you need to do. This is where you learn it. We teach it. And then you get into the historical internal dialogue. Have you ever heard this thing? Are you sure? Are you sure you want to do that? What if you lose? You know, who told you that you were going to be a successful trader? If you beat yourself up, this is exactly what you're listening to. If you're your— if you're your hardest critic, you're listening to the inner critic slamming that orphan nature of yours. And what I want you to notice is, does it help you? No, it doesn't. It makes it harder because all of a sudden you're retraining yourself to believe that you're going to fail. What we want to do is say it's not by pushing and being tough. If you want to change yourself, you're going to use compassion instead of beating yourself up. You're going to have compassion and realize that, you know, you— compassion is an incredible gift because you're going to be taking losses for the rest of your life in trading. So you need to have a way of calming yourself and making sure that you still are valuable and have inherent worth. And that your worth is not tied to your performances. You have to do that. If not, you're going to run through your capital pretty fast. And then you find what you, what you really find is this adapted voice, what I call the orphan. Is it— and understand that adapted voice is the brain adapting you to survive within a particular environment. Okay. That and the inner critic, that's the one that is criticizing you, judging you. And setting you up for failure and all that stuff. It's the one that curses you. You're— it's all that stuff. It's your avoidance of the internal struggle that keeps the observer fused to a particular organization of the mind you keep falling back into. The deal is, is what we really want to do, we want to take that observer, pull it back, and start recognizing that it can find these other aspects of your of this incredible resources that you have within your mind. You're going to have to do that though, because it's not going to be natural. You're going to have to work at it to be able to create new habits. Now, out of that, what I want you to understand is you inherited these self-limiting beliefs from your history. Understand, we, um, We as a species learned to be anxious because we were small and we weren't really nearly as competitive as a lot of the predators looking for us for lunch. And we would just simply start having foreboding about the future. We would say that, you know, saber-toothed tigers behind every bush out there, when in fact only 1 in 10,000. But it helped us survive. The thing is, it's not doing that anymore. You're trying to teach it to work with probability. And yet it's still whispering the same lies. These beliefs are not you. They are only the default programming that whispers or shouts and screams in your mind's ear. But until you get to the moment of going, you know something, I, I have never wanted to hear that, I want to push it away, you know— No, you don't. You don't want to push it away. You want to master it. That's the whole thing about trading. Is ultimately you find out trading is a journey into self-mastery, and if you're not willing due to fear to face your demons, then you're going to have a hard time changing the habits into highly effective habits that can trade probability. But yet this out here happens to everybody, and ultimately. You begin to awaken the higher, higher self. You start realizing that living within you is the discipline of a ruler. Within you is the courage of a warrior. You turn toward your— you turn toward your fears to master them, not to conquer them, but to master them. You turn toward— and you also find out that there is a part of you that can be compassionate. You start— you find that compassionate part can calm you down. You need that aspect. Beating yourself up is not going to work. Calming yourself down and having compassion, empathy for yourself when you're in a tough situation is far more effective for long-term success. So we've done that. All of us have this undeveloped potential. It's burnt into our DNA. It is really up to us whether or not we're going to be the human beings that we can be and develop this aspect of ourselves. Or not. It goes far beyond trading. Most people start doing my work and say, yeah, I did, I did this to be able to build a mind that could become profitable, but then I had no idea that so many other parts of my life was going to change also. I started embracing life very differently. And that's what we want to do also. We want to develop our potential. And within that All these are resonant programs, and some of them you're going to have to change them. Like, there is going to have to be a warrior, okay? And this is a— this is up in the top left. That's a symbolic representation of that warrior emotional program, that archetype. You're also going to have to need the discipline, the ability to maintain order under pressure of a ruler. George Washington Man, he did it. He beat the world's best army with a ragtag group that all he was doing is running from the enemy. At the same time, you have to have self-compassion of a caregiver. You have to be able to love yourself. You have to be able to find that you're worth this effort to recreate yourself. And as you do those 3 things, what you're going to start noticing is you develop The impartiality, the clearness of thought of a sage. This, friends, is the trader's state of mind. This is the mind that you can learn to pull together, and this is the one that you can learn to create—the mind that engages uncertainty. It doesn't have to be the old one, the one built for survival a million years ago. It's built for the survival of probability and working with all this up and down stuff that we do in trading. So this is where we're at. And the truth is, then after you develop it, you have to have the intention. This is a very— this, um, this is George Washington. It's on Christmas Day. He's actually pre-dawn, and they are about to attack the Hessians. Which are the most feared mercenary soldiers in the world. And what happens is that those men believe in Washington, and Washington is going to lead them. He has the intention of producing an independent country, not a colony of Britain. This is their beliefs that you're constantly projecting onto the markets. You know, if George Washington was predict— projecting probability, he'd probably say, this is— I need to get my wife and I out of here because this is going to be a bad deal. Yet there he is with a ragtag army about to beat the Hessians. Intention. You can do this too. And it almost goes back to the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. So out of this, you're going to tame your dragon. Okay, you're going to particularly fear and sabotage and impulse. It can be done, but you're going to have to become the human being that can do that not by power but by self-mastery. Mistakes are approached as signposts directing us to where we need to develop. Remember, it's failure. You can fail your way to success. Not as something to be avoided, as if you could, but where you can learn from your failure and you can develop yourself into a person who has the highest probability of winning at that moment. And right here, my, my real question for you is here is this is a boardroom, and this is symbolic of the, the internal governing committee of the mind. What I want you to notice is right now there are no one sitting in any of those seats running the company called you. My question is, who do you want? Who do you want running the show called you? Engaging uncertainty in trading and life. Do you want the historical organization has basically petered out and why you're looking at stuff like this, or do you want the empowered elements of the self? That's up for this task. It's really up to you. It's really up to which part of yourself are you going to feed. I believe that you feed the most empowered parts of yourself so they can bring forth the glory of who you are as a human being. I think that is in all of us, and I'm hoping that you come to a moment of going, you know something? I understand this better now. I understand how this stuff fits together. And yeah, I think I can train myself to develop these aspects myself, and I can change the course of my life. I certainly have. And it's made all the difference in the world. So ultimately, what do you do next? If this is the first time you've ever come across my work, you're going, whoa, what is this? Where's this guy coming from? What I would encourage you to do is to go to my website, kick around, look around, go to my YouTube channel. It's, it's, it's got 122,000 subscribers. It's got 300-something videos. And really look deep into my work. And then, you know, if I were you and if I'm just kicking tires, get my free book. Just check it out. What is this guy talking to? Or next, check out and get my, get my book Mindful Trading. But then If you're going and maybe buy some things and just say, what does the guy know what he's talking about? Start really looking in there, and my book will blow you away. It, it, it just, it's amazing. Then though, you're going, I need to train, and most likely I need a teacher. What I would ask of you is to consider a group course. It's gonna basically, it'll start in the first of the new year. And the deal is we want you to sign up early because we want you prepared when you show up. We want you already habituating the way you breathe under the conditions of uncertainty. It's really important because it takes a while to do that. So we're willing to give you a, basically our emotional regulation workshop for free.

Okay.

To do that, because what I want you to do is I want you to say, this is an opportunity I need to take. If I really truly want to survive and prosper in this new world, my individual course is for people who are serious. They'd say, you know, I want to work with the teacher. I want to see, you know, having having his having sharing space with him makes a difference. So the thing is, check us out because ultimately. It may be that you win the lottery and you fall into this and you just fall into the mind that works and stuff like that. Most people fall into that kind of thinking, and finally what happens is they find out that they have drained their capital and they have to exit trading. What I'm saying is invest in yourself. Start really looking at it and going, what do I learn from my failures and what can I build from my failures? Friends, this is what I encourage of you, and I want to thank you. I want to thank you and thank you and thank you. Uh, and here's some questions. I like this. Got one: how do I stop blowing up accounts? And what I would say to you is this: have you been listening? Have you been listening to me talk about how you get control of the mind that engages uncertainty? Again, what you're doing is you train yourself You recognize that in this failure of blowing up accounts is that your psychological competence— I don't know if you have an edge in your methodology or not, but you got to have that. But the deal is, is you develop an edge in your psychology that can drive your methodology. You learn the emotional regulation, you learn the mindfulness, and you realize that whoever you feed Okay, the sabotage, you're feeding it. Most people have a dollar sign about how much worth they are, and when the moment they hit that in their trading, they lose back down. And most people come in with scared money, they come in with scarcity thinking, and they blow up until you, until you challenge that demon and challenge that belief and recreate it. You'll continue doing it. But the thing is, what I ask of you Is to listen to this again tomorrow when it gets up on our, on our website and ask that question to yourself and listen. Thank you, that's a really great question. Let's see, are there any other? Um, one below it. Anonymous attendee. Okay, hello Anonymous. I joined late, do we get a recording of this webinar? Yes, you do. Is, um, Tomorrow morning we will— we will— it'll be tomorrow afternoon. Okay. Is, uh, we have never been able to take these things, turn them over, and get them out in the early morning. Okay.

They don't get the cop— they don't— we don't send them a copy of the recording. They go out to our website.

Yeah, go out to the website and it will be on our, on our front page. Okay. Or you could go to the YouTube, uh, Randy Howell Tube, uh, Trader State of Mind. at night, your Spark, and you would find it there too. But the thing is, watch it. Now let's see if there's any other questions.

There's not.

Okay, they're not. So what we're gonna do is I'm going to thank you for being here, and my hope is that— my hope is for, for the guy who said, how do I stop blowing up accounts? Listen to your failure. Listen to this webinar all over again and start saying, what can I learn from here? What is it I need to change about myself? That's the deal. And for those of you who are kicking tires, rewatch it tomorrow. Watch some of the videos.

Get the free ebook.

Yeah, get the free ebook. That's how you get a start. You start going, does this guy know what he's talking about? Okay, I don't blame you. I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to explore and to begin to say, what do I need to do in order to change the mind that I bring to the management of uncertainty?

Okay, there's some more questions.

Oh, more questions here.

Scroll down.

Uh, oh, there's a lot more. Um, I joined late. Here we go. Do you find that some people just don't have the right to type of mind to trade. I find that there are people who will— are— who refuse to develop their mind. They stay— they prefer to stay— they prefer staying blind than waking up. They want to— they want things to happen, and they want it to happen their way, their rules of success. And the truth is, is the rules of success you find out are very different than the ones that you necessarily learned. But yeah, I find that, uh, and I also find people who are willing to work their tails off and really get into their psychology and really do the deep hard work, heavy emotional lifting of reorganizing the mind that engages the challenges of living. So it works both ways. But yeah, there's a lot of people just, they're not going to do the work. I can't tell you how many folders I hover over there, my, my file. That have people who just didn't complete the work. We have people who pay us and then never show up. Okay, it's crazy. Um, every time I get paid, every time I get paid, I go on a losing spree and lose more than I got paid. Any suggestions? Yeah, you're sabotaging yourself. You have a money figure about your worth, you're getting paid, and what happens is you probably don't believe you deserve it at a some level. And if that's not it, what happens is you get paid and you start getting— you do something you never can do in trading. You allow yourself to feel good. Oh boy, look at this, I got paid! Yeah, yeah, yeah! At that particular moment, you've experienced emotional hijacking. You've hit the dopamine stuff and you're snorting cocaine. And you do not trade and snorting cocaine. You don't do that. I hope you don't do it anyway. But that's— you are sabotaging yourself, and it 2 routes, you know. One is you hit the dopamine too much, you feel good, and you just lose because you're not— you haven't got the mind of trading. Or you have— you start saying, oh my God, you know something, things are going too good, it's just going to have to fail. I think with you, you're getting paid and you're getting a dopamine burst, and then, um, you don't have— you're not, you're not, you're not practicing the ruler, the discipline of a ruler. You're letting the little orphan deuce go crazy and run around the candy store and go crazy, and you're going to have to recognize it doesn't work that way. You can go and have fun, but not while you're trading. Um, not sure if you see my question. Well, I see that. Uh, people who have addiction issues, impulsivity, etc. Uh, I can address that. Is practically, um, I was speaking in Vancouver last year and basically a person asked me this question, Randy, what if I'm sitting there and it doesn't fit my rules but I decide to take it anyway? And I said, you gambled. I think everybody that's trading has to really come in and check in and recognize that they can easily come and have a habit that becomes habit-forming. Remember, an addiction is simply a habit that's just— that's pissing people off. But what happens is people— at the same time, I work with traders who are recovering from addictions, and they make really great traders. They know they have a problem. They know they have to— they have to control the way they engage life. Easy does it. They have a group they that they can really be honest to, and they're trying to be honest with themselves rather than using alcohol or drugs to blunt what they really need to be working on. And what you'll discover, particularly with the A, is that it's really a spiritual path. They don't say, and what they do is they say higher power because they don't want to get they don't want to get bogged down in God stuff. What happens is that higher power. To someone early in the recovery simply may be the group itself. When you get around recovery movements, you find out those people are there to make sure you don't take the next drink, and you're doing the same favor to them. And that is a beautiful thing. So yeah, I see that a lot. That's it. Anyway, yeah, I you know, and take I find I also work with a lot of gamblers who are trying to learn to become. Trying to become traders. But the ones that I can tell you is this, is that if you ever get in a poker game with a really good poker player, you'll discover he's not gambling. Okay? And if you play with him over the course of an evening, he will take your money. He's not gambling. You are. And so you need to learn and develop the skill sets that allow you to become observer And the chooser of the elements that produce your mind. So anyway, good night, folks. I've really enjoyed myself. And take advantage of this moment. Go to the website. Go to the YouTube stuff. Start really exploring and saying, do I really want to be successful, or I don't want to keep telling myself the same story? Go check it out. And I wish you well. I wish you well, and I will see you.