Building a Winning Trading Psychology Mindset

Welcome everyone. My name is Randy Howell, trader state of mind. And I wish to thank you here tonight. And just to make sure we're all working here, let me know if you can hear me. Just type a Y into yes. Okay. Well, there we go. Okay, you can hear me. So what we're going to be exploring in this presentation is what actually is a winning mindset for trading.

Many people bring a mindset about winning to trading and they start discovering real quick that something doesn't work out right. Something's happening that we need to be able to really look at and maybe rearrange into our concept of winning. So that's what we're going to be out to do. And by the way, I hold questions toward the end and what I would invite you to do as we go along or if you have questions, go ahead and write them in. Dolores will collect them and we'll start answering them at the end of the lecture. Fair enough? I hope so. So here we go.

Interestingly, is that. Hold on, we're trying to switch, move the slides forward. Ah, we finally got it. Okay. You know, it just seems so straightforward. You know, I've got this winning attitude and a lot of people, particularly that alpha set has been in business and corporate and they've risen up to the ranks. They built businesses and they have the attitude of winning and not losing and making things happen. And they get to trading with these, this mindset. Or the perfectionist who has finally learned that, she says, you know, if I do everything right, then I won't be wrong and I'll win. It's important to win, to control outcome. And then they get into trading and find out they get steamrolled.

And something about winning doesn't seem right because when you take that loss, what happens is you don't want to lose, you want to win, you want to make money. And yet the more you try to make money.

The less winning you're doing. And we want to go, what in the world is really going on? And out of that.

We'Re still having some problems slide forwarding here. There we go. And what we really want to ask is what really stands in your way from the developing the skills needed for trading, the knowledge of trading, you know something, there's lots of sources for that. And some people might say, boy, it's really expensive. Other people says, you know something, it's really good knowledge. I've got the knowledge of trading. But then there are plenty of traders who can talk the talk. They can talk at in for dime about what they're doing and there's a big exchange going on. It's like two fishermen talking or a group of fishermen talking about all the fishing they've done in their world. But it's not the act of fishing.

However, when they go from that talking the talk to actual action walking the walk under pressure, real money on the line. Everything changes. All of a sudden, the composition of the mind starts getting really, really different. And winning takes on an entirely different perspective. You try harder and harder and harder to win, and the harder you try to win, the further and further away from winning you get. And.

Finally, and usually it's somewhere between three and five years that a trader gets into trading, pays his dues, you know, and does all that and says, you know something, I should be winning. I know how to trade. I can trade in paper and simulation and I can just about mint money. But there comes a time when you truly have to acknowledge that it's you that stands in your way. It's you that has the claws dug in and doesn't want to move forward. You can see that your winning ways are not producing winning in trading. But you refuse to give up and you keep pushing harder because that's part of the winning formula. Harder, harder. Push harder, harder. The last man standing wins. The last guy who gets up wins. Trading. Both have lost the money of the capital they've been investing in trading before that time occurs. So we're looking at this and going, well, what about you is the problem?

You know, you can see the mistakes and you keep, they keep happening. And you're going, why are they, why, why aren't they, why aren't they getting better? Why aren't things getting better? Why aren't I making money? And so you get this question of literally, okay.

Ultimately, what really has to be understood is that winning and trading is very different than you thought it was going to be. It's very different than the winner in business and the winner who's accumulated wealth, the winner who's climbed a. The tower, the stairs. And all of a sudden you realize, my gosh, some what's so different about it? It's like the harder that I try to win, the further it gets away from me. And how can this be? It's not in the world that I understand. And friends, that's the key right there. The world that you understand. Here's an example right here. You know, in other areas, say baseball, World Series and stuff like that, they want to win. They want to win. They want to control outcome, they want to do all that stuff, they want to make things happen. They want to predict and know the future and have faith that they're going to prevail. And it works in short term pursuits like football, like baseball, like basketball. That can happen. Forcing that will. Never giving up determination. All that stuff, man. And yet, hmm, it drives success in there. There. But something, it doesn't translate to winning and trading. And here what we discover is this.

It's quite natural to bring that winning attitude, that not losing attitude to trading. Because what you've been trained to do in most of the world is to be in control. You don't want to lose control. You, you want to be in control. You want to make things happen. And what you discover in trading is no matter how much force of will you have.

Okay.

There is no control. Control itself is an illusion. And the more you push it, the more you push it, the more you push it, guess what? The worse it gets. Because ultimately, the formula for winning in many other parts of the world is a formula of disaster in trading.

I have a client who runs a business where he really has to have alpha, kind of really alpha mentality. He has to be a winner, he has to close sales, he has to make things happen. And he's also a trader. And ultimately what he has to do is he has to go from the winning formula that runs a business. And when he starts trading, he has to turn that winning attitude into something very different, something built for probability where he has no control. Most traders have not learned that and therefore they get stuck and find out that, well, you know something, the problem is I keep trying to do the same thing over and over again. And despite, I know this is, this is the winning formula, this is what I've been taught, this is what everybody knows. And yet I'm losing money. Why? What's going on here?

And ultimately, what you're basically doing is you're bringing, bringing a tray, a brain to trading that can't do the job.

Your brain evolved for very different purposes than for success in trading. It's a completely different adaptation. That's the trick that you don't understand is literally the brain. As you understand it, bringing it to trading, the drain brain, becomes a liability to your capacity to produce success in trading. That's not pro. That's, you know, that's not what it's supposed to be. Yet your brain, excuse me a moment.

Your brain was carved by evolution to control outcome no matter what. And it was essential, friends, if you did not control outcome, and actually in caveman days, you would Actually say, control environment, not just outcome, but the environment factors in the environment. They were very, very dangerous things in the environment that if you did not control the environment, you became somebody else's lunch. So it was enormously important to control outcome yet. And what developed in there was also not lose. Because, again, if you. If you lost back in our caveman days and understand that's 12, 15,000 years ago, that's all. It's just blink of an eye that losing probably meant death to you or parts of your clan. So we developed. Our brain, developed ways of being in the world, okay, that looked for pattern for causal relationships between things because we wanted to be able to control the outcome. And we could do that also by seeing that cause and effect. We could see. We can see that the pattern's forming. We can see that. Okay, here's the bottom. I need to get in right there.

Unfortunately, that's only probability. It doesn't mean that the pattern is going to show up. It's going to act like it does in the textbooks. No, what happens is that the caveman brain looks at that and that causal relationship, cause and effect breaks down, and all of a sudden, oh, my God, we're in danger, Danger, danger. Weird stuff happens at that moment.

In trading, winning and losing is determined by what side of probability you land on.

It's not really about self, okay? Your caveman ancestors had to win to survive. Evolution and culture literally forged this particular association. And to the caveman, even though it didn't seem this way, winning really was the only landing on the right side of probability, losing the opposite. The problem is it sets you in that sign where winning, though, is living, losing is dying. So you begin to see our caveman here. He's trying to tinker with the computer, has got a serious problem on the hand. He's not built to engage in the probabilities presented in trading to that computer. He is built to survive. And what do you think possibly happens when you take that caveman brain that's still hanging around with you, and then you expose it to stress, expose it to the uncertainty of trading? Well, suddenly, what you're going to do is you're taking a loss and you're going to want to make up for that prior loss. You're going to want to be, you know, you can't let one trade. You know, in a rational thing, that one trade is not connected to the other. But in the caveman brain is. You have to make up. You have to make up for that or you don't survive. That's instinctual friends, that's etched into your DNA. Okay, Caveman literally says, yes, you have to be this way. Let's see another example. You hate losing. Well, here's why. It's a part of. You know, really good traders are great losers. They know that the probability is not on their side for any one single trade. Okay? They would. There's successful traders winning 35, even 30, and sometimes 40% of their trades. But what they do is they're a master of losing. They don't have a conversation in their head about losing. This caveman here facing a saber toothed cat, you know, if he loses that fight, he's dead. Okay? So that to caveman brain, that's your emotional brain, friends. That's the one that you bring to trading. That's the one that defines literally how you react to uncertainty on a subconscious level. Your caveman brains at event loss is a threat to life. So no wonder you put yourself in stressful situations. Stress defined as the challenges of not knowing. That's all about trading. No wonder that instinctual impulses take over mind and have you doing things that are going to kill you. And yet from a survival standpoint, they produce surviving in the short term.

Boy, I'm going to tell you something. You bring this brain, what in the world's happened here? And also then we go and say, well, you know something, Your ability to predict negativity about what's going to happen in the future. Okay, if you'll notice, I no longer watch news because what I discovered is that they're finding out the worst things in the world to report to you. Because what they know is the human brain is designed to look for the bad because they want to avoid. Stops you from acting in a different way. And it keeps the future on hold and you're. You're out there. So here we go. We have short man brain who's looking for short term survival instead of long term benefit. And being instinctual. What happens is that you get into that and before you know it, bang. Is you may decide not to enter a trade because you're looking for more and more, more and more confirmation, more and more confirmation. The more confirmed confirmation you look for, the more finally the trade gets away. And all of a sudden, oh my God, now I have fear of missing out. Now I have to jump into a trade. That's all caveman brain. That's the brain you brought to trading. And what you're going to get is, yeah, it's not going to work. Then we go to fomo FOMO is another piece of what I want you to get. These are instinctual parts of our brain that brought we are we brought to trading with us. We evolve from the African savannas to where we are now. And then you get to fomo. Fear of missing out. You know, the thing is, is that, oh my gosh, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's going to be taken from me. It's going to be what's good for me. It's going to be taken from me. Oh, my God. Whether or not it's jumping into trades after missing trades because you're fearing of missing out on the profits or whether or not it's jumping out of trades once you fit black because you're scared that the profits can be taken from you, that is instinct. That is caveman interacting with uncertainty. Or you're looking at this guy right here, a very modern caveman, slick, good looking, but he's still got a caveman brain, that emotional brain that's reacting to uncertainty the way it did a hundred thousand years ago. Okay. That caveman brain doesn't know that you're trading and losses are good. No, it is instinctually looking for survival. Hmm. And then we'll go to even one more, you know, and when the, when you, when fomos hits you and you don't get in the trade, you do that a couple times, you've been looking for confirmation, you get worked up, you start having this urgency. I can't let that happen again. I'm going to enforce this thing. I'm going to make this hang happen. I'm going to jump in that trade. I'm going to get the money that I've, that I should have already had, all based on the scarcity concept that, oh my God, you know, it's. If I jump in that trade, it's going to be, I could lose. I should stay out of that. That's caveman talking. And all of a sudden this urgency develops and what you want to do is you want to make up for that, you want to grab that stuff. But this time, the urgency that aggression has you jumping outside of your trading plan and God knows, figuring out what to jump into, and then you find out, oh my God, that was a huge mistake. What you can think is your survival instincts.

They'Re killing you. And unless you learn to be able to override these survival instincts, you're going to have a heck of a time becoming successful in trading. It's not because you're not man enough or woman enough or strong enough, or, you know, determined enough, winning enough. It's that the survival instinct could care less what you think it is pre thinking it is pre verbal and it's acting outside of conscious awareness. 95% of the decisions you make are outside of conscious awareness. I mean, I personally go down to Lowe's near me and I walk into the parking lot and there's all these 60, 70, 80 thousand dollar pickups that have never seen a lick of work, but they're manly trucks. And you see guys that look like me stepping out of them and you know, we're middle age, we got little bellies, we got that stuff, not, not doing a whole bunch of work. And yet they need that truck to feel masculinity. That's the deception. The truck, you know, they've been, they've been sold a way of getting to that. But the way the truck sounds, the way it looks, they got to be black, got to be red, they gotta have tinted windshields, all that stuff. Men, men, men, men. And all of a sudden you realize, you know, something that makes you feel manly, but it doesn't give you the kind of the discipline, the impartiality that's needed to manage uncertainty. You're still trying to manage certainty as if it was certain. No, what happens, you get the feeling of certainty, which is an emotion deception instead of the act of performance. This is where it really gets in home. Because the brain you brought trading is not going to be the one that brings success to trading. It's going to have to, it's going to have to evolve that certainty based brain of our ancestors. It has been great, it has done wonders. It allowed us to survive and to dominate the world. However, it was not built.

For survival. It was built. No, it was built for survival. It was built for control. It was built so that their species would move forward. We need to rebuild that brain so that as it approaches uncertainty, that uncertainty is decoupled from fear. In your cape man brain, your emotional brain.

Fear, uncertainty are coupled together. No matter how rational you are before you put capital at risk, the moment that you put the capital at risk, you're basically blanking out your cognitive brain, your thinking brain, and you're going back to that caveman brain. And the caveman brain is thinking about survival, it's not thinking about probability. And this, my friends, literally has to be retrained. And the question is, where do you start?

Well, where we're going to start.

Is a deeply different understanding of emotion and cognition. Because emotions are not what you Think they are.

Emotions are not psychological.

Though they will in fact, take over your psychology. Emotions are not mental, though. They take over the mind. Emotions are biological action potentials, okay, that coordinate activity between the environment that you're in, that would be the markets and trading, and the organism that you are, the trader. And every time there is a change of status in the markets, in the environment, there will automatically be an emotion, a biological action potential that fires and prepares for action on an instinctual level. You can see where. Oh, my gosh, we can get in trouble doing this. Yeah, they're firing in 0.00 seconds and are moving into action without thought. Thought comes later like a caboose, rather than saying, I'm a rational being that has some emotions. No, you're not. What you are is an emotional being, and it's in your body. Your body is the embodiment of emotion and that emotions are being triggered, literally. And if you don't believe me, sit in front of a computer screen tomorrow and watch yourself in a mirror or a video feed and watch the emotions ripple over your face and your tenseness, the strained eyes, the tenseness in your gut. And watch your breathing as it halts and panics and stuff like that. That's the emotion. That's not your breathing. That's not muscle tension. That's an emotion. It's embodied. So already we're going, wow, this is very different than what I thought. And then let's go one step further. Okay? We know that they're literally biological action potentials. And yet in this scene from Pixar's movie Inside out, you're literally looking at emotional programs that are trying to cooperate and also trying to compete with one another inside a little girl's brain. That's the control panel. What you're beginning to go, oh, my gosh, that thinking, the quality of your thinking comes out of the emotional cocktail that is there in your brain. And unfortunately, most of us haven't had very much training and actually know how to create emotional states that allow mindsets to appear that are effective for trading. So we've already gotten. Whoa. And this is where you're going to have to really change what is activated emotionally. When there is an encounter with uncertainty, that is the big deal. And like in here, what you're looking at and understand, when Picture Disney did this, they actually retained neurobiologists.

Did this film.

Yeah. And what they were doing is they were sitting there saying, tell us about how this operates, how the mind of the girl goes off and does these crazy Things and this is the way they ended up rendering them. Over there on the, on the left is anger. Next to the, next to the green, that's envy.

And disgust, really. And disgust is a very primal emotion, okay. And it's very necessary. It's needed for control. You know, when you smell something bad, it produces disgust and it teaches you to stay away. There in the middle, joy. And it's really good, but it doesn't necessarily need to lead the committee. Further to the right is anxiety. Then on the left, I mean on the right is sadness. Unfortunately, what happened this movie is that her parents would not allow the little girl to have her sadness. Her grief about moving from rural Minnesota to the Silicon Valley and sadness was just pushed away and it just started mucking up the brain and all sorts of really bad things happened. But you're literally seeing the way emotions work to bring forth mind. It's, it's one of the, one of the most important reads that when people say, randy, what should I read besides my book? Mindful reading. Mindful trading is, you know, I, this is one of those topics that I want people to watch, they want, I want to see because it will give them a really good idea of what's going on in the mind. And remember that anger is acting instinctually before thought. It's already there. When it feels threat, the aggression shows up to tamp down the threat so it's no longer a threat. Anger, okay? And remember, all thinking is emotional state dependent. Have you ever had an argument with your spouse and said some of the darndest things in the world, then the next day you woke up and says, oh my God, what have I done? I don't talk, I don't do and think things like that. Yet I did. Well, that's what, that's the power of anger. And then let's step further and I want to show you a depiction of an emotion. Over there on the left you're going to see an activating moment, okay? And basically you'll see that as stimulus. And then what you're going to see is you're going to see an emotional response time. You'll see there's an action, there's response time that's happening in the nanoseconds. And then you're seeing that emotion flare up and you're seeing it peak and just top out there and then it comes crashing down. That's the way emotions work. And if you've ever been hijacked, if you've ever said, randy, I have no idea what happened, I Was okay. And then something. My evil twin showed up and just took over. And before I knew it, disaster ensued. This is what happened. There was an activation of an emotion based on a stimulus. There was an activation moment, the emotion swirl, absolutely wiping out the kind of thinking that you need for trading. And then before. Before it started resending and going back to its status quo, to homeostasis. You've blown up your account, okay? And understand that emotion has fired in nanoseconds. Whereas if the information is even taken to the thinking brain, which you so much want, what separates us from caveman is. Takes a quarter of a second.

A lot of damage is done. The emotion's already triggered. It's already in the bloodstream. It's already altering everything. And then you're beginning to have the capacity of thinking about it. But that gets slammed out of the way that, friends, is what you're up against in trading. And it's like.

Left to your own devices, the chance of you becoming successful trader, just incredibly slim. None of the brokers want to tell you that, but that's really the truth. And then what I want you to see is this graphic because it is such a wonderful graphic about the way the cognitive thinking brain and the emotional limbic system work together. That caveman is the emotional brain, the limbic system. That driver, so modern looking, he's sitting there thinking. He's driving the brain and taking it to directions. He's in control. You know, I've got all this stuff, and I have pushed that. You know, that beast seems so. So tame back there. Okay, I've got him. I'll just ignore him. He'll finally go away because I don't need him anymore. And all of a sudden, you hit a stressful moment that triggers the emotion, and suddenly your caveman ancestor comes roaring back, taking over the mind. This is how reactions happen. They're programs, and it just simply pushes the thinking brain to the sideline. That's. That's what happens, friends.

And one last little thing on this, I want to show you what you're into.

Because if you want to master winning in trading, what I'm showing you right now is what you have to master. You have to come to where you have personal mastery of this area on the left. What you're looking for is, Is that you have a calm state of mind, okay? And what you're actually seeing is that information, data, information is coming into the. To what. What is known as the thalamus area. And it's being looked at quickly to see if there's a threat or whether not the information can be sent to the thinking brain to work. When you're in low emotions, that calmness it gets to, it doesn't activate and go to the amygdala. What it does is it, it activates into the thinking and you make calm, cool decisions. However, if the things that we've been talking about take over at this thalamus region where the information comes in, it's like an air traffic controller. That air traffic controller makes a decision about whether or not there's an urgency and danger to the incoming information. If based on past learning that there is, it never sends the information to the thinking brain at all. It sends it to the amygdala and to fight flight. Friends, this is what has to be mastered. And without mastering it, you're not going to become the winning trader you want to be. Now how do we start building, how do we start building that winning mindset? Friends, it starts with first the recognition that emotions are biological. And through bellows breathing into muscle relaxation, you can slow down the, build up the urgency, the emotion to take over. And here you're looking at like an alligator being trying to be got muzzled. Looking at the chocolate sundae, you're looking at that. There's an urgency to act. It's primitive and yet the thing is the woman is breathing, calming down and the urgency doesn't reach a point where it takes over. This is critically important. And until you can do that. And actually the first spot of my training literally is about learning to breathe diaphragmatically and release tension as you are in the urgency of trading, the uncertainty of trading. Because unless you learn that skill there, you have not learned it so that it's effective part of your trading strategy. Really important to learn to be able to breathe, to calm down when under pressure and altering it so that it doesn't crank up and just gun you down. That's the first major thing. Then as you develop that, you're also going to have to develop what I call the observer of the self. There is a witness in you that watches all this stuff going on and it's very impartial. It just sits and watches. And the thing is that that part of the self has to be ratcheted up and said, you know something? I actually need to be able to pull this so that it's a working functional tool, it's a skill so that I can observe situations stepping back out of thought, no longer identifying with them. And that's a big deal. Okay? Because as long as you're identifying with thought, thought it's, you're basically, you're gone. But as you learn to observe, step back and say, oh, these are thoughts running through my mind but I do not have to identify with them. I do not have to fuse to them. They do not have to take me away down their path. I can begin to witness without reacting to the information. That's mindfulness. Absolutely. That's the second part of our training is develop that tool so that we can look into the brain, look into the mind and start finding the beliefs that are driving your performances. Okay. And we're using, we're using the, we're using your trading account, the health of that as an indicator of the beliefs that you're projecting onto the markets. We're not, we're not taking the beliefs you say you have with all the winning Jardin. We're actually saying your beliefs that you're projecting onto the markets are being revealed in the health of your trading account. That's the whole thing. And you know, out of that.

You, what you discover is that you have to be really careful about fear but also feeling good. When you start winning. Unless you have a really well trained mind, that is a dangerous moment. It feels so good to went to win. But what it does is it also triggers overconfidence or what I call.

What do I call this? Embarrassing and missing.

It's, it's basically the pressure centers. It's dopamine kicking in, making you feel good, arousal. Okay. And it takes over and before you know it, you're making really dopey decisions. That's where it begins. So you're looking at it and going whoa. Then once we have this new setup way of being able to observe the cell, we begin to say let's take a look at that committee again. Let's start taking a look.

Yeah. Euphoria. The key is this is now we're developing the mind for trading and saying, well what, what mind do we really need there? What you're looking at here is you're beginning to look the different emotional programs no longer in cooperation with one another, they're beginning to test one another and they're becoming competitive with one another. This is what happens when you are of two minds about something. When you're having self doubt, when you're having overconfidence. You are actually looking at emotional programs being in competition and taking over for different points of time. This is what you have to learn to really truly control. You can't. What you'll discover is you can't control the outcome, but you can in fact control the mind you bring to the performance. And here what you're looking at is a mind going out of performance state. It's going into a state where there's confusion, there's competition, there's just all sorts of crazy things going on inside the head. The inner commentary about what you should do for. There's a dialogue of stay in, stay in, take more. Hey, guys, take it out, take it out. All that stuff is going on. So we're there.

And here's the thing, and it has to be so gotten is that as you learn to observe, you really, truly, as you clear that lens of your observer, you really, truly do find out that thinking is totally dependent upon the emotion. And under stress, remember that we're trading very stressful. You know, you never know what's going to happen. You're facing the challenges of living all the time. Your emotional brain sees those challenges of living as threats to life. They just don't see it as risking capital. They see it as threats to life. You begin to see, oh my God, I'm beginning to understand that I really need to control and get really zoned in on this. Because actually the key is this. The mind you trade with emerges from this community of rival programs that are duking out control. Cause what I would call mind is actually a governing board. Just like what you're looking at here, where there are competitive forces. The emotional program that have now been given voice somehow in the miracle from the brain. And as the mind emerges from it, those emotional programs take on character, they take on voice, they take on form, and they begin to have arguments, they have, they can have cooperation. But in here, you're looking at two dudes standing. You can see the confrontation going on. This is the kind of thing that's happening in your mind all the time. And this is what has to be worked with. Because as you begin to wake up and you begin to look into the mind and see the forces at play in the trading committee of the mind, what you discover, man, you discover there's a mutiny going on. There's a lot of discord, and it needs to be shaped up for success in trading. And then.

You, you'll see this happen. You'll see the intensity of this. Like, you know, you should follow your rules, but you don't. That's the trading committee, the governing committee of the self in conflict with itself. They're not on the same page. And you begin to see, wow, man, there's, there's one Part of me saying, take it, take it, do it, do it, do it. Then other parts say, no, no, man, you could lose. Don't do that. And you share this. You have this debate going on. That's the impulse. Whoever wins, particularly the urgency after you've taken some losses, you have this urgency to make up for losses or the urgency to over trade. This is becomes disastrous.

And what you'll do is you'll discover something.

There is something that I call the inner critic living in your mind. You can't help it, it's going to be there. There's no way to exercise it out from your mind. It's part the fabric of your brine and it's highly destructive. You would say it in the same way that the Chinese would say the yin yang. You know, the Cherokee Indians would say that your mind is composed of two wolves, a good one and a bad one. And ultimately the one that wins creates the destiny of your life. The Cherokee believed that it was the wolf that you fed that won. And you look at your trading account and you really, truly begin to see the wolf that won. Currently, this is where we're going, friends. And then you'll see, like for instance, behind the aggression of the alpha is the need to prove himself, to show that he matters. I want to be in control. I want to prove and usually in my business is there's guys who are real alphas. And what you discover really comes down to it. They're trying to prove to someone that's often dead their father, that they matter, that they have the stuff. And it becomes about money because money really becomes to the Olympic system becomes the symbol of your capacity to control outcome. And all of a sudden you go into, if I have a lot of money, then I'll prove I matter. That's the, that's the kind of thinking. And the truth is it becomes really, really dangerous.

Yet.

Not only is that there, but there's also. Most of my work is focused on developing heroic nature. You know, just like this iceberg. Most of what you see, most of the iceberg is not what you see. It's below the surface. It's been pushed there into what you could say the subconscious. And it's not working awareness yet within there, what you'll discover.

Is that you'll discover the elements to bill the probability base 9 needed for trading are there.

It is time that you learn to actually take those hidden strengths and to have them become working strengths. Literally in the active mind that trades under pressure. This is where it gets really interesting and the job is really about locating that heroic nature and calling it to duty. And I'm going to use the example here from Lord of the Rings. It was a beautiful archetypal movie. Basically when those emotional programs are given voice we call those. When the brain produces a symbolic representation of that, we call those archetypes. And in Lord of the Rings what you discover is the archetypes that you need. You need a ruler who has the discipline to maintain order under pressure to achieve major goals. Eragon, you need the wisdom of a sage that has the understanding to advise that ruler about how to go forward and to move forward. That would be guess who? Ganondorf. You also need, you need a warrior. Not just tough and tumble, the ones, the ones that accompany the king, but you also need a warrior of the interior. You need someone who knows the wars within himself. You also need the ability to have self compassion to calm things down, to get to a better mind. The caregiver. All those qualities are located in your brain and then in your mind.

They'Re there. I have a specialized process of where I use a process called memory reconsolidation to get at those emotional programs and pull them into working awareness. I don't use affirmations and visualizations that tend to fall apart under stress. But the memory work and finding the emotional memories works incredibly well. And ultimately what you end up with though is the challenges of engaging uncertainty going to always be there because you're never going to know what's going to happen but what you're looking for. And I want you to think about George Washington. If you're an American and have any idea he's crossing the Delaware pre dawn with a rag hatted army and he's about to attack a mercenary army who's still sleeping. It's an enormous surprise attack and it's the only hope that they had. Those men are taking a look at George Washington and realizing that he provides the leadership that they believe in are willing to die for. You also see the warriors.

You see them ready to fight, to protect the boundaries and to create the vision of the United States. There's also the sage sitting back there would be the French giving them really good advice about how to deal with the British. But you also find that Washington has a great stabilizing effect over a ragtag group of guys fighting the world's greatest army. And what you see is that organization happens. George Washington did not want to become the father of this nation. But he felt compelled to risk a fortune to lead this group and to bring forth A very different vision of the mind of America. This is what you can do literally with the mind that you're bringing to trading. The one that's not fit doesn't mean that it's wrong. It just means that it needs to be recalibrated, it needs to be retrained for functioning in a different environment. You're no longer in the environment of certainty where if there's a breakdown in certainty, you probably die and become somebody's dinner. You're working in the realm of probabilities, where you know that there'll be losses, you know that there'll be winners. It's really just all game of probabilities. If you maintain order of the self as you trade, you control the performance of the mind that you bring into the moment. That is where the deal's at, friend.

And the real question is, are you willing to redevelop your leadership style? Are you willing to really say you know something? There are areas. And one of the hardest things for men is to find that self soothing, that caregiver that dwells within them. They want to be tough, they want to be sharpened. Yet compassion is required to remold the mind to be able to trade in probabilities has to be there. And all these sections are there. But the real question is, are you willing to develop that mind? Are you willing to conclude from the past and move to the future? And here's the deal. After all this is over.

What winning really is, is your performance.

Winning literally is performing incredibly well, whether or not you win or lose. In my work, you congratulate yourself for performing well, not for winning or losing. You never had control either of those. But you did have control over your performance. That's the deal. You're always in a chess match, always. You never are in control of the outcome. Things happen. And yet what is in control is the person who's moving that chess piece. That's the person who control his performance. And this is what you can. And it's not like winning is not about making money. Winning is about performing well. Winning is just landing on the right side of probability. Nothing to get excited about. Losing is simply landing on the wrong side of probability. Nothing to get shameful about. It's the performance that mattered. You measure performance, friends, you maintain the performance sign. Then your edge that you have in methodology is able to extract more capital out of the markets than it gives in. That's it, friends. So how do you become the change? Well, I would like to invite you to one of two things is one Is our group course. Now, the group course, it's about to start later this month is already full. Our next group course is June 10th. And yeah, the first meeting. And basically what happens is that you need a month's advance notice or two months advance work to be prepared for the first day of meeting. When you work with me, the first meeting is not the first meeting. The first meeting is where we're going over material that you've already been assigned and we're talking about it and working with it, and then we're moving on. People who show up late to my group courses find themselves behind. And the group courses, I'm teaching you these skills that produce this possible. And usually it's really. It's mind altering. Is that you. It's. It's not exactly what you think you're beginning to. Oh, my God. I had no idea this was going on inside my head. Boy, I had no idea. And so what we encourage you to do is to sign up early and get ready for it because it's going to be at a torrid pace. And if you haven't done the work for the first meeting, you're already about two or three weeks behind.

So what we do is we offer a free.

Emotional regulation workshop, and you can buy it for a couple hundred bucks on our website. But we have. We want to give it to you free for starting early, not for signing up for starting early. Because we know that you'll be better prepared. That's what we want. So I have a website there where you can go to a spot on the website where you can learn more about that group course. And also if you're looking, saying, randy, is that all you got? No, the first thing, if you don't know about me very much, go to the website, start reading, start watching my videos, start really exploring. There's a lot of free stuff. There's a free ebook, there's all sorts of stuff. Get it. And then you might want to read my book, Mindful trading. But then as you go up and you realize, okay, Randy's defining the problem, but what happened? To solve the problem, I really have to get a hold of the intellectual technology that he's using to produce this. Yeah, and we also, besides the group course, we have a individual course that lasts over three or four months, is much more, much more intricate, much more personal and comprehensive than the group course. But it, you know, it's a. It's a very different animal, and most people end up wanting it because it comes with 10 consults with me. Okay? And if you're interested in that and you're seriously considered, after you go through this and really explore and read about it on the. On the website, we'll be happy to talk to see if it's a good fit between you and where you're at in your life and us, whether or not we. We're comfortable with you learning. Take a look at it, friends. Okay. Take a look at it. So. Questions? I have finished. I really appreciate it. I just. I get jazzed about this stuff and I just really great talking about it. But if you have questions, please, please let me know.

Look at that. Doris is learning.

The blue box. Okay. Hi, Randy. Happy belated Easter. Amen. I tell you something. Bless you and your loved ones. Your webinars has helped me a lot to be aware of my shortcomings as a human being. I just say your current organization of potential when dealing with the randomness of markets. To be frank, I don't know if my forex over trading is actually a gambling addiction. I fund my account, see 500% gains and then blow my account up in a single day. There you go. That's euphoria. That's your overconfidence. You're just tricking right into that by over leveraging and over trading. I'm not necessarily wrong and have a very good understanding of the markets. You got caveman drain. You're not taken care of. Market fundamentals. But over leveraging and over trading is a habit I can't seem to shake off. And you're trying to do it by yourself. Yeah, that's a good. That's, That's a good way to end up staying there. I'm certainly sign up for your. Your coach. Oh, once I get my company bonus, I certainly sign up to your coaching session. So far all my income goes to funding my account. I'm so sorry. Every month only to see it blow up. Buy and hold strategies just don't seem to work in forex.

Well, I'm glad you understand. You have a problem. And what I want you to recognize is start noticing that winning triggers a sense of euphoria and it takes you out of the trader state of mind. And suddenly you start just. You start trading from lust rather than from discipline impartiality. And there is no emotion other than discipline impartiality that needs to be present in an expert trader's mind. And what you're telling me is I haven't developed the discipline. I haven't developed the capacity to not to want to recognize that feeling good is Dangerous.

Does the group course content change with each class or does the curriculum stay the same? I've got your book and work. Oh, that's a different thing. Oh no, the curriculum stays the same. So does the curriculum in my. In my individual course. And besides that, people who are a member of my of groups, they can end up taking the course again. We call it auditing for free. And you also have access to the virtual classrooms virtually indefinitely. So a lot of people will go through it. Then they go back and you See People from 10 years ago coming back and studying Bunning back up, getting this stuff together and going, boy, I've forgotten all this. I need to restructure myself. So I've got your book and your work. Glove them both. Yeah. That a lot of people have found great success with that. They get a couple of the retail guided meditations. They put that together and they have. They. They end up with a pretty darn inexpensive way of training. And I get comments all the time that it's been, it's been. It's been a turnaround for them.

Where do I get your book from? Only our website right there. Www.traderstateofnine.com is. I long ago quit thinking that I should fund the. Fund different people and get a dollar per book. I decided that we needed to be able to do better. And I know that I don't hit the volume that other people do, but it satisfies my sense of control.

When would you open a course for non traders? I really enjoy the psychology of your training. I would like to apply your method. Still want to take your course? I get the gist. Here's what. First of all, I'm in the process right now. We're finishing my new book and it's about opening the door to your potential and realizing it. And it's not for traders at all. It's for people who are working with self development because what I have people working with me that we don't talk. We don't. The goal is not trading. It's really. It's either business or it's different areas of their lives that they're improving. So. But the new. The new courses that will be coming UP under Randy Howell.com will be more. Much better be more oriented toward general self development rather than. Yeah, it's not ready yet. We've just giving birth to this thing has been. Let's just say it's been pretty challenging while you're getting a heart transplant and stuff like that. Okay. This is James.

Randy did not. Oh oh. The Blue.

Where are we?

Okay, well that's what I was trying to read. Oh good. Highly recommend the individual training if you can swing it. And Randy did not pay me to say this. James is a client of mine. Okay. And, and check out the site. Yeah. Bless you Randy and Dolores. Yeah. And by the way, you will hear this voice coming in and out of conversations correcting me and stuff like that. That is my wife Dolores and she's the smart one in our family. Okay. So. And she did not pay me to say that. Oh, hi Randy. Great webinar. If one wants to take your individual course. Do you offer coaching beyond that? Yes, I do. And would there be a copy of this webinar on your website? Yes. Sometime tomorrow, you know, Dolores will send out stuff and tell people at 4 o' clock in the morning that it's there, but it will get there probably about 10. 10 o'. Clock. Okay. Hi, Mr. Howell. I prefer Randy. I live in Brazil. Trading is not a very common profession here. Yes, I understand that. Viewed as gambling or a job for lazy people. I've been trading for five years now. Actually getting worse at it. I've already read your book and still don't know what's wrong and how to diagnose my problem and, and evaluate progress. First of all, I so respect you. I've never had a client out of Brazil and I found out why is that My individual course is about the course about the cost of a car to a Brazilian. I understand. And it's one of those things when you're all over the globe.

You know, if we can't make money, if we start lowering our prices because we live in the States and we have the cost of living, we have all that kind of stuff. The thing is, is that what I, if, if you have my book, what you're looking at is this is really easy. You do not have to, you don't have to make this rocket science. It's, it's right in front of your face. There are five self owning beliefs that drive your performances and whether or not you're making money or losing money. The first is a sense of inadequacy. I'm just not good enough. The second is a, is a, is a sense of mattering. I have to, if I make a lot of money then I'm going to matter. I'll be able to show people that I'm the dude. That's what most alphas are, a sense of unworthiness. I don't deserve, I don't deserve this kind of money. Scarcity thinking, I think I'm going to lose whatever I risk. What I have is going to be taken from me. And powerlessness. When I get into things where I'm confronted by uncertainty, I feel powerless to do anything. I can't control outcome. No, you can't. You can only control yourself. That's the only five you need to look at. Let's not make this rocket science. Start looking at it from that lens and understand that your trading account is your teacher. It's the only friend that you have in trading. Your broker loves you because you keep trading and he gets a cut. But here, the thing is, you're looking at that. It's revealing to you what beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty that you're projecting onto the markets. Look in those five distinctions and you'll find your problem. Okay, Just started reading your book and checking out your website. Good. Great work. Thank you. Thanks for your work and a great webinar. Thank you.

Would traders who have taken your group course also benefit from taking your upcoming course for non traders? Or would the essential information have already been learned? The essential information is already going to be learned. I'm going to be doing. The work that I'm doing in my new company is evolved beyond what I teach. This work. Okay. I'm, I'm literally teaching you how to take off a. Basically a limbic learning, Take it down and experience your being and then taking that, that limbic learning back and beginning to compare it side by side and deciding whether or not you actually want to maintain that limbic learning, that implicit belief, or whether or not you want it to dissolve into the infinity of life. There's a lot more there than is in my current work because I have to work a very clean. Yeah. Anyway, Randy, can we jump straight to the individual course?

Okay. What I'll say is this, is that.

I have an incredibly full schedule and if you want they. Yeah, sure. You know, to me, ultimately, when it comes down to it, that's the best course of action and in two years you won't be able to do it. So I can understand why people want to do that. And what I, what I need you to understand is that it's pretty full.

And you need to be, you need to be flexible.

For. Because we're, we're going to be, we're going to be meeting together on Skype. On Skype. Right now I'm trying to learn zoom. But the thing is we're going to be talking 10 times at least on video in the course. In the course. And Everybody in The world wants 4:30 Eastern Standard Time. And it just so happens there's only, there's only four of those slots. I could, if, if I could make everything Thursday afternoon at 4:30, I, I could mint money. But the thing is, is, yeah, I wouldn't say jumping straight into the individual course is impulsive. I would say it just absolutely.

If you're flexible, we can do it. Okay. And it's something where the learning process is powerful. So yeah, it's a possibility.

See.

Okay. Thank you for your reply. I read your articles on your website, even though I'm not a trader and I appreciate it. Thank you. I actually appreciate that. And to be honest with you, the major thing.

Several years ago a guy was talking to me and said, Randy, I want to thank you. You've made me a lot of money.

And I knew that it was set as a compliment to me, but it just got in my craw and there was just something wrong. And I, and I had this dream where I was looking at my epitaph, my gravestone. And the gravestone epitaph was Randy made me a lot of money. And man, it just didn't, it didn't settle with me really well. And then I had another experience of where words just came to me out of the blue, very loud inside my head that said free the prisoners as you have been freed. And that started the embarkment toward working toward the self development market. I needed to go to a more expansive group of people that I could communicate with and teach what I've learned over my lifetime. And out of that we got way late there. I, I don't know if you guys know, but I had, I am now a year away from having a heart transplant, having had a heart transplant and I was, I was in, I was a sick puppy for before then and I'd had this plan but you know, when you, when you, when your heart's failing, it's really hard to get up and got the energy and stuff like that. And I'm now fully back, I'm fully engaged and I have a, almost feel like a 30 year old again. I do have a 30 year old heart and it's coming, you know, and I.

We'Re working hard on it. Okay. It's just, it is, it's, it's proving to be a pregnancy and delivery that's a little complicated. I want to thank you people, this has been fun. You've asked really great questions and you've shown the kind of interest that I'm looking for in people and recognize that. Yes. You're interested in recognizing. You know something? This is about how do I develop tools where I can change my head and I can. By changing how my brain interprets the reality out there, it can change my destiny. And fundamentally, that's what we're looking to do. We're not. We're not here to make people money. What we're doing is we're hearing to help people produce self mastery. And I want to thank you for being here tonight. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I wish all of you.

Just a great time with your life and that you just appreciate the gift that you've been given here. Life is a miracle. Enjoy it. Take care, my friends. It.