Building the Trading Mind from the Inside Out

I'm often asked, Randy, I've read a lot of your stuff, I've seen the videos and I'm really interested. But you know something? What's not explained is what actually happens in these courses. What's so different in those courses that makes such a difference in the way that you can redevelop your mind? And I've heard that enough so that I want to explain that I think everybody deserves it and they need to understand that this is a change process. It's not magic. It first starts with a very radical different understanding of the mind. It starts with an understanding that the mind really first comes out of the brain. And the brain is organized for short term survival, self preservation in the short term. That would be control of outcome in trading. And it would be the sense of not wanting to lose. That's what you would see. And it's everything about certainty that's the mind, whether or not you like it or not, by default programming that you're bringing into trading. And it's not going to work. That's why people, no matter how smart they are, no matter how accomplished they are in other venues where control of outcome is a real honest to God game changer. When you bring that same skill into trading, it's not the rule's uncertainty. And as long as you're bringing default programming of certainty of trying to control outcome and default programming of self preservation, you're going to fall apart in crisis moments and clutch moments in trading. That's the first big phenomenal thing, is that it's not psychological to begin with, it's biological. Then you're going, okay. The biological system is also built around emotion. The emotion is causing you to act, causing you to do. And it's going to happen in nanoseconds. It's going to happen precognition, okay? If you understand that, you begin to realize, well, well, the first thing I've got to do if I understand this is emotional programs that's firing and hijacking my thinking mind that I'm trying to trade with. You begin to recognize the first order of business is how do you go about controlling those emotions. I teach an emotional regulation schedule. It is stress inoculation. It's built upon that model. And it's literally about diaphragmatic breathing. It's about tension reduction. And it starts in the classroom, what I call the yoga studio, and then it moves into.

Trading room, okay? Where everything's live, everything's real, everything's risk, everything's uncertain. Ultimately you learn the skills of Diaphragmatic breathing of tension reduction in the yoga studio. But then you begin to immediately start applying them while you're trading, that's the big thing. And we'll spend two or three weeks doing that where you're learning to learn to literally bring emotion up, disrupt emotion. And you're learning how to say, okay, I can't control the firing of an emotion, but I can certainly control the intensity. And you're learning it in the environment that you're going to be practicing it in. If you are not learning the skill in the environment, then you're not learning the skill where you need it. You can stay in the yoga studio all you want, but when you try to apply it to the trading world where there's open combat, then you lose the skill. That's the first thing. And that literally, you're literally learning how to practice that, to do that, to maintain calmness through breath and tension reduction while you trade. And you're going to start noticing that. Man, oh man, oh man. The default programming has been taking you for a ride. That's why it takes two or three weeks to start. The second thing is I'm teaching observation or what we call mindfulness, where you're becoming aware of becoming aware. And literally what I'm doing, not only am I teaching you to slow things down, to step back out of thought, but then what I'm teaching you how to do is to start taking this noise that's running in your brain, in your mind, start making sense of it. That's the power of this is all of a sudden you realize all that noise literally is the emotional programs of the brain being given voice at thoughts in your mind. What I teach you over a period of another two or three weeks is who's doing the talking in your head, okay? You have to be able to discern.

The emotional program as thought form while you're trading. And you have to learn to go, okay, the first thing I'm going to do, through observation, through mindfulness, I'm going to discover what part of the self is doing the talking, what part is actually doing it while I'm beating myself up, while I'm losing control, what parts of me, what parts of my mind are in control and where we start. After you learn the basic skill of mindfulness, where you go, oh my God, I had no idea. You mean my thoughts and I are not the same? Not at all. Not at all. You and your beliefs are not the same. And what you learn in this program is that all you are is one potential Organization of a self that these basic emotional programs put you in order as if you've seen the movie Inside Out. You see this dynamic of these emotional programs organizing the mind of a young girl. Same thing happens in a trader's mind. What you're learning to do in this program is to discern those programs that are creating the mind. You're trading with powerful stuff. It's no longer, oh, my God, what's happening. You know what's happening. No, no, no, no. You have a very precise understanding what's going on inside the Committee of the Mind. It starts there, where you're beginning to find the fear state, what I would call the orphan state within you. And the inner critic, that's the part where you're being criticized. You have that judgment, the part of you that says you're not going to make it, you really don't matter, you can never handle it. And the part that says, oh, my God, oh my God, oh my God, what's happening to me? What's happening to me? I'll never make it. Those parts, you turn toward those. And that takes a lot of the work. You, you have to use all the skills that you've learned from the emotional regulation and the observation, not to just turn and run from, oh, my God, this is really uncomfortable. I've been avoiding this all my life, and now I have to decide whether or not I'm going to learn to become a traitor and turn toward this discomfort or whether I'm going to turn away from it and continue this landslide. That's the big ticket. However, once you learn that, you have to develop the skills to be able to turn toward that discomfort. And that's what we call taking emotional enrichment. Where you're going to find these emotional programs that when put together, create a mind that can manage probability. That's the trick, friends. I use a special process that is, you know, it's proprietary information of where. I use a process in psychology called memory restructuring. Where in neurobiology, what you discover is memory really is fluid. There's no such thing as a solid state or video memory. Your brain literally is taking an experience and coding it based on the belief system you are and the observer you are into a particular memory. What we're doing is we're taking memories of where you were challenged and were able to work through fear. And we're finding the discipline, we're finding the courage, we're finding, we're finding the self soothing and the impartiality that allowed you to handle that situation differently. This takes A while you're using guided meditations, you're using instruction to be able to get at that and finally see the distinctions that allow you to summon that piece forward. Because ultimately in memory enrichment, what you're doing is you're getting at the feeling component, the emotion, the chemistry of the emotion, and you're intentionally provoking that into working awareness. When you do that, you have created the emotional cocktail that creates the kind of thinking you're capable of. And what we're aiming at here is producing the cocktail that produces a probability based mindset rather than a certainty based mindset. From there, what I'm doing is I'm teaching you how to teach how to take these emotional programs and symbolically represent them with symbols of heroes that you may know in your mind and then organize them into what I would call the A team where you're beginning to organize and you realize, you know something. I can show up and challenge with any old mind that happens to show up that day, or I can be intentional about the mind that is going to show up to manage uncertainty. Because here's the trick, friends. What you discover is that you never had control of outcome. Never. That was an illusion. Most people want to make money and they put that as a target and they lose because they're so focused on making money that they're not seeing the one thing that they can control. Trying to make money is trying to control outcome. What you can control and what you're taught in this course is that you can control the mind that you bring to the performance, performance of trading. I teach you how to do that. You're in uncertainty, no doubt about that. The challenges of trading and uncertainty are there. But what you ultimately do is you're learning through both guided meditations and teaching and by learning in the yoga studio. Okay, where you're going and you're going, okay, I'm experiencing this, I'm experiencing this. I'm learning how to organize this mind under pressure and then I'm taking it into the real life arena of trading. I'm learning how to do that and I'm taking notes. I have special logs that you use to do all this stuff with. And you're learning how to build the stamina that allows you to have a disciplined, impartial mind that you bring to the management of uncertainty. That's the power. So ultimately what you're also learning besides all that, and now we've gotten into like four to six weeks of work here, what we're learning now is to produce an intentional mind. You Begin to realize, no. What happens is you spent your life just showing up with whatever mind that your history gave you. That's that original default programming that the brain produced to produce a self that could survive in an environment. Now what you're doing is you're intentionally building a mind that can manage uncertainty, not outcome, uncertainty. That's the trick. That's the edge. So you've become intentional about the mind that you're going to bring to trading. Then what you learn powerfully is the micromanagement of trading. Where you're going in and you're saying, okay, there are certain moments in the trading cycle that I start losing my stuff. I have a tendency to lose my stuff in these areas. Well, what we do is we start using programming that teaches you how to alter the particular cocktail that produces the mind. Going into those moments, you're not catching yourself once you've already got a problem. You're catching yourself long before you enter the problem. So you have a mind very well suited to peak performance. That's how you do it. You start with all these skills, add and fold one another. You learn with the emotional regulation skills. And again, that may take, you know, it may be a month before I see a person when they're learning that skill. You learn those skills, you demonstrate them, and then you learn the next skill, mindfulness. You demonstrate the skill under pressure. Then you move forward and you go, now I'm going to demonstrate the skill of being able to turn toward what I call the historical internal dialogue. That's the one causing all the problems. And you learn to tolerate it, turn toward it, and realize this is just one organization of the self. Then what you're learning is how to take this. Take this emotional programs of the mind and reorganize them and put them into fighting formation for the management of uncertainty. Suddenly you're not using the old mind anymore. You're using the mind that can manage probability. Once you've done that, you turn toward the challenge. And it's not like you go off into the sunset and live happily ever after. No, what you do is you realize it's always going to be a struggle. And you have built a mind for that struggle. Just like a tennis player, just like a chess player realizes he's going to have to struggle and maintain the skills. That's what you're doing now. And then the last skill that I teach is vigilance, where you realize, okay, I've got it together now. I'm just going to let it go. I've got it all together. No. What happens is the only thing that separates you is that you have found a way to produce a process that gets you into that mind. You are not better. What happens if you learn how to build a mind that engages that uncertainty? That's what makes it different. And that's what has to be every day, all the time. That's it. Friends, I really appreciated your time and it is time to go. And I want you to look at the article and I'd love for you to take a look at the. The workshop coming up. Thank you and have a great one.