Controlling Your Emotions

Have you ever gone on tilt just at the wrong time? It was looking good. At the same time, it came to that moment and suddenly, just when you need a solid, stable mind tilt, you get hijacked. And before you know it, not only has the trade left you, but it's taken you too. Now, the deal is, is what you've just experienced is emotional hijacking. And the question is, what is causing this?

A lot of it at the very core is really about what you think of about success. Most people that I work with have a formula for success that they have, they have been using for generations and generations and even before them. And it's simple, it's called hard work. Lots of it equals success. So what happens when they get into trading? And you know, these people have produced success in other areas of their life. So that formula, hard work, hard work in, success out, okay, that's the formula. And so they get into trading, they start making mistakes and they say, okay, this just requires hard work. I'm going to do it again. I'm not a quitter. I'm going to do this, I'm going to make it happen. And then what happens is three or four years later, they're still stuck in there trying to get that formula for success, hard work in, success out to work. It's worked so good in the past, why not now? Well, the truth is.

That formula may work in a regular whirl. Trading is a highly specialized world where one big factor hangs over the trader. No matter how much you work, no matter how much you huff and puff, you do not have control over outcome. You do not.

And that success formula of hard work in, success out depends on that. By working hard, you control the outcome in trading, you're working hard, it's just going to repeat, repeat, repeat the pattern over and over again and you keep tilting. And every time that you follow that success formula and you work hard and then get bopped in the face by another loss and you start developing a reactive pattern, okay? It wants to avoid or it wants to jump through that hoop really fast so that it doesn't have to experience the loss or just the out of controlness. And yet the more you resist it, the more it persists. I cannot tell you how many people, particularly alphas, they come in, they've used that old success formula really well. It has made them a lot of money. They get into trading and they're used to making things happen. They're used to winning. They want to, you know, they want to get to the goal now and so they sit there and they're in a trade and they're sitting, they're waiting, they're waiting. And what happens is they start getting agitated. They don't like boredom, they don't like patience, they don't like watchful wakefulness. And they're sitting there and they're sitting there and they got to get the goal. They got to get the goal. They got it. You know, I've done all this hard work, I'm going to have success. That's their thinking. Meanwhile, what happens with all that agitation and you're moving from boredom into like doing something else is suddenly you start looking around, then you start looking into other possibilities. You might say even a market that you don't ever follow. There, you're there, you jump in, and all of a sudden you didn't even know you did, you were just avoiding the boredom.

The deal is, if you're going to be successful in trading, you're going to have to reinterpret boredom. You know, the cougar, an apex predator in North America. If you look at the cougar hunting, what you'll see is this big cat, you know, 225, 250 pounds, sitting up in a tree.

Waiting patiently. You might even look at it and think that it's asleep. And yet it understands the white tailed deer is going to fall into a pattern eventually. And what it knows is if it sits there patiently waiting there, will a deer show up there? And so he waits. He waits, he waits. And when that deer shows up, he just drops down from 15, 20ft, snaps the neck, and there is just no danger at all. But he patiently waited to see what the forest would give it. That's an apex hunter. It's not a stalker like the African lion. But what I want you to see, that success formula that you bring is not working. Suddenly it's going to have to get updated. It's going to have to get updated to something that was really about potentiality. You live in a world of possibility. You live in a world of potential. In trading, that trade may or may not go your way. That's why you have a stop, that's why you have a plan. Because what you've done is you found an edge in the probability that allows you to extract more capital out of the markets than you give back in. But that is so far removed from the old success formula that drives most of the world. Hard work in, success out is that when you do all that hard work, you're expecting success. And what we're Saying is that the whole thing is don't bring that attitude into trading. It has been the failing of many a powerful alpha businessman, okay? He thinks he's going to make things happen and he's done it before. So he knows, he knows he's going to win and all he has to do is get with it and then it blows up because that's not the way trading is structured. Trading, hard work means nothing in trading. The coordination of effective action does though.

And to do that, you're going to have to build a patient mind that waits for what the markets are going to give you. Not what you want to take, not what you want right now and to achieve your goal.

Matter of fact, in trading, you know, I hear about all the time, I'm going to make this money, I'm going to go make some money, I'm going to do this. They're already setting themselves up for failure because they do not control whether or not they win or lose yet they're saying, I'm going to make some money.

The truth is you don't have control over that. You don't have control over whether you win, make money or lose, push back capital into the markets. What you have control over is the mind that you bring into that performance, okay? It's not the winning and losing, it's the mind you bring there that can patiently wait, patient, patiently execute your rules, okay? To extract your edge. That's what wins in trading, okay? So emotional control, what I want you to do, if you're having problems with emotional control, just take a look and just say, what, what, what success formula am I using here? Is it the hard work in, success out that maybe have helped you tremendously in another time, in another place? Or are you looking at it and saying, you know something? Trading does not respond to the rest of the world. Trading has its own unique set of parameters of rules for success and that you're going to have to decide whether or not you're going to have to abandon while trading those particular rules about hard work. Because you get into hard work and you go into trading, they don't mix, they don't mix, they're going to create problems for you. Again, what happens is it is a, it is a disciplined, it is a patient, it is a clear thinking mind that you're looking for. It's not goal oriented, it's performance oriented. Now it just so happens that if you perform well and you, which you can control you and you have an edge, then what happens is it's going to extract the Capital that you're seeking with minimal input back in. So there you go. The thing is, what I'm asking you to do is to really take a look at it and say, you know, what formula am I using? Does it say the hard work of 10,000 hours is going to make me successful? No. The hard work of 10,000 hours. You might know trading really well, but you have not developed the emotional skills to be able to build the mind that engages all that uncertainty. You're wired for fight flight. When you experience uncertainty, what we're saying is, no, you have to use another motivation. And in biology it's not fight flight, it's approach. You're going to have to have the curiosity. You're going to have to go, you know, I'm not in power of this. What I'm in power of is the mind that I bring into this performance. Can I execute well? Not whether or not I'm going to win or lose.

Execute well. You do that, you have found out what the work in trading that produces success.

Very few people ever figure this out. And you see plenty of people after five years giving up and they've blown all their capital and stuff like that because they walked in and maintained a hard work mentality to produce success. And they didn't realize that that is just fatal flaw in trading. It's a probability mindset of where you don't control outcome, you control again the mind that you bring there and you train yourself to maintain that mind that produces a flawless performance.

You do that, that's the psychological edge that drives your success, drives the edge in your methodology that produces more success. Friends, come learn more. Come figure out how to produce this mind. It's not hard. It's something that is very different. It's like from an alien universe and you have to learn to adapt it and you have to learn so it becomes habituated in the way you respond to all things. Not just in trading, but in life. And that's what you discover when you develop this attitude, is that you're more prepared to engage the challenges of living okay than you ever were and from a more powerful way of being in the world. Come and learn, Watch more videos, come read articles, take a look at all the stuff on our website and start really educating yourself about, oh, I need to shift my success formula from the certainty of winning hard work to the probability and where you're managing the mind that manages that probability completely different. Good luck, friends. Come and learn. Come and learn. Thank you.

Sa.