Controlling Your Emotions Under Pressure

You're in control until the moment you're not, until that pressure gets real. Then all of a sudden, all that careful planning, all that stuff you do, just flies out the window. Why is that? You know, the thing is, is you study hard, you have invested heavily, you've learned a skill set that most can actually make money when the money's not real. But when that money becomes real, something you can lose, all of a sudden, it gets down deep inside you and something occurs that, honestly, traders don't understand. They don't understand what's going on. They have a tendency to think that, oh, I can handle this. These are emotions. I can just take those feelings and push them away or barge through them, or I can do something and learn to master them by pushing them around, by ignoring them. But the truth is, it doesn't work that way. It may have worked that way before you got into trading. You might been able to, like, man up on something and push hard and work hard and say, I can do this. And with every bit of the rigor in you, you were able to produce that. Yeah, that's a different world than trading. In trading, the model is really about probability. And you don't have a brain built for probability. You have a brain built to produce certainty, to be right, to win, and not to lose. That's what I refer to as the caveman brain. And the reason you can't trade the way you can when the money's not real is. Is because that emotional brain, the caveman brain, does not tell the difference between money, which it doesn't understand, and life and death. When you're in a situation and that trade goes against you, and it goes past your soft stop, and you're doing everything you can not to lose. I'll give it some more room. You are playing out a drama that began about at least six and a half million years ago. Where to caveman, when he was in a fight, if he lost, that means he got consumed. He was dead. And so you can see the urgency, the problem. That's the emotional brain. Very few traitors ever get themselves to be emotionally intelligent and start integrating what is going on in the thinking brain, which they think is reality. You know, it produces all this cognition, all this thinking, all this stuff. The problem is it doesn't even see this powerful beast living within it. The emotional brain, the caveman brain, it's instinctive. And what you're doing, when you put pressure on yourself in training, you're triggering the instincts of that caveman ancestry years, and it's popping up to fight flight. The thinking brain never saw it coming. It's incapable of that. It doesn't. It has language centers where the emotional brain doesn't have language centers. It doesn't have thought. It has movement. I mean, understand, emotion is defined e out of motion, action out of the body. It's all action oriented. And it's not built to think first under stress. It's built to immediately go and either attack or avoid the threat in front of you. And that's the problem. We don't see that and it bites us at the very time we need to be there. So the first real thing is what do you think an emotion is? Okay, they're constantly dominating your thought. They're taking over a good trading plan that knows how to execute an edge and then blowing that out and all of a sudden you're a bucking horse and a burning barn just like that. That's emotion. Now what is it? Well, there's a couple of definitions that are interesting from neurobiology. One is any deviation from a standard sensorial pattern, okay? And if you're looking at your charts and you're seeing that thing go up, there's all sorts of stimulations. There are all sorts of perturbations going on, which means you're triggering two emotions. The question is which one dominates, which one takes over. The closer you get lost or the more you want to win, to feed the crowd or all that, that's what's happening to you. So another definition that I use, an emotion is a biological action potential that coordinates action between the environment, the markets and you. The organism, the trader, by there being a change in status in the market. By definition, an emotion is going to merge. It triggers the thinking brain, never saw it coming. This is all instinctual. This is all automatic. It is all familiar pattern. The last one to find out about this is your thinking brain. Meanwhile, we're taught to believe that we're thinking creatures. We're not. We're emotional creatures who think that thinking from a neurobiological standpoint is a behavioral output. Okay? The thinking and then the behavior are linked together. But the thing is, the emotion was there first and pops open. So the key is what you really need to get, whether or not you like it or not, whether or not you could ignore it before trading or after, is that emotions dominate thinking. All thinking is emotional state dependent. And what you're looking at with your performance and your P and L statement, you're looking at your beliefs, your emotional beliefs about your ability to manage Uncertainty. And if you had caveman ancestors.

Those beliefs are going to crash under stress. They're going to go to fight flight, they're going to feel threatened and either move to avoid or to attack the source of that threat. That's what's happening in your trading. How do you go about working with this? First of all, by recognizing that the mind, the brain that you brought to trading, built around that caveman model brain, is just not going to produce the kind of success you believe is possible in trading. That's the bottom line. You've been able to force your will. You've been able to do a lot of stuff in a different environment. A lot of people have been very successful in corporate careers and business careers. And then they get to trading, try to use the same success formula, and it blows up in their face. That's because the worlds are different. The probability mind is what trading is all about. That's the antithesis of what your survival caveman brain is built for, though. So if you want to produce consistent profitability, if you want to find emotional control, you're going to have to go back and acknowledge that instinctual emotional brain that you brought from your caveman ancestors is prime center the moment stress happens. And you're going to have to learn, what am I going to do with it? And if you understand the way an emotion works. We've talked about the definition of an emotion, but the very first stage, when it pops open, there's an arousal moment where it's revving up, revving up, getting ready for action. And it could be immediate. It can bypass thinking very easily. Okay, then what happens is there's a motivation. That motivation is telling the emotion which way to go. Attack, avoid, approach. We want an approach to maintain order of the mind in trading. But we are built for fight, flight. Okay, from our caveman ancestor. So the motivation is telling what to go to go. And then the feeling after a direction of the emotion has been established, and then after it's revved up, it reaches a critical mass moment where boom, suddenly a trigger is opened in that emotion is flooding through your brain, flooding through your body.

As chemistry. You're cooked at that moment. Your brain just got taken out, and suddenly it is serving this emotional brain. It's no longer pretending like it's in charge. It's not. So you're looking at that and going, okay, how do I deal with that? We've talked about, hmm, okay, there's arousal, there's motivation, there's feeling, but there's also predisposition that's what I call evolutionary psychology. That's the genetic temperament you bring. And you're going to bring it from ancient survival strategies, not probability based mind. You're going to have to work on that. You're going to have to work around that to be able to stop it from activating that survival instinct, from activating and taking over mind when under stress. The last one is belief. Okay, Believe me, your P and L, it's telling you the effectiveness of the beliefs you have really at the very deep ends about your ability to manage uncertainty. Okay? And most find in trading those beliefs are not effective, they're going to have to change. Where do you start? You start with acknowledging an emotion's biological. And you start using your breathing as part of biology. You start using your muscle tension and relaxation to interrupt the process of that emotion. If you're diaphragmatically breathing, it's very hard to go into fight flight. But most of the traders I work with, when I first start working with them, they're either holding their breath or they're very shallow breathing. They're a target, a sitting duck for an emotional hijacking. And, and they don't even know it because of their ignorance about emotion and how to use emotion. Now. So we've gotten to that point, we said, okay, we need to learn how to disrupt and control the intensity of emotion. We also need mindfulness to be able to step back out of our thoughts as if they were us and to come to a profound insight. You and your thoughts, you and your beliefs are not the same. What beliefs really are, are assessment made by the brain about its capacity to manage itself in the environment. Once it finds a perceptual way of managing that.

Neither good nor bad, it locks into it. And suddenly that becomes a limbic belief. And when you add cognition on top of that, that big, huge thinking brain of ours, it becomes a belief, a subconscious belief. And all of a sudden you're going, okay, those are the ones I got to get at. Mindfulness is used to step back to observe and to begin to open the door of the mind and begin to see who in the heck is in charge of that mind of yours. When you get under pressure, it's not the good guys, I promise you. It's going to be the bad guys, the ones that want to blow up things from there. What you have to do is you have to learn that the mind is really more like a board committee that manages a company called you and that there is no permanent you. This thing called you is actually One potential organization of your potential into a self that got locked in by your emotional brain. And you've been in the fallacy of thinking, oh, that's me. No, it's not. It is just simply one organization of a potential self. What we want to do is go in and see the ones that have locked in and we want to disrupt that. And what we want to do is to replace them on this governing board of the mind. We want to replace them with what I would call the empowered mind. The mind that's rooted in the discipline of ruler, the courage of a warrior, the self soothing of a caregiver, and the impartiality of a sage. That's very different than the survival mind.

That's the mind that can manage probability. It can maintain order of the self. It has the courage to look at literally what's stopping it. You. It has the compassion to actually recognize that through compassion is the doorway of change. That's where you find your inherent worth. That's when you start realizing that, oh, I'm just one potential organization of a self and I can become designer of myself. I can become captain of my own destiny. So you organize that. And then what you recognize is that the movement toward our destructive nature is never going to stop. It's always there. But what you do is you train yourself to have this empowered mind present, okay, as the new, as the new committee. And you have to be vigilant because that's the price of freedom. Friend. How do you do this? Well, what I encourage you to do is get the head knowledge, what we're talking about now. But I actually ask you to take it deeper. If you haven't or you're not familiar with my work, get my free book from the website. Just start there, then start doing a lot more YouTube, then read the articles. And ultimately though, it comes down to two courses, a group course and an individual course. Where those are the places where the education is presented for you to be able to learn how to take the tools of change and start applying them to yourself to build the mind that can maintain emotional sobriety under pressure. It can be done. You can teach an old dog new tricks. The thing though is you have to acknowledge that it's. You're going to have to work at it. You know, you have. Besides 6.5 million years of evolution, you also have decades of conditioning, you know yourself. And so you're going to have to, you're going to have to work that down. And this is only if you really want to be successful in trading. Okay, where all of a sudden you change from being a person has to win, not lose to where a person. What you're saying is this is probability. I know that. What I have to do is I have to work on my performance. I can't win, I can't lose. I don't have control over that. But I do have a lot of control about the mind I bring to that moment of performance. That's what we teach. Come learn, friends. I look forward to it. And be well. And good luck with your trading.