Correcting the Blind Spots that Sabotage Your Trading

I want to talk to you about perceptual blind spots. They're the things that are blowing up, sabotaging your trading from what it could be. And you don't know it because you don't see them. They just happen. But let's start, and start defining what is a blind spot. Blind spot. Well, if you've ever been driving in a car with a rear view mirror, you've been able to look into that rear view mirror and swear you had space over there. And then you move over there and there's a car there. What you've experienced is a physical blind spot. It's in your mirror, and you're not seeing all that's there. And of course, as a driver, what you're learning to do is you're learning to take advantage of that, learn from that, and anticipate and know where those blind spots are so you don't make stupid errors. Well, it works the same way with perceptual blind spots. Let me explain. One of the famous ones, okay, is some psychologists got together and they did this experiment. They got a bunch of cheerleaders, boys and girls, and then they had a group of people, both males and females, and what they were told to do is, while they're doing this routine, what we want you to do is what you. We want you to decide which one's male and which one's female. Okay? So they were really into that. They were going to, they were going to figure this out. And the cheerleaders, from the, from the distance, you just couldn't tell initially. So you're going to have to really study this. So the cheerleaders do their routine and all like that, and then the people come in, they start talking about which is which and stuff like that. And they talk about that. And they were pretty good at that. And then the professor asked the question, did you happen to see the gorilla that walked through the cheerleaders while they were doing the routine?

None of them did.

A person dressed up as a gorilla actually walked through the field as people were watching the cheerleaders and didn't see the gorilla. That is a perceptual blind spot. That is exactly what you're going to have to learn to be able to stop. Because ultimately what's happening is your brain is creating a virtual representation. It's going to create the virtual representation. Not like I'm seeing reality out there, but what it's doing is it's creating. It's taking sensorial data from all the senses coming in, and it creates this Idea, this model about what reality should look like.

And that's based on your biases, your beliefs, and your assumption. It then projects that out onto the markets. Now, in trading, what happens is we're not looking for the perfect virtual representation that can see the truth, the reality of the markets. We're looking to build an effective one that can look into the markets and be able to extract more capital out of the markets than they give back. That would be an effective one. It's never the truth, but it's an effective virtual representation. In that virtual representation, you're beginning to see what's important to see. The problem with most traders is they go into trading and they know what they want to see, just like those people trying to figure out which were the males and female cheerleaders. But what they do, in trying to see what they want to see, what they need to see.

They'Re missing the blind spot that they need to learn how to listen to. That's the way the brain works. It has this idea about what you're looking for, okay? And if it's not in that range, you're not going to see it. Wow. If you have a mind that's built saying, I'm going to win or I'm not going to lose, I want you to hear the bias in that. Because ultimately, what happens in trading, you discover that you are going to lose. Matter of fact, you're going to lose between 40 and 60% of the time.

So you know that there's going to be a problem with winning, and you better give it very. You better change the idea you have of losing, but yet you have this idea of winning. You bring that in, you're looking to that. Yet because of that, that bias, you don't see what you need to be seeing to be an effective trader. Because the effective trader not only needs to see the opportunity, but he also needs to see, okay, I know that there is a certain number of trades that I'm going to lose. That's just simply probability. And I finally need to be able to look and see at that bias in me that wants to win. I want to control outcome. If you can't see that bias in operation, you will walk into the blind spot. And if you walk into the blind spot, it triggers the instinctual survival skills of the emotional brain. Remember, the emotional brain to its way of reckoning. If it stops you from getting into a trade, okay, then all that seeking more confirmation and the trade sliding on past you, it's one it doesn't see it as, oh, Man, I needed to be taking all these setups, these valid setups. No, it's saying that, well, there's risk there, that risk is biological in nature, it's not psychological in nature like you would want to think. And all of a sudden you're seeing. It doesn't see that, it stops you from seeing that, it stops you from seeing the probability.

Do you see the problem? If you were to design a situation that the brain was totally not prepared for, it would be trading everything that the brain wants control over outcome, wants to be able to predict outcome, and it doesn't want to lose and it wants to be in control. All those have to be given up. All the biases, all the assumptions of the human brain has brought to it from wherever you came into trading, all of a sudden you're realizing it's blinded you terribly to what you need to be seeing. A probability based world. Okay, so the deal is, how do you go about shifting this brain that you came with, that evolution gave you to the brain that you need to find success in trading? The first thing is, is you're going to need to really get up on your game and emotions, you're going to have to understand emotions far differently than you do now. They're not feelings, they're biological action potentials that coordinate action between you, the trader and the markets. That's the environment they trigger. They take over brain, they take over mind, and cause you not to see what you need to see. In a probability based world, but not in a survival based world. That's the big thing. Then you're going to say, well, how do I regulate them? You're going to have to learn to regulate the emotion, to give yourself a prayer of a chance as you regulate that emotion. And that's done through breath, that's done through tension reduction. You come to the moment where you control the intensity of the emotion so it doesn't just take you over, it doesn't totally blind you. But then once you do that, you have to produce mindfulness. You have to come to a moment of where you realize, well, what my brain has really done, it's produced a virtual representation and I need to take that away from reality. I need to start saying what composes my virtual representation. I'm projecting onto the markets. That, friends, is where the deconstruction of the old brain, the old mind begins. And you begin to realize, you know something.

My thoughts and I are not the same. My beliefs and I are not the same. The truth is I'm an organization of potential into A self. And in mindfulness, awakening the awareness of being an observer, I can begin to reorganize, deconstruct that old self and reconstruct it into a probability self, into a self that assumes probability instead of assumes control over outcome. Makes all the difference in the world. Suddenly you're on the lane to where you can begin to see. You know something? I now can see the perceptual blind spots that I've been falling into and having all these problems with. And whether or not that's not being able to get in trades, whether or not that's revenge trading, where it goes against you and you take a loss and you want it back, boom. You don't see losing, you don't see that. But in a probability based mind, you do. Do you want to learn more? Because ultimately this is a reconstruction of a brain built for one purpose and constructing it for another purpose, one that it's not designed to do. It's going to take work. It's more than just emotional regulation. It's more than just mindfulness. It's actually finding emotional programs in the brain to be able to pull forward at the moment of crisis, at the moment of when you're really getting stressed. That's where the blind spots happen. And you're going to have to learn how to pull them up and act from them to learn how to do that. Come to our website, get the free book, start exploring our courses and recognizing that there is a difference between people who become successful traders and people who stay stuck in mediocrity and die the death of many thousand cuts or just simply blow up accounts. The ones who survive, the ones who become successful traders, take it seriously that they're going to have to develop their brain, they're going to have to develop their mind, because it's not the one that's required for success. And this is where it starts. Look at the perceptual blind spots and recognize that's your emotional brain telling you, I'm not up for this. And then decide, you know, I want to learn how to see what I have not been seeing. I want to be able to learn what I have not seen. I need to learn emotional intelligence. Come and look, take a look at what's there and begin to recognize that you are the designer of the mind you bring to trading. It can be done, friends, but you have to decide, you want to. You have to decide that what you're doing is not going to work, okay? And that you in fact can rebuild the self for higher functioning probability. That's it. Come and see us. Take care.