Cracking the Code for Maintaining a Disciplined Mind Under Prssure

What's the code? Have you ever noticed that it seems like there is a code that some traders have and figure out and they can just trade. They don't do really dumb stupid things, they don't get hijacked. They just somehow have cracked the code for successful trading and just seem to be able to do it flawlessly. Yet the rest of us, at least 95% what they find out is that there's got to be a code that they don't understand. And if they did, they would be able to perform a lot better. The truth is there is a code, it's encapsulated and something we call your survival instincts. It's part of the emotional brain. And ultimately what the problem comes down to is those survival instincts. That emotional brain has programmed you for a particular way of interacting with uncertainty. And we're not talking about something that happened yesterday or the day before. We're talking about something that has happened millions of years over countless times so that they become state traits in the transmission of your biology into the future. So literally the biology that you bring to trading right now is the same biology that was used for our survival way back then when it was a very dangerous world and we couldn't think, we weren't thinking homo sapiens at that time. We bring that same brain mind to trading. It's survival in the short term. That's what it's programmed, that's the code. And yet we think that we can control it by thinking. That's just not the way it happens. Ultimately when you see a person just absolutely go crazy and start jumping into trades that he's not supposed to be or freezing, what you're seeing is that old code trigger because of things it's experiencing in the environment called the markets. Your job is to recognize that's the code. It's been programmed by your limbic system. It's hardwired and besides that, it's hot wired. What do I mean by that? Is that the limbic brain is interested in short term survival. It's also interested in the excitement of the hunt. So when you're over trading, what you're doing is you're basically caveman. You're seeing the prey and you're jumping on it right now while you can get it. That's the excitement that leads to over trading, to revenge trading. Then there's the fear of oh my God, you know, I could lose my life. Because to the limbic system, that emotional brain of yours that you bring unknown into the real world of today and trading what you're doing is you're saying, okay, I'm taking a brain that was designed for one thing and evolved for one thing, short term survival. And I am creating the very worst nightmare I could possibly imagine with inter day trading a day trader. You're literally forcing it to confront uncertainty. It wants to control the outcome of uncertainty for survival's sake. It's going to do anything to do that. And yet we're forcing it into a situation where you have to acknowledge you don't have control. You're past its encoding now and the code triggers and guess what? You're hijacked. That thinking mind that was there while you were calm is suddenly just swept away by this avalanche of emotions.

That's the code that you had to break. And you might be able to say, you know what, it really looks like. You'll have information, we would call it sensorial information, coming into the emotional brain from the brain stem and it's hitting what is known as the thalamus, part of the limbic system. There is an air traffic controller who's making decisions there about whether or not to route that information to the thinking brain. That's what the traitor wants. Or to take the low dirty road to the amygdala and fight flight. That decision is based on history and past adaptive system success.

There's the trigger. It's not built for probability, it's encoded for short term survival. What we want to do is we want to take that air traffic controller, disrupt that part of you from sending the information to the flight flight, fight flight syndrome. That's what we're out to do. And we want to be able to route it, the slow road up into the neocortex, that thinking brain of yours that makes all the great decisions and stuff like that, that's what we want. The question though is how does this all happen? Well, first of all, it's adaptive. The limbic system finds a solution, wires it in and codes it into the program and there's your code. It's not like you're just going to out think it. If thinking gets in the way of the emotional brain's primitive programming, it just blows the thinking brain out. The very first thing that you're going to have to do in order to get management of this and to be able to recode it and to reprogram the mind that you bring to trading, you're going to have to produce emotion regulation. You're going to have to be able to calm the emotion down before it gets ahead of steam and Takes over the thinking mind. That's what has to occur first. And what we teach. That's the breathing. That's the muscle relaxation. That's all that stuff. Because what we discover is the emotion is biological. It's actually a biological action potential that coordinates action between you and the environment. You, the trader, the. The markets. It's not a feeling. It's not psychological. It overwhelms psychology, but it is a biological response to changes in the environment. The brain sees its changes as threatening, and that's what happens to you. You hit this where it's uncertain. You don't really control. You might want to think you do, but you know you don't control it. And suddenly that old programming, that old coding takes over. Bam. You can disrupt that. You can calm it down so that it doesn't take over. That's the emotional regulation element that I teach. The other, though, is actually getting at the belief that the limbic system has encoded about your capacity to manage uncertainty. This is the one you see in your trading account, not in what you say to yourself.

You trust the trading account. You don't listen to the lies going on in your head. When you do this, what you discover. There are a couple profound beliefs that are not. They're not conscious. They are what we call subconscious. They are limbic learnings that when it becomes. When your brain becomes psychological, it becomes hidden beliefs that drive your trading, drive how you interact with uncertainty. The first one of those is adequacy. I'm not good enough to do this. I don't know enough. The second one is when you start equating your sense of mattering to money. If I make a lot of money, I'll matter very dangerous, because you're giving the markets that you don't control.

Control over your mattering. You know, that's a powerful problem, and yet that's what a lot of people do. The next is worth. A lot of people just simply don't believe that they're worthy, that they deserve to make real good money, or they have to work really hard, not just the kind of stuff they do in trading. The third one is scarcity thinking. Just a sense of scarcity. Oh, my God. It could be taken away from me. And understand caveman had a right to believe that his life could be forfeited really easy. And the fifth one.

Is a sense of powerlessness. If you've ever been just whipsawed in a trade, you understand powerlessness, and suddenly you become a bucking horse in a burning barn. These are the beliefs These are the encoded beliefs. They're not into thinking beliefs. They are literally Olympic beliefs. They sit below the threshold of your awareness. You have to be like a detective and discover them and then you have to learn to change them. Now we teach that. But the key is these are the basic self limiting beliefs that drive your interaction with uncertainty and risk until they are. First you have to observe, you have to get what is the coding here? I'm telling you what the coding is. And it's not the kind of coding you think is rational. The emotional brain could care less about reason and ration. As a matter of fact, you discover that all reason is is a rationalization that the thinking brain cooks up to make sense out of whatever decisions the emotional brain has already decided. What you're doing is you're having to go in and calm the emotion down emotional regulation and then get at the subconscious belief that drives the health of your trading account. That's the performance. You're wired.

To avoid that randomness at all costs because it produces confusion in the brain. Confusion produces vulnerability. Vulnerability triggers the fight flight response. However, if we change the belief to one of curiosity of death, disciplined impartiality, the way we approach that uncertainty does not trigger that fight flight primitive survival instinct. This can be taught. It takes effort, friends. And you have to start observing it as you trade. If you want to learn more, go to our website. Start reading the articles, start really exploring. It's not you as a psychological being that's the problem. May contribute, but it's the biology that you have to start with first. That's the. That's where literally day trading is the worst nightmare that you could have conjured up to force the brain to engage with. You have to re encode it. Friends learn how come see us friends.

Sam.