Developing Self Conrol

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Welcome everyone. My name is Randy Howell with Trader State of Mind and I am just delighted that you're here. But before we get started, let's make sure you can hear me. If some kind souls will please put a Y in the, in the question box, I would greatly appreciate it. That way I know that I'm not just talking out into the ethers. Okay, so let me see here.

Why are I not seeing anything? Okay, so I'm assuming that you can hear me. Correct.

Okay, there we go. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. What we are here to do is begin to recognize that the.

That trading is different than the rest of your life. Is that somehow the mind that has produced success, persistent action, all that stuff in the other world out there outside of trading, when you take that same mind, you bring it to trading and all of a sudden something goes crazy and you end up losing control. A lot of the time you'll be doing really well. All of a sudden you get sucked into feeling good and you end up doing dumb stupid things or what happens, you take a loss, then you're scared to get in and it impacts the whole well. And where is that control? Well, what we really want to do is to take a look at control and begin to define what emotional control would look like. And in this we're going to probably from your perspective, change the whole dynamic of how you see emotion and the way you experience emotion and, and how you work with emotion. You can get away with not working with emotions in the outside world, but in trading what you can discover, absolutely important to understand emotion differently and to be able to work with emotion to create the mind that engages uncertainty. And that's the first big truth, is that all thinking is emotional state dependent. So when you're looking at control issues, what you're really saying is that you're trying to use your thinking brain and suddenly what happens is it can no longer control the emotional nature as you get further and further and further into risk. And how do we do this? How do we do this?

The real key is you come into trading with the brain that it's not going to produce success. In trading, most people come to trading with a winning attitude. They have a success formula that says hard work and persistence and drive all put together is going to bowl through something and you're going to find that space. When in fact in trading that's dangerous because what happens is all you do is you end up scaring yourself. So just because You've experienced historical success and confidence and you feel as though, yeah, I've got it, I can do that. You bring it to trading and you discover the rules of success in trading are very different than the rules of success in your ordinary world. In your ordinary world, it really, truly looks as if you can control outcome, winning and losing. You work harder, you're more persistent, you try more and more, you don't give up. But in trading, all that stuff falls away. And you discover in the world of probability that trading comes out of is that old success formula simply doesn't work. So the deal though is.

What, what's going on here?

Somewhere in the first two to three years of trading, traders work hard, they do all the success formula stuff and still they lose control. They have it down, they know what they need to be doing. But their old ways that have followed them into trading is based on habits that were established another time, in another place and they worked. But you bring them here, it's not going to work. And when you get, say I'm going to get more knowledge, I'm going to learn, I'm going to talk to this Randy Howland, I'm going to figure out what the magic formula is, what the magic words are, what the spells are that allow me to produce the mind that is just oblivious to anything like risk and stuff like that. And then.

It takes about two years to really get a methodology down. And by that time you're thinking, okay, what I know is that I should be able to start making money. I've got the methodology down, a way of managing risk. I've got my system finally down so that it actually works and it can, you know, I'm just really working in tune with it and you know, hey, my psychology, no problem, I can handle that. And then we discover the big deal about the old ways don't meet new very well. The conditions of success in trading and what most traders find.

All that smart logic driven trading get up and just stay, you get, you get stuck and you kind of stay there because all you know how to do is to produce success in one particular way. Hard work, get the knowledge and then keep at it, keep at it until you make it happen and it doesn't work. So the deal is that we need a different mind. We need to be able to say.

What'S actually going on here that I'm not seeing, that I need to see to be able to produce a mind that can produce consistent profitability.

What is that going to take? Well, it starts here.

You have a Certainty based mind that has been built over millions and millions of years.

And you are placing it in a probability based situation. Understand is that the certainty based mind wants to see that it can control outcome, make things happen, when in fact it really couldn't. But it was a bias that developed and that bias became so strong that it just kind of took over and you didn't know that it was there because it's a bias. And you just thought, I can make things happen, I can work harder, I can do more, I can do this. And there I've done it. Then what happens is.

Your biology and your psychology are dead set against creating this new way of dealing with the challenges of trading in life.

Ultimately, what you're going to discover is the problems that you had in your outside life are going to manifest in your trading. But the difference is denial and distraction and just not focusing on that that you can use in your regular life. Ignoring things doesn't work. The truth is your trading account.

Is the barometer of how successful, how effective the beliefs that you hold about your ability to manage uncertainty really are. You're going to find out that you may talk the talk of believing something, but when you actually get in the mix of where there is a probability mindset there and you are not guaranteed success, in fact it's a matter of probability. You can do everything right and still end up wrong. And then you realize, oh my God, that certainty based mind is blowing up. And when that happens, your control really starts really just melting because suddenly the old way of doing things is not working.

So ultimately you're going to have to transform the way you think. You're going to have to change what I would call the observing self. Because ultimately my work is based both on emotional intelligence and also certain concepts in quantum mechanics. And in quantum mechanics what you learn is this, is that.

What exists is not matter and stuff like that. What actually exists is potential. The observer that you are about that potential is what congeals that potential into a set of beliefs. And that is what you're taking into trading to use it. From a neurobiological standpoint, what the emotional intelligence people would say is, you have never experienced reality. Friends, I know you think you're looking at it, you're looking at this screen, you're doing all that and you say, yeah, this is here, I can see it. It's a fact. All this stuff is there.

In emotional intelligence. What they would say is this something very different is that what you're actually seeing.

Are inputs coming in through your nerves. Through your senses, through your nose, through your ears, through feel, all that stuff. And it's coming into your brain, the brain, which by the way has never ever, ever been out there in the real world. It's sitting in a cranium where it's pitch black. And then it gets all this information and it starts making guesses and assumptions about things. And if it works, it logs it in. And all of a sudden that's the world you see out there. But that's not necessarily the out there is actually being created by the mind in your head. It's actually being created by a brain that gives rise to the mind that grew up on the African savannas. It's not used to seeing probability based stuff like trading. It's used to seeing, looking out and seeing all these bushes and assuming that a saber toothed tigers behind every one of them out to get you, when in fact only 1 in 10,000 is actually there. But the thing is, is that that probability based mind locked in that everyone was there because it had survival value. So you were bringing a survival based brain into trading. That's creating the mind.

All thinking is emotional state dependent, okay? The brain generates a behavior called thought. And all of a sudden you're discovering that oh my God, this is, this is. I had no idea that it was like this. And the question really becomes, what are we going to do about it? So what we have here.

Here'S our hunter gatherer. And what happens is he's out picking some stuff and he's getting everything ready. And then what he does is he sees the mastodon and automatically.

Information starts coming in this, the brain looks at it and says, danger, danger, danger. Or it could be seeing that mastodon as a food for their clan for the next week. And everybody gets excited. And then they get a group of guys together and attack that mastodon. And most likely some of them are going to die in the process. But they live. And the ones that live get enormous respect. They get leadership positions. They also get the first dibs on breeding genes into the future. Honey, that is the way it works. So what we really want to do is that we have to change the way that the brain reacts to uncertainty. That's the deal, okay?

Your caveman brain, that mammalian brain.

Does not, cannot tell the difference between capital risk and life risk.

To the caveman brain, it's all the same. So when you're looking there, you can talk a talk about being rational and this has a risk profile, blah, blah, blah, blah. The caveman doesn't see that he sees, oh, he's putting. He's putting capital at risk. And oh, my God, what if I lose? What if, what if? That's scared money, friends. That's exactly what that is.

So.

What I want you to actually see here is that an emotion is not what you think it is. You're looking at an image of where there is a whole bunch of energy and electrical energy between two synapses and they're jumping. And what happens is at that level of synapse, there is a deviation in standard pattern. You might be looking at a chart and all of a sudden that chart is showing you that, oh, my God, it's going down. But I had predicted it was going to be going up. There is a change in status right there. The change in status is what triggers a biological action potential called an emotion. It is automatic.

If it wants to, it does not have to send it through the thinking brain at all. If it's an emergency like, oh, my God, that tray is going against me. It can take that stop at the thalamus, the mammalian brain, and send it directly to fight flight just like that. So understand this. The emotion is a biological action potential that is embedded in your body. When you feel the tenseness when you're getting, you know, you're getting tense and boy, and particularly when you just are sitting there and looking right into. You're just. You're almost jumping into that screen. That is an emotion, friends. The tension in the body that's preparing you for fight flight, that riveting, that riveting of your attention is all of a sudden the whole world disappears except for that little thing that is an emotion. And then the thinking produces an explanation that the emotional brain's already decided. Thinking is an afterthought. It's kind of like it produces alibis. Okay? And so what you're seeing is that it feels so in control. But what I want you to recognize is the emotional brain that can shut off the thinking brain in nanoseconds. That is when you lose control. That's when all of a sudden you start reverting. Not to all this cool stuff that you've learned to do while trading, but you go back to reactive.

Psychology that was developed.

Millions of years ago. So that's what we've got.

And here you are. This would be a good way of describing it. Just say. Let's just say that you're walking along and you turn the corner on a mountain, a mountain road, and right there is a bear, a big one. What happens is you are searched you have emotion triggering, okay? And it's all survival focused brain. And what you're lurking to do very quickly is you know that you're going to have to fight or flee, okay? The truth is uncertainty becomes a threat to your existence, okay? And then when you add capital that friends is when you really, really, really have troubles. And the deal is that control that you have by thinking. I'm a, I'm a disciplined trader. I'm a disciplined trader. It collapses right then and there. Because what I really want you to take, what take a look at is this.

This is a fear based brain, okay? A negative assessment machine that you have that you broke. And what happens is that you're looking and by the way, this is a scene from the movie Inside out, which is really about a little girl being taken away from her home and moving someplace else. And you're seeing the inside of her brain where there's control pan on. These emotional programs are basically creating the world that the little girl lives in. And here you see anger. And under stress those survival instincts are going to hijack your rational thinking. And all of a sudden you rationalize. So right there, what you really, what you've been mistaking as a rational thinking logic is actually your brain rationalizing. That is what your thinking brain does. It rationalizes a story that supports what the emotional brain believes. Okay? This is what we have to retrain. Otherwise this guy right here is triggered into being. He comes into being in nanoseconds. He hijacks the thinking information going to the thinking brain and he moves it into the emergency line and, and he goes down to fight flight in the amygdala. And he is acting from instinct, which is a deadly thing to do in trading rather than rational mind, which you're going to have to learn to be able to control those emotions to be able to achieve. So.

And what I've got here is a checklist of what a lot of things that traders do. Because you know, the thing is they're serious, they want to become better traders. They know they have to do something. So they start developing that positive mental attitude. Oh yeah, I can handle this, I can handle this. I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. But after you take six or seven losses in a row, that positive mental attitude starts really getting tough. And then after several losses, you're looking at setups again and suddenly one shows up and, and what happens is that instead of that mental, that positive mental attitude showing up, then there is scared money showing up. But then you can use Visualizations, you can visualize yourself overcoming these problems. And I promise you that negative voice in your head that I call the inner critical saying that's bs, that's only visualization. You know as well as I do that's a lie. What I find is that visualization and affirmations break down under pressure, under stress. The affirmations, I'm a disciplined trader, I'm a disciplined trader. And then all of a sudden you blow up. They sound good, but when in practice they fall apart when there's stress there, then nlp, you know, what happens is you learn how to do all sorts of things to be able to short circuit that, to control the emotion. And all of a sudden you discover that one of the vast problems with an nlp, it is thought oriented. And thought is the at is the caboose of the engine of emotion. And then you got the tapping where yes, that works for a while, you can get thing done and then it crops back in. Same thing with hypnosis is basically you're entrancing yourself and that entrancement works for a while and then it starts falling apart and the old pattern emerges again. That's why hypnosis doesn't produce long term, very good long term results in the area of eating or smoking. And then those guys to do the prosperity thinking, you know, I'm going to think my way into success. I am going to, I'm going to use my mind to overcome matter. When in fact.

What I have found that really works is changing the observer itself, which I'll be talking about in a little while. And what you discover is when you develop the observer you start noticing that you've been living in a tunnel vision and you can only see certain things from that tunnel. In observation you learn to expand the vision and you see enormous new possibilities for the self and you can start acting on it. But it's not the mind over matter. It's developing the observer to see a richer world and then beginning to habituate those new things to become the mind that you bring to trading. That's the big deal, friends. Now.

Hold on, there we go. What I want you to do is recognize this is the work of trading is really rooted in patient observation, the observer and not urgency, not making things happen. And I really want to give you a model of what this looks like. And what you're looking right here is an American cougar American, okay? It's all over the northern North American continent. And what happens is the cougar hunts very differently than the African lion. Now, understand, the cougar and the African lion are both apex predators. They're the big deal in the forest. But you are actually looking at a cougar hunt right now. What I want you to do is recognize he's not chasing you, he's not stalking. He's up in a tree. He's probably 15, 20ft. And he is. There is a path right below him where deer come. They know they. It's kind of a setup. You know, you know that, you know what can happen. And you know that sooner or later a setup is going to be happening at that particular site. And what the cougar does is drop that 15, 20ft, and if he's lucky, he snaps the neck of the deer, the deer drops dead to the ground. So there's no chasing involved. And if that, if something goes wrong and that deer gets up and runs, the cougar doesn't chase. What he does is he climbs back up the tree, waits for the forest to give him another opportunity. Sounds a lot like traitoring, doesn't it? What happens is that this is an ambush predator, whereas the African lion is the exact opposite, is a chase predator. It's going to attack, it's going to run down and out of that. They also get massive injuries. They have to start replenishing their capital at a high rate. They have to start breeding, producing more lions. Because you get kicked by a zebra, you get gored by and impala are. You screw around with a buffalo and you've got real problems. You get hurt, you die. So they have to replenish a lot of capital, a lot of the capital that keeps them alive. Whereas the cougar, the cougar doesn't live in packs. What happens is it's a loner. If it's a female, it will have pups. But the deal is it's a solitary hunter. And what I want you to grasp is it's patient. It will sit there for a long time. And if you were to see a cougar actually sitting there hunting, you would think, maybe it's lazy, maybe it's just falling asleep. No, it is. It is patiently waiting for the deer to show up.

It doesn't go stalk, it doesn't go chase. It's not highly persistent. If it gets away, it just simply goes back up the tree and starts over again. But it's powerful.

So what the trader has to do, much like the cougar, is become so that you're patiently waiting to see what the markets will give you. And then you strike. Okay, I have a, I think I have probably sold so many posters when I. Because a lot of the people that I work with realize how powerful the symbol of a cougar is. And, and the way that cougar as a symbol is exactly what the trading mind needs to look like. Remember, it's not about determination, it's not about persistence. It's about patiently waiting, patient observation, waiting for the forest to give you something, waiting for the markets to give you something. That is control. And when you get to the moment of where you can manage the emotions, there's. You're saying, what emotions do I need? My promise to you is you're going to find out that you're going to need discipline, the ability to maintain order under pressure. You're going to need courage to wait to face the doubt you have. You're going to have to use self soothing so that you can maintain patience. And then you're going to have to strike with precision.

Completely impartial. Okay? That, that my friend, is the deal.

So the question.

Is this. How do you go about transforming urgency to act into patient discipline where you have self control? How do you do that? The really the first thing is to come to a moment of where you realize that the brain that you brought to trading, no matter how successful it's been, how much you like it, is not going to work. In trading, the rules of success between that outside world that you've been living in and the trading world of probability are so different from one another that you're going to have to change the way the brain engages uncertainty. Okay, we want to be in control. Well, you don't have control over winning and losing trading. What you're going to discover is you have control over the mind that you bring to the moment of performance.

That is the psychological edge that drives your method. Edge. Very few people do that and they don't. The truth is they think, you know, I really don't really want to do this psychological stuff. What am I going to find? You're going to find a regular human being. That's what you're going to find. And with a brain ill suited for trading, if you're normal and you're realizing that you can in fact go in and redesign, reorganize that mind for trading. And what you discover is this. It is not winning and losing that is important for success.

Listen that one more time, how many of you people say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna win money today. I'm gonna make money today. Ultimately, when you Say that.

You are already declaring something that you can't control. You cannot control winning or losing. So you're already setting it up. The more you push, the less you're going to be able to get. So what you're doing, you're saying, okay, I get it. If I step away from winning and losing, making money as success in trading, what is? It's the personal self mastery of the mind that you bring into the moment of uncertainty. This is success. It's not about winning and losing. Remember, you can do everything right and be wrong, but the deal is if you have an edge, if you have found an edge and you continually are able to patiently control that you're going to extract more capital out of the markets than you give back in. But what happens is that you don't have control on a day by, on a moment by moment basis of whether or not you're extracting capital or putting capital by the end. But you do have control of the quality of the mind. And what you're going to discover here is we want to have the discipline of a ruler, the courage of a warrior, the self soothing of a caregiver, and the impartiality of a sage. Those are the emotional programs that we want to bring forward to build the cocktail that the mind you trade with comes from. Okay, so we've gotten there. We know this is really about self mastery that leads to the extraction of more capital than you put back in. It doesn't cause winning and losing though. That's the deal. So we've gotten that and say, ooh. And it just so happens that we teach a five step process that we have been teaching for the last 20 years. And actually I was teaching this process when I was a clinical therapist and working with really rough populations in ptsd. And this is the same process that I used for that. But the deal is we want to transform the mind that trades. We already know that the mind that you brought is not built for the task you're asking it to do. And you're going to have to wake up and recognize the gift you have as a human being is that you can retool the mind, whereas a gorilla can't do that, my dog can't do that. And what we need, the process starts with emotional regulation. If you're losing control, you know what it's like to lose emotional regulation. You trigger, you tilt, and before you know it, you're in fight and flight. You've got to be able to manage, manage the intensity of the emotion so that it doesn't hit the tipping point and flood into your bloodstream and your brain and take over mind. The second thing is you have to have mindfulness. You have to recognize one big fact that's hard for people to grasp initially. You and your thoughts are not the same. In fact, you are not having thoughts. Thoughts are having you. They're creating you. What we want to do is wake up that observer so that you start creating a different organization of your potential that can in fact deliver a better mind to trader. That's mindfulness. Powerful. It's when you open the door of the mind. You look in and you realize all this crazy stuff going on is not me, but I am responsible for how it's organized. Yeah. And if you don't think there's a bunch of different parts of the self running around in your mind. Oh, and you think, oh, yeah, you gotta be crazy to have voices in your head. I tell you this. If you don't realize there are powerful forces running around in your mind duking for control of the construction of the self, then you're already in really serious trouble, because that's what's going on. Okay, the third thing is you're going to have to find what I call the historical internal dialogue. That's when you discover is that there is a part of you that is highly destructive and you will beat yourself up if you take a loss. And you might just get all overjoyed and euphoric when you win. You realize that, guess what? Beating yourself up does not make you a better trader. Feeling good after winning money only sets you up for failure because you've triggered the reward system to produce a lot of dopamine. Dopamine is like snorting cocaine while trading. You don't want to do it. It creates a mind incapable of. Of being able to trade in a powerful way. But you realize that, oh, there is a. There's also a historical, adaptive self that from your caveman days, evolutionary psychology, through your family system that you grew up in, you learned to have beliefs that turned into assumptions and biases and beliefs about the world out there. And you have been acting from them your entire life, not even realizing they're just one set of emotional programs among many. What we want to do is to say in chapter step four, we want you to develop your empowered nature. We want you to be able to take these internal resources that are there and to start developing them so that you do have the discipline of a ruler. You do have the courage of a warrior. You do have the ability to calm yourself Down. And you do have that clarity of thought that a sage has. These are emotional programs that you can learn to pull forward, to create the mind that engages the challenges of living in that particular case, the uncertainty, the risk of trading. So.

That first step is emotional regulation.

First you begin to recognize that an emotion is not what you think it is not a feeling. It is a biological action potential that triggers when there is any change of events in your market. And when you're looking at your charts.

So you know you're not going to stop emotions from happening. What you're going to do is become emotionally intelligent about the use of your emotions and creating the mind. But I want you to do something.

This breathing as a way of regulating emotion has been around for 4,500 years. The Hindus started working with it within their yogic tradition, and it's been there. And it's also, back in the Aramaic days, breath was considered to be the thing that sustained, sustained and brought forward life. So you're saying you know something? If I regulate the way I breathe, I can control the intensity of an emotion. What I want you to do is just take a moment right now and scan your body. I want you to notice where the tension is. I want you to notice your shoulders, your neck, your jaw muscles. I want you to feel your gut muscles, maybe even your thighs. And I want you to imagine you're trading and the trade is going against you more and more and more. And I want you to start seeing the tension. I want you to start noticing the breath starts halting or it starts breathing really high. Do you see that? Now, what I want you to do right now is to see a light, flash, flash, flash in your mind. Now, what I want you to do is to pull air down into your belly, then into your chest. Hold for a moment, let that breath out. And as you do, let the tension from your body drain, drain, drain like honey flowing out of a jar until you're loose and limp. Loose and limp like a sleeping baby. Now, do that one more time. You're still looking at all this stuff. You're looking at that trade going against you. But this time what happens is that you have started breathing diaphragmatically, which means you're getting a lot more oxygen into your belly, into your chest, into your bloodstream, into the brain so that you can't in fact, think. You're back there. You're looking at that situation. The trade's still going against you. This time, again, pull air into belly, expand to chest, hold.

Release slowly and release the Tension in your body, let it drain, drain, drain, until you're loose and limp, loose and limp like a rag doll. Now what I want you to notice is scan your body and notice the lessening of tension as you are both intentionally draining tension out of the body and you're breathing diaphragmatically. I want you to notice that. And tomorrow what I want you to do is to notice when you're trading how tense you get, how you stop breathing. And then what I want you to do is to go back to this and say, I am going to do this silly exercise that Randy had where I'm breathing, pulling air into the belly, expanding to chest, holding, releasing slowly and letting the tension drain, drain, drain. I want you to notice the difference in state of mind. Okay? This is the very first thing that you will learn in working with traitor. State of mind. This is the ground floor. It all starts with breathing. Ultimately you're going to control the intensity of the emotion. That does not mean that you're controlling the mind. But if you do not control the emotional nature, you're going to get swept away and never get to the mind anyway. So that's step one. You're learning emotional regulation.

Now.

What I also want you to actually do is think about the exercise I just gave you. And here we have, here we have a poor dude. He and his saber toothed tiger are locked up pretty tight with one another. And out of that what happens is I want you to notice something. Notice that hypervigilance activates the arousal element of emotion. He's sitting there hardly breathing, just tensile. Then the arousal turns on the feeling component of the emotion. The chemistry of the emotion begins flooding into the body and the brain. Then the emotional motivation kicks in. It compels you to attack, avoid or approach depend on the direction that the emotion is taking you. Then the emotional belief in there is literally your belief about your ability to manage this situation. And this is what many of you, when you, when that trade goes against you. This is pretty much what you're looking at inside your bed. Okay? It's the same thing. This is your emotional brain triggering to win safety. Tigers and big bears were everywhere. So then.

You'Re sitting there, you are making, trading decisions, mind decisions from this reactive emotion. This first step, emotional regulation can break that. It can help you start your journey into rebuilding the mind. But it starts here.

So the thing is, is that you have to learn to manage the biology of the emotion. That calmer mind that, that breathing and that tension reduction produces a calm mind that Calm mind is no longer in fight flight, and it can start making the kind of decisions that you need to be making as a trader. Or you can continue doing it the other way, get tense, try to push through it, and just simply continue the pattern on and on. But this is the deal, okay? This is how it works. The second thing in mindfulness, what you're learning is you're stepping back out of thought and you're stopping from identifying with thought. You're beginning to recognize you know something? Huh? When you do that, you recognize that you and your beliefs are not the same either, is that you are potential. The observer that you are.

Is taking that potential, consolidating it into itself that you take out and you think is you because it habituates. And you look through these eyes and you do not know. Better to ask, is there more?

What you're doing is you're projecting your hidden beliefs onto the markets, okay? And when you see the health of your trading account, you're seeing how effective those hidden beliefs are for the management of uncertainty. What we want to do is say, how can we use this observer? By stepping back out of self. No longer identifying myself with my thoughts or, or my beliefs.

What can happen here? Well, this is when it gets really interesting. Suddenly you discover that your brain is really a committee of rival emotional programs that give rise to the thoughts in the mind. Now, in this case, by the way, if you have never met me or anything like that, that's me. And I'm taking a look inside my mind and I'm seeing all these different Randy Howells, and they're all competitive with one another, trying to control the self that acts, the self that trades. So now you're in this point of where you can actually step back and realize, oh, these are not me. These are aspects of my being that as a human being, I have been gifted with the ability to manage and put together into a completely different way that allows me to. To change beliefs and to. And to engage reality from a still mind. Really cool stuff.

And the third step is once you've learned to observe, once you're able to calm and then observe, I will be asking you to find your historical internal dialogue. Now, that's the one that nobody likes to do because it's pretty negative. And what you discover is that if you've ever beaten yourself up or if you just whipped yourself into a lather and stuff like that, you have experienced the inner critic. The inner critic is that part of you that condemns you, judges you, blames you, or Sets you up for failure. Get in that trade. Get in that trade, man. Don't miss this, don't miss, get in now. And you jump in and all of a sudden you hit a brick wall. And when you hear that though, you hear that voice and then it laughs. That's the inner critic. And you realize that I've beaten myself up and it doesn't help. And yet the thing is I keep doing it because that's that. That apparently is what I've been taught to do. So the thing is, this inner critic also is in a relationship, in a dance with something that I call the adaptive voice. If you've ever felt like scared money, if you've ever felt, oh my God, ashamed, oh my God, what would people think? I can't let people know this. Or oh my God, I'm just no good, you know something, why am I doing this? Blah, blah, blah, blah. What happens is that you feel that shrinkage, you feel that, oh, that is the adaptive voice. It also may be aggressive, it may seize the opportunity right now, get. And all of a sudden you blow things up, okay? And if you happen to been an alpha who's been very successful, you come into trading with that attitude of success, making things happen, and you blow up net worth. So you get this idea is that you have been avoiding this internal struggle, doing all these affirmations, doing all this stuff. But when it comes down to where the rubber meets the road, when that money is really put into risk, what happens is it shows back up and you need something to answer the inner critic. Because that adaptive voice, that orphan nature of yours is either scared now or it thinks it has. It's euphoric, it thinks it can't lose. Both are dangerous emotional programs to project onto the screen of the mind when you're trading. So we've gotten there. And then there's the thing is that you have inherited self limiting beliefs from your family of origin, your culture, from environmental psychology.

From way, way back, from our 6 to 8 million years ago, they're there. And we can stay a primate brain, a mammalian brain, and they'll just run on there. But what I'm asking you to do is to recognize that though you inherited these, though you learned these from your history, they are not you. They are just simply default programming. The whispers are shouts and in your mind's ear, this is what you're going to have to master.

And without the mastery, the problem happens. So we're going to have to awaken what I call these internal resources, this empowered self. And it's that this is what you literally are learning how to do. And it's powerful because ultimately what you're going to discover is that within you, because you're a human being, because you were a social mammalian that had group survival from the beginning, you do have the courage of a warrior living in you. You will can pull forward the courage to face your fears. You may not like it, but the thing is that you are going to have to turn toward your personal dragons, not kill them. That's not possible. You're going to have to master them. You also have living within you the discipline, the ability to maintain order under pressure of a ruler. And what happens. We're showing the image of George Washington, the father of the United States. And you know, the thing is, he made a lot of sacrifices to be able to become that person. The deal though is without him, this country probably wouldn't be here. And it's interesting right now, isn't it? So that's there. And what we want to do is we want you to find it in my own cell. That is a Roman centurion that is symbolized by, in the movie Gladiator Maximus. He has that sense and feel. I use that as a symbolic representation also. You're going to have to develop the self compassion, the self soothing of a caregiver. Beating yourself up does not work. You're going to have to have compassion, have love for that part of the self that is making mistakes. And you're going to have to learn from those mistakes to build a better mind. And if those three processes right there are working, you're going to develop the impartiality, the clarity of mind of a sage symbolized here by Spot.

These are the emotional programs that you want to pull together with mindfulness and calming the self down to create the mind that you bring to trading. We are changing the mind that you're bringing to trading. The old brain is not going to work. The new brain can be trained to produce from these four emotional programs. That's what we're out to do at the same time. All that being said, I'm into George Washington these days. This is actually crossing the Delaware. They're about to attack Haitian mercenaries and it's Christmas Day. It was the turning point in the revolution. The thing is what you notice is that in intention you are becoming the change. You are taking these aspects of your being that are there that probably have been pushed away, and you're pulling them into the light and you're beginning to habituate them so that they are the ones that trigger when stress is there. That is how you do it. The beliefs that you project upon the market are the results that you see in your trading account. You will be able to tell how effective.

That mind you're creating is. But this is the way. This is the way we actually teach this process. You actually master the dragon. You don't beat it like Rambo. What happens is you master that dragon. And as you produce self mastery, what you discover is what most people discover in taking this course is that their lives outside of trading also improve greatly. They start understanding why they've been acting the way they and what makes them tick. And they start having the tools to be able to change that in trading. What happens is they really have to practice. And over time, what you do is you see them practicing and turning this into.

Pathways, neural pathways that create habits that become embedded. This is what we're doing. And mistakes, the thing is, mistakes are just simply signposts that tell you where you need to be working.

And the truth is that mistakes, I hope you welcome them. Because without mistakes, the brain doesn't learn. The brain does not learn from success. It learns from failure. So here you fail your way to success. That's a saying by Ray Kroc of.

McDonald's, the creator of McDonald's. So this is where we're at. If for lasting change, the deal is this is you're going to have a committee of the mind. Okay? What you're doing is you're saying, who is going to sit and make the decisions in the steering committee on the governing committee of my mind, okay? What you want. What you want is the discipline of a ruler, the courage of a warrior, the patience of a caregiver, and impartiality rather than fear rather than aggression. Okay? This can be done. So the deal is this. Who is going to populate your trading committee? That's the question. Okay? Left your own devices. You may do it. That's great. However, if you're looking at it and going, wow, this guy is making sense, what I'd like to do is basically invite you to consider our group course. It's going to be held in January, okay. And it has five sessions that covers the very material that we've been going over here. If you join early, and I want you to join early because you need to do a lot of practicing with your breathing so you just don't show up and think you've done it. I read the stuff one time and Randy, I've got it done. It's already more Than half full? No. Yeah, it's already more than half full. And the deal is, is that it will. That's just the way it is. People recognize that they need to do the practicing of the emotional regulation.

For a month or two before you show up the course. If you don't do that, you're late. Okay. That's why we want. That's why we want. That's why we're willing to offer you a really nice gift. It's 200 bucks if you want to go buy it on our website. Or you can get it free simply by having a good sense locking in and saying, I'm going to be practicing this, so the first day of this course, I'm going to hit it hard. That's what we're looking for. Okay. So the registrations are over and basically there's five sessions, and I'm the teacher of it. And.

You do it. And it's all on thinkification. It's a really great program.

It is.

People call it highly cost effective is what they call it, but that's one. And the individual courses for people who are looking for something highly comprehensive and deeply personal at great depth, it really gets into the mind how those got organized. And really you have me as a teacher, me as a mentor as you go through it. That's the big deal. You get to be with me for 10 times and it's on zoom and it's a heck of a course. But enough said. I want to thank you for being here, for exploring by opening yourself up to think in a different way. I really do. It's the first place where you have to say, you know something. It's not working. I can't keep doing the same thing expecting different results.

And what you're seeing is an emotional intelligence way of going and using the brain to create change. And if you have any questions, fire them up. We have just a few minutes and I don't. Yeah, put them in the question box and. Oh, we've got some. Okay. This is Eloy. Okay. I've been reading your book for two weeks and looking at your YouTube videos for four months. The thing is that one month ago I lost my mind during a trade and started doing revenge trading. My question is, is there anything you can do when you're in the state of mind where you're literally not thinking, just acting and losing? I've been meditating and doing some breathing exercises, and that has helped a lot. When you actually find yourself in that state of where you're hijacked the very Best thing you can do is get the hell out and go. And however you exercise, burn out the chemistry of the stress in your body. And it usually takes. A lot of people run, a lot of people walk, they have trampolines, they do whatever. Yeah, you walk dogs, you do anything. But the thing is once you get to that area where fight flight is there and your heart rate is over 95 beats per minute, you are disengaging and you're burning the chemistry out. And it usually takes about 25 to 45 minutes to burn that chemical out. Okay, but that understand that's emergency stuff is that I would like, I would hope that you come to a moment of where you're trained well enough so that stuff like that doesn't happen. Okay. So thank you. That's actually a good question. Let's see. This is from Matt.

Who is using chat GPT to review their trades and trading journals.

I do not use that. I know that a number of people that I work with use that to be able to do that. But that's not something that's relevant to what I do. I took the group course many years ago. I'd like to take it again. Are there any discounts available?

Yeah, email Delores and maybe, I don't know, but I've been Delamin many years. It is.

A. Leah, how do you release the shame that you feel when you blow your account? Boy, that's a great question. That's one of the most honest questions I've ever seen people do at this particular moment. What happens? It's not so much releasing the shame, it's coming to a different understanding of shame. Shame from an emotional intelligence perspective is an emotion that is telling you. It's called an organizing emotion. It helps to build relationship maintain relationships among survival groups. Shame is an emotion that tells you that the current way you're organized is not working for the good of the whole. And shame is disorganizing you to get the party started so that you can reorganize the self toxic shame says that you're a character flaw and nothing can be changed about that. That's just simply not the truth. Our biology tells us that shame is an organizing emotion. And if you learn how to use shame, which I teach you can use it to reorganize itself into higher functioning. That's how you do it.

Okay. Sometimes I get tired from being self aware. Then my work takes a hit. Other than being loud while in a work session, how do you focus on the good track data instead of something negative? You may. You maintain the mind. One thing that I do.

One of the major things is to recognize is that you cannot maintain the trader state of mind for more than an hour to an hour and a half at a pop. Okay. And even within that hour, hour and a half, because at that particular time, what you've done, the brain, the fuel that's fueling your brain is glucose. And when you are thinking, the kind of thinking that is required by trading, it is like taking a muscle car and just flooring it into sucking and it. You burn out of, you burn out of the fuel. That's why you need to be taking breaks every hour to hour and a half. The second thing is, is that as you're trading, you should be having alerts that fire every 10 to 15 minutes that allow you to come in and check out are you in good shape? You know, I have people where, you know, the thing is, is, yeah, I want to be a man. No, you need to be really clear that if you're getting foggy headed, that this is a biological problem. You need to allow the brain to, to refuel. Okay.

Oh my God. I'm here in the UK and I've arrived one hour late, later than I should have.

We're gonna have recordings up tomorrow both on our website and on my YouTube. So go there, this will be there for you. Yeah, go to the main page of the website. It'll be there from Jay. I started out trading and hoping to be successful so I can pay for courses like these until that time comes. What do I do in the meantime? I'll pay. What a heck of a lot of people do. I have over 300 videos up. Okay. And I have people who listen to my videos all the time. They, they get up in the morning and that part of their process is they listen to stuff and I, it's. And they say, randy, you're in my head. And I thought, at first I didn't like that idea. But the thing is, it's working for them. These people are producing consistent profitability. They're doing that. They have never. We get emails like this a lot. And so I, I know that people are, are clever people and they're learning how to use the materials that I give free to help improve their performances. The other thing is, is that, you know, besides my book, besides the workbook that goes with it, there are a number of retail guided meditations that help you tremendously, learning how to do these things. And that's one is affectionately been named Poor Man's Course. But the Major thing is people will get on. People really are into the YouTube. But also.

Words of wisdom has done and podcasts with me that now has got, I think it's over 700,000 views. And people, people use that playing again in the background and stuff like that to help them maintain their mind. That is a start, my friend. And then save your money. Come to a moment of where you can invest in yourself.

It is all about winning or losing a trade. No, it is not. You keep that attitude and what you will do is you will end up blowing and working with scared money. It is about the mind you bring to the performance.

You do not control outcome, winning or losing. You control the mind you bring to performance. And it just so happens if you do that.

You will actually be able to extract the edge, the method edge you have because you have found the psychological edge that drives your method edge. That is I, I get people to celebrate their losses when they follow their rules, when they wouldn't change a thing. It just landed on the wrong side of probability. It's important to truly go in and get that and understand that is probability is very different than certainty. The truth is, certainty isn't an illusion. Okay. Probability at least is telling you the truth that you need to be able to take care of yourself. Okay. So winning and losing is not. Deal. Okay.

I'll have positive P and L days for a week or more. Then it hit a wall. Yeah, this is called sabotage. And a lot of people find that they have tied their net worth to their self worth. And I once had a guy that traded with the high six figure account and every time he went over to seven figures, a million dollars, he would lose back down into the high six figures again. When I met him, he had been doing that for 15 years. When it came down to it, once we opened this thing up and really looked at it, what was going on. He grew up in a blue collar Detroit family where the father was a union guy working in a Ford plant, where the union and management were always banging each other in the head. And the guy was convinced that nobody was worth a million dollars. And he would shout and scream it at the dinner table. And he's doing it right in front of his kid who grows up to be a trader. And that's what he was doing. He was taking that injunction and building it into reality. Every time he hit that seven figures, he would lose back down. That was his sabotage. I don't know what your sabotage is, but it sounds like you hit a point and a lot of people finally Realize they start going, oh, you know, it's going too good, something bad's got to happen. Or you start winning and you start getting euphoric because you're hitting the dopamine going, I got it, man, I've got this down. Yeah, yeah. And what happens is, no, you just snorted cocaine and ultimately dopamine is going to have you thinking, you've euphoria, think that everything's going to go great. And you do not bring that kind of mind to trading. And that's where a lot of people blow themselves up. And the third track is that you have, you have a, you have a set limit about what your worth is. Okay.

How long did you get to a point where you are able to emotionally regulate and execute during trading? How long does it take to climb? How long is it going to take to climb? Well, first of all, I have actually seen people do this in six to eight weeks. Okay. I have seen people who work at it and what happens is they refuse to actually look at the darkness within them and it took them for a lifetime. The deal is, is that I see people using this work to master themselves all the time. It really depends on whether or not you're willing to do the work. Okay. So the thing is, as soon as you do the work and you recognize that what you're doing is there is, there is nothing to fear.

The truth is that I teach a concept called inherent worth where I'm getting you to find something totally inherently worthy within you that is about your being rather than about your performances. And that is what you keep locking in on.

Okay. Hi, Randy, my name is Wilmer. God bless you and thank you for your time. I'm a break even trader. So far in these first couple of months, that's really good.

On a live account. My question is, do you think I am on the right track for recognizing early that controlling my emotions and focusing on my performance and trading will push me to the next level of profitability? It'll open a door. Whether or not you decide to go through is another thing. But the deal is to recognize.

First of all you're doing pretty good for a couple months. Usually it takes people a couple years to get to the moment of where they're sliding around with profitability on a consistent basis. But the major thing is keep doing what you're doing. The answer is yes, you know, is that, you know.

If again, depending on a lot of people that come to these things will never take any of my work and they will never pay for it because can't afford it. Okay, I understand that. That's why I, I'm very committed to doing a lot of sharing. Again, if you can't do the group course or the individual course or the poor man's course, go and start watching the videos. Start coming to a moment where you're really listening deeply and you're working with yourself. Talk to yourself. Talk to that orphan nature of yours. Okay? You can do that.

Hello. Could you please explain a little bit on how, on how we will work on this path of eliminating the limiting beliefs? Well, you learn how to produce emotional regulation, okay? So you're not being overwhelmed. You learn how to observe and quit identifying with the beliefs that are producing this stance. Then you learn what the inner critic and what your orphan nature are talking about, who you'll find your self limiting beliefs there. And then what happens is you will learn how to produce an empowered mind. And when you do that, it only begins there. I actually call it the internal struggle of where you start exposing yourself to things that used to really trip you up. And at the same time, while you're doing that, you pull forward this empowered mind that you've built. Okay? That's where the action is. Because ultimately the inner critic only has the power that you give it.

When you stop giving it the power and you start creating your own sense of efficacy, that's when the magic happens.

Last one. Is it right here or.

In the blue? I heard Warren Buffett said he follows a saying from the great baseball player Ted Williams.

Is that he waits patiently only for a pitch he can hit. Consider. I consider that a very good analogy to being patient on a personal edge. I do too, by the way. However, sometimes I feel my journal shows I'm a few seconds early or late and miss a good trade. How do you. What do you do to manage your emotions? To not feel? No, you don't. It's not that you don't feel them. It's like you're emotionally intelligent using your emotions to particular. Use a particular mind. You're letting self limiting type of emotions creep in and you haven't learned how to. How to do that struggle. Well.

What do you do to manage your emotions to not feel you're too early or too late in your system and eventually get charged up. You don't get charged up to take another trade before you keep seeing a missed opportunity.

I don't even know how to answer this.

I have laid out a process that I teach from understanding emotions very differently, to regulating the emotion, to observing the emotion, to recognizing the negative Emotions, building the empowered emotions and then using that to reclaim the stuff. You're actually at a moment of where you need to catch the emotions before you even start. You need to be in an empowered state of mind before you start trading. And in my own trading training, what I'm teaching is for a person as they move into an area they have problems in, I am teaching them to pull that mind up as they move into that area so that what they're doing is they are learning to self correct. Reprogram the old belief and the pattern behind it.

One more. Lionel. Hello, Randy. First time on your website.

A webinar. My only question is, how do you develop a probability mindset when trading?

This process that I was talking about, this five step process is how you do it, is that, you know, ultimately you come to a big huge moment where you realize that historically you have been programmed to become winning and losing. And the truth is that's an illusion. The truth is that you are already in probability. And I'm asking you to wake up a mind that can engage that. And again, what I do is I teach the regulation that's a lot, the mindfulness. And then I teach you to look for the things that actually.

Stand in your way from that. And then I teach you to find the empowered mind. And what happens is all that is located in my group course and in my individual course. I don't. I meet people every day, not every day, but two or three times a week that have never, I don't know, they write me and say, I want to. Thank you, Randy. I've become a profitable writer simply by listening to all your videos, all the free stuff that I give and they've been able to do it themselves. I'm okay with that. Okay. At the same time, what I know is that those are, that's really exceptional stuff. What I know is that it takes a process that. A step by step process to be able to change something that has been set in concrete. Okay. And to evolve it to where it's a flexible pattern and a new habit shows up about the way you interact with uncertainty and friends at that. I am talked out. I wish you guys well. If I can help you, please, please check us out. And.

Happy Thanksgiving. And the holiday season is coming up. I just simply wish you the best all the way through. And if I can help you, I'd like to have that opportunity. So be well. Look at this. And tomorrow, truly do the little exercise and notice the exercise, the breathing exercise and notice the tension in your body, notice the way you're breathing. And to recognize that one small step is the beginning of an incredible journey. Okay. It all starts with breath. That's where it starts. Have a great holiday. Have a great Thanksgiving. Wherever and whatever you are. Take care. Bye. Bye.