Trading success depends on psychology, not just strategy. Your brain craves certainty and control, but markets run on probability. You need discipline, courage, and the ability to stay calm through frequent losses.
It seems so easy when you look at trading logically. You look at it and say, you know something, all I have to do is follow my rules. I have a set of rules that allows me to, to be able to have an edge in my trading. And if I follow them, I'm going to do okay. I have methodology, risk management, and I have my platform, trustee platform. And I'm ready. And what people discover after all that training, after all that, all that money that has gone into training, that there's something really big missing is called trader psychology.
There are three legs, there's methodology, there's platform, and there's trader psychology. Most people don't look at trader psychology because they think, hey, I've got a good trader psychology. I'm good, I'm good, I know how to win, I know how not to lose, I've got the right attitude. And then they go into trader, they actually go into trading and they discover something is they don't have the right mindset. They discover that they do not have an effective mind for trading. And here's the deal. No matter how good your mind's been.
Evolution has built it for something completely different than what you're asking it to do. In trading, evolution built a mind that controls outcome. It wants to be right and it does not want to fail. Because if it fails, you're dead. You don't move your genetics into the future. So we're wired, we're wired to look at that, I gotta win.
But you bring that attitude of winning and losing into trading and you discover something.
It'S unfit. It's an unfit mind that you brought from your winning days into your trading days because you've gotten a certainty based mind from evolution and history. But you need a probability based mind if you're going to be successful in trading. And you do not come equipped with that. How do you do it though? How do you do that? First you have to see and believe that the mind that you brought is not going to be effective and accept it and say, you know something, as much as I like this mind, as much as I really am comfortable with my beliefs about winning and losing, those beliefs are not creating the reality of highly effective trading. You say what's required? Well, one of the biggest things right off the bat is you have to recognize that you're going to lose and you're going to lose a lot. Your whole attitude about losing has to change. You move from losing. Oh, I hate that, I hate that. I hate to lose to losing. As I just landed on the Wrong side of probability. There's nothing wrong with what I did. It's just that this is probability rather than certainty. And then you come to the point where you realize that, you know, I'm going to have to learn to manage emotions. I'm willing to quit denying that I have emotions. Trying to hold them and push them down to going, you know something? I recognize now that there is no freedom from emotions. I can't trade without emotions. No, you can't. The only time you don't have emotions is when you're dead. But what you can have and what's powerful is that you can have freedom of emotions. You can choose what emotions show up in the midst of uncertainty. That's the power, friends. That's when you go, I've got it. But even there, there's more you can begin to say, you know something? I know that.
This force of life created in me a particular being, a certain set of possibilities that allows me to live and live abundantly. However, it was for one particular environment and now I'm in a different environment. I have to build that mind so that it's effective with probability management, not certainty management. This is the big deal. You realize that you've never been in control of outcome. No matter how much you believed it looked or that it looked that you had control of the outcome. Your Alpha ness just doesn't work. In this new environment called trading. You can't make things happen.
What you do is you manage yourself. You manage the mind that you bring into the moment of trading. That, friends, is the secret. That's the place where you go, wow, there was never certainty. No, there's never been certainty in the outside of your life.
However, in trading you don't have that illusion. You get it very quickly, is that you never had control. But what you do have control over is not the outcome, but the mind you bring into the moment. From there you discover that you can build a mind rooted in discipline, the ability to manage under stress. You can build a mind rooted in courage, turning toward your fear rather than avoiding it or pretending it's not there. You have the ability of creating a self soothing part of yourself that calms, calms, calms your fears down. You also have the ability of calling forward an emotional program of impartiality, clear thinking. So here's the deal, friend. You can take the mind that you brought or and get the results you're getting or what you can do is you can build a mind built in discipline.
Built in courage.
Built in self soothing and built in impartiality. As emotional states and out of those emotional states comes the mind that you trade with because friend what this is really all about very simple is all thinking is emotional state dependent and what you're looking to do is to build the emotional base that can manage probability. That's what you're doing friends come and learn. It can be done. You can rebuild this mind but it's not natural, it's not going to happen because you will it. It's not going to happen because you spent a lot of money on stuff it's going to happen because you say you know something. I have to build a very different way of my brain engaging uncertainty, engaging the probabilities of success and failure and recognizing that I can control performance. I can build a performance mind, a probability mind rather than staying stuck with an artifact that no longer works a certainty based, alpha based perfectionist based mind. You can do it friends I can teach you. Come and learn.
It.
