Emotional Discipline Building the Patient Confident Mind for Trading

You know, discipline, it's something that we know that we have to have to be able to trade effectively. We have to be able to manage the emotions that just absolutely are part of the trading environment. And we know that, we know that you're supposed to plan your trade and then trade your plan. Yet the vast number of traders, once they get into the trade, once they start anticipating the trade, what they discover is that discipline breaks down. And what I want to suggest to you is this, is that it's really more about understanding discipline and what discipline really is and what it could be versus the way it's applied now. So what I want to do is I want to start saying, you know, the way we look at discipline, we want to think of it as something willpower. We force our will upon the emotion, okay? And what we discover is that works for a while, and it certainly may have worked in other endeavors in your life, from business to athletics to corporate life. And it was that willpower that allows us to subdue the emotion. And yet when people get to trading, something strange happens, is suddenly the more that you resist that emotion, the more that it persists. And the more you push against the emotion, the bigger and stronger it gets. And what's common in trading is that suddenly out of nowhere, the emotion that you could so easily control in another environment becomes uncontrollable. It becomes the 800 pound gorilla in the mind. And you're going, what happened? What happened? It's so easy. You know, I could use the willpower, I could deny the emotions, I could push the emotions away and yet there they are and they've come back stronger. What we're beginning to realize is the paradigm that you use for emotional discipline needs to be rethought. And this is what I'm going to suggest to you, is that emotional discipline does not come out of force. It comes really out of observation. It really comes to what observer are you, what mind are you bringing into the mind of trading? Or better said, what mind are you bringing into the performance of trading? And you're going, you know something? When I experience an emotion, most likely you have learned how to push the emotion away or to will power it out of existence. And yet in trading, what you discover is that emotion starts growing and growing and growing till it hijacks the rational mind. What we're saying is, what if the emotion needs to be treated differently? And mostly I'm talking about fear and greed or my favorite, lust. That's when you jump into trades. You go, why did I do that? As you begin to realize that, you can watch the emotion if you know what to look for. You can see the emotion when it first starts, when you can do something about it and you can interrupt it before it gets on a head of steam and takes over mind. But you have to start realizing, wow, you know something? My brain and my mind is not really just some static instrument. What it is, is it's a community of rival emotional programs. That's the brain that are duking it out. And part of those programs is fear. It has a place at the table in the brain, a place at the table in the mind. And by denying it, by resisting the fear, you're not listening to it and you're not mastering what the fear is trying to tell you. What happens. If you had a sense of discipline in you that was really instead of about willpower, about force, it was about being able to manage.

Being able to manage the intensity of an emotion. What if it were about being able to manage the stress of a moment where part of that management was just not force. It was also self soothing or what we might call self compassion. What if you began to realize that, you know, the emotion can grow and I can resist the emotion, I'm going to force it into my will or I, I can start recognizing the emotion is biological. It takes over mind. My job is to learn how the emotion works and what I realize the emotion has triggered. And let's say greed or fear and it's beginning to grow. You have that urgency to jump in a trade, or you have that fear to get in a trade, or you have an urgency to jump out of a trade, or you have a fear that the profit is going to be taken away from you. Instead of resisting that emotion, what if you were to turn toward that emotion and calm the emotion down? You get at the fear and then all of a sudden you say, well, this is really about self soothing. I can calm the fear down and I can get at, to the very core meaning. And friends, this is where discipline, understood the way most trading is done today, really falls apart, is that this is about the emotional brain, which basically looks at the thinking brain as just some appendage that happened to show up along the way. When the emotional brain feels the emotion, it simply wipes out the thinking brain. There's just a level bam. That that happens. What we're saying is something very different. What if you were to say, you know something, the emotional program discipline, what if it were in place and it were about soothing the emotion first, then listening to the Emotion and going, you know something? Am I prepared for this and can I manage the stress of this moment? Can I maintain order in the midst of this stress? And you're going, you know something? That's the whole key is discipline is not about forceful management. It's about maintaining order of stress. It's about maintaining the order of the mind as it engages uncertainty. And what you learn very quickly is that when the brain encounters uncertainty, it automatically, by default, triggers to vulnerability. That vulnerability triggers automatically to fight flight. Your job in discipline is to recognize what the emotion is trying to do and then being able to counteract it and to be able to move it forward and move it back into its place and decide, you know something. In discipline, what we really want to do is not just control fear. We want to change the emotional response that the brain, the mind has to uncertainty. We already know what the default programming is like. What we're looking for is to be able to change, okay, when I'm coming upon it, instead of just trying to fight the emotion. What I'm going to do this time is I'm going to use discipline of a ruler, I must say, who needs to show up in this moment. Discipline does, impartiality does, self calming does, and the courage to face the fear does. Those are the elements missing friends. They're very doable. You can learn to do this. You learn to regulate the emotion. Then you learn to observe, become mindful of the emotion. And then you become an intelligent user of emotions. And what you discover is you don't have freedom from emotions.

No, what you have is freedom of emotions. Uncertainty in trading is going to happen. It really depends on which emotional mind shows up in discipline. What you're doing is you're ordering the mind that shows up to meet the certainty. You're not trying to make the certainty, the uncertainty go away. Huge difference.

This is training friends. It's not an event where you go, oh, there's just one little skill that if I learn it, everything's fine. The holy grail appears to me. No, what you're doing is you have to change, you have to adapt. What evolution has given us, it's given us a brain and a mind that reacts primitively from survival instincts to uncertainty, from uncertainty to vulnerability. To fight flight, what we want to do is through discipline, internal discipline, finding the discipline inside you to maintain order under stress and saying, what we want to do is in maintaining order. We want to bring a different emotional mind to the game. We're not going to change the uncertainty of the game. We're going to change the mind that comes to execute. And that's where the discipline comes from to say I can't make emotions disappear, but I can order what emotions come to engage the uncertainty. You want to learn more? Watch more of the videos, Read the article from this month. Take a look at the book. Get a free ebook. Start really exploring at the website how you go about training the emotional mind to be able to do with this. Come and visit us. It's been great and my hope is that all your trading goes well. Meanwhile, get trained.