Emotional Self Mastery of the Trading Mind Under Stress

People talk about emotional self mastery as if it were emotional control. Like you could take an emotion, you could push it around, you could push it away so that you're not having to feel that emotion, okay?

That's the typical way that we're taught to manage emotions. Until you get to trading. Suddenly, trading presents an incompletely different animal for us to really deal with. And this emotional animal, us, is at first an emotional being who rationalizes. We're not a rational being who has some deviances with emotions. No, the key is emotions are not, by any stretch of the imagination, feelings. You know, that psychological feeling. I feel the emotion, I feel the fear, I feel the anger, I feel the urgency, I feel all that. Well, that's only one tiny little speck of an emotion. An emotion from a neurobiological standpoint is better understood as a biological action potential, okay? That is coordinating activity, action between the environment that would be the markets and the organism that would be the trader. They happen spontaneously. Most of the primitive emotions that are deeply concerning and trading don't even work in the thinking brain. They bypass it. They see the urgency, they see the need to control outcome. They see that they're powerless. They see that they're not in control. And suddenly it's no longer a thinking thing. It's at that moment something completely different. It's reactive. The circuits going through the thinking brain are just simply left out of the equation. Now, you experience that as going nuts, going tilt, okay? Like when the trade goes against you, or you've missed so many trades getting into trades, you jump into trades, all that stuff, tilt. You're actually experiencing an emotion. But you don't know much of that emotion. You're still equating it with a feeling. A feeling is one small component. A feeling literally is the chemistry of the emotion in the body that you're feeling. But when you feel that emotion, it's already hijacked you. You've got to start a lot earlier. You've got to start at this one point in emotion called emotional arousal. When there is a change, okay, in status, the trade goes against you. There is automatically an emotion that that's going to rise. When it rises, it starts building strength. It starts getting ready for action, fight, flight type stuff, okay? It starts revving up emotional arousal. Then you do feel that feeling because it's cranking up, cranking up, and a switch is turned on right there. That's the big one. It's no longer revving up. It's pulsing through your bloodstream and your brain, altering the Way you, you perceive. Okay? I often work with heart rate monitor and an app to be able to establish a range of. Of really competent trading. And I had a guy the other day says Randy, it was really amazing. I was at one heart rate and I perceived the charts completely different. I understood them. I was on the time. It jumped five beats per minute. And suddenly I perceived a completely different, completely different chart. That emotion had taken over. It had become a feeling. It's pulsing through. Suddenly there's motivation. That emotion is telling you to do something. No, don't take that loss. No, no, no. Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That is what the emotion is motivating you. Fight flight. What we want is, is approach curiosity, being able to be interested but not sucked into it. Now then, we also have genetic predisposition. Some people are just nervous. Some people are more risk taking. Okay? That's just part of it. The last part is meaning is belief. Okay? This is very different than what you hear about how to train the subconscious. In reality, what you're doing is your limbic system, that emotional brain is amoral. What it's doing is it's trying to figure out a way for you, the trader, the organism, to survive in the moment. And it will come to a solution. If it works, say, like getting out of the trade too early, you go, whoo, I'm out of that. Then only later do you go, oh, my God, I missed the whole run. I missed it. That's the whole point. The emotional brain doesn't care. The thinking brain didn't have a dang thing to do with it. What we're looking to do is go, whoa. You're telling me that at the level of belief, those beliefs are created, then they're wired into pattern, into circuitry, okay? And I promise you a few mantras and having a big smile on your face and saying, I'm a disciplined trader is not going to work. You're not going to train the subconscious, the emotional brain, by some mantras and some words and some affirmations, okay?

It will not change until it recognizes that the old organization of belief is no longer working effectively for the organism.

Okay? You can huff and puff and you can do all that stuff. You can talk the positive energy and you can just program all you want. But under stress, that's trading. All that falls apart. That's why you do all that positive thing. And yes, I'm going to train that subconscious. They're not successful in trading. It feels good. It feels so good. Yeah. Yeah. I'M all pumped up. Being pumped up is dangerous. In trading, feeling good is not allowed. What you're looking to do is you're looking to sit there and produce. Discipline, impartiality, whether or not you win or lose really doesn't really matter at that moment. What matters is how you perform. What, what mind do you bring to meet the challenges of trading? Okay? That's the deal. Because if you have an edge and you have your performance mind really linked in, then that edge is going to drive your ability to pull more capital out of the markets than you're leaving back in. It's no longer about winning or losing. That's emotional mastery, emotional self mastery. And what you're doing is you're realizing that in order to get to that level, you have to tap into the Olympic beliefs, implicit beliefs, or what they're also known as, or learnings. You know, if you're not a human with the brain, you don't call them beliefs, you call them learnings. Okay? So you're looking at it and what you're looking to do is, is not all the feeling good. You're looking for the place you don't want to go. The place you want to go is where the magic is. That's where you go in and you fight the age old problems of a deep sense of insecurity, of not mattering, of unworthiness, of winning and big money and just that sense of whole nine yards not mattering. If I make a bunch of money, then I'll matter. And what you realize is that that are the beliefs, okay? That the beliefs that the limbic system built. The limbic system doesn't know about money, okay? It doesn't know about money, doesn't know about computers. Money becomes a representation of your power in the world to stay alive, to prosper. Money becomes your net worth, not just your self worth. And so if you make money, you have a sense of well being. It also is about your competency, okay? But even more, it triggers because of this scarcity that says, oh look, oh my gosh, it's going to be, what I have is going to be taken away from me. There's a limbic belief right there. And what you're doing is you're seeing it organized around there. And the last one that I really look at is powerlessness. When you experience that powerlessness, trade goes against you and you go tilt and all sorts of things. What you're looking at is literally these deep, deep seated emotions that are built around money as survival, not as accumulation. I Feel good. No. Money becomes a representation of caveman's ability to survive. It doesn't know about greenbacks, it doesn't know about coal. It knows about survival. And we put the money up and that's what it begins to represent. Your beliefs about money and what it will do for you is powerful. And let me, let me give you, in closing, let me give you a powerful belief. One of the greater entrepreneurs of all time, Branson, made the statement about money. What he said was, money is for making things happen.

Now what I want you to hear in that is it wasn't about his power, it wasn't about his safety. Okay. It wasn't about his prestige. No. It was about making the deal happen. Completely different conversation about money. Those are the old beliefs. Those are the emotional beliefs that you're going to have to master and they're not going to do. When you see the secret and stuff like that, it seems so easy. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's not. In trading, you're faced with the reality of your trading account. You just can't feel good. And it seems true. No, you have to deal with the darkness within you. And out of that darkness comes great light. When you start mastering that deep part that you don't want to see, and that's being revealed in your trading, that's when you begin to see. Oh, this is emotional self mastery. Yeah. I can design the belief system if I'm willing to do the work and dig that arises when I intersect with uncertainty. Yeah. Instead of fight, fight, you'll have approach there. Where you approach it and you recognize that you're not running for your life, you're not fighting for your life. Fight, flight. What, what you're doing is you're approaching recognizing that if you follow your rules, if you follow the performance of your rules, then what happens is your greater chance of winning is there. And that brain, that primitive brain begins to adapt to that. That, friends, is where the magic is. Take some work. If you want to learn more, watch more. But come to the website, watch my webinars and start really deciding if you've had enough of the positive self talk and the affirmations and if you really are looking to build a mind that can engage uncertainty. Okay. Successfully. That's where consistent profitability comes from. I wish you well. I wish you well, friends. Come join us. Take a look and see if this work is talking to you. Okay? Take a look at it and see if it really works for you. Then come visit. Tap the tires, look around, look at the courses we offer. I wish you well. Take care, my friends.