Getting Real and Growing Up as a Trader

At some moment in the evolution of a trader, they realize they have to grow up, they have to truly evolve from who they were before they were a traitor, and really become the kind of mind, the kind of person that can produce success in trading. Because there's a difference. There's a huge difference. And the question is, when did you wake up?

Usually there's a story behind it. You know, you get into it with how that idea about, boy, you can really ratchet this thing up. You can see the number of games and you can see what trading can really do for you. Then you think of all that personal freedom, all that stuff, and it's just intoxicating. You get into it and before long you're still, you're working. You realize, oh, I have to, I have to be able to learn all this stuff, have this knowledge base so that I can achieve those goals. And then, oh, I don't know, two, three, four, five years pass and what you notice is you're still behind the game. Success is still around the corner, but every time you get there, it's like a mirage. It keeps getting further away. And so you start with going, what drove me? Usually it's money. Yeah, you just think of the personal freedom. You think about the ratcheting up all that stuff. It seems so great. Then a lot of traders, once they get in, they get fascinated by the whole notion of working with the markets and really seeing themselves work and probabilities and they're hooked. And it's good because they love what they're doing. So what happened is that you got drove for one reason, you evolved to another. But then you discovered something. What do you find? It's not working. It's not working at all. And then you go, well, what happens? What's now? And this is when you have to really begin to say, am I going to take responsibility for myself as a trader? And what I want you to do is take that word responsibility and I want you to break it in half. And what it says is response ability. Responsibility in its original form was literally about managing, Having the ability to manage the response that goes on to different things out in your environment. Boy, nailed it right here in trading. Because what you have to do is being responsible is not enough. You have to become response ability. You have to develop that responsibility so that you move from the kind of brain and mind that you came to trading with. And that's gonna work. It's not gonna work, friends. That brain is built to control outcome. It is built to be right and God forbid, wrong and it wants to predict outcomes. It does, it does, it does. You get into trading and discover is that you have no control. It's an illusion which freaks the brain out. That's been built for God knows how many generations to be in control of environment, to be right to live. Okay. And then be able to see causal relationships that allow predictions to be made where those woolly mammoth are going to be at this particular moment in time. Then you go, wow. So my job is literally to build my responsibility to a very different world than I originally was built for. Yeah, the world that you were built for through psychological evolution. Evolutionary psychology is the way a lot of people call it. And your personal psychology truly has, has built a person that was successful adapted to a particular environment. The problem is you're going into a different environment with a very different set of rules. It's like asking an LPGA golfer at the top of his game to play baseball. You remember Michael Jordan did that and he was the greatest basketballer of all, but when he went to play baseball, he was not the greatest. And so there's a need to adapt. And that's where the problem really begins. Your brain is organized around fear and that leads to fear and aggression. If you can't avoid the threat, you attack the threat. That's what you come to the game with. It wants to avoid and threat to your emotional brain. It's very different than what you think of as, oh well, this is probability. No, when you're, when you're wagering cash on a risk and getting into it and realizing you could lose the emotional brains thinking, sabertooth hybrid gobbling up and what it's if it stops you get more confirmation, more confirmation stops you. It wins, it gets reward, it gets dopamine, it locks it in and suddenly you have a really hard time pulling the trigger. The same thing when losing often, you know, you caveman brain there is sitting there going, whoa, whoa, I just took a loss. Somebody took a chunk of me. It taking part of my clan. I have to attack back. I have to render it as a non threat. And all sudden you revenge trade, you try to make up for prior losses. And I guess the really big one is scarcity thinking where you know, the thing is you're you, you're saying, oh my God, I've got into profit. Finally after all this, all this craziness, I better take the profit now while it's still here. Friends, this is not personal psychology problems. This is evolutionary psychology issues where you're designed for one thing and you're Asking that design over millions of years to suddenly change for this, this is the illusion and why you have to grow up because it's not going to work.

So, wow, we've got it. This is a deadly cocktail, evolutionary psychology and personal psychology together. It just, it just tears you up because ultimately that brain of yours is about control and winning and predicting. And the brain on trading is about probability.

So ultimately.

The big key that has to be gotten is that you're not having thoughts, they're having you. And that thoughts are the caboose, they're not what's driving the train. The train is being driven by the engine called emotion. And those emotions are designed from millions of years ago on the African savanna. And suddenly you're putting them into a probability based world of trading. It's not going to work. So what I want you to grasp is there is actually nothing wrong with you. Nothing.

Evolution did its job. It developed you, adapted you into a human being that survived. Okay, everything's fine. It adapted you for a specific set of circumstances though. And then all of a sudden you change the circumstances and you're not fit to work in that arena. And this is where you have to go, well, how do I go about changing? And you can. It really starts with the recognition of emotions, literally that you don't have emotions, they're having you and that they're biological, they're not psychological, they overwhelm psychology. And that you're going to have to have a different emotional responsibility if you're going to grow yourself as a trader. If you're going to grow up and you're going to do what's necessary to be able to become a consistently profitable trader. And once you grasp that whole notion of motion, the very next thing is, well, how do I start managing the emotion? That starts with breath, believe it or not. Breath, that stuff that's been around for 4,000 years by the yogas, okay?

Because an emotion is biological, it will have a signature that includes the way you breathe and the tension you hold. The very first thing I teach is how you can sit there and manage the intensity of emotion by breath, by the relaxing relaxation of attention. And you get it so that it doesn't bill, bill, bill and wipe you out. That's the first task of growing up and becoming and building the brain that's needed for trading emotional regulation. Is it going to solve the problem? No, it's not. But without solving that, without being able to control the manager and manage the intensity of emotion, you're never going to hit the mind.

The mind requires you to develop mindfulness practices what I would call the observer. Suddenly, where you recognize that you know something.

I see a bunch of thoughts floating around in my head and what's happened is the observer that I currently am is fusing to those thoughts unexamined. And in mindfulness and observer work, you're learning to step back out of thought and recognizing that you are not those thoughts. Oh, and besides that, that mind of yours, it's just simply one adaptation among a huge potential that got organized into a particular self. There is no permanent you yet. You can go and start redesigning, redesigning the self that trades, this organization of the self that trades. This is when you start going, whoa.

This is the power of mindfulness. And then you have to start going, well, what is this mind business? I tend to look at the mind as a governing board that has lots of different personalities in it, some good, some bad. They want to take the company different ways that companies, you and the chairman of the board that would also be you, has fallen asleep and has been asleep at the well. And as you wake up in mindfulness, you realize you've got a mutiny going on. And you have to start reorganizing that mind, not the way it used to be, but into a different way that can do the work of trading. And you begin to realize that in the same way that fear and aggression are simply parts of your human condition, so are discipline, the discipline of ruler, the courage of a warrior, the self compassion of a caregiver, and the impartiality of sage. And you can train, you can be trained to pull those emotional programs up to create a completely different committee of the mind that moves into the probabilities, the uncertainties of trading. That's what's needed. If the old brain, caveman brain, with that fear and aggression, when exposed to uncertainty, is allowed to be there, you're going to continue down this route that most traders do. They blow their cash out in three years and are gone. Or you can say, you know something? What I really need to do is I need to redevelop my response ability so that when I encounter uncertainty, what is summoned up is not the old programming, but the discipline, the courage, the self soothing and the impartiality of the probability mind. Fortunately, through memory reconstruction and consolidation, you can build that access so that literally when you engage in uncertainty, instead of the old route, the old programming coming up and you can call forward this new mind that you've built especially for uncertainty to manage it. And that is what we teach.

It'S something that you're born with. It's there, it's a latent talent and it's your turn to be able to pull it forward and to make it the normal way of engaging uncertainty. It's big turnaround, it's unnatural compared to the evolutionary person that you are. But this is what gives humans just a ticket to co create the world we're in. And friends, this is where it begins, is recognize that you're going to have to get some growing up. You're going to have to go, wow, what I got into trading for is. No, it's, it's just not doing it. It's a different game and I'm going to have to adapt to that game not the way I want it, but the way I see it's necessary. Then you learn to manage those emotions. That's the emotional regulation. You develop mindfulness so that you can really begin to separate and become. You can start tinkering with the voices within the cell. And then you start building.

A mind out of the discipline, out of the courage, out of the self soothing, out of the impartiality that engages the uncertainty. The brain no longer freaks out. You open the door to becoming consistently profitable. That's the game plan. It's time to grow up. Thank you.