How a Past Traumatic Loss Impacts Trading Decisions in the Moment

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Welcome, everyone. My name is Randy Howell with Trader State of Mind. And first thing, let's just make sure that people can hear me. If some kind people would please type in yes into the chat box or why or the question. The question box, that would really great. Thank you very, very much. Okay, we're ready. Well, you know, it's very interesting is.

Several weeks ago, I started recognizing that an enormous amount of people, when they start working with me, have had traumatic events, traumatic losses in their past. And it definitely just absolutely rattled them when they were trading. And so what happened? I said, you know, it's really weird. How is it that I haven't talked about traumatic loss and traumatic events impacting trading performance? I mean, I've been doing this for 15 years. I'm going, that's a long spell not to talk about that. Being that it's so prevalent within the client base that I have, and it's prevalent in the client base I have, I know it's relevant within the trading community at large. So we're going to be exploring traumatic loss and traumatic events and the impact it has on how you perform under pressure. That's what we're going to be doing. And as always, I am going to hold questions to the word the end, and I'm going to address them then. But that doesn't stop you from.

From being able to. I've lost what happened. I'm looking so I can't see you. And I'm going, well, you're not. You're not going to see me because you're going to see slides. You, you're not going to see me. Okay? The thing is, what we want to do is we want to look at this and we're going to hold the questions toward the end, but type them in, okay? So that we have a slew that we can work with. And at the end we'll start addressing everything. So we ready to go? Let's do it. Now. Let me ask you something as a trader, okay? Have you ever. Have you ever been in a moment of where you've just absolutely lost control and when the trade goes against you, okay. And particularly when the trade goes against you, all of a sudden you're powerless and it's just boom. What you're looking at is a stress reaction. And in psychology for a while, we call it acute stress event. That means you have been exposed to an event that was beyond your control and your brain could not integrate it into the perceptual Map that it currently has of your life. Okay. Happened today. Yeah. And the key is this is what you're looking at is a traumatic memory that the. An event that you experience that the brain has encoded. And it encoded it around being powerless. Okay. And what you're looking at is a very fast reaction to it that happens long before you can possibly think. And this is where we really need to look. Because ultimately, what happens with traumatic loss, and I want to be really upfront with this, is not just traumatic loss. And trading traumatic events would also include sexual abuse when you're out of control. And it would include. It include really violence in the home. It can include like an accident of where, like a lot of people, when they've hit trees head on, can never remember hitting the tree. What you're looking at are events and where I. My early career was built with at risk youth where kids were experiencing enormous levels of crazy, crazy, crazy ones of crazy things happening in the family, from drug abuse to this to that, and a lot of beatings, a lot of that stuff. So I was very common. Working with post traumatic stress disorder was just simply part of my game. And I hate to say it, but a lot of the work that I teach in my group and in my individual course, they're based on working with post traumatic stress disorder. And again, what happens is that traumatic loss occurs when your need to be in control is severely challenged. And no matter what you can bring forward, you cannot be. You cannot have a modicum of control. You are powerless. And this is the thing, is that in the powerlessness, your brain just goes on tilt and it's going to either react from fight, flight, you know, fighting or fleeing, or it can dissociate. A lot of people will just simply go numb. They will simply back out. People I know, people I know have gone through things where. Like natural disasters where they're completely out of control. Like right now, if you just had a bunch of missiles land on you and, you know.

Crazy things happen, it's out of your control and you have that sense of powerlessness. Well, the brain encodes that. We're going to look at that a little later. And what happens is it starts looking for matches. And it just so happens trading provides a lot of those matches. Because in trading, we think that we're trading money. We're actually. To caveman brain, your primitive brain, we are actually trading life and death is caveman does not know about money. He knows about power. He knows about safety. He knows about controlling outcome. He knows about prestige, and he knows about being able to predict event. And when you're put into a situation where you become a bucking horse in a burning barn, what you do is you build traumatic memory. And this is a way. And this is the way it gets crazy. So we know that and we go. Then we go, okay.

You are sitting in a situation in trading where you, you see. And I. Couple years ago, I worked with a guy who blew up five and a half, fifteen and a half million dollars in five minutes. Pretty. And it traumatized him. So you're looking at that, you're looking at that memory and you realize created by loss. And all of a sudden you were in a sense of powerlessness. What do you think your limbic system is going to do? It's going to look for that potential loss into the future. You already have a brain that's wired for anxiety, looking for trouble on the horizon. And what happens? The brain starts creating stories about it. And you start getting in the place where the trade goes against you. You go crazy. What happens? You've waited there too, a little too long. You want to get in the trade to prove yourself. And then it really beats you. There's all sorts of places where it occurs. And it also may show up literally when you're taking profits early, where you're scared that if you don't take the profits right now, they are going to be taken. They're going to be taken from you. And if you happen to have grown up in poverty, okay, it's very common where they have. It's not. It's not fomo. It is scarcity thinking where literally they are scared that what they have is going to be taken from them at any time. It's very traumatizing. And then they get to trading and what do they do? They start. They learn all this stuff. They've got the skills. And then they go into trade and then they get to profitability. And then what triggers is the traumatic memory of growing up in scarcity. The one of the ones that I have a current client where he grew up in a trailer in a trailer park where mom. There wasn't a father anywhere around. And.

The bill collectors were constantly hounding them. They couldn't answer the phone, okay, because it might be a bill collector. They would leave the house when they saw people coming toward them. It was that kind of thing. They were stigmatized like that. The guy grows up, becomes very wealthy, and yet at the same time, what he's afraid of is that whatever he has is going to be taken from him. And in Fact that happened to him. He had a major project that had. He had built up a hospital, and then it was taken from him. So these are the kinds of events that create the kind of traumatic memory that your brain begins to scan the environment for. And trading, obviously, is one of those things that can really, really make the thing happen very quickly. Now, it can also show up anytime where there is a fear of losing again that keeps you on the sideline. Remember, in traumatic and acute stress organization, you are either when you fire and you lose cognitive control, what's happening is that it's going to either go through aggression, it's going to go through avoidance, or it's going through. It's going to go through dissociation. A lot of people say, randy, I don't know. I was just sitting there and, you know, I wanted more confirmation. But what happened is I just went numb. I don't know what happened. The trade got away from you. That's the traumatic memory that has created acute stress memory. Okay? And it would be in many ways, you know, post traumatic stress disorder has certain qualifying things. So I tend to call this acute stress syndrome or acute stress memory instead of ptsd. But what we're looking at is learned behavior in the face of powerlessness.

So you're looking at that and you're going, ah.

And the key, though, the point in traumatic loss and memory, if it's so powerful, what on earth is it? Okay, and I want to go over this one more time, because the truth is a traumatic memory is when the brain cannot integrate incoming sensorial information. Now, that may sound really weird to you, but, you know, what happens is the brain, the senses, bring in information as electrical impulse to the brain, and the brain makes sense out of it, or at least tries to make sense out of it and makes its best guess about what's happening. But if it's put up against something that is overwhelming, the data feeds are coming in so strong that, you know, just looking at a line going down, down, down, down, down, like this cartoon character is doing. What it's doing is it's triggering the memory of catastrophic loss. Okay? And out of that comes an emotional reaction to it that generally you get angry. You don't want to take that loss. You want to punish whatever it is, and before you know it, you're gone. But the thing is.

Is that.

Quite frankly, your brain doesn't understand money.

If you are in a situation where, like, this guy right here is facing a bear and what happened is he's immediately triggering at the same time you could substitute that bear for the drain of money. Okay. And the that we in the slide a little before. And to be honest with you, it would be the same effect because the brain.

Sees, doesn't understand money. What it says is it again, what it does is it sees money as representating representational of power, of safety, influence, status. And all of a sudden you're face to face with this bear. You're not competitive with it. It's overwhelmed your ability to be in control. It's totally overwhelmed. That is the point where you know that things are going to happen. It just so happens that being that the caveman brain you have doesn't understand money, okay. Suddenly begin to say, oh, you mean when I am looking at taking a loss, my brain is actually seeing the loss of life? Yeah. Remember, money to it is power. And all of a sudden you're seeing taking a loss. And what you're seeing is you have no longer have any power. You may be somebody else's meal pretty soon and you react heavily to it. That's happening all the time in your trading, all the time. The difference between trading and regular life is, is that regular life, there's enough interval between events that you can just make it disappear and pretend it's not there. It's like long range karma. However, in trading with the short time frames that we have is trading is more like instant karma. It instantly is back to visit you again. And if you haven't got the brain ready to be able to integrate it and work with it, it's going to go bananas on you. So what we're getting then is that just imagine.

So that when you have taken the loss, that really shakes you to the bone. Your experience is powerlessness. That powerlessness might say, I'm not good enough, I'm not this, I'm not that. You know, the trading gods are against me. But you're experiencing powerlessness and you fall down and all of a sudden what happens is how does the brain avoid that?

One way the brains avoids that is to stop you from getting into trades in the first place.

So the traumatic.

Hold on a second.

I don't have that slide.

But we will use it.

What we're looking at here, I do, I do. The thing is, if you take a look at this Neanderthal illustration, you're looking at what would be wolves. And you're saying that the only thing that stands between a meal for those wolves and the safety of him and his family is that spear. This is how traumatic memory gets set up. What I want you to see is from an evolutionary standpoint, it's very important. It helped them survive at the same time. Now, in today's world, we don't have the wolves, we don't have the bears, we don't have the lions. What we have is a brain that doesn't know about money and taking big losses in money, okay? It's going to produce that traumatic memory. And I might add, again, if you experience traumatic events at any time in life. I once had a guy as a client that basically went to a. He went to a bar to watch a football game, you know, sports bar. And it was halftime, and he got up and he was going to the bathroom. And what happened is that there was a line, a big line at the boys bathroom. You know, he's. He's never seen that. Now, the women, of course, they're out the door. And what he does, he sees an open door, and he realized he can just sneak outside and go to the restroom. Well, while he's out there, he gets assaulted, beat up pretty good, and robbed. And while that's happening, a cop car comes by on a different thing with his lights flashing. I get a hold of him, and what happened is he's really jittery. The reason he's coming in because he's just losing it, going into panic when a cop car comes by with his lights flashing. What happened is the brain, during this moment of powerlessness, integrated the flashing lights going by in the alley. And what happened is every time he saw a cop car with flashing lights, it triggered him back to that event, powerlessness. And he was having a really hard time with it. That's the kind of thing that we're looking at.

The point is that traumatic events create reactive patterns that automatically, instinctively respond to a number of things, particularly loss of control. Whether or not that's money, whether or not it's life, the caveman brain doesn't care. So what you're looking at is the moment that. Here's the kicker in trading, what you have to give up.

Is control over outcome. You learn that control is only about controlling. The mind you bring to performance. And if you have an edge, working with probability, you. You pull more, you extract more capital out of the markets than you give back now. So what you're looking at.

Is by taking a major loss, what you're doing is you're setting up an instinctive way of responding to loss. Again, the brain doesn't see loss of money. It sees loss of life. So it has to fight for its life. It can't give up. It can't give up. Just like that Neanderthal caveman, he could not give up. And so you're looking at it, you get the reactive pattern going and before you know it, what you've got is you've got a full blown case of acute stress syndrome. Okay, let's take a look. How do you do this? Okay, people who have worked with me know that I love this graph. Let's put it this way. There's emotional stimulation coming in. There's emotional, there's emotional data coming in to the sensory thalamus. The sensory thalamus, it's kind of like a traffic cop or are a person who directs air traffic controller. And what that air traffic controller is doing is it's seeing all the flights all around. And what it's doing is it's deciding which are important, which are dangerous, which are emergency. And an emergency shows up. So what it's doing, instead of sending the information to the thinking brain to deliberate and to think, what the thalamus does is it immediately rockets from that air traffic controller position over to the amygdala that produces the fight flight response. Okay, that's the way it works. Now what we can do is we can take one step further. Where you see the hippocampus, that's where the memories are stored. So what happens is that when it hits the hippocampus, when it hits the thalamus with the air traffic controller there, it's linked directly. Particularly if it's, if it's really an acute memory.

The hippocampus. And all of a sudden suddenly that memory comes back, floods, and you are overwhelmed and overwhelmed again and nothing happens going to the sensory cortex, you get nothing to the new brain, the thinking brain, it goes directly in nanoseconds over the amygdala blows out and the chemistry is in the bloodstream. Stress response is in the bloodstream in.003 seconds. Now what that means is the feeling as chemistry of the emotion is in the body forcing you, compelling you into action.

That is why it is so massively important to get these particular kinds of events back under management and so that you can integrate them back, back into basically what we, what we call the perceptual map. Where. Okay, I've got it. This is stuff I can handle. And we do it bite by bite often. But the point is, this.

Here is the way the emotional brain sees the loss of money. You know, the thing is, is you see it going, ah, it's mine, mine, don't take it out and this is how the emotional brain perceives. It's life being in jeopardy.

And nobody tells you about this stuff when you come into trading, you know, and plus, you walk in, you're all full of it, and you think, oh, I can do this. I can do this. This isn't so hard. This is. I can think through this. I've got this. I can learn a strategy, and it's going to be able. Yeah, I can. I can, man. I can work two hours a day. I've got financial freedom. I've got time freedom. I. I can see the whole thing. And in that particular moment, the brain's not recognizing, you know, only 2, between 2 and 5% of traders actually are consistently profitable. That is blown out of the way. That positivity bias is there. And particularly, I don't know anybody who says, you know something, okay, I'm going to become a trader. I'm going to become a trader. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to find. I'm going to find someone who can teach me how the emotional brain reacts to potential loss. Now, you don't do that. What you do is say, I'm going to follow the strategy. I'm a smart person. I can do this. Then you get into there, you trade paper, you go, wow, I can do this, man. I can mint money. Then the live stuff happens, and suddenly that money starts representing your life of the caveman. And you start seeing it taking losses, and it doesn't understand money. It's incapable of understanding money. So now we're at this place where you go, okay.

I'm taking these losses. Now I start chasing the money. I start chasing the money because I can't let my life go away. Caveman doesn't want to lose his life, and he works and works and harder and harder and harder. And all of a sudden, it becomes a huge problem in your trading. I mean, we've had people here.

That have already talked about it. Yeah, it happened to me today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It happens to every trader often. And nobody wants to talk about it. And I'm guilty of this, too. Look, I've been working with traders for well over 15 years. I'm very aware that traumatic loss, traumatic events really build instinctive, reactive patterns to potential loss, to potential profits, all of it. And I'm going, you know something? And I see all the time people who really, truly qualify. They. They're from highly abusive backgrounds. Horrible things have happened to them. They're highly reactive, and they've taken Big losses. I know they have reactive architecture in there. And I've never written about it, I've never talked about it. And this is. This is actually also me coming clean. So you're looking at it and going, okay, he's chasing it. And my question is really, this is that how do you go about fixing this problem?

I have no doubt that each and every one of you has tried in their own way, to the best of their ability, to solve this problem, and yet it still happens. And the key is we don't frame the problem in such a way that it is solvable. We don't understand emotion. Without understanding emotion, we don't really understand how we can possibly fix this problem. So it's the misunderstanding of emotion. We think that we're logical and rational beings. I'm from the advertising and marketing industry, and what we know is that you're not. We know that emotions dominate your perception of the world. We know that you're an emotional being first.

And you make up stories that you call logical to support what the emotional brain has already decided. What's very common around where I live, near Charlotte, North Carolina, is, you see, when I go to the Lowe's, I see these guys and these pickups that are anywhere between 50 and 60, $70,000. Some of them, if you get a King Ranch variety, they top 100,000. And what you do is you see a bunch of guys getting out of these trucks. Most of them are my age, have pot guts, and that truck has never seen a lick of work in its life. But I want to tell you something. When you turn that truck on with those big wheels and you know that almost that ladder you get in, God, it feels good. God, it feels. It feels manly. What you're feeling is testosterone, feeling as though you're powerful. The marketing boys have figured that out. They don't sell the truck. They sell the. They sell the masculinity to a guy who probably doesn't have as much testosterone running in his body anymore, and they're willing to cough up money like this. I talked to the wife of a guy who just gotten a $70,000 truck, and she said, oh, he was so depressed. And he said, oh, it would make me feel so much better to have this truck. Now what he's doing is finding a really short fix to basically a sense of powerlessness. So the thing is, you get it, is that we make decisions based on emotion, not on reason. And we do that.

What we finally really figure out is this. The problem is your brain on uncertainty. We can live in a myth, a fiction about how much we're in control for most of our lives in this slow motion life that people are living. And it feels as though, yeah, you're in control, man. I've got guy down the street has a couple really big motorcycles. He's got them so they're really loud. He fills, he feels mask and he's got a big huge truck. He's got all this stuff. He feels in control.

And he was laid off work. So you began to see.

Your brain's built to control outcome, to be right. Otherwise you're dead and predict the future.

These are survival adaptations. They're not going to go away, unfortunately. They're really good for our survival, but they're very, very bad for trading. So this is where it comes down to we have to develop not just the IQ business, that knowledge of training. We have to develop the emotional intelligence to be able to use that knowledge under threatening conditions. To the emotional brain, the emotions are not optional unless you want to be dead. We are emotional beings and emotions are not feelings. They are biological action potentials that fire when there are changes in status in the environment. That would be the markets and God, are there so many different changes in the environment that happens as you trade. Everything's ambiguous, everything's this. There is nothing like certainty. You can't put your hat on anything. And there you go. So what you're doing right off the bat is you're taking, you're taking a brain that simply can't handle what you're asking it to do. There's nothing wrong with that brain, but you're asking it to do something that it's diametrically opposed to literally. Trading is the brain's worst nightmare. So you're going to have to develop the eq, the emotional intelligence to be able to calm the circuits down and take that instinctive caveman brain, calm it down and let the thinking brain have a chance. Because here's what happens otherwise. On the left, that's when the money's play there is no activation because the truth is it's play money. It's like playing with Monopoly. It's play money. It's not real. And so you can do paper trading and everything's fine and it's not lighting up threat. However, then you go live trading and it doesn't even take much capital. You start putting real money at risk.

To your caveman brain. Suddenly life is at risk. Suddenly your thinking higher cortex is taken offline. The, the amygdala the size of an Almond takes over, blows out everything. That's the way it works. So we get it. Is that how do we fix this problem? And it starts with understanding, going, hey, you know something? Because emotions are biological in nature, maybe we can work with them through.

Biology. Wouldn't that be cool? Because ultimately, what you're looking at is a geek thinking he's in control in the caveman brain in back, sitting there. And the moment stress hits up, all of a sudden the roles are reversed and caveman's in charge. That's kind of the way it works. But what we want to do, we want to start with Motion Regulation 101. We want to start saying what we want to do when we expose ourselves to something like a threat and understand risk and capital is a threat to the emotional brain, your caveman brain. What we want to do is the evolution solution to that is a stress response to stressful situations. Fight flight. What we want to do is we want to train.

You to produce a relaxation response. This is the first stage of emotional regulation. And what we discover about an emotion, it being biological in nature, the way you breathe, the tension in your body, and your heart rate are all part of an emotion. You are the embodiment of that. If you start altering the way you breathe and the way you hold tension in your body, what happens is you automatically interrupt the emotion that is attempting to take over your mind. And it's very simple, is in diaphragmatic breathing. And this has been around since the 80s. This is Herbert Benson's work. He did a very good job of being able to take the yogas of India and say, they're saying they can control all this stuff. And he said, no, they can't. Western science said that. He hooked him up, put them in the laboratory, and found out they could, stripping all the religion, all that, the culture out of it. What he discovered, being able to respond calmly to stress depended on two major factors. One was way you breathe. If you do diaphragmtic breathing in the midst of stress, the anxiety of stress, the distress, cannot maintain itself because it requires holding your breath or upper, upper panting. It requires that to continue it. So if you start breathing diaphragmatically, the anger or the. The anxiety cannot maintain itself. You fall back down into a calm state where your thinking brain can start making decisions again. Add to that muscle tension when you know, if you get a mirror, get a video, watch yourself tomorrow when you trade and. And notice how much tension is in your body, in your face, in your eyes, in your back, in your Thighs, in your chest, in your gut. That's all emotional arousal. It is part of an emotion and you're sitting there letting it build up. Oh, well, yo, pretty tense. You are looking at an emotional hijacking in process. And if you don't start diaphragmatically breathing, it's going to hit you and it's going to take over. And all of a sudden the traumatic memory in its adaptation is going to take over. And again, you're going to be doing something stupid. So this is the whole point is that the brain is going to react to uncertainty the way it's been programmed to do for the last six and a half million years. However, you as a sentient being can alter the way your body responds to stress, starting with emotional regulation and the relaxation response. When you do that, you start noticing something. It doesn't solve the problem. But what happens is if you cannot manage the intensity of the emotion, you never get to the door of the mind.

So emotional regulation has done you a great favor. The next thing that needs to happen is that you are going to have to learn how to awaken the observing self. If you ever notice when you're observing something, even if you say, I am scared, what happens is you notice that there is a witness that is outside of your identification with fear, that watches. That's the observing self. That's mindfulness. And in here, what you're seeing is on the left. You're seeing a person that is all caught up in his thoughts. His observer has fused to, identified with. I'm not good enough. I'm not. This. I'm about. I'm going to lose all that. Okay? Understand you and your thoughts are not the same. But if the observer that you are identifies with those thoughts, it creates that reality. Now on the second one, the guy's in observer mode. What he's doing is he's recognizing that my thoughts and I are not the same. I can step back out of those thoughts and recognize I am not this. I am the observer. And this is when you begin to develop some skill about what mind you're going to bring into the arena to deal with the uncertainty of trading. This is powerful, friends, but most people would never do that. They are too scared. Are you saying that I have voices in my head? Of course you do. And if you don't recognize you have powerful forces running in your mind that you need to attend to and learn how to master. You will never get to the profit center. There are. There are parts within you that are dead set against you. Being profitable, you will discover that living within you, your brain, adapts you to survive in a world short term. And what happens is that in doing that, it's not necessarily interested in. It's not interested in you being successful. It's interested in you surviving the next moment. That's what adaptation has. You also discover that unexplainably, there is both destruction and construction happening simultaneously in humans. Like, for instance, the galaxy that we're in. At the very center of that galaxy, there's a black hole. Destruction. And what you see is the creation of the Milky Way and the destruction of the Milky Way are happening simultaneously. That is also part of the human brain, the way we think. The Chinese called it yin yang, but what you see is within us. The Cherokee would say the two wolves, a dark wolf and light wolf. And the wolf that wins destruction versus construction is the wolf that you feed. Most people feed the dark side of their nature by ignoring it instead of trying to transform it. And then what you do is. The powerful part is that this thing called beliefs, once you set a belief up, and believe me, a belief is only an assumption that has taken on the force of certainty. Understand, Galileo got excommunicated because he said that the sun was not, I mean, the Earth was not the center of the universe. Everybody believed it was, and they saw that as true. Galileo produced a completely different interpretation. And you know something? The key is, what I'm asking you is the beliefs that you have create your truth. The beliefs you have create how you act from the charts you have, and it creates the truth. Most people really, once they get past their bs, discover that the beliefs they project onto the screen of the mind, onto the markets, really are not capable of managing the uncertainty of the markets. And they start creating an explanation. And if that explanation fits, it becomes stabilized as the truth. That's what we have to free yourself from. This is the, this is the. The prison of your comfort zone. You know, your. Your brain has just simply organized you into a comfort zone, a construction of a self that has worked. And what happens is that trading is rattling your cage. It's saying that the beliefs that have organized you into a being that works into the world, those beliefs, that organization itself is not going to work in managing uncertainty. It was built to create certainty. So you have a collision.

Between the certainty that your brain is seeking and the uncertainty that is all about trading. This is why people fail in trading. So ultimately, in mindfulness, you. What you discover is first is emotions really create a community that actually compete with one another. To take over the construction of the self, to be able to form a self that can survive in the world. Then the miracle of consciousness happens and that emotional nature is given voices.

There are emotional programs given voices. And that's what I call the governing committee of the mind. And the real key is.

Who is running it. Who is running the committee of the mind? When you trade, usually it's not who you'd want it to. In my work, what we do is we talk about, we talk about the orphan. If you take a look at the model there, he's looking into the screen and he's saying a slightly anxious and not really sure about himself. Then you see a voice whispering in his ear, you're a loser. You're a loser. It's not going to happen. Or take it, take it. This is a really good one. But what you're looking at is a person not comfortable with ambiguity. And what we're looking at is this is called the internal dialogue. And what you discover is this is where the emotional programs of the brain are given voice in your mind. And it's not if unless you've woken up and started working with it, you discover that you're stuck in an organization of the mind that cannot work in trading. And out of that, we call this the historical internal dialogue. And ultimately what you're doing is you're realizing there is an adapted voice that basically. Adapted basically. And what you're going to discover, it's very shame based. Believe it or not. Yes. Right here in trading is that the alpha wants to win, to prove that he matters. And he feels as though he's not the big deal that he needs to be if he doesn't win, gets into trading and what he does is he blows up accounts. And all of a sudden you begin to realize that there is a dialogue between an inner critic that is attempting to judge you, to criticize you, to seduce you into making really stupid decisions or tempting you to do stupid stuff. And there's also this childlike quality that is fear based, anger based. And what you discover is that element of the self does not have mentorship around that can help it make better decisions. You're leaving the caveman brain to operate in a world that it knows nothing about.

So.

This is how your brain initially learned to deal with uncertainty. You're seeing it in trading right now. That's how you learned how to deal with it. And what you're discovering is no matter how successful it was in another world, it's not successful in this world. And this is where you really, you truly have to begin to dig and you have to say, you know something, I need to find the wall of self looming beliefs that are driving my trading. Because fundamentally you project your beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty onto the markets. And what you discover is how, how effective they are or ineffective they are about extracting more capital out of the markets than you give back. That's the truth meter found in trading. And you are going to have to learn to be able to organize that into higher functioning. You're going to have to take the beliefs, you're going to have to start going, no, these are only beliefs. They're not the truth and they're particularly not me. They're only beliefs that have taken over me. And the good news though, you can intentionally awaken powerful internal forces, emotional programs living within the self that can produce the mind, that can handle uncertainty, that can handle the ambiguity of trading, that can handle the probability of trading. Very different than the caveman brain. Very different. The potential's there, but you're going to have to show up and you're going to have to teach it. Now the way we do it here is I use a process called memory reconsolidation. And by the way, memory reconsolidation really is saying that when you see, when you're in the midst of an experience, your brain, based on its biases, its beliefs and assumptions, encodes that experience into a memory. And when it does it, a lot of the experience is left out. And particularly what's left out in a lot of fear based thinking is the discipline of ruler, the courage of a warrior, the self soothing of a caregiver, and the impartiality, the clear thinking of a sage.

Those are not encoded into the memory and unfortunately they're stored in the hippocampus and it becomes involved in this reactiveness. Those are the memories. And this is how I get at. We need more powerful programs, okay?

We don't need the fear and the anger responses, the fight flight. We need, we need the programs that allow you to think clearly in the midst of stress. And this is the way you actually go about reorganizing it. And I have very specialized techniques for doing memory reconsolidation and memory enrichment. But what you're doing is you're actually getting at an emotional pressure program that did in fact show up under stress. And you're learning how to pull it forward to create the emotional cocktail from which the mind arises. That's a big trick. And in the process, what you're doing is you're redefining the beliefs about your capacity to manage uncertainty. That's the deal. What does this look like? First of all, with training.

You can actually learn to pull these programs up rather than the ones that evolution and natural selection biased you with. To me, probably the most powerful archetypal movie I've ever seen ever is Lord of the Rings. What you're looking at here is various actors from that series and Frodo up front, the guy who finally was able to take the destructive ring of life and throw it back into the lava from which it came. But to do that, he had to really man up. He had to find self mastery against all odds within himself. He did not start out that way. What you also find is the discipline of a ruler. What you also find is the compassion of a caregiver, the self soothing and also the warrior, you know, that protects the boundaries of the kingdom. You also find the sage that can give the kind of advice. These are all participant programs within your brain. The question is, can you pull them forward? It just so happens I use memory reconsolidation to get those. I don't use, I don't use. I don't depend on visualization, on affirmations, training the subconscious to try to convince the, the limbic system to believe something that it's not willing to. I'm going in and finding where we can actually show that these things existed under stress already and we're saying, okay, now we got something we can work with. We're going to pull them up under stress. That's, we're going to do this. That's the difference maker. And one other thing that's really powerfully important for all these people who think that, you know, I hate, you know, I hate that sitting around doing nothing, I get really bored, blah, blah, blah, blah. What I want to tell you is patience is also a form of action.

The patient mind is the guy who gets waits to see what the, what the market will give it rather than trying to make it happen. If you're having problems with patience, then what I'll say is you need to start right there. You need to start. Personally, I practice patience on a daily basis. It doesn't come naturally natural for me. It's pretty unnatural actually. But I practice it so that I can maintain it. And that's what I do in my meditation practice. I am practicing patience, practicing patience. And out of that patience, what happens is what you do is you calm down the anger in you. You calm down the instinctual responses to challenges. In this case, the Hulk is being calmed down by an empath. And what you're looking. You quit trying to win or lose to prove yourself, you disconnect your performances, okay, from who you are as a human being. Your performances only show you your competencies. It's not about you as a human being. And failure becomes how you learn. That's when you have a solid mind there. And the first step, of course, is that you're going to have to keep calm. And out of this.

Winning only becomes landing on the right side of probability. It's not about how powerful you are. It's just landing on the right side of probability. Losing is only landing on the wrong side of probability.

And with a very deeply centered mind, you develop the capacity of becoming a very good loser. Your job, when you. When you're basically managing risk, is to say, you know something, I need to keep my losses small so I can trade another day by keeping them fall. When I find it short, I. I get to find the ones that do ride. I get to write them. And what I do is I do in fact, perform. And out of those performances, I execute my edge in my methodology. So this is actually how you get to the psychological edge that drives your method edge. It's kind of like this. If you've ever seen Formula one cars, you know, they're monstrosity versus technology and all that kind of good stuff, but the driver has to drive that machine. You don't put a guy like me who's driven passenger cars in a machine like that. To me, you do not put an untrained mind with the technology and methodology you have in trading to go out and make some money. No, you train that mind to perform.

In winning and losing, find their own place. That's where. That's where it comes and what you become. Like, the best analogy I think I've ever seen is that of a surfer. This surfer in this image definitely is not controlling the wave.

That wave is just like opportunity, potential. In the markets, he's found potential. And now what he's doing, he's executing, he's taking his mind, and he's controlling the one thing that's really, truly important, the mind he brings into the moment of performance. Friends, that's exactly what the group test does, the group course does. It teaches you the tools to be able to pull that together and to become the surfer rather than a person trying to command that wave. Foolish to wisdom. That's what it's like. So my question is, how do you become the change? Well, the question would also be Are you ready to learn these things? Usually the people I work with have been trading for four or five years and they've been banged up enough to realize that, you know something, I'm tired of banging my head and, you know, I need to. I need to find out that, you know, banging my head is not. It's not a good thing. It may be normal, it's not insane, like Einstein said, it's normal. But what you're looking for is something more than that. And out of that, how do you become the change? My encouragement to you is this. If you actually really want to invest.

In and you're building yourself to become a trader who really is. Can be consistently profitable, I would actually encourage you to look at our group course. It's going to be starting in January, which doesn't. That's not that far away. And about 80% of our people sign up early to begin early to learn the emotional regulation pieces before they get in class. Because this course, really, if you show up and haven't done the work, we're assuming you've prepared for Class 1. Class 1 is not about getting acquainted. It's about covering emotional regulation and moving to mindfulness. Here.

It includes five sessions with me. It's a webinar floor mat recordings. The meetings are recorded so you have copies of all that. You have a virtual classroom with an unlimited access 24. 7. That's why we get so many people from across the world. And at June 6, in January, it starts. What I would encourage you to do, we made a mistake. It says June 16th. It should say January. The key though is this, is that by signing up early, first of all, you're going to get a free emotional regulation workshop that you can buy from my website for 200 bucks or you can get it free as part of this. We're not doing it to entice you to buy. We're. We're doing this to entice you to start early.

People think they're just going to be able to do these exercises a few times. No. To change the way you respond to uncertainty by using a relaxation response takes one to two to three months of changing the way your body has learned and adapted to being open to the other. That's the big deal. I encourage it. Okay, for those people who are saying, you know something, I want, I want, I want, you know something I understand. Randy's the teacher here. I want an individual. I want to work with them individually. Well, the individual course is highly comprehensive and very personal. It comes with 10 sessions with me one hour sessions and it's by zoom. And it follows a curriculum, same as the group course. It just gets deeper, that's all. The key is this, is that what I'm really inviting you to do is to recognize one serious fact is the mind, the brain that you brought to trading is not up to the task. Not because it's not a good mind or brain. It's just that it's built for completely different. What I'm encouraging you to do is to start recognizing you're going to have to develop your brain and your mind for something radically different in terms of what the mind has to look like to engage uncertainty. That's probability and that is what produces success. I want to thank you for being here. Okay, I do. And if you have questions.

Let'S take a look at them. Okay. And we'll start. I have to get closer. My glasses, My eyes are not what they used to be.

Yeah.

Okay, here is, here's Bill. Is there a point where market forces can and will overwhelm any amount of emotional training that a trader has, no matter how well developed it is? The answer is no. Okay. There's a point. I mean, I've seen, I have seen really great traders. I have a friend who has, I don't know, he's made $180 million in the last three years. It's quite common to see him lose quarter of a million dollars in 15, 20 minutes. Okay. But what happens is what happened with him, and this is the main thing, Bill, is that he came to a moment and his journey into becoming a trader, that he said, whether or not I win or lose, I'm okay with myself. If he lost everything, he would still be okay with himself. I believe that about, about Mitchell. So no, it's not okay. Is there another one? We're looking. We're trying to get people who are still in the class. Okay. Will we be sent the record? You're not going to get this. You're not going to be sent a record. But what happens is that we will unload it onto my YouTube channel and we'll also unload it onto our website. And that'll be tomorrow by midday and you'll receive notifications. So you'll get access to it by tomorrow, midday. Okay.

That's it. Well, my goodness gracious. Well, if there's no other questions. Are there any other questions before we leave?

Going once. Going twice. Sold. Tomorrow. Get yourself a mirror and watch yourself. Trade. And start noticing that. Oh, my God, I'm looking at myself. Trade and I'm seeing Randy's definition of biological action potential for emotions. I see them written all over the place. I see myself already. I already am squandering the emotional capital that I have by not understanding my emotional nature and how to build it to a mind that can trade. So we're quitting. So. Well, Dolores and I will go have a glass of wine. One last one, Andres. Here's from Andre.

When working through a hijack, do you recommend to always step away from begin breathing strategies? Yes, I do. You know, if you're in the midst of a hijacking is that if you stay connected to it, all it's going to stay is stay hot. If you step back out of it and start breathing, you're going to start cooling the central nervous system down and it gives you. It gives you a chance. So. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so here we go. Friends, I wish you well. I hope you the best. And if I can help you, take a good look at that group course. And let's see, next class. June 16th. You're very funny. You're very funny. No, it's January. It's January. Yeah, that's, that's, that's. That's our fault. Okay, so. And it, and it's, it's correct on our website. So next class is January. Okay. So I, I'll see you guys. Take good. And trade. Well. Be well. Bye. Bye.