How to Build a Calm Patient Trader Psychology

Foreign.

Welcome. You know, it's interesting. The moment that real capital is put at risk in trading, everything changes. Before then, that risk is not real, it's not a threat. Okay? But the moment that paper money's gone, paper profits are gone and you're really risking capital, the entire brain is activated, okay? You really, truly have diametrically opposed forces colliding with one another at this moment. And it's something that traders notoriously haven't figured out how to deal with effectively. Fundamentally, what you're having is you are wanting higher brain function, okay, that neocortex to produce the logical and rational thinking that allow you to work in probability to recognize that, yes, this is just one trait. It's not that important in the whole overall scheme of things. And la de da da da. I can manage this to where you're also activating primitive survival instincts within the brain. And the emotional brain, that doesn't see it that way at all. It sees it as danger, danger, danger, and activates immediately into high alert. Suddenly what you've done is you've triggered the amygdala which rushes this enormous survival response. And all of a sudden the amygdala is firing hormones and chemistry all over the joint. And what you have is an emotional hijacking. Suddenly the calm emotional mind that you need to be able to trade effectively is gone.

Is absolutely gone. That's the key.

What do traders do? Well, what they do is they try.

They try.

To emotionally control the best way they know how. What do they do? They resist the emotion. And in resisting that emotion, I'm gonna push against this, I'm gonna push against it. What they discover is not only does the emotion persist, but it grows stronger. What the trader doesn't recognize is that the emotional brain is really a 600 pound gorilla. And the more you push against it, the more it pushes against you and it's a mountain and you're a molehill and it's not going to work. That's why you keep getting hijacked and hijacked though. You try harder and harder and harder. Okay? You just, you just bring up the dice and make it a bigger bet to the emotional brain because it sees itself in threat and it overwhelms you or, well, we just talked about it, that willpower, I'm going to will myself through this. I'm going to will. I'm going to not let this emotion do. The more you do that, the more it grows and takes over. And of course there's also the deniers, the one that Say, you know something, I'm just going to deny it and pretend it's not there. And suddenly they get ambushed. Or the people who just simply say, you know something, I'm going to go do something else, I'm going to distract myself, I'm going to do all sorts of things. And while I'm away, disaster happens. That's the way it happens. And most the people in trading use something called exposure methodology to be able to adapt themselves to this new environment. And that exposure is really about just continually exposing yourself again and again and again to the circumstances in the hope that the brain's going to adapt to the new circumstance.

You know, we long ago in psychology discovered exposure by itself doesn't work. All you're doing is you're traumatizing the brain again and again and it becomes hyper vigilant. So suddenly in that exposure, you're just simply triggering the fight flight thing all over again, faster and faster.

And a lot of it is just simply that we don't really understand what an emotion is. We don't understand the way it functions. First and foremost, an emotion is not psychological, friends, it is biological. And that biology takes over, mind takes over psychology. Ultimately what an emotion is. It's actually a biological action potential that helps coordinate action between the environment and, and the organism or the markets and the trader. If you begin to understand that the emotion triggers at particular cues in the environment, like when you're sitting there getting confirmations and you need to be entering, that's a cue. And what happens is the emotional brain is going to view that as, oh, this is danger, danger, danger. Because ultimately it's going to go, okay, the moment that I feel uncertain, I feel vulnerable. I'm wired to move from vulnerability to interpret that as threat. And threat activates the fight flight response and boom, I'm gone. Okay, that's the wiring you brought to the game and it's not going to work. Ultimately you begin to realize, okay, an emotion really is happening in a biological sense and it's preparing me to interact with the environment, the markets. And it just so happens the emotional brain is predisposed to view uncertainty as a threat to its being.

Unless you know how to manage it. And most traders have really messed up because they're trying to use the resistance, the will, the denial, or the exposure way of dealing with emotions. It doesn't work. All the brain's doing is what it was designed to do. However, this is something that you can actually get in and change. There is a glitch.

Because ultimately what Happens is information comes into the hippocampus and based on memory, that hippocampus makes the decision about whether or not it needs to be dealt with right then and sends everything, everything I tell you right there into the amygdala for the fear response. Okay? Or if the hippocampus interprets that is not a threat, it sends it to the higher brain centers. That's what you want. That's where all that logic and reason is. So ultimately what we want to do is we want to intervene at when information is coming to the hippocampus and before it decides that it's going to take the low road to reactivity or the high road to probability management.

Friends, this can be taught. You don't have to sit and stay in limbo and simply not know how to deal with the emotions of trading. You can become master of the emotions. So ultimately what you discover is that the brain itself.

Is all about neuroplasticity in the same way that modern science knows how to deal with strokes. Now, where brain areas are damaged, they teach them how to reroute the patterns and organize things so that a person regains functioning. The same concept applies to redesigning the mind. Okay, you can do that. The key is that as you do this, you begin to understand this is that ultimately once you understand that that circuitry about what information is coming in from the sensorial modalities, you have to be able to work with that moment where the information hits the hippocampus and before it's either taking the low road. Emotional reactivity are the high road to probability management through logic and reason. And you do that, friends, first by understanding just what we're talking about here. Then the second thing that you do is you also learn how to start manipulating that, how to start working with it differently. You take it off default setting and you start learning emotional regulation skills. You start recognizing the emotion. Being biological has a breathing signature, it has a tension signature. And by taking control of those voluntary type of operations that are biological and emotional, you learn to alter the emotion. You keep the emotion from growing in intensity so that you no longer have the hippocampus saying, oh, we're going to send this right over the amygdala and we're going to have an emotional hijacking and we're going to do short term survival. You are literally taking the survival instincts of the emotional brain. You're calming them down so they don't trigger. Once you do that, and again, that's something we teach. Once you do that, Then there's this whole new arena comes up that we would call applied mindfulness. This is where you begin to learn how to step, step back out of all the thoughts that you thought you were. And you realize that I and my thinking are not the same. I and my beliefs are not the same. They are just one potential organization of a self that happened. What you're doing is you're going, yeah, it happened historically, back when I had nothing to say about it here. Now, as an adult, you have something to say about it. You begin to say, you know something. I know you how to reroute. Reprogram the emotional programs of the brain so that I create a new mind from it. Friends, this is the way you do it. The instinctual survival instincts are always going to be there. Your job is to change the programming of the way it's interpreted. That's what can be done. Friends, if you want to learn more about how to do that so that you're not getting hijacked, you're not finding yourself in over trading. You're not finding yourself in a frenzy. You're not finding yourself fearful of actually taking trades or jumping out of trades because you're fearful that the profits will be taken away. If you want to get past that, come and check us out. We have both a group course that teaches the fundamental skills that allow you to go beyond this programming that you inherited from history and to build a programming you need for probability management trading. We also have an individual course where fundamentally you work one on one with me. That's powerful. If you're not ready for that, get the free ebook, come to the website, check it out, lots of articles and the one that is also cued to this one video that we're doing right now. Come to some of our webinars that they're free. They really explain this stuff on a deeper level. The main thing is prepare yourself for becoming the designer of the mind that you bring to trading rather than staying stuck.

With the mind that you've brought into performance right now. Come and learn, friends, and learn.