How to Build a Successful Trading Psychology

What's the secret to building a really solid piece of psychology as a trading mind? How do you create that mind that has got an edge, that psychology that you bring to the game actually has an edge that can actually make that method edge you have work. How in the world do you do that? What is the secret? Actually, almost all traders are looking for the answers in all the wrong places. They actually avoid the very thing they need to be looking at and really become observant to. And I'll cut to the point. The actual secret about building a trading psychology that produces success is really about your relationship with failure. Sounds weird, doesn't it? Tell me something. Who in here right now listening to me is okay with failure? Most of you are gonna say, no, I wanna win. I'm in this thing to make money, blah, blah, blah. Yet there's one powerful, powerful moment, and it's called this: your brain does not learn from success. Success to the brain simply habitualizes a particular solution and locks it in deeper and deeper and deeper. And before you know it, if you're a trader and if you've ever done this, Where you say, you know something, whatever I do, I end up doing the same stupid thing over and over again. It's like I, I don't mean to do it, but I get into it, and before I know it, I've done that same stupid thing. That, friends, is the result of success. What has been learned has gone on pattern, automatic pattern, and got locked in so that every time it finds a particular situation, It fires to that, and there it is. You do it over and over again. So Einstein really needs to be corrected when he, when he said that, you know, the whole thing about failure is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result. The thing is, what I'm saying is actually what I'm asking you to do is take a look at your relationship with failure. Okay? Let's put it this way. Who in here is okay with failing? Not many people. Yet, we may not know Ray Kroc. Ray Kroc is the founder of McDonald's, all those fast food restaurants that I never go walk into these days. But understand, Ray Kroc revolutionized fast food. And when asked, One time about how he did it. You know, he looked at the person and he just simply said, failure. I have failed my way to success. Whoa. Now, I want you to understand this is one of the most successful corporations the world's known, and the guy who started it literally failed himself to success. The difference is this though, his interpretation of failure, my guess, is very different than yours. In trading, you want to win, you want to make money, and the one thing you don't want to do is be a failure. You don't want to lose because, God, if people knew that you were losing, they would say, oh my God, he's a loser. I don't want to be a loser. I mean, I grew up playing football in high school, and on the On the dressing room leading into the dressing room was a sign that said, winners never fail and losers never win. Okay, what you get out of that is all of a sudden there's an entire way of seeing the world that you've got to be successful, and to be successful, you're not failing. No, Ray Kroc proved that. But it's just not him; it's everybody else too. It's even the word sin. You know, when you when you say sin, you go ooh, that's that's definitely something you don't want to do. Yet if you go back to the ancient Aramaic, sin means missing the mark. What does that mean? Missing the mark is an archery term, and it just so happens back in those days. Back 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 years ago, young kids who had some real skill with a bow and arrow were deeply sought after by the kingdom. They would bring talented boys back into the grounds where they could be taught archery by a master. And the thing is, is that the way they learned was they shot arrows at targets, at marks. And it was only until the kid, the student, missed the mark— sin— that the teacher, the master teacher, had something to teach. So I want you to see how maligned even that word, that we've really twisted the whole notion about failure and learning. Because the truth is this: not only does your brain not learn from success, Your brain learns from failure. That's exactly what's presented in that where you're in an archery school, you're talented, you have a master archer there as a teacher, and there's nothing to do until you miss the mark. At missing the mark, then the teacher appears and learning takes place. It was through failure That the opportunity to learn and become a better archer appeared. It's the same thing with trading. In trading, what's going to happen is you're going to discover something really powerful. And this really is the, the beginning of where I would ask you to start really becoming a student of failure. The deal is you are going to fail in trading. You know, you cannot control outcome. Yet everything we do in trading, particularly teaching people how to trade, is all about avoiding failure. What happens? You know, you're taught a methodology that reduces things and things like that, but then you come to the moment where you realize that, you know something, if I fail, particularly in the United States in a culture, highly competitive culture like ours, but what I've discovered is the United States is no more competitive than most other group of people. The thing is though, is we don't want to fail. We want to win. We want to be a winner. We don't want to be a loser. Okay, and that bleeds into our trading. We bring that attitude of, I'm going to work hard, I'm going to— I'm just going to push right through this, which has been maybe successful in another career, in another time, in another place. And then you bring that tested and sure way of becoming a winner, you bring it And you, you're not going to say uncle. You're not going to. And besides that, if the trade goes against you, man, you're going to get it back. You're going to get that money back. You're not going to be a loser. Do you see how embedded that way of being in the world is? And yet, right there in front of you, that's a formula for failure. We fail and we keep doing the same thing over and over again. Expecting different result, but we fail because we haven't really turned to failure and said, are you telling me, Randy, that failure is my teacher? Yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you. And out of that, when you fail in trading, you may have this thing about this conversation about winning and losing and stuff like that. And oh my God, I can't show my face. What I would say, that's a very poor way of building the psychology, what I would say is this. You know, when you fail, you ask the question, was this a failure of methodology? And let's just say you look at it and you go, no, I did— this is exactly my plan. Then you ask the question, is this a failure of my psychology? You take a look, and what you recognize is you ended up having an urgency to act. You got bored. And you kept waiting there, waiting there for something to happen. Okay, never did. And suddenly you just got this thing where you needed to get out of nothingness. You have to be doing something to be doing something. That's not true. The game of trading is built around patience. It is waiting for the markets to give you something. You're not stalking it. You're not making things happen. If you're doing that, which is the way most traders act, you are failing. And you're failing— the biggest failure though is that you're failing to see behind your failure. When you fail, you're going, okay, was it a method mistake? And I say, no. Let's just say it's also not a psychological mistake. You handled it really well. And what you really conclude right there Is you just simply landed on the wrong side of probability relative to you. That, in the way I teach trading psychology, is victory. What I know that you cannot control is winning and losing. What I also know is that what you can control is the mind that you bring. To the performance called trading. And the powerful thing, as you begin to add emotional intelligence to this, is to recognize something very powerful, is that all thinking is emotional state dependent. What you are doing in trading is you are conjuring up a certain set of emotions, because out of that confluence of emotion comes the mind that you bring to trading. And it just so happens. That if you bring the discipline of a ruler, if you bring the courage of a warrior, if you bring the self-soothing of a caregiver, what shows up is the impartiality of a sage. That's who you want engaging the uncertainties. Meanwhile, if you haven't taught yourself to learn from failure, You bring a mind, bring a brain that was built millions of years ago, and it was built for another time in another place where there were a lot of really dangerous animals that sought us out for food. Is that we lived in a dangerous world, and uncertainty meant death. When we were uncertain, it was a dangerous place. So we Learn to lie to ourselves about certainty, and we would tell ourselves how bravado we were and all this kind of stuff, how courageous we were, and how manly I am. And yet at the same time, you get into trading and what happens? You blow up. And what you realize is that your orphan nature is blown up and your manliness just got taken out like the trash. That is the place of learning. You have made a failure Instead of avoiding it this time, what I'm asking you to do is say, what's behind that failure? There will be beliefs about your desire to lose. A really good trader, it's a pretty boring game for them because they know they're not there to make money. They're there to perform well. And it just so happens they have an edge in their methodology that's going to extract more capital out of the markets than they give back in. Their job is to maintain that mind to be able to have a psychological edge that drives that method edge. And they've learned how to do it. There are very few people who have really just won the genetics lottery and had just a great mind for trading. Most learned to separate performance from their being. So here's the deal. Tomorrow, next day, or whenever it is, I want you to— next time you fail, I want you to really stop and pause and say, what am I to learn from this? Not how do I avoid this? What do I learn from this? And what you're going to do is start getting at the deeply held beliefs on a limbic level that are holding you back. Okay? This is when you start looking at failure as the avenue for growing the mind that trades. Now, my friends, you are looking in all the right places. The problem has always been here. The problem solution has always been here. What you're doing, what you do control, is the mind that you bring into that moment. You can learn to do that. Okay? You learn that out of failure, out of recognizing what you've been doing is not working. And you need to find a better way of doing things. That's how most people end up coming to me, is they start watching my videos and realizing they've been doing it all wrong. No wonder they're failing. The problem is, is they recognize they're not learning from their failure the way we were meant, as evolutionary beings, we're built to do. We are adaptive. We learn from experience. And in trading, we often lock ourselves down. And what I'm asking you to do is to open it back up. Open up failure not as an indication of who you are as a human being, but as a growth opportunity for you to expose where you have been ignorant and to bring the light of awareness there and to retrain yourself. Who would have thought that trading was going to be an adventure into self-mastery. It is. You master the self, you master trading. That's the ticket. Learn to fail well. Learn from it. Find out what beliefs behind there. Then we can talk about how do you go about changing deeply held beliefs. It just so happens I teach that. But first, right here, I'm asking you to look and say, the real deal, where it starts, is to redefine failure. Ray Kroc failed himself to success. I'm asking you to look through his eyes and start seeing, if I looked at failure as a means of growth and development, what would change about the way I used failure as part of my trading. That's self-mastery. Come and join us. Go to my website, watch more of these videos, really check in, and maybe even get my free book. Okay, the deal though is this: you have learned the very first tool you have to learn to become Proficient at trading, your whole understanding of failure has to change. I personally went through an enormous business failure, and it was horrible. I felt terrible. But out of that, I grew into the human being that's talking to you right now. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I wouldn't recommend it, but it was the best thing that happened to me. I learned how to take failure And build it into a higher order of success than I'd ever imagined. You can too. Come see me. Take care. Bye-bye.