How to Stick to Your Plan When the Trade Goes Against You

The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen only mode. Welcome everyone. First thing on the agenda, can you hear me? Just someone would please just type in a Y. I would greatly appreciate it. Got it. Thank you, Jim. Thank you. Thank you very much. Meanwhile, I'm still Randy Howell, and this is Trader State of Mind. And we're looking at a really interesting topic today. I cannot tell you in my business of working with trader, psychology with traders is how many times people have the knowledge of trading. They have rules that if they could only follow, they would be profitable traders. But the thing is, somehow that trade goes against you and suddenly the rules just fly out and it's wow. After it's all over with, the answer's why? What happened? Well, that's what we're going to be looking at today. But right now, if you have ever done any of my webinars, you discover I do the presentation and I leave some time at the end for questions. What I would love to answer questions. What I would love. If you have questions during my presentation, what I really ask you is to type them in.

The question box so that we already have some when that we're at the end of the presentation. That would help me and it would help us just have a better use of our time. So let's go. Okay. This thing, this thing about being able to follow your rules, what makes it such a powerful problem? You darn well know that if you follow your rules, you have an edge and you have enough sense to say, you know something, all I have to do is follow my rules. But just like the biblical character said, you know, I try to do what's right, but every time I try to do what's right, I do the exact opposite of what I really want to do. What in the world's going on? This is really the patterning of emotional intelligence, friends. You know, ultimately what you've got is you have, you have knowledge, but what you don't have is you do not have the emotional skill set to be able to use that knowledge under pressure. We tend to look at emotions as bad things, and ultimately they're not bad things. What they are, they are essential building blocks about the way we as human beings respond to uncertainties in life, uncertainties in trading. So the deal is everything has to do with your limbic system, your emotional brain, your caveman brain, and it's just simply doing its job. But it's doing its job. Oh, God, millions of years ago, up to maybe a hundred thousand years ago, and it's doing its job. For short term survival. And when it sees that it's in a place where it's got a problem with its life, then it's going to take over. It's going to produce an emotional response which is action. And from understand my standpoint, emotions are not feelings. Emotions are biological action potentials that simply fire.

When a certain crisis shows up, when a certain incident shows up, Boom, just like that. They're in the bloodstream in nanoseconds, they're into behavior in less than a second. And what happens is you thinking, oh, I've got all this knowledge, All I have to do is follow my knowledge. You are missing a giant chunk of what is necessary to become a successful trader. Training your emotional nature to be able to respond to challenging moments, not the way you were programmed by evolution, not the way you were programmed to respond to challenges at growing up, but no a particular specialized way of where it's not about short term survival anymore, it is about long term thriving. So this limbic system, it's just doing its job. It's us.

Who are not able to understand the needs of the trading mind. We just think knowledge is what works. No, that's not what works. You know, ultimately your caveman brain simply doesn't know, have any idea about what money is. If you were to dump a boatload of money right into a clan of cave people, they might use it to burn stuff with. They might play a game, I don't know, they'd do anything. But there was no place capital had not shown up. However, money.

Is more than that. It is a lot more than that. Just because money, just because money doesn't seem anything to the caveman, survival is. If you were to take a look at this, money equals the power to survive, you would begin to understand the problem you have following your rules when the trade's going against you. The money is not something you spear. It is a symbolic representation of your power to survive. And do you know what the main fear is? The main concern about this, this is actually not a human. This is actually another ape. But what you're looking at, this right here, used to happen to us quite regularly, to our ancestors at race, is we were preyed upon by big cats.

By big bears. And ultimately this would be a scene that strikes terror. And when you are in a place where the trade goes against you, when you really have skin in the game, this is where you're at. This is where the thing is, you are fighting for your life. You're not fighting, oh, am I going to use this Position, blah, blah, blah. No, you are fighting for your life. And interesting, this is a leopard. But when I was researching this, they actually have a mechanical saber tooth cat now that walks and talks and they bring around and that, that, that cat is about twice the size of.

A large African lion. So you can imagine a cat like that with big old huge 6 inch incisor teeth coming at you. Wouldn't you fight for your life too? Well, that's exactly what happens is you have put money to risk, order's been filled, you're out there and suddenly that thing is heading toward your stop. The caveman brain doesn't see the stop, doesn't see it as a protector of your capital. No, it sees it as a saber, the tooth cat, coming to take you down and consume your energy, take you out. So that, my friends, is exactly what we are looking at and out of it here. You've got to make a decision. And you're going to have to learn if you're going to be a successful, consistently profitable trader, you're going to have to have the knowledge. You're going to have to have the knowledge of trading. You know, it allows you to be able to find a mathematical edge that it gives you the ability of extracting more capital out of the market than you're putting back in. But you're going to have to match that head knowledge with emotional knowledge. You're going to have to be able to say, you know something, I need to bring my heart, my emotional brain, my caveman brain and my neocortex, the thinking brain, together so that they're in a new partnership. The deal is your brain is organized around fear. We were little creatures. If you happen to take a look at what the leopard had caught, that's about the size of human beings a million, 2 million, 3 million years ago. And yeah, they were being preyed upon by a much larger predator than a leopard. So we're now here going, okay, how do we take the heart knowledge, the emotional knowledge that keeps us calm and recognizing we no longer have to fear the lions, tigers and bears. We're over that. But the thing is, is the emotional brain does not know that. If you want to be able to use that cognitive brain of yours or what trading demands you, you're going to have to complement your knowledge with the emotional skills that allows you to maintain emotional sobriety when you get into the heat. And you don't know what that trade's going to do. And instead of becoming cavemen, running or fighting, you're going to follow Your rules. So now we've gotten that and out of that. Let's take a look at this relationship. This pretty much is what's going on right now. We pretty much ignore the emotional brain, that caveman brain, and we think that we're in charge of the brain. We're steering it, it's like a car. We're just going down life, everything is fine. And what you're looking at is that caveman brain.

In Caveman's time, 90% of the time, they were in what is known as rest, digest. They were chilling around the fire. You know, they're telling stories, doing this and that. The other. And they're only about 10% of the time were stressful events in their life, like hunting, being hunted, and that kind of stuff. And the modern world has produced a completely different thing. We now are in about 90% stress and 10% rest and digest. And so what we want to do is go, once that caveman is activated, it is going to short circuit the thinking brain.

You can work this out, you can test this out for as long as you have capital. But at some moment in time, my hope is that you come to the moment of realizing, you know something. I keep wanting to believe that cognition alone can win this thing. And I'll find the stiff upper lip that, you know, the willpower, just putting distances between me and emotion to find out that truly that's not going to work. In trading, you can't ignore what your survival instincts are firing in you to do, because the fight flight just takes over the rational mind. Now all that knowledge is blown out. This is what happens. It happens every day. I don't have a business. If people became emotionally intelligent, learned how to use emotions, recognizing that instead of ignoring them, pretending they're not there, is to begin to actually know how to intelligently use them to create the mind that can, in fact, deal with uncertainty. So we're here, and then it happens. This is what happens to you when the caveman brain wakes up, sees an emergency, and just absolutely blows you off. That's how much. That's how much control you have. It's like saying, you know something? I've got a little pop gun here, and this guy over here has a bazooka. Who do you think is going to win that fight? The emotional brain has enormous amounts of communication leading down into the thinking brain. But the thinking brain only has two 19th century telegraph lines. Moving back into the emotional brain, do you see the problem here? It's overwhelmed. And yet at the same time, that emotional Brain, it does not think, it emotes. It is constantly organizing you to survive in an environment. It's constantly scanning the horizons for threats or opportunities. However, when the trade goes against you, the brain doesn't perceive that as an opportunity. It perceives it as a threat. And we're talking about that big cat drawing you up into a tree. And along the way, the emotional brain blows out your ability to think clearly. You're no longer. You are now wired for survival rather than for performance. And friends, this is what you've got. And the deal is what I want to do.

This is such a vital topic that I really. I want to show it to you in a variety of different ways so that you actually become. You come to a moment of where you realize is whether or not it's with me, whether or not it's somebody else, whether or not you think you're going to really read this and do things. I get plenty of emails who have read my book and stuff like that and says, randy, it's changed my life. I've become profitable. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I'm absolutely astounded. But what I want to show you here, this is a way where.

Information is coming into the brain that's called emotional stimuli. You have a challenging moment, and it's going to a part of your thalamus called the sensory thalamus. And that temporary. That. Excuse me, that. That sensory thalamus is a lot like a traffic cop. One that is managing a really busy intersection. What it's doing is it's everything. When it's not an emergency vehicle around, stuff like that, he's just sitting there, moving different cars this way and that way and all like that. Everything's going fine. The sensory thalamus does not sense threat. Okay? All that information's coming in. Everything's good. That traffic cop can keep thinking and performing. Then what happens? Let's just say, oh, now let me finish that thought. And out of that, the traffic cop says, everything's good. It will send that information to the thinking brain, the sensory cortex. Now, what you're looking at, that takes a long time. It takes about a quarter of a second for that information to hit the thalamus, get checked out, sent up to the thinking brain for you to be able to make a decision that goes back down as an emotional response. Okay? Now, the problem is not when everything's going copacetic. The problem is when all of a sudden there's an emergency vehicle coming, and all of a sudden you hear the siren, you See the flashing lights? You're doing all like that. And all of a sudden the traffic cop is stopping everybody, everybody. And what he does, he stops everything and signals the emergency. Through that emergency is now that emotional signal, that emotional information is going to the thalamus. The emergency's on. There's a challenging moment here and all of a sudden it doesn't go to the thinking brain. It takes the short route, the low road to the amygdala. Boom.

And in nanoseconds, the chemistry of stress is in your bloodstream. It is altering the way you perceive. And plus with the hippocampus, it's storing these memories of past traumas and it's firing. That's what is happening, friends. Then it hits the amygdala. The amygdala lights up. Fight, flight. And before you know it, it's all over. This, my friends, is exactly what you are looking at. And the question is very simple.

What do you do? What do you do.

To get the mind to actually be able to trade? You're going to have to be in a place where the process that you're currently using has to change. You have to rewire the brain to respond very, very differently for what you need, for what has been happening historically. And then the truth is, when the brain encounters uncertainty, it is programmed to experience vulnerability, which, by the way, just makes the thinking brain cuckoo. And that leads to the survival instincts of fear and aggression taking over the rational mind. That's when you over trade, then you fight back. When that trade's going against you or you go, I'll just believe. Please, please, please, let it come back. Let it come back. I'll double down, I'll double down. I do anything. Now you're actually scared. Money. Okay? This is a hot wired pathway that must be interrupted.

Before it can change. And so now we're going, okay, I'm beginning to get this. I'm beginning to get this. And so ultimately what we're saying then is.

Here'S a great promise to you. With effort and skill sets, you can train your brain to respond differently to uncertainty. Okay? And I'm going to tell you right now, it's not easy. It's not like there's some little magic piece of knowledge I'm going to give you. Count to one, count to 10 two times, and you're back in control. The thing is, you have hardwired instinctual nature that's firing and taking over mind. This is the way evolution shaped you. And you're going have to find a way through Emotional intelligence to be able to say, I can interrupt that and over time I can rehabituate, I can rewire the way the brain is going to respond. This is what you want to do is you're going to be responding instead of from fight flight, you're going to be responding to uncertainty from strength. This, my friends, is when the magic happens. But before this happens, ultimately what your trading account is really revealing to you, it's really revealing that the beliefs you hold about your ability to manage uncertainty.

How effective they are with dealing with the markets and extracting capital.

More than you give back capital. It's that magic thing, is that the truth meter.

Is going to tell you whether or not those beliefs are working or not. Are you making money? Are you not making money? Most people are. The truth is, is that if they really, this happened a couple times today, most people, if they really got down to it, their beliefs about.

Their ability to manage the uncertainty on a critical basis, on a challenging basis, they're not there. And I'm going to give you one example of how this happens is I have a trader who's been, I've been working with in the last two weeks. Last week he had $25,000 a week, okay. And he was really happy. Whoa, look at this. But what happened is this week alone, he's given that money back and then some.

It's very often that what happens when you beliefs get played here. And the belief that was driving him, it's just so happened he grew up in a family where his father was a traveling salesman, was never home. And then when he was home, he could either be really fun and cool or he could be a monster. But the thing is, he loved it. He'd finally come home, he would be played with and all this stuff and he would have a great time. And then his dad would be gone. And he got used to that pattern. And what he learned is that no matter what you have, it's going to be taken from you. This connection to his dad, his dad, you know, traveling salesmen learn ways, healthy ones learn ways of staying connected to kids and things like that. But what this man learned is that what I have, when I get feeling really good and everything's going right, I know that it's going to be taken from me. That's what that was a pattern he learned. And it just so happens that's the belief that was driving his trading. That's how deep this goes. And it really comes down to.

No, I didn't.

So now we're sitting here.

I Can't. Why is that?

Ah, it does go forward. Now, ultimately, it's these beliefs about managing uncertainty that are being revealed in your trading account. And right here you're having a graphic about, literally, in many ways, this is what the reality is. Not out there. Like, this woman is pulling a reality toward her and what's happened is the actual phenomenon is pretty barren. And yet she is projecting her beliefs upon life and pulling forward a completely different way of being in the world. Reality is not out there, friends. It is in your head. It is between these two ears. And it is about the beliefs, the assumptions and the biases you have about life, about meeting the challenges of living that are being revealed in your trading. Being revealed in particular tonight. Being revealed about what happens when that trade goes against you and you're being stopped out. What happens to your rules at that particular time? Do those rules stay structured? Do you believe in those rules so fastidiously that they stay together even under that pressure? Because at that particular time, that leopard is attacking you? So now we're looking at this and going, oh, wow. And the one thing you probably have to learn more than anything else is that winning and losing.

Are simply about what side of probability a trade falls on. You know, the truth is, is I can't tell you how many times you probably maybe happens with you that people come, this can be a winning day. I'm going to make money today. Let's go make some money today. Or I have a goal of 500, 1,000, $1,500 a day. And you know something? If I get that, I'm happy, fulfilled and stuff like that. And what you're doing is you're creating a goal that you have no control over. You can't wish it. The thing is, what you have, what you can have is a mind that controls the mind that you bring to your performance.

That will give your probability edge, the psychological edge needed to drive it. So there what you're doing is you're saying, okay, even if I do everything right, I don't necessarily land on the right side of probability. I could land on the other. But the truth is, it's what I can control, not the outcome. But what I can control is one thing, the mind I bring to performance. That, friends, is what it's really all about. And then what you discover is this.

Either.

When for most people, winning and losing are about your human worth, you know, you make a lot of money, you go, look at me, look at me. I'm a big, I'm a big dude, right? Now, and if you lose, oh, my God, everything's horrible. No, what happens is winning and losing just means you've landed on one side of probability the other. And the real thing, you don't control that you're not in control, no matter how much you want to be. What happens in trading, that's not you. But ultimately, remember, to that caveman brain, this is a life and death game.

And the deal is what you're then doing is your performances are revealing your worth.

Not just your net worth, but your worth as a human being. And if you're doing that, if you're allowing that to happen, then you are behind the eight ball with the trading gods. It's just something where.

You have to separate your worth as a human being, what I call inherent worth, from your performances, which were about your competencies. Your competencies can be dealt with. You can learn better competencies. Your inherent worth is either intrinsic to your human nature from being a social mammalian, where groups work together, they all have inherent worth enough for everybody to pull together to live, or from your spirituality about how do I find inherent worth? From the internal divinity living within me. Now we're looking to say, how do we do that? And ultimately, though, it's this inherent worth that you have to find, you have to be able to find it. Otherwise, your K fan brand, it's just the opposite. Winning and losing, it's just winning is living, losing is dying. Okay, Whether or not you're that hominoid on the left hand side or whether or not you're that human being on a computer on the right hand side, you know, ultimately what this is about is our caveman ancestors had to win. They had to believe they were going to win, even if it was a lie to. To get through the day, to be able to survive another day in trading, the worlds have been turned around. Is that what you're working with is probability so that you trade to live another day. You trade so that, okay, I've gotten losses. You know, this thing all lined up really great. But it was my hypothesis and it was wrong, and I move on from there. And the real key is if you can say the question, you know, when you take a loss, you know, does this match my setup needs? And is it a good setup? Would I take it again if you say yes to that? From my definition, you have just won. But you have to train that. And the deal is in taking fear offline, you can develop the internal strengths that live within you. You have powerful inner resources that have never been tapped to and Built forward to produce a mind that can work with a probability based mind, with uncertainty. It doesn't happen. We're built differently. But the thing is, what we're going to be talking about here is how do you go about doing that? How do you build these inherent strengths? Well, first what I want to do is I want to talk to you about.

What these inherent strengths are. And these will be inherent strengths that come from the social mammalians that got out of trees and became hominoids. And when they did that, they're on the African savanna, they look out the African savanna and they see a dangerous situation behind every bush. They believe a saber toothed tiger can become every there. And what happens is you find that anxiety has been built into us. At the same time. If you're going to have anxiety, you're not going to make a good trader. What we are also endowed with that can be developed with stress testing. You have the discipline of a ruler. You maintain order under pressure. Okay? That's the part of you that provides leadership that really able to run the show. And you have to have that because it's the primary emotion that has to be mastered. To be able to trade well, you have to be a disciplined trader. You have to find a core of discipline that you can act from. So what happens, you stick to your rules when everything in you and the caveman in you is just going nuts and wants to take you in all sorts of different ways to make sure you gamble. No, you have to stay disciplined as a ruler. The second thing is you're going to have to find the courage of a warrior. This doesn't mean being a big chooch dude, nukem beat up everybody. There are bigger monsters on the trading God side than possibly you can muster up with you. But what you can do is you can bring forward the courage of a warrior. That allows you to face your fears so that you can master them. Not conquer them by force, but to master them. They bring a gift. But you have to be able to have that courage of a warrior. To be able to take that gift and to internalize it and to become the powerful human being that you can be as a traitor. Probably the most important of these emotional programs are the self soothing, the self compassion of a caregiver. Ultimately, to change a core belief about how you can manage uncertainty is going to require compassion. Compassion is the one emotional state that just detangles an emotional program and allows you to reorganize it to higher functioning. Another way of saying this is the 1980s. A guy guy by the name Keegan, a research psychologist at Harvard, wanted to know what the most effective form of therapy was. So he did a big test and what he found out, he wanted to find out what the best modality. And they figured cognitive behavioral therapy. Okay, what they did is they, when they got back, of all these different modalities of therapy, which one was best? They discovered had nothing. The client's progress had nothing to do with the kind of therapy being used. It had everything to do with the compassion, the empathy the therapist had for the, for the challenges that the client was going through. The empathy, the compassion is what did the therapeutic work of change, of changing the beliefs. So you're getting it. It's this character. And most guys, guess what, have a hard time. They're hard on themselves, they're rough on themselves, and it doesn't work, but they keep doing it because that's all they know. What I'm saying is no you self calm. What happens is you nurture. You grow very differently than the way you initially the hands you got dealt the first time. If you do those three things, bring those powerful resources up, you're going to be able to get to the impartiality of a sage that allows you to stick to your rules while the trade's going against you. That sage is your knowledge. That knowledge can't be used unless you have the emotional sobriety, the emotional intelligence geared from the other three aspects. Otherwise that orphan nature of yours is going to have a really hard time. So this is the key. Now you're really beginning to learn.

What is so important about emotions. Ultimately, emotions govern the kind of thinking. All thinking is emotional state dependent. And you are literally looking through blinders right now and you're making decisions. Is what this Randy Howell guys say, does this make sense? And you're doing it from an emotional state. And it allows you to only see one small part. You change the emotional state. Say if you became curious right now rather than skeptical, and all of a sudden you looked at this talk, this thing that's going on through curiosity, suddenly a different world shows up. Suddenly you start seeing the connections of how neurobiology and emotional intelligence.

Need to be sewn in to the knowledge of trading that you have. So what I'm inviting you to do is, is take your blinders off, start recognizing that as a human being, you're the only animal that can actually observe themselves and change emotional reactions intentionally. Other animals, social mammalians, they don't do it intentionally. They do it in response to the environment. That's what an emotion is doing. It's coordinating activity between the environment and the organism. We can do something one up. We can actually change the belief systems we have, the way we respond to uncertainty on a different level. And it really comes down to, do you really want to learn? Ultimately remember, the natural response to uncertainty is fear. Okay? And in this graphic, what you're looking at are two different things. One guy is freezing, the other guy is running, sometimes freezing. I look at, we have a lot of deer on our property. And deer, when they hear a sound, they immediately freeze. And what happens is predators see movement, they don't see objects. So if they freeze, it's a good deal. So happens whose cat can see objects? Then you're looking at the guy running. Good survival strategy and you're beginning to say, you know something? These are the survival strategies that I inherited from evolution. These are the survival strategies that I inherited from my culture, from my community, from my family of origin. That's what you're looking with right now. And you have got to have the discipline of the ruler and the knowledge of the sage that are not being contaminated by fear to be able to trade well, so you've gotten this and you're going, okay, well what's next? Well, that courage of a warrior. All of us have dragons, all of us have to master demons. Most of the people that, it's amazing how I find is that I'll have a guy who starts really realizing, oh my God that I'm becoming a much better traitor. And he tells all his friends, yeah, you really need to go talk to me. You know, this guy can really help you. They, oh, no, I don't want anybody looking in and finding something really bad around me. No, man, I've got to keep that a secret. Well, that will cripple you, that will paralyze you. It is time you realize that you are going to have to stand toward your dragons. You're going to have to master your fears. And what you're going to discover is the fear only has the power that you give it. Right now, it's controlling you. You have the power within you to organize yourself so that you are courageously going, moving past the fear and realizing this is self mastery that we're working on. So from there though, what you're also doing is that you need the self compassion of a caregiver. It just so happens the reason I use this image is that I've had a heart transplant while I was at Duke Medical. And one of the things, you know, when they saw you open like that, coughing and laughing are the last things you want to do because it are sneezing. Oh my God. Sneezing is the worst. And what they do is they give you a little pillow that's shaped like a heart and it has duke all this stuff on it. And what you do is you hold, you hold that, you hold that heart over your chest and you apply pressure, you hug yourself. And what that does is that allows the mending in the sternum to go forward and it minimizes the havoc that sneezing, that laughing, even swallowing can cause you. And it just so happens one day I was doing this and I realized that you know something, I was more than just stopping pain, controlling pain. I was hugging myself, I was hugging myself in love. And I began to recognize, you know something.

I need to produce self love. If you're going to survive as a trader, you better be able to produce self love. So you've got that and you realize that's actually one of the biggest ones that you could. But also you need the discipline of ruler. You know, you take a look at Abraham Lincoln, man, how he maintained order during that period of time, I have no idea. But the thing is that discipline is what allows you to maintain composure under very trying times and stick to your rules. It's necessary. But it's also part of your genetic potential that is right in on your genome. You do have to learn to train it. You do have to learn kind of like combat test it in order for it to be able to make sure that it's really, it's feel ready. But the thing is these are potentialities that live within you as possibility. The deal is it's most likely you being born as this wide open.

Infant adapting machine. You're adapting well, I'm wiring in real time.

Not by genetics. What you're doing is you're learning how to survive in the environment. And most of us wire in more of a fearful set or an impressive.

Fraudulent personality. It happens. So the thing is, now we've gotten that, but they're also. You have to have the wisdom, you have to have the clear headedness. Okay, I want to tell you something. Trading is challenging. There's a lot of stuff happening really fast and you have to be very clear headed to be able to manage that, to assess it and to make decisions. You have to have the clarity of both a sage and you have to have the discipline of a ruler. You have to have the courage of a warrior and you have to have that self soothing to keep yourself calm. To be able to be in that zone. That, my friends, is how it works. And what I want to say is using the Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest archetypal movies ever, ever done. I don't, I don't expect in my lifetime one to ever top it. But what you're looking at, if you look at these in terms of archetypes, in terms of emotional programs, you have a ruler who's there to reclaim the kingdom.

You have Frodo there who has to really, truly win the inner war going on between him between destruction and construction. He has to get rid of that ring and throw it into the lava again. Yet it's beginning to control him. You have Gandorf, who is applying the wisdom there. You're, you're also seeing warriors show up. You're also seeing, in this case women as both fearsome warriors, but also as deeply, deeply self compassionate, compassionate people who are able to calm people down. You see all of a sudden that social mammalians living in groups all have these archetypes learning to work together for group survival. Nothing has changed. My promise to you. Challenges are going to come. And the truth is.

They are there to be mastered. They're going to come. And the deal is, is that you're not in control of the outcome. That's the deception that you keep falling for. It seems logical that you can control outcome, but you can't. You can have magical thinking that doesn't work and you're gambling, but you can control the mind you bring into the moment. Once you begin to realize these emotional programs can be trained, they can be discovered, they can be nurtured, they can be grown so that you can in fact use the intelligence of emotional togetherness and pull together the mind that is needed to trade in probabilities. Now.

This is something that I call the trading or governing committee, okay. And other people call the mind, the community that raises the children that raises all that. What I want you to recognize these resources are in your biology regardless. They're housed in your brain as emotional programs. And the deal is, is that do you want to take charge of what's possible or do you want to always be blind to the committee that's running in town? And if you think, for instance, that is he telling me that I should hear the voices running around my head, I'd be crazy if I did that. My view is this quite differently, sir, is that if you're not aware of the forces at play in your mind, then you've already lost. You don't really stand A chance. What happens is you have lots of voices and you need to decide how to whittle it down to being the ones that are productive and empowering, that can do the job of trading. You have a lot of detractors, you have a lot of stuff that would like to take you out. And the question is, are you going to listen to them or are you going to do this in a different way? You would experience it often is self doubt or urgency to act. You know, oh my God, I've lost this amount of money, I need to make it back right now. And all this stuff and you're saying, oh, that again. Caveman brain doesn't understand it. So lots of capital he's looking at, he's lost a leg or a head and the money's flying away. His power to survive is being taken away. No wonder he jumps into hyper drive and ends up in fight flight. Until you take control of the Kanye of the mind, you cannot maintain the discipline in the face of uncertainty. Instead, what happens, you begin to experience that inner critic. Have you ever heard that part of you that criticizes you? It's never good enough. Have you that says you're stupid, you're never going to make it? Or what made you think you could trade? Have you ever heard that? And then what happens is you don't recognize it. It's not you. You reckon, oh my God, this is about me. No, it's not. It's about the inner critic. A highly destructive emotional program living within you, a part of the committee of the mind. And you're listening to it because you haven't had the wisdom to, to turn around and say, man, I need to examine this. Instead, you've fallen for the deception that. Oh man, I don't have voices in my head. I'm not crazy. Of course you have voices in your head. Of course you do. You have self doubt, you have grandiosity, you have greed, you have all this stuff that have different agendas. The deal though is, can you bring a practice of bringing this in place and recognizing that the inner critic is the destructive aspect of your being. It's not. It's not. I don't necessarily call it evil, I don't call it bad. I just call it highly destructive. And out of that what you will hear.

Those dragons, those demons whispering in your ear, you're never going to make it, you know, Take this trade. Take this trade. There's money here, there's money here. Trust me, trust me. All that, this all happened while you weren't looking this all happened because you haven't got an observer that can observe all this and start saying, oh my God, where's that coming from? Because you're going to discover you have a lot of misinformation running around in your head. It's just not in our politics. It's running around in your head. So understand, you are built for survival. You're not built for thriving until you make it so. And out of that you start saying, how do I start constructing, reorganizing this committee of the mind, my brain, to get all these emotional programs linked together, working in an orderly fashion in a particular direction? Well, this is what we're really talking about in our programs. And by the way, if you don't know me, haven't been exposed to my work, watch a lot of the videos that I have on YouTube. There's hundreds and hundreds of them. Also, go and read my free ebook. Just start beginning to acquaint yourself with these radical ideas I'm talking about, because I'm telling you that you can reconstruct the mind that nature built for short term survival into a mind built for managing the probabilities of uncertainty. That, friend, you can do. And besides that, they can be taught. In our program, the very first thing that happens is emotional regulation. So what happened with emotional regulation? You're not trying to change the way you think. What you're doing is you're changing. You're managing the intensity of an emotion so that it doesn't reach the breaking point and the caveman goes into action and the sensory thalamus just puts up the emergency vehicle sign and you're cooked. Okay? And so what happens is we want to take the historical organization of the committee and we want to reorganize it specifically for trading. The truth is, is that your human brain is just not built for managing the uncertainty of trading. It has to be trained, or at least for most of us. Okay, ultimately.

This is something that's taught in my courses and stuff like that, but this is ultimately what really is possible. If you're looking at this guy, you get very clearly, man, that's really cool. And all of a sudden you realize that wave is incredibly powerful. It's a lot like the markets. What that surfer has learned to do is not to try to conquer the wave. Master it, man, just manage it, force it into its will. It's trying to learn to work with it, to say, what is it willing to give me today? And this is exactly what happens in trading. You are looking in mastery. What you're Learning is that you know something. You are a surfer of the markets and you're finding the currents and surfing them. You're not trying to make things happen. What you're doing is you're learning to build with that market and you're willing to be open to taking whatever it's willing to give. That, my friends, is the way it really works. Now out of that, you know, you go, wow.

Randy talks. This is like amazing. He's bringing emotional intelligence work. He's explaining these problems on a biological level so that you begin to understand that there is no separation from your biology, emotion, brain, mind and your spirituality. They're all happening in the substrate of your flesh.

Excuse me. And what I'm here for is to make an invitation to you. If you're ready to get to the moment of realizing nothing is going to change until you change, I'm inviting you to explore. Going to our group course. It includes five group sessions with me in webinar format. They're recorded because we work all over the world and you receive copies of all these recordings. You have virtual classroom, it's 24 7. And you learn the basic skills you need to be able to build this mind. And if you go, and we're having our next one and January.

The deal is this. Don't wait till January to sign up for this thing. Start way early because retraining the way you breathe in the presence of stress takes about. Excuse me, I'm beginning to get the end of my voice, aren't I? Hold on a second.

It takes about a month to start retraining your emotional response, which includes the way you breathe and the way you hold tension. It takes a month to start habituating a new way of doing that. That's the first lesson that you're going to learn. You're going to learn how to breathe, release tension so the emotion doesn't explode, the caveman doesn't explode and become a 600 pound gorilla. And again, that takes a month. That's why we want to get you in early. And for doing that, we're going to give you a free gift.

You can spend $199 or you can sign up early and get it. But the thing is to schedule and go. There's the information. The other thing is that we offer an individual course that is highly comprehensive and deeply personal.

It's a multimedia learning system. It's got videos, text, MP3s, and it's got 10 sessions with me over a period of three to four months by Zoom. And it's a very powerful, powerful thing. And it's a thing for when a person's really interested. When you know something, I am ready to change. I want the tools to change. But meanwhile, get the free stuff kick around and then if you really are going, I still need to know more about this guy. Get my book Mindful Trading. Okay. The deal. It's here. It's here. Okay. Your job as a human being is to take this potential and organize it into higher functioning. I want to thank you for being here. And no matter what, my hope is you have a great life. And I also hope that tomorrow you watch yourself trade and notice the way you breathe, notice the way you hold tension and recognize I had no idea that my emotion had already taken over me this early. So we can take some questions out. This is a How to keep away from emotions when risk portrayed is increased by scaling in. How do you handle emotion when markets do correction move? Well, the same way you do it in any old time. The thing is, is what happens is that if you're recognizing you're sizing up what you're having to do at that moment before you start sizing up, what you do is you would learn how to pull all this stuff up as a. As an emotional real. It's a quickie thing where you learn that I can. Once I. Once I know that I have problems like if I'm sizing up or down is I'm. I'm at a point where I need to go in, in that moment to reorganize the mind. And you would learn how to reorganize that mind. Then you would learn how to pull, pull that mind up and then you. In specific, you would need to be training yourself to show up in these moments. Like even after I have a.

That's another one from emotions. When I risk capital by increase scaling in. How do I handle emotion when markets do correction move? Well, what happens is you train yourself. In my case, I teach stress inoculation where it is a rapid response where you are seeing. You train yourself when you see something like that happen, you immediately will see the word calm flash, flash, flash in your mind and you would be breathing. You'd be interrupting the animal instincts and you would be going back to the programming that you've learned and you would end up with a mind and I can't see the rest of what it is.

Okay. This is John, former student. Okay. As an update after taking your class last summer, I have now done short term and swing trading with a profit gain to loss ratio. Of 95%. Good for you. I chat with my four best friends on a regular basis. With Chief Red Cloud being the ruler and Robert E. Lee being the warrior. It is super easy to observe and identify the three thoughts in one's mind and at times the self, critic and fear of the orphan. Then my four best friends step in to assist, sticking to the rules. John, I really like the way you describe that you might start seeing some change in my work. These are your friends. They're not just emotional programs. These are guys that you call on in times of duress. I really like that. I really like that. That's a good way of describing it. And I really like the idea of friends. But what I want you to see what John's doing. He's actually learned how to pull these aspects of the self, these resources up. And what he's doing is he's building relationship with these internalized parts of the self. Good work, John.

Here's some. David need to have process goals, not outcome goals. Good. And by the way, David Debay is one of the better traders in the United States. He runs Polaris Trading and he has been a friend of Dolores and mine for a long time. And he was actually a client of mine. And I think he was really using me. He was an intuitive trader who had done incredibly well. But when he started taking on clients and rooms, they just got blown out. When he would take an intuitive trade and they had no idea why David was taking them. He. And so ultimately a lot of our work was about taking his intuition and getting it down so that people could understand what he was actually doing. David's if you're looking for a really good trading coach and someone who can teach you trading, David is a great guy.

I have no patience. How do I change? Mike, you need to listen to what I'm saying is change is a process. And like David Debay, one of the better traders in the United States is saying it's not outcome goals you're looking for. It is process goals. You can control process. You can stay in process. The thing is, ultimately you have to produce emotional regulation. You have to put mindfulness. You have to be able to recognize the strengths that are living within you and develop them or you stay stuck. Okay, what guarantee are you given? Tell me something. In trading, who guarantees you anything? Okay. It's 30% of my individual clients go on to be consistently profitable. I used to think, oh, God, that's horrible. And then I realized when someone told me this that, you know something? If a baseball hitter hits 300 over a lifetime. He's in the hall of fame. So the thing is, there's no guarantee you're in the wrong profession. Here's some from Bill. Hi, Randy. Can one make a comparison between recidivism and criminals or alcoholics and traders that damage their trading accounts? Yes, they can. Traders may want to change, but keep reverting back to their old ways. Is their behavior that leads to recidivism the same? Yeah, it is. It's really interesting, Bill, that you're saying that, you know, ultimately what happens in addictions work, which I used to be in, is you're not looking for a complete recovery forever. You're looking at more distance between the next time they have a lapse. And it's the same thing as if you have a practice of maintaining mind and trading and you work at it and you're really conscientious of it, occasionally you're going to fall out of practice and you're going to fall down and make a mistake. And what you're going to do is say, okay, I've made a mistake. I fell out of practice. I need to reassert myself. I need to bring that practice back up and I need to learn how to. I need to learn. What can I learn from this event? But yeah, it's really. It's very much like that. An rude. My wife is pronouncing names really well. Well, thank you. I'm much more challenged. Hi, Randy, I have your MP3 meditations.

Which I purchase individually. How long before the lessons start to internalize like the one where I let the trade run?

How long?

Well, first of all, you know, if I were you, if I were. If I were just depending on MP3 guided meditations to change, to change core material, I would think that I probably was over valuing the products. Most people that used the retail stuff that I have, what they do is they will get my book, they will get the workbook, and they will get selected guided meditations. And as they're going through this, they're allowing the book to get them to the deeper material. Because ultimately this is all about taking your adaptive self, that which Carl Jung called the orphan, and calming the orphan down and reasserting the empower of the mind.

I don't know of any timetable. Most people, when I get stuff like this, they've been working with it for a couple months. And what they've also done is they've been very serious students of it, recognizing that the guided meditation is not knowing to solve the problem. It will Teach you a path, but you have to make it a practice to get into that zone. Okay.

Melinda.

Is an effective trading system required prior to taking group your group course? No. And our scholarships available. We used to give scholarships and we just got burned by them. Okay. And the deal is, what I would say is it's always better to have an effective trading system. What a lot of people find, particularly in my individual course course, as they get deeper into the course, as their psychology improves, they discover their methodology.

Is missing a couple holes and they have to do things. I would prefer you having an effective system that you've seen and you realize that when you trade paper that you can make money, but when you go live, you can't. Okay.

Dube.

And Polaris Trading. And David's a good guy. Okay. He's one of the few. Usually you get into this level where guys at that level and they're kind of weird. David's actually.

Just really nice guy. Okay, Manish. What are few actionable steps from today's webinar? The most powerful thing you could do is go and watch yourself trade and realize that you are being emotionally hijacked enormous amounts of time. You will notice that you are holding your breath. You will notice that you are breathing only with the top part of the lung. You will learn you have tension in your jaws. All that. And if you wanted to do something, I believe I have a breathing guided meditation in the retail stuff. You would get that one and you would say, I'm going to practice this so that I can practice diaphragmatic breathing as I engage the markets. That would be. I have actually seen people become profitable when they were able to control their. Manage their emotions more effectively. That would be the first step. Raj, how do I control my urge to go against the trend? I correctly recognize the current trend, but instead of going with the trend, why do I always go against the trend? Because you're sabotaging yourself. What. What fight or flight has to do with it. Has everything. Yeah. Oh, I can take small stop loss when I'm wrong, but when they will frequent when I trade against the trend. This is stressful, Rog. This is not something I'm going to be able to answer this question and you're going to solve. You have a. You have a very core belief about sabotage. Okay. And like the guy that I was talking about earlier, the thing is, is that his sabotage was literally about, if I have a really good time, it's still going to be taken away from me. And that was the problem that has to be solved. Other people is a little bit more simple because what happens, they start winning and they get euphoric, they start getting more dopamine in their system and out of that winning, yay, yay, I feel good. They fall into euphoria, has you believing that the good times going to roll on forever. What happens is you are already, you are trading from scared money and that's the problem that's going to have to be solved. And you're seeing the symptoms of scared money. And your dialogue, you're telling me so the deal is what you have to solve is what's behind the scared money. It's your beliefs about your, your ability to manage uncertainty and understand.

You are not going to control trading results, you are going to control process.

Here's John. What are common threads you've seen over time when traders go through the group course and have better results versus those who did not?

It's all about keeping it active. Is that what's very common for me is I'll get, I get a lot of, I get a lot of people writing me former group settings just letting you know I'm doing really good, blah, blah, blah. I hear from those. But when I finally end up talking with guys who have fallen off the wayside ultimately is they are not maintaining practice. It's kind of like what David Dubay was talking about earlier. It's about process.

Yes.

Top end athletes, it's the same thing. It's about process.

So ultimately, let me go back to that. That was John, right? What are the common threads? The main thing is that they just don't maintain practice. And you go, well, they paid this money, why don't they maintain practice? And besides that they have this thing open 247 for the rest of their lives. It's not like they can't go back study and stuff like that. But when I talk to them, they end up talking about I, I, I rather than the forces in their mind. And again, the guys who do well are the ones who practice. The ones who maintain practice and then start sitting. Yeah, vigilance. They, Yeah. I have a saying by Thomas Jefferson, the guy who envisioned the United States and what he said was the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. And if you get that, you say, okay, what my job is, is to maintain the vigilance. That's, that's what I would say. Okay, Cheryl, Cheryl. Where is Cheryl? Okay, Cheryl, what material do you recommend reviewing before the group workshop? Well, I'll tell you.

I would watch a number of my videos. They're free. They're sitting there and it'll get you more in line with the lingo that I use, the Jardin that I use but more than anything. Is that.

What happened? Okay. Oh, that's the last question. What was the question?

Oh, the main thing is start early. I mean I'm gonna tell you I get plenty of people. What they do is they come in, they have a really serious problem about you know, they really don't have emotional state management and they wait to the last two or three days to register and then they get in and of course they have to goof around trying to find out how to. How to work thinkific and they are totally unrepaired for the first, for the first class. The first class is we're going to the next. We're going to the next skill set. I'm expecting you before you show up to have practiced for at least three to four weeks establishing a pattern of being able to show me that yes, you can in fact start a new habit about the way you can regulate emotions. Okay. Before you get there because this, the group course in particular.

I'm cramming a lot in and the other thing, if you really wanted to be prepared you could.

Get my book and begin to see what you're going to be learning because the group course and the personal course, I use the book as the backbone for what you're going to be learning. Except what happens is the book is knowledge. What you're going to be learning in the courses is how to. The actual how to. How do you go about doing this? That's a good question And I want to tell you, I want to thank you and I realize there's more but we've already gone over and.

That'S all we're going to do tonight. I wanted to thank you for being here. I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. I love a curious group. It makes me come alive and you guys have certainly done that. So I thank you. And tomorrow watch yourself trade get a mirror, videotape yourself and watch the emotions on your body as tension and as breath. Okay, Take care. Be well. Bye bye.