I m Trying Hard Why is Trading Success Still Elusive

The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen only mode. Welcome, everyone. My name is Randy Howell with Traders State of Mind. And I am delighted that you're here today. And I'm really excited because this is something where I see traders really work and what happens is when they find that working. Still, that's enough. Still, profitability is elusive. That's what we're going to be looking for today. But first, let's find out if you can hear me. Okay. If some kind souls would just simply type in on the question box a why, I would greatly appreciate it. And I would know that I'm not speaking to the ethers of reality. Okay, we are. Thank you, Howard. Thank you. Okay, the thing is, we're sitting here and we're going, okay, Practically everybody I know works hard, they're persistent, they have a positive attitude, and yet at the same time, something keeps happening and they consistently do the same thing over and over again. And so we're sitting here going, what actually is the problem here? You've got the knowledge, okay? And yet at the same time, there comes a moment when knowledge is not enough. You can't say, okay, I'm going to teach you all about emotional intelligence. You're going to have the knowledge of it, but if you can't apply it and actually use it to create the basically the self that engages all the uncertainties and the challenges of trading in life, then that knowledge by itself is not going to work. And what we've got, what we've got is exactly that we have. And particularly when people are looking at trading as an option to what are they going to do and stuff like that. They trading is made to look so easy that even a caveman could do it. And at the same time, you know, there's a caveman over there on the right and he's trying to figure out how to use that rock with that screen and stuff like that. He is from another time, another place. And the skills of working hard, those are not necessarily the most important ones. Staying alive in the moment is a very important one. He had lions and tigers and bears to deal with. And at the same time, we don't, we don't, we don't have. I haven't seen a lion, tiger or a bear around my home in a very long time. Never. So the thing is, you still have the brain that you shared with a common ancestor to the chimpanzee, and it is the one sitting there at the computer looking through that emotional brain. So you can already see that there's A problem. And I'd like to quote that prophet Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. The deal is this success in trading just seem so doable. All you have to do is follow your plan. How hard could that be? And uncertainty becomes real and not theoretical. In the heat of performance and uncertainty, all that plan just goes. It's like this guy right here. You see all this money change on the ground, you're going to pick it up, you're going to have a really good day, and then you get steamrolled. So ultimately, all that knowledge, the thinking brain gets overwhelmed. And what we really want to do is say, well, what actually is going on here? What actually am I missing about the trading mind, about taking the mind that I have that's produced pretty good okay stuff, Randy, in other areas of my life. What's so special about trading? And let's take a look. Let's. We've been misunderstanding the problem, and here's the place that it starts. We human beings. Tell me something. When you look into a mirror, what do you see? You see a reflection of yourself. You may have some conversations about what you see and stuff like that, but do you actually realize that you're looking at an animal, a social mammalian, a great ape that shares 98% of genetics with chimpanzee, our common ancestor? Okay. Did you know that's what you're looking at? And the deal is, you and I like to believe that we're logical and rational beings and that is what dominates everything. We're just going to be rational and we're going to put all these other emotions to the side, and we're going to focus on being rational, and we're going to execute our edge and everything's going to be copacetic. The deal is this. There's flawed information right here. We are not rational beings. We are actually emotional beings who rationalize. This is the real problem. The deal is you are the embodiment of emotion. Think about your muscles getting tense before you're about to do something. That tensing up, that's emotional motivation. That. That is revving up the emotion, ready for action. And then you think, okay. And then, you know, I also hold my breath when I'm. When I'm tense and stuff like that. And I'm looking at uncertainty. That is emotional arousal. You are stopping air from going to the brain because all you really. All that air is going to be going to the top part of the chest for fighting and fleeing. And it happened in an instant. So that's the start of understanding. The real problem in your trading is that you are not a rational being. And that when you look in the mirror, my hope is you. And I do this myself and I find the part. Sometimes it's really hard to do. As I look into the mirror and I go, my goodness gracious, that is that I like to think of myself as a human being, that I am above and beyond any other kind of animal. And all of a sudden I realize is that I'm a social mammalian, I'm a great ape. Do I see that when I'm looking at reflection? If you do, you can begin to really, truly appreciate what you have to do in terms of training and how you're going to have to work with that particular brain in a way that you haven't been able to. Most people think all I have to do is follow my plan, I'm going to be rational and everything's there. And then what happens? Then the trade goes against you, rationals out and all of a sudden fight flights in. It's that kind of stuff that we, that we must actually master. And the problem is the brain on uncertainty. That's actually what I do for a living, is I study the brain on uncertainty. It just so happens your brain from the early get go from the Serengeti does not like uncertainty. It likes to be able to see things. It likes to control the environment. It wants to control outcome. And it needed to believe it could or we would have never survived to become the human beings that we are. But back then, having to do that maybe was a little delusional, but it worked and got wired into literally who we are as a genetic human being. So your brain is built to control outcome, to be right, not wrong. God sake. And to predict the future. Oh, I can tell this is going to happen and never give up. These are survival adaptations that are a part of our shared evolutionary psychology. And it just so happens there's a problem, Houston, is that you do not control outcome. The truth is you maybe want to be right. But the truth is to have to insist on being right in trading is that's a good way to set yourself up for failure. Because when you're right, you just landed on the right side of probability. Relative to you. If you're wrong, you landed on the wrong side of probability. Having to be right, it's not there. Predicting the future, you know, you do all that fancy calculation and stuff like that and you predict what's going to be happening, the high probability. But the thing is that the really good traders know that that's a probability that may not show up. It's a probability, it's a possibility. And you're preparing for that. And if you see it, you're going to seize that opportunity. If you don't see it, you're going to sit on your hands. So now we've gotten to this moment where you know the problem. The problem is this, is that in trading control of these factors is an illusion. Okay, that's the piece you need to get. And that you may be going up and down, up and down, and you may be able to talk again. But the truth is, is that it is true that when you look at this stuff, you begin to recognize that I have fell into a way of seeing the reality that is not accurate at all, just not at all. So we're getting there. And again and again you realize you don't have control. But do you believe that? Do you do that? No, you don't. You have an instinctive need that when you get to the moment of where you're face to face with that uncertainty, you fall into fight flight, the emotion triggers, and in nanoseconds, it's already chemistry in the bloodstream and it's wiping out your thinking brain. And what happens is you are then seized by fear and aggression and you're trading under pressure. That's what you're doing. So ultimately you find out this is it. Willpower, positive thinking or emotional suppression fails. Okay, when the pressure of threat is, enters the game, that's the piece. If you were prepared for it and knew how to prepare for it instead of pretending it's not going to happen, things may have been different. But the truth is a lot of the skill sets that you use to be able to train yourself to trade are simply not going to work. That's the problem. So now we're going, well, what do I do? Well, first of all, let's just spend a little bit more time in this area where this is. This, this little engraving right here is, this is takeout. Fast order in the ancient world. You know, they've got some sort of bison and they just want a meal. They're on the go. And you see that it's a lot different than going to, going to a fast food restaurant, sitting in the line and waiting for your food and giving the order outside and stuff like that. You know, this is a very different, it was very dangerous to get food back then. So the deal is simply the brain that you brought to trading cannot give you the success you're Seeking. It was built for something completely different. It was built for short term survival. You're looking in the management of uncertainty, of probability in particular. You're looking long term survival, thriving actually. So you're basically asking the brain to do something that it's its worst nightmare. Okay? What nature has given you is not what the artificial world of the market needs. It's going to have to get retrained to, to do that. And how does that happen? You're going to have to retrain the brain to work effectively in the trading world. And this is actually a transitional moment in the evolution of a trader up into this moment. Until you realize this, you've been trying to acquire knowledge, you've been trying to get to the moment of where you have enough knowledge that you can trade on paper and you can produce profit. That's what you're out to do. And then though the next piece comes in, you introduce uncertainty, you introduce the fallibility of being human. And all of a sudden all that knowledge goes out the door because it doesn't know how to deal with uncertainty. And yet you're going to have to retrain it. Fortunately, the brain's highly adaptive and can be trained to work in a world rooted in uncertainty. We're doing it anyway, but we don't have to deceive ourselves. Your brain's going to resist that, okay? It wants the comfort zone, it wants the comfortable lie. It doesn't want the truth that says, oh, I'm going to have to evolve, I'm going to have to change. You have to become the designer of your potential rather than to leaving it to natural selection. Natural selection. I don't think it's going to give you the mind that you're looking for. And this is where it gets really, really focused. Okay? Oh yeah, Dolores just said you didn't say anything about the questions. What happens is, if you have questions as we go along, what I wish you would do is go ahead and write the questions in the question box and I will get to those immediately the time I finish the presentation. But I would really appreciate it because a lot of times we sit around here twiddling our thumbs after, after I've made the presentation and people are trying to figure out a question, then they have to write it in and it takes some time and we ended up missing questions. So as we go along, as you listen to this, ask questions, and here, this is where iq, Thinking brain, you've got that, okay? But eq, Emotional intelligence has to be developed at this moment for you to Be able to use that knowledge in the conditions of uncertainty. And remember this, emotions are not optional. You are an emotional being. You may think of yourself as an Aspie Asperger's, but at the same time, underneath all that stuff, you're an emotional being. They are actually biological action potentials that govern the relationship between you and the environment, between the trader and the markets. And ultimately, once that emotional brain finds a solution, it locks it in and then it insulates that circuit and it fires and becomes automatic. It bypasses thinking. And thinking may take a quarter of a second to get the message and the chemistry is already in the bloodstream and thinking is being blown away. So this is where you have to be able to bring the heart knowledge, the emotional knowledge and the intellect knowledge, the knowledge of trading, all that stuff. It has to be coordinated together. This is the big transitional moment for traders. And my guess, if you're listening to this particular presentation, you've come to that moment and you're looking, how can I start using the knowledge I have and start using it from an eq, an emotional intelligence perspective, so that I actually can, I can actually run that knowledge and actually trade through that knowledge with stabilized emotions? Yep, that's what we're here to do. So here's the thing, is that if you grasp that all thinking is emotional state dependent, take a look at this graph here. On the left side, you're looking at, you're looking at low emotion. Everything's pretty cool, everything's pretty calm. You don't feel threats, you don't see opportunity. And what you're saying, what you're seeing is the information is getting to the thinking brain pretty rapidly. There's not, there's not a thing where everything's being stopped and looked at. No, it can be integrated, it can be thought through. On the right side, what happens that this is a high stress situation. This is when you're looking at it. Oh my God, it just went against me. What am I doing? I hate losing. I'm going to double down on this. I'm going to go. What happens is when you're talking like that, you realize that your thinking brain has been disabled. It hit the thalamus and all of a sudden the thalamus as a cop looked at it and says, no, I'm going to let the emergency, I'm going to let the emergency vehicles through, I'm going to stop traffic, thinking and all that. The emergency goes. And what happens is, then what happens is if it's fear, what you're doing is you're going down that line. It could also be aggression where you don't want to. You don't want to miss out on that trade. But this is what. This happens all the time. It's unavoidable. If you. You don't recognize, you really, truly need to become intelligent user of your emotions. Okay? You are wired to perceive uncertainty as a threat. Your brain is a negative assessment machine. And what happens is you're going to have to work with it. And this is a really another really excellent way of understanding it. There we've got our geek with the glasses on, and he thinks he's in control. He's driving the brain. Everything's great. The knowledge is there. He is just so engineer, okay, but in the backseat is caveman. Caveman. As long as things are copacetic, he's cool. He'll sit there and hang out, and thinking brain will think that it's under control. But when it starts seeing that trade going against you, or when you see an opportunity that you've missed before and you have an urgency to act, that caveman starts jumping up and down and you've got a problem. The point, though, all this can be worked out through your biology. This is the first step in developing an action plan for emotional regulation. 1. You're recognizing that, yeah, you have a thinking brain, but that thinking brain really is a pretty good servant. But if it thinks it's the master, you're in trouble. You know, ultimately, if you were to look at it this way, if that. If you see an emotion as an enormous locomotive, powerful. If you see the engineer who drives that locomotive, those are your beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty. The caboose is your thinking brain. It's along for the ride. Okay, so you're getting this and going, well, how do I go about doing this? Can I work this out? Yes, you can. So first up is you're going to have to learn to regulate the emotion so that it does not build up enough steam that it breaks out, stops thinking, and floods the system with cortisol. Okay. That's the first thing. And how are you going to do that? Well, the way that I teach is basically what we're going to do. We are going to be doing, actually, a little experiment here in just a moment where we're going to be looking at breathing and your muscle tension as part of the way an emotion readies itself for action, taking over the body and mind. They can also be used to interrupt and calm down an emotion before it gets a full head of steam. So let's take a look at this. What I want you to do, we're going to be testing a little bit of bellows breathing and muscle relaxation here, okay? I want to give you a really crash course. Diaphragmatic breathing is when you pull air from the outside into your nostrils, down your throat, down to the lower lobes of your lung. You would feel it as belly moving. If you pulled air with your belly like a balloon, pulling out and pulling air down, that would be diaphragmatic breathing. And then when you release, you would let go of that breath slowly, slowly. And as you're letting go of that stress, you also, you let go of the stress of your body too. You let it drain, drain, drain into your loosened limb. Loosen limp like a ragdoll. Okay? You got that? I'm going to compress it a little bit. Pull air into belly, expand to chest, hold, release slowly. Let the tension drain, drain, drain like honey out of a jar until you're loose and limp, loose and limp like a sleeping baby. I want you to notice how calm you've gotten, how your body has less tension in it, how the breathing style is working. Now what I want you to do, we're going to do another one. I want you to remember a time when you got stressed out in trading, okay? And it's building, it's building. And it may be that famous one of the trade going against you. And you don't want to take the loss you hate losing or it be the trade getting away. However, whichever time you want and what I want you to do is to imagine a movie of where you're watching it. And as you're watching that movie, you start getting excited, you start getting going. You know, you really start building up steam. Really, really. You know, you can actually feel it like it's happening right now. See the word breathe, flash, flash, flash in your mind. Pull air into belly expanded chest hold and then release. Let the tension drain, drain, drain like honey out of a jar until you're loose end limp, loose end limb like a ragdoll. Still maintaining the image of that scary moment or that moment where you just got sucked into a trade. I want you to notice. Take one more breath in, all the way to the belly expanded chest hold, release. 1, 2, 3, 4. And as you release, let the tension in your body drain, drain, drain. Now a good question to ask is what just happened to you while you were holding an image of a stressful moment as you were doing diaphragmatic breathing? What did you notice? Okay, this is what we want to do is that we know that we can interrupt the emotion that's building. We can calm it down so that it doesn't get a load. And it, after it builds up to a particular moment, a switch goes off and it's no longer building up, it's no longer in emotional arousal. It starts flooding into the body and you feel the emotion. It's chemistry in the body. And when you feel, when you have that sensation, that is also a moment where you realize that your thinking is being altered by the emotional chemistry there. You want to control that. Now I can tell you this right now, is that if you practice, if you practice emotional regulation, what you're going to discover is you have a much better handle on staying with trades and staying in the zone. But at the same time, it's not enough. But without it, you're never going to get to the mind. We now need a tool, mindfulness, that allows us, that allows us to go and say, okay, now that I can calm this thing down, I can step back out of thought. You and your thoughts are not the same. And all of a sudden, instead of being just absolutely, they're all around you and you can't get out of them and they're just, you're fighting with them and they're just all around you. All of a sudden, suddenly you step back and you become an observer. Instead of being caught up in thoughts, you become observer of thoughts. This is really powerful. This is when you say, this is when you can actually break the thing of, I don't know why I did it, Randy, but I keep having the same mistake over and over again. It's because you have not deactivated the trigger, the emotional regulation. You have not produced observation. Where you step back, you can become observer of the going and coming of thoughts in your mind rather than fusing to them in the false belief that your thoughts represent who you are. You and your thoughts are not the same. If you get nothing out of this other than that, that is what I hope that you have gotten. Now, the second thing this bears repeating, okay, you and your thoughts are not the same. But at the same time, you start noticing what's behind that thought. You start noticing these things. These are emotions, anger, dread, resentment, fear, self pity, grandiosity, irrational exuberance, all that stuff. Remember, you do not have thoughts, emotions and beliefs. They have you. But they only represent one organization of a self based on your history and past adaptation. This is when evolutionary psychology, you bring some stuff with you from our ancient ancestors. You also bring stuff from the family you got born into, from the culture you grew up in, from just the social system around you and stuff that happen. So now we're doing this thing and going, you know something? I'm beginning to get this thing. I'm beginning to get that. Well, I just skipped one. Excuse me. What you're easily being exposed to is that your brain, your adaptive self is going to organize the potential you exist as into a very small portion of your potential, okay? And one of the things you are the product of your brain organizing your potential for survival in the world in which you exist, probably from, not from trading, but before that, the potential gets locked into your perceptual map and you mistake that as you, your adaptive self is just one organization of a self among many. So out of that the way, a good way of looking at this, if you. And this is powerful because as you become observer, it's just not thoughts you want to observe. You actually want to observe for the beliefs that drive your trading. And the very first thing that we want to do is to recognize something naturally. You do not. You do not see and then believe something. You actually believe something and then you see the truth, but you come to believe. And now that beliefs, that's your perceptual map and you look out. So the thing is, it's this is that learning to become observer of the thought life, it's like one of the biggest keys in learning how to build a mind for trading. It's going to have to be done. And out of that it frees you from the prison of your comfort zone, which was originally organized to adapt you for survival in the environment in which you were thrust. Okay, it just served you well. But the thing is, not in the trading world, the rules of success in trading are rooted in patience. They're not rooted in taking action and making things happen. They are rooted in patience. You are rooted in patience to be able to see what the markets are willing to give you. And what you're seeing is through your beliefs. And you see that as truth. The deal is, it's not the truth. It's your beliefs having become so solidified that you see it is true now. So now in mindfulness, mindfulness allows you to imagine your mind as a governing committee. And I think this is one of the most powerful concepts in this image. You're actually looking at a governing committee, looking at another governing committee. And you're realizing that these are interacting parts. And ultimately on a biological level, your brain is a community of rival emotional programs that are duking it out from control of the mind. However, when that brain produces mind, you have a governing committee and those emotional programs are given voice in your mind. And all of a sudden you see the competition going on inside the mind for control of your behaviors, of what you do with that finger of yours. And trading. That is what we have to work on. That is what we have to be able to say. How do I get a hold of that? And if you finally get it, oh, you've got this observer and you have all these voices in the self. Yeah. If you don't think you have voices in the self, what I'll say is that you are being taken for a ride by them. The internal commentary, okay. Have you ever heard it? Have you ever beat yourself up, called yourself all sorts of names and just got really angry and beat yourself up? Well, that's the internal commentary. And what we want to do is say who is having that conversation. And the deal is, most likely it's not who you want or should want having that conversation. You need specific emotional programs to create the trading mind. But those are not the ones that are natural to you, are the ones that got built before you knew to look for them. So now we're going, oh, wow, you get it. There's always a commentary going on inside your mind. And have you tuned into it. This is called the historical internal dialogue. And if you tune into it, most likely you're going to discover it's kind of like makes you feel and you're trying to ignore. You'll do almost anything. In Denmark, they actually did an experiment where they asked people to stay silent for 20 minutes. But they could use a shock if they wanted to if the silence just got just disturbing to them. And well over 60% of the males in the sample actually shock themselves repeatedly during that 20 minutes. So you begin to see that we don't want to see things that we don't want to see inside the cell. And yet at the same time, we need to see them now. This is where the emotional programs of the brain are given voice in the mind, this committee of the mind. And what happens is you need to be able to see the voices in here, because some really are good, some are bad, Some are just thoughts just running through mine. You need to be able to go in and say, I need to do some work on this mind that I'm bringing into the moment. I have plenty of natural resources, But I'm getting stuck repeatedly with just one or two voices that make all my decisions under stress. That is what has to be changed. Now this historical internal dialogue, you can discover that this is a place that you get stuck in. Like for instance, it's composed of what I call the inner critic. That voice that judges you harshly, that voice that accuses you, that tempts you, that has you trying to talk you into doing something that sets you up for failure. And then what happens is you discover that you have an adaptive voice that I often call the orphan. And it's, and it's doing the same. It's just trying to prove itself. It's trying to prove that it matters, but it has beliefs about whether or not it really, it can really do it or if, you know, if people really knew me and I really talked and stuff like that, they would know that I, I was imposter, all that stuff. Yeah. So what you're getting is that there is a part the inner critic has produced that self doubt and you also have this other part called orphan. And that's the part that you're going to have to learn to really rementor. So this is how your brain initially learned to deal with uncertainty. This is all happening between 3 and 5 years of age and locking in and setting up about 75% of your personality. And most avoid dealing with this internal struggle. I don't blame him. It's not, it's not comfortable and can get you and you can get away with it until you start trading. Trading for forces the evolving trader to redesign the sell so the management of uncertainty is present. This is the real change that must happen here. And we're getting closer and closer to being able to show you. You kind of have to do it because you know, ultimately this is really all about the wall of self limiting beliefs. When you hit that barrier and a lot of times traders will actually have a number of how much money they're worth and they hit that number and they will actually lose down if they get beyond that. I actually had a guy a number of years ago that was traded with a high six figure account, had been profitable for a long time but every time he hit seven figures he would lose back down into high six figures again. And it just been going on and on and on. Nobody had been able to figure it out. He and I were working and what happened is he grew up in Detroit. He grew up in a family where the father worked blue collar and the labor union at a Ford plant. And you know, management and labor were always banging heads and the father just was angry that he didn't believe that all these executives were worth a million Dollars a year. And he would pound his fist on the table. Nobody's worth a million dollars. And here's this eight, nine year old boy just soaking it all in. He grows up, becomes a trader. And every time he hit that seven figures, a million dollars, he would lose back down. He had to finally diagnose it, the self loaning belief. You know, suddenly he wasn't worth a million dollars. And then he had to be able to start reworking it so that he could go over seven figures and move on. The brain, the brain will lie to you, okay? And the thing is is that what you're looking to do is understanding that you're projecting your beliefs onto the markets and, and getting feedback. And you see that feedback in your trading account. So you find out how effective or limiting your, your beliefs are by watching your trading account. Okay? It's telling you that you have, you have highly effective if you see it growing and healthy or ineffective if it's not, if it's losing value. That's what we're looking to do. That's what we're looking to do. And finding it, finding them is something where a lot of people have blocked. You know, they don't want to see that part of themselves. They will do all sorts of things rather than look at and deal with self limiting belief. And at the same time in trading you have to make a decision about whether or not you want to be safe or whether or not you want to grow as a trader. If you want to grow as a trader, you're going to have to go looking for your self limiting beliefs and make it your business to change them so that you can free your trading account to grab more cash rather than putting it all back in. So we've gotten there and there's good news, friends. There's really good news. You can intentionally awaken the emotions needed for uncertainty management. It's not that hard. And the deal is living within you as potential. This goes back to the quantum mechanics idea of that you exist as potential. The observer of that potential is what gives that potential form. And you have a particular form called you right now. And what we need to do is we need to make sure that we start looking for the emotional programs of the discipline of a ruler. The ability to maintain order under stress. And the deal is if you have not got discipline, nothing else really matters. You have to be able to find that discipline to maintain order. The second thing is you're going to need the courage of a warrior. Why courage? Because you're going to go hunting for your demons, the ones that have been basically putting a stone in your way. And you're not going to thug and beat them up, you're going to master them. You also are going to have to find and develop the self soothing, the self compassion of a caregiver, probably, if for change. The most important of these emotional programs, compassion by itself is the antidote to fear. It can take a fear circuit, neural circuit, and it can take it, calm it down, tease it apart, reorganize it into higher functioning. Okay? That is the power. And if you've done all that, you will find the impartiality, the clarity of thought of a sage that that's who you want making your trading decisions under pressure. All these exist as a potential self. Your job is to say, I've had enough. I know that I need to be able to. I need to be able to build this mind. So I use a particular process called memory reconsolidation and enrichment. And let's just say the way the brain operates, it will see experience and it will encode that experience into memory. And based on its biases, its beliefs and its assumptions, and after about 30 days, that memory consolidates into a solid memory. What we're doing is saying, you know something? We actually want to go into memories of when you have exhibited where you've been in a tough situation, you were scared, but somehow you found yourself through a situation where there had to have been the discipline of a ruler, had to have been the courage war had. You had to have calmed yourself down and thought clearly, what we're doing is we're going in and we're getting the brain to remanufacture a new memory from that experience rather than the old one the way it originally did. Okay? This same process basically, where false memory is created, but I'm actually using it in reverse to get at aspects of memory that you can see for a fact that these emotional programs were dominant and they were leading the mind that engaged the uncertainty. That's what. That's the very first thing that we do. And from there, from there, we actually are going one step further. We're actually going into the archetypal world of Carl Jung. Now, right here we have a picture of. Golly, who are these guys? The Lord of the Rings. God, how could I possibly do that? You're looking at, these are archetypes. There's Eragon the ruler, there is the magician, the Sage of Gandorf. There you see all these and you see the women folk, they're being expressed as compassion. But Also the one on the right top, understand she's the one that killed the God awful creature. And you're also seeing warriors. You're seeing these particular archetypal examples and these, the reason they are archetypes is because they are deeply embedded into our emotional landscape and they're needed for group survival. In this particular case, what we want are the heroic varieties of this. And ultimately I teach you through symbolic representation how to pull those up and to have them really present. But it's rooted in the memory of where you have actually experienced the emotional programs that we want. So you know for a fact that there when the inner critic attacks and says, oh, this is bs, you know, this is just, this is just visualizing. No, it's not. You're actually going into a memory that did happen and you're seeing it there. And it's also more than just saying some. I'm a discipline trader. I'm a discipline trader. No, you're actually going to the memory, okay? You're not wishful thinking, you're not positive thinking. You're going to the actual memory of something that did happen where you can pull strength from these. That is the difference maker. Now what I want you to do is in this process, you come to a moment where you're no longer trying to win control outcome. That's the action of success in a lot of other domains, the action of success in trading is patience. Okay? And then a lot of people are uncomfortable with patience. They're uncomfortable, they get jittery, they get distracted, they're bored, they want to do something. Well, the thing is, is that unless you can solve that problem about what's going on about why you can't be patient, you can't trade, patience is there for you to wait until the trade comes to you. Ultimately. The story I like telling about this is the American cougar is a. Cougar's a big cat, okay? It's get up to 225, 250 and it's the apex predator in the North American area. And the way it hunts is very different than the African lion that stalks and sustains. Lots of industries I'm at and I bet I also know. And they also have to replenish that capital. All the deadlines that happen because they're worked with big huge buffalo and they get impaled by, they get impaled by impalas, they get kicked by zebras. You know, it's, it's tough. What happens is the cougar climbs up a tree, goes up about 20ft and waits very patiently for the. For the. For the forest to give it something. It waits patiently. Waits patiently. If you were to see a cougar doing this hunting, you'd probably think he's napping. Well, he's. No snow, he's just. He's patiently waiting for the forest to give it to him. He knows the setup. He knows that deer have to cross his path. And he waits. When they get into the setup, he drops silently, that 20ft, hits the deer in the head, snaps its neck, and the deer falls down dead. If that deer doesn't die, gets up and runs. The cougar doesn't run after him. It runs up the tree. It goes up the tree, sets up again, waits for the next thing. He's a very patient hunter. That is exactly what we're looking for here. Okay? We're no longer trying to move to control outgoing by controlling the mind. What we're doing is we're realizing that we're producing a particular mind that gives us the ability to control what we bring to the arena. We don't control winning and losing. We control the mind. We bring into that moment. That is the psychological edge that you want. So after that, this is where there will always be a struggle. There will always be that inner hulk with us that can trigger to anger, trigger to fear. And the truth is, that's what that caregiver is there for. The empath. She's there. It's there to be able to calm you down so that you can maintain it's not about winning or losing. You don't control that. What do you control? The performance which you can. That's the edge. That's the new winning. This is the psychological edge needed to drive your method edge. Now, in the same way, winning only becomes landing on the right side of probability. Okay, it didn't say about winning. It's nothing about who you are as a human being. We actually do work in what I call inherent worth, where you actually discover that you find the inherent worth of you as a social mammalian or as something greater than the self. And you discover your worth is through that. It's not through your performances. Those are just if you have a failure, it's just an opportunity to learn. The deal is, when you do that, losing only becomes landing on the wrong side of probability relative to you. There's no need for excitement or dejection. It's only the management of probability that matters. Winning and losing, you have no control over the mind you bring into that moment. Yeah, you do. And that's where the magic is. So ultimately, when it comes down to it, you are like this surfer. He does not have control over the outcome, but what he does have is he's got knowledge, he's got cognitive knowledge about how to surf he better, okay, but then also he has emotional intelligence that he's been able to use to be able to build the surfer that he is to be able to ride that size wave. He and the wave become one. He's patient, he's getting a good ride. He could also be clean. His plow could be cleaned. The deal though, this is exactly what our group course and our individual course teach. It is taught as a process of interlinking skills that result in a mind that is comfortable with engaging uncertainty and staying calm and patient. It operates from disciplined impartiality and friends. That's the only state of mind that works in trading. And it's something that fortunately it can be taught. And I, I, I, I have found that it generally takes two or three years for a trader to really learn the, learn the knowledge necessary to trade. And only then do they actually recognize that knowledge is never enough. They need to build the emotional intelligence to be able to build a different sort of mind that engages the uncertainty of trading friends. That's the next stage. A lot of people never get there because they get locked into knowledge and thinking that's the way it's going to work. Knowledge. As Einstein said, knowledge is a very bad master, but a very good servant. Okay, and what we're saying is, is that from here, what do you do? What do you do? Well, I can tell you this, is that we're having a, a lot of people, if you've never, if you've just got here first time, first time you've met me and stuff like that. What I ask you to do is go to our website and just simply get our free book. If you want to kick some more tires, get, get my book, the Mindful Trading Book. But then maybe get some of the guided meditations and just look around and start saying, where's this guy coming from? Learn more about the emotional intelligence of trading. If you come to the moment where you realize that, well, I've been, I, Randy's talking right down into me. And if you say how do I learn? How do I take this to another stage? We have group courses and the next one meets when March 26th. So it's a few, few weeks away. And in there what you learn is the very skills that I've talked about here. You learn how to use them and work with them. And we want you in there early simply because it takes, particularly with the breathing, the emotional regulation. It takes three or four weeks to train yourself to the way you need to be trained for when you show up. Because when you show up for the first course, we're already into mindfulness. Okay. So we actually give a free gift if you sign up by March 21st. It's a. It's an emotional regulation workshop that you can go to our website and spend $199 for it or you can get it free. Okay. We have people already signed up for this. It's about half full. And people get in and they realize the value of getting this stuff down and practicing with it rather than thinking that they can go over it a couple times and it's changed. We also have an individual course that is highly comprehensive and personal and fundamentally it comes with 10 sessions with me on zoom. And it really gets into it, really gets into it. It's a very. It's, like I said, it's much more depth. Okay. And it's really more like a multimedia graduate level course. And it's powerful. It's very powerful. So there's lots of different things, but right now I want to thank you for being here. I love reaching out and just be open. Try to open people's eyes and to see what could be. So do you guys any have any questions or any. Any there. Any there? Let's see. We've got thank yous. That's always good. Yeah, we don't do discounts. Basically what happens is that what you discover if you go look at other people's work, you will see that I'm actually priced pretty darn reasonably. And I've done that because I don't want to find a bunch of guys who can afford and just knock off 10, $12,000. I'm looking for people who. It may be a struggle to come up with some money, but the thing is they want to be able. They want to improve. Yeah, it's the value. That's what it is. Is there a replay of this to watch later? Yes, there is. Tomorrow there it will be put up on my YouTube channel and on the website too. Both. And I see. Randy, I would love to know how we can overcome known emotional biases. For example, even though I have been able to follow my rules and trade mistakes one day at a time for a good long time, I still find myself subject to many market biases. How would you suggest working on this? What, what. Ultimately what happens here is that you have to a bias. Behind the bias is a belief. Okay. And what you're looking for is the belief. And those beliefs are about your mattering. They're about your worth as a human being. They're about your adequacy. They're about whether or not you believe that you're going to have a pot of gold at the end or not. But the biases are there to spot and recognize that at one time. The reason they're so, so hard to eradicate is because they were very successful. You're going to have to learn to honor them. At the same time, you're applying compassion to them and you're beginning to build because the biases in the language that I use, orphan has locked in emotional beliefs and you're going to need to show it leadership. Okay. Okay. Is having emotional intelligence able to become aware of your emotions as they arise. Build this skill of awareness as improving my trading. Is this available? Oh, I'm sorry. You know, I'll tell you what emotional intelligence is really about. Learning how to use emotions to build mine. Okay. And I wanted to read that there was something I wanted to make sure it's not just awareness of your emotion as they arise. What I'm asking you to do, particularly in trading, is to prepare the mind as you move into particular moments. Okay. The most poorly managed moment in trading is order fill. People don't realize that in order fill. You have been looking, looking like as a, in American football, as a offensive coordinator looking for opportunity to exploit the moment that you are in the trade. You're in a defensive coordinator looking to not take losses. And the deal is people don't do that. What I'm asking of you is say, you know, what I'm really doing is saying I need to start finding critical moments of where I need to pull the mind up, make sure that it is in this empowered mode before I move into an area. Here's from Manny. I agree that regulation is key. It's first step. However, as you know, traders are never alone. They usually tend to form in groups. How would you speak to a trader who doesn't set stop losses? I wouldn't, doesn't care about psychology. All they want is to make money and all they want to do is avoid losing money because it's frustrating having been in alliance with such people. You don't have anything to do with them. Those guys are not doing you any good. What happens is that they're going to be blown out in two or three years. I mean, if you, if you Haven't. He's gambling and he's wishing for something else. So be very careful of the company you keep. There are several groups that do very excellent jobs of maintaining it. But the thing, the thing is, is that you just can't be around people who have beliefs that simply do not work and continue to do them and then to actually talk about as if they could just don't go there. This is B.B. okay. Love you. Mr. Howell. Dr. Howell. Mr. Actually, Randy's good. For me. Working with my memories is hard. I have so many, I am not sure how to process them. Do you have a course specifically for building empathy? Yes. Well, it's part of the course. I notice emotional hijackings in myself. It's not about fear or courage. Sometimes overconfidence. Yeah. Urgency to act overconfident hurts me. Don't chase opportunities. I don't chase opportunities. I let the trap. I set the trap and let them come. I'm working on my trading mindset, Resisting autopilot, managing boredom and staying engaged. I've defined, redefined money as a tool good for you. Not as a source of safety or source of your power. And I know that my interest, I know my inherent value good for you. What challenges me most is my ambition. When resources are limited, that triggering flight mode. That triggers flight mode. Being nonchalant in other areas can also create problems where effort is needed. Everything you say I intellectually get. But I struggle with how to do it. Every day I struggle with how I'll say this is that good. The deal is, is if you look at this as a practice, I'm going to give you an example. The way I do my day. Okay. When I get up in the morning, I'm up. I actually do a meditation before I get up. But the main thing is when I get up, the very first thing I do, I'm at the side of the bed and I'm looking out at the trees outside of our bedroom. And I'm looking and I say, where's Ruler? And ruler appears in mine. And immediately my posture changes to the way I see that ruler energy in me. After I firmly establish that with breath, I call forward Orphan. Because I know that if I don't know where Orphan is, most likely I'm seeing through his eyes. So I start right there and by the time I actually get to my office, I am going to pull up the entire crew and I have a system where I have. Where I can actually do it in one breath. Okay. Which is part of my. In the individual training and you know, out of that, what I realize is when I do that, that mind is good for about 30 minutes. And I actually had this happen. I had words of wisdom, came to interview me at my home, no less, and they needed to have about four hours. And what happened that last hour? Clearly the glucose was gone from my brain and I was not thinking nearly as clearly what I had needed to do. Actually, What I needed to do was to have taken a break and done something other than think like walk around, pet my. Pet my dog, hang out with my cats, do something where the glucose could be reformed. I fell out. I did not perform really well in the last 20, 30 minutes of that interview. Okay, clearly. And I know why. Because I kept going. I mean, they had, you know, they had planes to catch. They had stuff like that. And we needed to get this piece done. So what happens is that normally what I do is about every hour I go through a breathing exercise. I pull up my mind and I reestablish it and calm down. I also break my walk up into my exercise, up into two sessions where I'm getting the breath, I'm burning cortisol, I'm burning all that stuff. I come back and I lay down for 15 minutes. What you're doing is. And then I have various cues that allow me to pull up the mind at particular moments. What happens is that's my practice. Just like when I was being interviewed by Words of Wisdom, I fell out of practice. I was able to identify what the problem was. At the same time, all I could do is say I had to do that. And I'm getting back up. I'm reestablishing my practices. And this is not really about how perfect you are about your practices. It's about your striving. It's about your striving to be able to say, I need to manage this, I can handle this. I'm going to get back in the saddle. I'm starting over. I'm going to learn what I can and I'm going to move on. That's how I would encourage that. Okay, what are the psychological practices? Okay, what are the physical practices to calm other than the breathing? Well, in my work, it's the muscle relaxation that goes with the breathing. That's a big one. Also safe place where I'm using a symbolic representation of a place of safety that pulls that. The other thing is exercise is that anytime you have a pretty big emotion that you really need to, you know, if you took a big chunk of a loss or you. You were at the End of an hour and you needed to take a break. I strongly encourage exercise that burns out a lot of the stress chemistry and is able to set you up a lot better. Here's Walter. I bought your book. Well, thank you. I'm on chapter six, awakening the observer of the self. Amazing book. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Keep at it. Okay. And this is Chad. Will the diaphragmatic breathing technique help to slow my rapid heartbeat? Yes, it will. When I enter a trade, what happens is that you. Oh boy. In my individual work, I actually teach people how to use a heart rate monitor and a app that has their heart rate aligned. But right now with you, you're already in fight flight the moment you enter the trade. So your deal is to main have a practice before you enter. And then as you enter the trade is you're, you are working to maintain it. Okay. And you're going to have to practice. It's not going to happen because one time it's going to happen because you practice this numerous times a day. That's what happens. But yeah, that is, that would be the way you do it. Last one, guys. BBC. So walking away when done and realizing quicker that I'm not aligned with the market. I also realized trading less has been the key for, for me to be successful. Good. In fact, I don't even trade every day and still produce winners. I'm ready for the next level. I know it's a process and I will take the steps daily but need the right stuff so my training efforts are not to be wasted. Well, BB, I would encourage you to look at the individual course. Okay. That's exactly what it's built to do. Okay. Okay, last one. Amanda. What a pretty name. Does the physical exercise help get out the emotions equally for men and women? Yes. Or is there a difference? Process as we know that men and women are wired differently. Yeah, but exercise, you know, the thing is, is that women do a lot of the same exercises and what happens, they get the same experience of, you know, getting in and burning out the chemistry, which is really what you're doing when you're exercising. You're burning particularly the stress chemistry out. Otherwise you can sit there in that emotional state for another 45 or 50 minutes or you can burn it out in 15. Okay. I prefer the shorter version. It also is showing me that I can, I can manage the intensity emotion, which is really key because, you know, ultimately this is really all about managing the emotion and pulling the right emotions up to create the mind. Well, anyway folks, I want to thank you for being here. You guys were wonderful and if I can help you, please let me know. And tomorrow the exercise that I did on the breathing, I want you to practice that in front of your screen as you do things, all of you, particularly when your heartbeat goes wild and crazy. I want you to start doing that and then if you really have a picture that of a place of a very deep, safely calm place, use that to focus on as you move into the stress of activity of managing the trade or actually getting into the trade or getting out of the trade. Fair enough. And let's see what happens. Take a look and take a look at your face, your shoulders, your body and start noticing the stress, noticing that the holding of breath and noticing what happens when you start breathing diaphragmatically. Fair enough. Well friends, I've enjoyed it. Thank you. I will see you next time.