Keeping a Disciplined Mind When the Pressure is on to Make Your Money Back

How do you keep a disciplined mind when the pressure is on? Particularly, let's take a look at one particular area of trading that is just absolute dogs, traders, that's when they take a loss, they can handle it. But when they take that second and third, maybe even fourth loss or series of losses, suddenly something changes in them. What we want to do is get past the idea, okay, of, oh, well, I've got the theory down, I know it intellectually, and I can make the practice work. We want to get past that. We want to get down and say what actually is occurring? What actually is occurring. When you hit that stage of taking those losses and suddenly there's an urgency that starts developing. You have this expectation of making money, and then you fall into a hole, and then what swells up is a urgency to make up for those prior losses. You want to get them back. And fundamentally, at this particular moment, this isn't really a psychological problem. This is really an evolutionary psychology problem. It has to do with your biology. It has to do with limbic learning. That emotional brain has learned something that has been very, very useful to it. And now, out of the context of caveman days, when everything was dangerous and, you know, taking a loss really meant a danger to your life, to being in trading, you've taken this caveman brain, this emotional brain, this limbic system, and you've moved it into an arena that no longer exists anymore. There may not be any lions, tigers and bears anymore, but the limbic system, that emotional brain of yours is still living in this dangerous world of back then, of caveman days, when there were saber toothed tigers, there were big bears, there were animals that hunted us down. And when they attacked and hurt you, you wanted to hurt them back. You wanted to get back what was yours. You want to do all that. That's the evolutionary psychology element of this, of the difficulty of taking a loss when in fact, you know, I mean.

Trading 101, everybody knows that, hey, losing is just simply part of the cost of doing business and trading. You get used to it and everything's fine. You tell that to the emotional brain that is still back on the African savanna, still in caves, and still lives in a dangerous world. And it's not going to happen. So ultimately, what we're looking to do, we're looking to say, you know something, we need to reintegrate the thinking brain, that neocortex of yours, with the emotional brain, the limbic system, and start producing a different.

Partnership than the one you currently have. Because if you're like most Human beings and most traders, what you've done is you've relied on platform and relied on your risk management, your rules, your system to be able to say, okay, I have an edge and all I have to do is follow this edge. And what we don't recognize is the edge also has to exist from, from an emotional standpoint and from a mind standpoint. You need to have a psychological edge to be able to drive your method edge. And that's the collapse when you take that 1, 2, 3, 4 losses and all of a sudden your expectations of making money, of being successful are shattered on an emotional level, on a primitive emotional, caveman level. And all of a sudden the thinking brain is just wiped out. It's not there anymore. And all sudden you end up doing weird stuff that you say, God, I don't understand what I just did. Well, you just experienced, you just experienced the emotional brain taking overthinking. All that stuff you thought you were in control about. An instinctive survival based mind just took over just like that. This is the evolutionary psychology that you bring to the game. And it's not a choice. The brain is just simply responding to repeated threats, okay? It feels endangered, it feels as though it's under attack and something's been taken from it and it hurts. Taking losses hurts. And all of a sudden what triggers is not all that rationalization of, yeah, well, you know, trading, you know, trading.

Taking losses is part of doing business. That's a platitude. At the gut level of survival though, the system's under attack and it has to respond. You have to get back what was taken from you. And therein lies the revenge trading. And therein lies trying to make up for prior losses when in fact it's a random feel. And, and one particular trade does not have to do with any other series of trades. It's one at a time and it's statistical analysis of whether or not you can use the edge you have in your system with the edge that you're bringing with your mind. Usually they're far apart and that's why they have to come back. And how do you do this? Once you realize, okay, I just got hijacked by my survival instincts.

And nothing's going to change. Willpower is not going to do it. Working harder is not going to do it. It'll drain your account, it'll put a hole in your P and L statement for sure. But what happens? It starts with emotional intelligence, friends. You have to acknowledge that the emotional brain's there and that it has far More control and power overthinking than you ever gave it credit for, Descartes. This I think, therefore I am was wrong.

The truth is you think because an emotion explodes onto the scene and thinking is then directed by that emotion into a particular direction. In this particular case, you take the losses and you go, oh my God, it's being taken from me, I have to get it back. I'm being hurt. And out of that what happens is survival. Emotions show up. That fear or aggression starts showing up and you start acting from that fear and aggression, not from the rational self that you want trading. So it starts with understanding an emotion as a biological action potential, not a feeling. Action, friends, emotion. That emotion is going to cause you to move into action. And it happens before cognition, before thinking, matter of fact, a survival based emotional response to threats in the environment. The emotion's already exploded. It's in chemistry in the body and is already acting in fight flight in the amygdala. Before the signal, the information actually gets to the thinking brain, the neocortex. That takes 0.25 seconds at least.

The emotion has exploded by past thinking, is in the system.

In this system altering the way you think and perceive in 003 seconds. Out of that you realize, my gosh, I need to slow the system down. So the first deal is emotional intelligence. And then within emotional intelligence, you're looking for emotional regulation. And the skills have been here for thousands of years. It's called breathing and tension reduction. The Hindu yogas had it 4,000 years ago. And out of that what you're doing is you're using your breath. The way you breathe is actually part of how an emotion establishes and maintains itself. You alter it and you alter the emotion. The emotions hold on you in fear and aggression. There's the holding, there's a fear. And what happens is you go to diaphragmatic or bellows breathing. You alter that and you disrupt the emotional chain reaction going on. That's the first step, friends. The second step is mindfulness, where you step back out of thought and quit identifying with the thoughts and beliefs that are running through your mind. And recognize that's just one potential organization of a self. That's all it is. There are other potential organizations, but the Olympic system has locked in a particular reactive pattern that goes off automatically because it was very successful when you needed the survival way back then. But now something else is needed in mindfulness. You're beginning to say, I'm going to stop identifying with all these thoughts and beliefs. As me, it's Just one particular self that's been generated. And we can go in and we can start saying, with applied mindfulness, or what we call second order metacognition, you can actually begin to go in and start redesigning what nature through evolution has given you. Because what nature has given you through evolution is not going to work in trading.

It works in a lot of other fields and a lot of stuff. People become successful business people because of their aggression, because they really go out and make things happen. Other people by perfectionism, what they do is they don't make mistakes and so they have succeeded to a degree. You take that to trading and it's meaningless. You know, we were talking about managing randomness, managing uncertainty. Very different. The brain hates uncertainty. And then once you develop this mindfulness, you start going, let's find that historical dialogue. You've all heard it, you know, this commentary that goes on inside your mind all the time, blah blah, blah, blah, and just goes on. It's constantly making judgments and criticisms, observations. Well, that's just mindless. That's not just mindless chatter, friends. That's the historical internal dialogue. And it's happening between what I would call the inner critic and your orphan nature, the adapted self. That's what the limbic system has adapted you to become in the environment that you're existing in. That's what the limbic system is interested in. And you begin to go, wow, no wonder I'm limited. That's where you start discovering, oh man, I've got something. I've got a sense of inadequacy going on here. I've got a sense of mattering. I have to make a bunch of money and it's being taken away from me. No wonder I'm going bananas here. My sense of worthiness. Do I feel worthy about making money or you know, something?

Have I got this really limited perception of what's possible for me? It's going to be taken away from me. Have I got that? Or do I experience powerlessness? And you will know powerlessness if you've ever gotten into a trade and it started going wacky on you and just up and down and you feel, ah, that's the powerlessness. You discover all that is organized, all the systems, the way you react emotionally, are tied into those four belief systems. And you've got to be able to find something beyond that. And in finding that, what you discover is that there is powerful potential living within you. In the same way that fear, aggression, temptation, judgment and criticism exist in you.

So does discipline, the discipline of a ruler. So does courage, the courage of a warrior, so does self soothing, the self compassion of a caregiver. And so does the impartiality, the capacity to think clearly under pressure, that of a sage. And what you realize these are potential organizations of a self that could be. But you've been locked in.

To historical narrative. And what we're doing is you need to wake up through mindfulness and begin to say, oh, there's so much more. I can reorganize the mind from survival instincts of literally survival in the moment to the probability mind, the intentional mind that is built to manage probability. That's what can be done. What we're doing is we're taking what nature has given us, developing it into something that can manage the uncertainty of trading the probability based mind. That's where we are, friends. It's very doable. What I would recommend is go to the website and read the article, start looking at a lot of the other, the other videos that I have, read the articles on the website and then start really exploring. There's lots and lots of material on the website that you can go to. You can really get into learning, you can kick a lot of tires. Discover more and more about the mind that you bring to trading. My friend, it's not your fault. There's no reason to hide it. Okay, it may not be your fault, but if you're going to be a successful trader on a consistent, profitable basis that can support you, you're going to have to redesign the brain to get the mind that can engage uncertainty and work with uncertainty, rather than the mind that comes from the emotional brain that just absolutely loathes uncertainty because it's the fear of death. Okay, so there you go. Come to the website, friends, take a look and start really educating yourself and recognizing this is a design, this is something that can be designed from what you had to what you need to be able to produce the consistent profitability that you're seeking. Thank you. I've enjoyed myself.

Sam.