Keeping Emotional Control When the Money is Real

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to actually maintain control, emotional control, when you put capital at risk? You know, intellectually, you sit and you understand something very, very well. And you know that, okay, I've done this charting. I know what I'm supposed to do. I. I know what I'm looking for, and I know the conditions and all that. All I have to do is I got that thing planned, and then I'm going to go in and wait till that opportunity shows up, okay? And then I'm going to execute. Practically every trader I've ever worked with has the idea on intellectual level. They know how to trade yet. Guess what? That's the thinking brain. That's the thinking brain that isn't connected to the emotions. It's just sitting there and it's sitting on a throne and it thinks it's ruling the whole mind. It doesn't realize that it's sharing power.

Then all of a sudden, that intellectual stuff, it goes from planning the game day to game day where the money is real and there's no reset button. And suddenly that risk is there, that uncertainty is there. And all of a sudden.

The thinking brain is not alone. All of a sudden, the emotional brain and all those survival instincts that the emotional brain embeds fires up and it starts looking out and it sees danger. Now, this is the important thing. Why is this so important? Why can't I just control my emotions by snapping my fingers? Well, the truth is this.

First is your thinking brain does not communicate directly with the emotional brain. It actually has to learn to calm down. It has to learn that, oh, that emotional brain is there. And I need to incorporate that part into my decision making. But meanwhile, what happens is that the emotional brain has a completely different agenda than the profit motive of the thinking brain. Huh? The agenda is to stay alive this moment. Now, what do you think is going to happen when that caveman brain is suddenly put up face to face with uncertainty? That produces a sense of vulnerability in that caveman brain. And it sense, oh, my God. In that vulnerability, confusion. And in that confusion, guess what danger that is. The programming, Hot wired programming that we carry from our caveman ancestral days to this modern brain, this modern human being of ours that we take to trading. We don't realize we're taking that caveman brain, that emotional brain that's really focused on survival. We think and we fell into the thing that we think, therefore we are. No, the truth is we're not thinking creatures. We are emotional creatures who have the ability to think reasonable. We are not rational creatures who have emotions. That's what the thinking brains got all wrong. And until you make that decision, you're always going to have this conflict of interest between your thinking brain and your emotional brain. Your thinking brain wants to be able to execute its plan. It wants to be able to make money. It wants all that stuff. It's got a plan, execution. Execution, yeah, we're going to do this. All we have to do is move through this and intellectually understand there are going to be losses. That's part of the game of trading. Everybody knows that. But the clash is that emotional brain who says, oh, this is life and death struggle. It doesn't know we're in the 21st century, friends, it's still thousand thousands and thousands of years ago where uncertainty, things showing up were perceived as first threat until proven otherwise. Now you see the dilemma. We have a thinking brain that we bring into trading that's totally unprepared to add the risk, the capital risk that triggers, that triggers that emotional brain of yours for survival. And that is simply the way it is. Let me give you an example of this. I have a client, he's looking at it and he's looking at his charts. He's got his plan, and then he's just watching, waiting for something to show up. And then something shows up in his charts. Then it starts getting warm. Still no big deal. Whether or not it forms into a live trade or not, I don't know. But it comes and suddenly it's formed, it's there. And besides that, all these things converge on this. All these things that say, oh, this is a hot one. This has got. This is, this may be the big winner of the month. You better go for this one. And suddenly there is Samuel going, I want to make, I'm going to make some money. I'm going to make some money. He's getting excited. He's going to get excited. Everything is going his way, all the numbers, everything. Then he gets into that trade. Guess what? It starts bouncing around on him and bouncing around on him and then it noses down toward that stop.

Meanwhile, Sam's sitting there going, oh, no, no, no, I'm not going to lose this one. This one. This is a ride. I know it, I know it. Do you hear the survival brain kicking in, taking over the thinking brain in trading, you don't know anything. It exists as potential and possibility. He knows it. And so what he does is he moves a stop and then it keeps on going. He moves it again and before you know it, guess what? Yeah, he crashes and burns.

So here we go. What happened is Samuel did not recognize the input or what the criterion that the emotional brain was. Judging by he hid it. And though he intellectually knew what he was doing, he was not connected to his emotional half. Remember, the brain is divided into two things. A right brain, a left brain on the right brain. That emotional center down there, let me tell you, it's got some strength. Samuel just found out and it just hijacked him. Okay, that's what it looks like.

Your emotional brain has survival instincts that are not going to go away.

You're not going to train the subconscious into laying down, backing down when there is threat perceived through risk. Okay, what you can do, though, you can begin to say, you know something? I begin to understand my emotional brain better. It's rooted in survival instincts. Those survival instincts don't know they're in the 21st century. So what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to start saying, oh, so I am carrying an emotional brain into trading with me, whether or not I like it or not. All those guys who are telling me that, oh, yeah, just leave your emotions at the door. It doesn't work that way. And then what you discover very quickly is this the very brain that you brought to trading, the one that allowed you to survive for millennium, that allowed this species of ours to be who we are, that one, the one that in the thinking brain, we sit on that throne and think we're in control. Suddenly, what happens in trading, it discovers it's not.

That's where it all begins, and that's where it all ends. We have to look at those survival instincts. We have to learn how to manage them.

And in managing them, we also have to build an intentional mind that is very different than the one that we brought to trading. How do you go about managing that emotional brain so that it doesn't short circuit the thinking brain? Which, by the way, it does really rapidly, just. Just like that. If the emotional brain perceives threat in that risk, it's going to trigger the survival instincts and it's going to hijack the thinking brain as if it wasn't even there. It just washes it out. That's what happened to Samuel. Now, where does it start? How do you begin? Once you grasp that you're going to be bringing this emotional brain with you, and you need to learn how to kind of reshape it in the way it engages with uncertainty. Because understand.

It'S going to perceive uncertainty as dangerous threat unless you go in and retrain it. The first step toward that is emotional regulation. When you grasp that emotions are not psychological, they are biological. They are biological action potentials. And their job is to control basically the work, the cooperation between you as an organism and a trader and the markets, the environment. Anytime there's a change out there in status in the markets, automatically an emotion is going to erupt. Once you understand that, the first step is this, you regulate the emotion, you disrupt it. You disrupt it by breath and by tension release. Because what you discover is that your breath and tension in your body are part of the emotion called emotional arousal. The moment you start doing diaphragmatic breathing, breathing all the way down into your belly, which pulls air into the very lobes, the lower lobes of your lungs, you start getting oxygen. You also reroute the impulse from taking away oxygen and glucose away from the brain into the big muscles for fight flight. You move that away, but that's not enough.

Basically, emotional regulations are going to get you to the door of the mind. It's not going to open the door and look in there. I teach applied mindfulness. Not only is it mindfulness what you're looking to do, you learn how to understand how you got shaped as a brain to engage with uncertainty. And you begin to recognize a powerful thing, that you and your thoughts are not the same, you and your beliefs are not the same.

All that is just simply potential.

That the brain has organized into a particular self that allowed you to survive. And it just so happens that particular self is not going to make it in trading. You're going to have to get the limbic system to dissolve that potential back into this ocean of potential from which it came and to organize it so that it's focused on being able to engage uncertainty and work well with uncertainty. That first step, emotional regulation. Second step, learning to understand who the players are in the mind. What we're looking for is not just fear based or aggression based trading. We're looking to find that, okay, I'll think it's an emotional state dependent. So what we want is we want to create the emotions that create the mind that engages uncertainty. The ones that work friends.

The ones that work to manage uncertainty, to manage probability of trading is the discipline of a ruler, the courage of a warrior, the self soothing, the big one of a caregiver, and the impartiality, the clear thinking of a sage. In my work, what you do is you organize yourself in order to be able to pull those four emotional programs up. That allows thinking to come out of that, that engages uncertainty. No longer is uncertainty and probability seen as a threat that your emotional brain left to its devices. Suddenly what you're doing is you're seeing it from a probability standpoint, where you see the edge, your method. And as long as you can produce the edge psychologically, which you're doing by inventing this self that engages from discipline, from courage, from self soothing and from partiality, you're creating the mind from the brain that engages the uncertainty in a very powerful way. It's not about winning and losing anymore. It's about performing. And this is the way you do it, friends. But best of all, all this is learnable. You can learn to do this. You can learn how to move away the old way that your brain wants to, the way it's been behaving for God knows how long. And you can retrain it to work from a very different emotional ground. That literally gives you the psychological edge that drives your method. Edge, friends. That's what this work is all about. It's training you how to literally recognize that you can shape that brain. Okay? It's no longer natural selection shaping it. You're adapting your own brain for the purposes of working with uncertainty. That's self mastery. Come and explore. Come look at the website. Come and just see how you can truly begin to be the master of your own destiny. In control of the mind that engages that uncertainty when risk is involved. Come, friends.