Leaving the Garden of Winning and Losing: Separating Net worth from Self Worth

There comes a moment in a trader's evolution that they come to realize that they literally are the weakest link in their trading system. They've been chasing everything else, you know, going from this to that, this indicator, that way, this way, this teacher. And finally they finally conclude that it's not about the knowledge that's going to bring them to success. There's something wrong about their performances. And this is when the magic can really start to happen. You can come to the moment of realizing that the way you think about success, the way you think about winning and losing, maybe that's what's in the way. It's just not you. It's the way you think about winning, losing, and success that's getting in the way. Now, that may seem weird, but look at it. How many people do you know that have gotten into trading and have had a really good.

Sprint as an entrepreneur, as a business business, or in corporate, and have done very well? They come in success. They know how to produce success, yet they get into trading, and suddenly their focus on winning, their focus on making things happen, blows up in their face. And all of a sudden, those very same alphas.

Are blowing up accounts.

And yet they go, you know something? This works so well in the other area. Why can't it work here? Well, friends, what we really want to do, if you want to produce the kind of success you know is possible in trading, you're going to have to disconnect your performances.

From your worth as a human being. It's the biggest thing. As long as you say, I want to make money, what you're actually saying is that what I'm doing is I'm evaluating myself as a human being by the amount of money I make, whether or not I make money or not. If I lose, then I must be a loser. I must be a failure. And that, friends, is the biggest deal in trading, is that we have an enormous need, fear, not to fail. And we bring it. From our caveman days. Those ancestors of ours understand for them to fail.

Was the kiss of death. Those are real dangerous elements sitting out there in the world all the time. And if they failed, they became somebody's meal. They died. And if they won, they prevailed. It doesn't take much to recognize that that really was a powerful influence on the genetic transmission of the genes into the future. It became a trait to win and not lose, because losing was failure.

And failure meant death. Now we're a long ways away from the lion, tigers, and bears of yesteryear of our caveman ancestors, where we were really developing ourselves into human beings. However, every time we turn on our machines, bring up our charts, we're turning on that section of the brain called the emotional brain, where those memories, those learnings still reside.

They're instinctual. You wouldn't know you had them. They're below conscious threshold. They are not part of the thinking brain. They are part of the emotional brain. And what we're doing is we're saying literally, that deep connection between winning and losing, life and death way back then, is now interfering with the way you perform now. Because now, if you lose, that does not mean that you're a loser or that you fail.

Okay? It just simply means your performance did not work, it did not win, it did not maybe lose. What happens is you begin to recognize from the trader's mind, from the evolved trader's mind, you really, truly begin to recognize that winning simply means you landed on the right side of probability. Winning or losing meant that you just simply landed on the wrong side of probability. To our caveman ancestors, that's crazy. That would get you dead. So you see that brain we're bringing in? And what we're doing is we are associating our performances, which is really about our competencies, okay, to our sense of worth as a human being. They're coupled. If I make money, I feel like I matter. And to be honest with you, a lot of Alphas, what has driven them to make money was the need to feel as if they mattered, to show people I'm powerful. Then they get into trading and finding out that kind of mind doesn't work in the same way. Let's say if you fail, if it doesn't work, you take a loss. That's about your performance. And what you need to be looking at is, is this a method mistake that I screwed up with my trading system, or is this a psychological mistake where I got triggered and that points me to where I need to be working? Or was it just simply probability? There's lots and lots of losses that's going to be in partnership with you in trading. Okay? An occasional win. I mean, if you get 50, 50 win to losses, you're really doing something else. You know, 40, 45% is great. There are plenty of traders who are winning 35% of their trades and are profitable. Somehow, though, this link between your performances and your being gets associated with one another. And suddenly, if you lose, you're a failure, and it triggers all that caveman stuff. Oh, my God. Or think about it. If you're in a trade and that thing Starts going against you, and it hits. It's going to hit that stop of yours, and you give it some room because you don't want to lose. You hate losing. Of course you do. Caveman hated losing his life. But you're looking at it and going, you know something? That mind, that brain that was so successful for our survival, now placed in a totally different world.

Is dangerous. And, friends, what we have to do is we have to be able to separate literally your performances.

From your sense of worth. That's the very first thing the great traders have done that they have figured out that if I lose, I'm still okay. Or as one recently in a conversation told me, he said, you know, it was after a quarter of a million dollars I lost. And finally I was all worried about, oh, my God, oh, my God. And suddenly I came to the understanding that I'm good. I'm good. I may win or lose, but that's not about me being a good human being. I'm a good human being. And after that is when he started being able to shift his conversations about winning and losing so that winning was just landing on the right side of probability. Losing, landing on the wrong side of probability. And, friends, I want you to look at yourself in the next several days. What do you announce when you're about to trade? A lot of people end up trading with a sense of not wanting to lose. Now, where do you think that's going to go? Failure. Others think, I'm going to make some money today, okay? And then what they're doing is you're saying, they're basically saying, I'm going to control the outcome. I'm gonna win. And what you discover is, no, no. You have no control over whether or not you win or not. What you have control over is the mind that you bring to the performance, come rain or shine, okay? That's what you control. But you go in expecting to control outcome. And I'm gonna make money, I'm gonna win. I'm gonna make, hey, I'm gonna show them. And you're setting yourself up for failure. The question when you fail, are you opening yourself to learning? Are you triggering to fear? Because you think it's like, oh, my God, what am I going to do? People are going to find out that I'm a loser. What if I think I believe I'm a loser? No, what you are is you're demonstrating an incompetence in trading that can be remedied. Because understand this. The brain does not learn from success. That locks in a pattern the brain learns from failure. So what I'm asking of you, when you fail in trading, when you lose in trading, what I'm asking you to do is say, what am I going to learn from this? And a lot of people learn that one, their method, something's wrong there. But a lot of people discover if the mind they currently have is not working in trading, and that indicates the need to be able to start retooling the whole conversation's perception you have about winning and losing so that literally trading becomes about performance. It really comes down to the mind you bring to perform in that moment. It's nothing about you, okay? Not your being. It's about your performances, which, by the way, you can improve, but your being. That's a totally different question. That's a totally different question. So what I'm inviting you to do is to distinguish your performances from your sense of being. And at the very core of it, if you find some lack of mattering, a lack of worth, lack of competence, thinking of scarcity, where you think what you have will be taken from your powerlessness, when you're in trades, friends, you need to face that demon. You need to master that demon. It's showing up. It's showing up because of failures in the system, and it's showing up to be mastered. And until you do master that, what happens is your performances and your being become linked, and you've got trouble, trouble that you're not going to overcome yet when you delink them and spend a good bit of time on your sense of worth and recognizing I have worth beyond performance, my performance is simply about my competence. Then when you fail, you don't have to beat yourself up. Instead, you learn very quickly that the tool, the emotional tool when you fail is compassion. The moment of failure, if you're shamed, beat yourself up, locks in, and it just digs the grave deeper. Compassion opens up and allows you to say, I acknowledge the worth that I have as a human being, and it's different from my performances that I soothe myself down and recognize. It's not an attack on my integrity of being. It's showing me that I need to improve an internal belief structure living within me so that I can trade on a higher performance level. Friends, that's the ticket. So when you start trading, I want you to start noticing how you link performance to your being, to your worth. Understanding caveman times, it was a literal, direct connection. You know, if you failed, you died. Here in trading, if you fail, there's a moment of learning, but you never controlled outcome. You don't control winning or losing. What you control is the mind you bring into that moment. And friends, you can build that mind. You can build a probability based mind instead of the reactive, instinctive, fear based mind that you come stock with into trading. That fear may show up as avoidance, or it may show up as aggression, but it still, it still shows caveman not wanting to lose, not wanting to forfeit his life. And yeah, sure, no doubt about it, your childhood, that formative period of the brain where it's organizing you, yeah, that personal psychology development gets, gets in the way too. But at the very core.

Is that sense of worth that you have to rediscover and to nurture so that when you get into trouble, when you do fail, you recognize calming, encouraging, that part of the self that feels that existential pain can be calmed down and it can become open to learning. Friends, that's the first step to a successful trading mind. It's a big giant step too. Okay, good luck. And if you're interested, watch more, go to the website, read, look, learn about how you can start developing.

An independence from your performances and your being.

And to know that forever that you deserve.

That you have meaning, that you have value, that you have inherent worth. That's where success starts. Training.