Master Yourself; Master Trading Unlocking Your Potential

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Welcome everyone. My name is Randy Howell with Traders State of Mind. And I truly welcome you and I'm delighted to have you here for this webinar. And before we get started, what I want to do is first let's find out if we hear each other and talk and talking to each other. If you hear me, just type in a Y into your, into your typing thing, chat box, and that way I'll know that we're good to go. Okay, we're good to go. The second thing that if you haven't been around me and stuff like that is I hold my questions toward the end. That, and a lot of that is just simply so that I don't. I keep myself straight and keep myself focused because I'm here to serve you guys. And if I start going off in different directions and get chasing other ideas, I don't stay focused. And so that it's. That's part of what it is. Now, that doesn't mean that as you come across a question that you can't ask the question. And we'll take it at the end. Okay, so there you go. Now let's get started. You know, a while back, I finally came to recognize that people who are coming to me, yes, they really, truly wanted to be able to become better traders. They wanted to become profitable traders. And they were just getting bushwhacked and hijacked and they wanted to look. And they had found in my programming a way of training to really help with that. But as I got deeper, what I really discovered is a lot of these people were not necessarily coming to become better traders. They were actually becoming to become better themselves, to produce a better self, to be more effective in the world. And ultimately what it came down to was beginning to understand that what is required, at least the way I teach this particular course and this particular way of understanding psychology of trading is you truly have to master yourself to master your trading. And that's how you come to unlock your potential.

Let's move on. For instance, practically anybody who trades, the reason, one of the reasons they got into trading, one of two reasons. One is they saw the financial possibility that trading offers. You just size it up and you see, that's unlimited and it's really thrilling. You know, you go, wow, look at that boy, that could be me. And also there's this element of personal freedom of where you're not tied to the man, you're not tied to the. You're not a corporate man. You can, once you Become good at this is that you really don't have to work that hard all the time. And at the same time, you see that potential and you try hard. I have not met traders who are failing for lack of effort.

I've met traders failing because of a lack of emotional intelligence. They know how to trade. They have systems that demonstrate that they have an edge. If they were able to get the mind right, to be able to exploit that edge they have in their system. But they still fall apart. They still fall apart. And the really question is, why is that when you're trying so hard and you want to become successful so bad, you want to win, why is it. And you may have been very successful in another career and stuff like that, you bring that same success formula to trading, and you just fall apart. You just absolutely just start melting right there. And you know you're close, yet you're so far away. You have that comfort zone that becomes a prison. Unfortunately, you don't even know what. How that comfort zone is organized. You say, oh, well, I just get out of the comfort zone. I've seen all that stuff in business management and all that stuff. And on the intrapersonal level within you, it doesn't work that way. That comfort zone is more about your limbic reality, your emotional reality. And what happens is that you discover very quickly it's a barrier to what you want. And.

The problem is you can trade as long as the money's not real. The moment that money gets real, though, suddenly risk, uncertainty rear their ugly head and something takes over and you can't get out of the comfort zone of the way you do things in order to build the mind that can produce the kind of success you're looking for in trading. That's the piece we're looking for. And again, we're having problems hearing. They're having problems hearing. Some people say they can't hear.

Well, let's see what we. Dolores.

Okay.

Is that me that I'm showing right there? Okay. So could it be? Ask them. Tell me something. Is it my voice? Is it too low? Okay, because it could be that we could turn the volume up here. Okay. Okay. Larry's saying he's here. It's fine.

Always good.

Okay, we'll tell Dolores to quit typing. Well, that's when I'm responding. I know, I know. What happens is Dolores would be responding to people while asking questions and things like that. So. Okay, we will be a little more careful on the. On the typing business. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that input and thank you for Being able to help, help us work through this thing. Okay, so here we are.

We'Re going. What is this comfort zone? What is it? It's keeping me from here. This comfort zone. The first clue I'm going to give you is it's more limbic or emotional brain oriented than anything else. It's not psychological. That's what I want you to hear. And the short answer about your ability not to produce success has everything to do with. You're asking your brain to do something. And the mind that comes out of that brain, that is its worst nightmare. It is exactly what it was designed not to do. The truth is that the emotional brain can't tell the difference between biological threat. Like what you're looking here from this grand movie 10,000 BC of an oversized saber tooth tiger in a man. What you're doing is, by the way, a saber toothed tiger has six inch teeth. Those who look like about a foot. But the thing is they're big ferocious animals and they're about the size of a man standing up that you get to see it. And we dealt with these guys 10,000 years ago.

Not just the blink of an eye. And the truth is, is that we have a brain designed for short term survival. Okay? And we're asking it to work probability. That's the nightmare, friends. And most people say, well just leave the, leave your emotions at the door. You can't. The moment that you face uncertainty and your brain is designed to produce certainty and to be right and certainly not to be wrong. You fire it already and everything goes, everything goes cuckoo. Your thinking brain is taken offline. This is the whole point. If somebody tells you this, and I don't even know if trader trainers know this, okay, I really don't. What I do know is that we have a tendency not to see what's right in front of our eyes because it's happening on an alembic level and it's non thinking. We wouldn't even notice it. In the same way that a fish doesn't notice water or we don't notice any air until say we were plunged into water and all of a sudden we notice the absence of air. That's the same thing here is your brain is operating at a level that is just simply below the threshold of your thinking and awareness. That's the limbic reality. It's already figured out.

How to build familiar pattern that adapts you to short term survival. That's the comfort zone, friends. It fires. Boom. Just like that. It's already producing behavior before the messaging Actually gets to the thinking brain. That's what's happening with this guy. So when you're looking at it, you get it. Okay, wow. And wow, this brain. Are you telling me that I've been trying to be rational and it's designed to control outcome? To have a sense of certainty? Yeah. To be right and not to lose. And when, when it, when it experiences that confusion, it also then. And that, that confusion is the lack of control. The actual realization that no matter how much of a control bias you have, the truth is it's an illusion. You have the illusion of control until you're confronted in trading with your, with your profit and loss statement in your trading account. You can get away with lying to yourself in other areas of your life. But the thing is, is man, you just can't push it on down the road. If you're a day trader, it's happening real fast. It's instant karma. So you're beginning to see the way the emotional brain deals with uncertainty, particularly when there's money involved. Because that, that limbic brain of yours cannot tell the difference between the loss of money, okay, and the loss of identity, the loss of life to it. It's all rolled up in one neat package. Survival of the organism. And you're playing a game that's triggering this evolutionary psychology to the surface. And what I want you to hear is this is evolutionary psychology. We haven't even begun to talk about the psychology, your psychology of the little beliefs that you did form about your ability to manage uncertainty. We're talking about things that have become state traits and are just actually woven right into your brain in its ability to react to uncertainty. And again, what are you doing? What are you doing? In trading, there is no certainty. Anything can happen. And we try to build all these things to make more certainty when in fact it is only probability. And we don't like that word probability. When there's action there, when there's potential real loss there. Because that triggers us back to the lack of control and which leads to vulnerability. Okay? The brain. Oh boy, now you've really upset the brain. That triggers the fight flight response. And that's why you say, Randy, I don't get it. You know something? When I'm in sim boy, I can just mint money. But when I, when I, when I go to live trading, everything changes. I can't follow my rules. I'll, you know, I will, I will. I will make my plan up for the day. And then I get into trading and all of a sudden it just, it's gone. It may take one or two losses and all of a sudden I'm sitting there and I want to make up for prior losses and I want to do this kind of stuff and suddenly I just ditch my plan, I'm off. I'm often caveman land.

That's happening to most traders.

That's why you have to self develop yourself because you did not come stock with the brain that can trade. Now a lot of people say, oh Randy, I want to say something. There's plenty of traders out there who are, who have learned how to trade successful and stuff like that. And my response to that is so what? When you recognize that somewhere between 2 and 5% of traders actually make any money at all, only about 2% are consistently profitable and actually produce a living. 5% are at least marginally profitable, are not losing money. That's not the kind of odds you want to take on. You know, if you're, if you're, if you're a F minus, minus, minus, minus, minus math play math whiz. You need to learn a new game. And what we're saying is, okay, the brain I bought is going to have to be retooled. It's going to have to be retrained for the rigors and the needs of probability management. And what I know for a fact is that my brain as it came stock off the shelf to me from history is not up to that task. Okay? Not because you're a bad person, not because it's not a good brain. It has, it's helped you to survive and prosper. And we have become a very dominant species on the face of the earth. Destructive too, I might add. Yet at the same time, we still have that animal instincts with us that we carry from our primate background and our, and just the biology of our being. Remember there, there's probably people in this group who have a pig valve in their heart. Okay? That's how. And there that pig valve can work in the heart for over 10 years and it's a common surgical procedure. Wow. We have a lot of in common with our cousins at the same time is that we're human beings. We are capable of more than the historical conversations that define us. We can become designer of the conversations that we have about uncertainty. And that's what this is all about. Friends, we're going to have to learn how to take that left brain and that right brain and we're going to have to learn how to work it together. Because friends, it's at this level of uncertainty, this vulnerability that's where the emotions kick in. What I want you to grasp is that emotions are not psychological. They're not touchy feely, they are biological. And what you experience is psychology of emotion is in fact the emotion taking over your psychology to a neuroscientist, to a guy like me. What we're defining an emotion as is a biological action potential that coordinates activity, the relationship between you, that would be the trader and the environment, that's the markets. Anytime there's a change in status in the environment, the market, then by definition there's the triggering of an emotion. It arises to be able to help coordinate the activity, to maintain life between you and, and the markets. And if you've ever experienced like you're sitting at a trade setup and you're sitting there and you, an indicator tells you once kind of forming, then there's this intimate thing and you keep wanting more and more confirmation you have experienced the biological action potential of saying, you know something, If I keep him out of this trade, he can't do the risk of getting himself killed or loss of money. To the limbic brain, that's a success.

The same thing with fomo. Let's just say you've made money, you're in the black finally, after being whacked out, whacked all around during the trade. And you're in the black. And what happens is suddenly you want to take those profits now before they can be taken from you. That's the firing of an emotion.

And suddenly, before you know it, your thinking is all about, how do I get out of the trade right now? Take my little skinny profits that I feed my broker very well, but I don't, you know, I'm not making money yet. This is where the emotions kick in, friend. So when someone tells you, I will trade without emotions, just leave your emotions at the door. Just remember this, if you're trading, you are going to have emotions. And if you're not having emotions, you're dead. Okay? That's the only time you're not experiencing emotions. We certainly don't want that. What we want is to have emotional intelligence so that we train what emotions arise to meet the uncertainties of trading, of managing the uncertainties of trading. That's emotional intelligence. And that's what we're after to do here. So here we go. We're going, oh, boy. Emotions may be a little different than I thought they were. And then what we discover is this ignorance of your emotional nature. What really keeps ambushing your potential and keeps you in that cage, keeps you from going, you know, I just don't get it. You know, I know the potentials there. I know it's, you know. And what you discover finally is that emotional intelligence is not an option in trading unless you happen to have won the genetics lottery. And I'll tell you something, there's not a person in this room who won the genetics lottery, are you? Or you wouldn't be here. So we're all going, you know something, how is it, how do I increase my emotional intelligence functionally? I don't mean just having knowledge of it. I've read Goldman's book and I know about emotional intelligence now. No, I'm talking about the level of performance when you're actually in the trade, when you're meeting the risks.

When the trade's bouncing around on you, when you're committing capital to risk, when you hear and feel that order fill and realize, oh shit, I'm in the trade now, whether or not I like it or not. Then immediately it starts whacking around, going against you, doing all that stuff. Those are the pieces that are there without developing. The brain is going to remain designed for short term survival. Whereas what you need for trading a future oriented probability mind, okay, that can be built, but it certainly didn't come stock with the product that you brought into trading, that brain you brought into trading. So the key is, what do you do, you know, and to do that, let's take that one look, last thing, and if you want to know exactly what your problem is, you're looking at it looks pretty crazy. Looks kind of crazy, doesn't it? What you're looking at is down at the bottom left hand corner where it says emotional stimuli. You're looking at emotional data coming in through your senses. And its first stop is at the sensory thalamus. And sensory thalamus is making a decision about whether or not to send that information directly to your thinking brain, that, that sensory cortex up there, or send it to the amygdala, okay, that's the low road.

And there's a traffic cop. And that traffic cop is about the experience it's had. What the limbic system has learned about danger and threat to the self. And if you've, if you've ever worked with a guy or been around a guy who lost a lot of money and then suddenly was having a difficulty getting into trades, or when he got into trades, he'd go bananas. What you're doing is you're experiencing emotional learning. And that traffic cop, when it sees that danger signal, what it's Doing is it's stopping traffic and it's routing that signal to the amygdala, which is where fight flight starts. So that you can either attack the threat from aggression or flee or avoid, avoid the threat that's coming, you know, that might be staying and not being able to pull the trigger. That may be aggressive trading, trying to make up for prior losses and stuff like that. So just remember this, that these primitive emotional programs and the wiring, they're hot wired. What that really means is if that traffic cop decides to send that signal to the amygdala, it's there in.003 seconds. And the emotion, it moves into chemistry and moves into behavior action almost immediately. Meanwhile, if that information is being sent to your thinking brain at all, it's going to take at least 0.25 seconds to get there. And then the thinking brain has to do what it does. It has to think through the situation. Meanwhile, the chemistry and the motivation and the action, the emotion, the primitive emotions of fight flight already in your body and they're already compelling you to act. You have just been hijacked. And it happens way down there on the left side of that screen where it says the amygdala. That's where it's happening. So the action is at that traffic cop, that traffic cop is going, I need to regulate that traffic cop so that that circuit is cooled down and it's not so fast to allow emotional arousal and this quick and dirty route to the amygdala. Because what I want to do is I want to send it, I want to stay in a reasonable state of mind. I want to be in a disciplined, impartial state of mind, to be able to maintain my composure, to be able to trade my plan. And at that time, if you, if you need, if you realize the trades not gonna work out, your hypothesis is wrong, you take a small loss. If it's right, then you allow you to stay on. And then when it hits profitability, you're regulating yourself again, allowing that thing to see if it's gonna reach target.

That's, that's the kind of training that's really happening and that's really what I'm teaching. And it's shown in this little graph. Meanwhile back at the ranch. This is when under stress, you're looking at kind of like a depiction of what this modern looking egghead of a guy driving the brain in the mind thinks he's in control. Meanwhile, what's happened is he stuck this much more primitive part of himself that he gets from history that caveman brain, he stuck him in the back and is actually ignoring him, which is about when that is the most tragic thing that a trader can do is to ignore the emotional nature and also just. Just the way the brain's wired in and around uncertainty. So because it moves so fast from triggering to emotion to action, much faster than thought.

You don't have time to think through this stuff. You need to have a plan. You need to have the skills to be able to mollify and calm down this emotional reactivity that goes on by the development of emotional intelligence. And this is why, my friends, you cannot trade your plan under stress.

Because you haven't paid attention to your caveman. He's there. You might be able to push him out of about in the background there for a while, but under stress, he's triggered to fight flight and he takes over the thinking mind. That's pretty simple. So what do you think we've got?

You know, again, you're always being told. You're always being told to leave your emotions at the door, and yet I've already told you, you can't. There is this monkey brain. The Easterners call it monkey brain. That monkey brain. Is that what we would call again, the emotional brain? And what it's doing is it's got all sorts of things going. You're trying to ignore it. It's trying to get your attention. The truth is that you're not a rational being, no matter how much you've deceived yourself into believing it. It's self deception. If you have ever.

Ever bought.

Like a 50 to $80,000 pickup.

Okay, you have experienced. You have experienced the power of emotion over reason. Where I live, it's. It's easy to go into a Lowe's parking lot and see guys my age, middle age, and older get out of huge pickup trucks that cost, oh, 70, $80,000 because it makes them feel better. They've been played. The thing is, that's the emotional brain warping reason. That's what it is. And what is all this warping going on? Well, what I want you to do is take a very quick look at this. These are the biases.

That you come stock with from your evolutionary psychology. You bring these to trading whether or not you like it or not. Almost everyone has experienced optimum. The optimism bias. That's thinking, yeah, I hear all this really bad news about how few are going to happen, but you know, I'm going to succeed. I believe I'm going to do it. I can. I'm going to Believe I'm going to prevail and they walk in and just get slammed up to the ground. The casino knows that kind of thinking produces gambling. There's also something called control bias. We truly believe that we can control.

We truly believe we can control. And yet what trading is demonstrating to us day in and day out, particularly if you're a day trader, is that you are not in control, that it is an illusion.

Yet at the same time, the control bias still is there. Ask any alpha who's blown up accounts, ask any perfectionist who keeps trying to do everything right so they're in control of being, of winning. It doesn't work. Anything can happen. The confirmation bias, the famous confirmation bias. What's happening there is what your brain's doing is it's ignoring the evidence that doesn't support your position. And it's then only seeing or distorting the evidence that allows you to say, yeah, this is the narrative position I'm at and I'm right, I'm confirmed by looking at it. Two different observers could see the same facts, same evidence, and based on their confirmation bias, are going to see different realities. Then there's that little thing called cognitive dissonance of where you're not open to other ways of understanding. You've got this idea. It's very interesting. The other day.

A client of mine says, you know, I'm trying to talk a friend of mine into seeing you because it has helped me so much and I know it would help him if he had only not get in his own way. And the truth is, he finally said, actually, he's scared of seeing you. He really, he doesn't want to hear something different than what he believes, even though it's costing him money.

Cognitive dissonance. That's how powerful it is. The guy doesn't want to listen to other ways of understanding even though it's costing him money. My view and what I said to the guys is that he hasn't lost enough yet. He hasn't come to the moment of where he set the concrete hard enough for him to wake up and realize that kind of cognitive dissonance is going to kill him. At least it's going to kill him as a traitor. Okay, then there is another one that I hear about all the time, and I call it clawback bias. If you've ever tried to make up for prior losses, oh, I'm in the hole. I have to get myself out. I have to claw myself back out. The casinos know you can't do that. You know this is a statistical edge. And if you bring in that clawback mentality to try to make up for prior losses, you're already at a psychological disadvantage to the casino, to the markets, and yet it's there. And I keep hearing traders all the time keep telling me that they're trying to make up for prior losses and they just accept it like fact. They never examine, no, I can't. You know, this is, this is really, this is probability. And it just so happens that one deal is not necessarily connected to the other. And this is one trade at a time, one trade at a time. And eventually it may be that I arrive at a place where I haven't lost money or I'm winning money, but the truth is you did not claw back. That is an old, old bias built into our caveman ancestors that they needed to fight back. They needed to fight back, they needed to fight the saber toothed tiger, they needed to fight the bear.

Even if it hurt them, they needed to fight the bear or they were going to be consumed. It was pretty simple. Understand the basis of the evolutionary psychology of that, the chase instinct. That's when you start just chasing stuff, chasing stuff. And a lot of hunters, you know, they, you know, we have a lot of deer hunters around here and some, some of them climb up trees, on stands and wait for the deer to come. Others want to chase it, they want to stalk the deer. And the key is that there was a time in our ancestral past where we did stalk big game. And I mean big game. Can you imagine a bunch of seven or eight guys taking down a woolly mammoth that's five to ten times the size of an African elephant? You really, truly have to have a chase instinct that really overwhelms good sense, survival based. And yet at the same time, when we're exposed to it in trading, it falls on its face for us. The last one of these instincts is scarcity thinking. And that's a belief that what you have can be taken away from you if you don't act now. That's that FOMO of taking your profits early so that the profit can't be taken from you. These are operating, you can say on a subconscious basis, but they're not really subconscious. They're happening in your emotional brain or your limbic system. And these are limbic learnings that have been wired in to your genome. They become state traits that are literally flow genetically from one generation to the next. And they're part of our human condition. And you're going to have to master these in order to become a successful trader. And that is why very few people ever become successful traders. But they kept going, oh yeah, well, the turtles. Well, this, well, that. You know, if you go back and read a lot of these stories, you realize that they may have been successful short term and then lose everything and stuff like that, you see. And again, so what this is really about the standard human being, not some exceptional genetic freak. This is something about, wow, this is the human emotional architecture that I come equipped with, unless I am this genetic freak. And this is what I'm going to have to learn to deal with and to change and to work with. So now you see the biases. And by the way, this, that I have never shown this slide. I have never worked this. I finally came to a moment where I just wanted to start talking to people about.

About literally what the trouble is. Okay, now how do you experience this? Well, you chase trades from overconfidence. You revenge trade to punish the others. You pull the trigger. You can't pull that trigger for the fear of loss. Fomo, you fall apart while managing trade. These are these biases that are operating as a limbic reality that are below conscious threshold. That which, that's the way I would define subconscious. I don't even talk about unconscious. Okay, so here you are. Here you are. And friends.

The beliefs that are behind all this are pretty easy. These what I'm about, what you're seeing here are the limbic beliefs behind these inherent biases that you're inadequate. Have you ever beat yourself up and said something like, geez, what in the world made you think you could ever make it as a trader? You're never going to be good enough. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That's inadequacy. That's the beliefs you have that you bring to the management of uncertainty.

Or mattering, that you don't matter as the being that you are. Only if you start making money. If I make money, I matter. What you've done there is. You have equated your mattering as a human being with your performance of making money. And the interesting thing is you have no control over whether or not you make money or not. What you have control over is your performance in the moment. Okay? That's what you have to control of now. Also the worthiness thing at the very core of it, a lot of traders discovered that they don't really feel worthy and they're undeserving of this and they keep trying. But there's the voice in the back of the mind that says, you know, you don't really deserve this. You don't warrant this. And there's also, there is something wrong with you that keeps success out of the way and that you're powerless under stress. These, friends, are the beliefs that you're measuring in your trading account and that drive your emotional encounter with uncertainty. Okay, a few more. I realize this is bad news, but I'm going to give you good news, okay? Just hold your horses. Okay. And the big piece of information that you need to. Yes, the, the big piece of information is this.

You do not see and then believe.

What happens rather is that you believe. And out of those beliefs, you see. I once worked with a trader who.

Managed, basically used an eight figure account and he could, he could move markets, he could do things like that. And what happened is one day he and I were working on Skype and he pulls up this chart of his and he says, randy, what do you think I see here? And to be honest with you, I had no idea what he saw. And I said, well, Christopher, what do you see? He said, I see blood.

What I want you to understand is his belief systems. When he looked at all his charting, what he saw was blood. He saw the ability, the migration of traders into particular areas where he could move the market, shake them up a little bit. They'd panic and he would suck them dry. That's how he traded and he had the size to do it and stuff like that. But what I want you to see is that he had a belief about what he was seeing as charts. He saw those charts as a way of seeing emotions.

Not little things like, you know, resistance and blah, blah, blah, blah. No, he was seeing emotions at play and he was looking to get people stuck in particular areas and pull the plug on them. Saw it very differently. So the question is, how do you, how do you go about changing the beliefs that shape the way you interact with the randomness of uncertainty under pressure? Okay, this is the beginning of the good days. What I want to do is first you need to understand emotions, okay? And the force of your emotional nature. What we've done is we've talked about emotions as a biological action potential. You need to grasp that not just some little words that Randy Howell is writing here for you to see. You need to recognize, oh my God, that's what an emotion is. It's really not psychological. It is biological. And because psychology comes out of biology, the emotion has already influenced your, your psychology when you trade. Then the second thing is that emotions are activated when there's any change in the environment.

And the last thing you need to know about emotions is their structure. Is that when you're feeling tense, when you're holding your breath and do this tomorrow, just do it tomorrow. Just watch yourself in a mirror or if you have a video feed, watch the video feed and take some stills of yourself. And what you'll see is, you'll see that muscle tension, that holding a breath or panning is actually the arousal of an emotion. It's revving up, preparing for action. When you feel that gut sensation, that that's the feeling component. You're actually feeling the chemistry of the emotion as the arousal has reached a switch level and it's no longer arousing, but it's becoming, it's beginning to just throw chemistry into the bloodstream, into the brain, altering thought. Then there's the emotional motivation. What direction is that emotion telling you to go? The fight flight is fight flight, friends. There's also approach.

What most people you know, if you're attacking through aggression, that's your over trading, that's your revenge trading, that's breaking up our losses. Avoidance is that FOMO business that not getting into trades, all that kind of stuff. But what we also, there's another, there's another motivation, it's approach and that's where curiosity comes in. That's where the curiosity and the disciplined impartiality begin to be able to be the motivation that allows you to act rather than fight flight. Then there's the meaning. Those are the limbic beliefs that are driving those perceptual biases that we were talking about. The last thing is down here at genetic predisposition. That's what I said is yes, there are some people who clearly won the genetics lottery and they have a predisposition that allows them to trade and learn how to trade with almost the apparent lack of emotion. Yet at the same time it's most likely it's high functioning autism. Now the second thing that you're going to need to do is you're going to need to calm that emotion down through emotional regulation training. And now in the way we do this, we're looking at breathing as a component of an emotion. Remember, emotions are biological and that if you are breathing with the top part of your lungs, what you're doing is you're fueling the fight flight response. If you start breathing diaphragmatically, what you're doing is you're taking away the ability of the fight flight response to build and to take over mind. So breathing, the way you breathe has an enormous impact on the Emotional intensity of the emotions that are vying to take over the thinking of your mind. The same with muscle tension. Muscle tension is another example of literally the biological footprint of the emotion. Okay. And this can be learned as a skill so that you're regulating that emotion so that it doesn't take over thinking mind. And then you go, well, I was able to trade my plan. Darn. I didn't get hijacked. Darn. Yeah, exactly. However.

Because you can emotionally regulate does not change the problem. What you've done is you have allowed yourself to manage the intensity of the emotion.

And it gets you to the door of the mind.

If you don't manage the intensity of the emotion, you don't get to the door of the mind. You don't get to look into the mind to see what the beliefs are that are self limiting your ability to develop your potential and to master the self. That's where the action is. And here what we're doing is saying this is where you have to be able to see the markets and charts.

With the, through the eyes of emotion, through the eyes of a different set of emotions. You have to be able to clear basically the old way of seeing things so that you see things from a different perspective. And what you're looking for is not necessarily the right perspective, but you're looking for an effective perspective. One that ultimately gets gets down to you're extracting more capital out of the markets than you're giving back. That would be an effective belief system. The key though is you have to develop the observer. You have to be able to develop the ability of stepping back out of thought and recognizing that you and your thoughts are not the same. In fact, you and your beliefs are not the same. These are things that happen to you. These are things that.

Basically you don't even have these thoughts and beliefs, they have you. And it's only, it only represents one potential organization of the totality of your potential. It's just that this is the way it's been organized. It flocked into that comfort zone. And you're going to have to break that comfort zone open and reorganize it so that higher functioning, higher expressions of your potential can show up. Translated, you end up with a probability based mind rather than a survival based mind. And then through applied mindfulness, you actually find and change the beliefs that produce performances under stress. That's the big deal is changing those beliefs. Those aren't easy friends, but they can be done. And to me it's just part of the evolution of a trader if you're going to be a successful trader, if you're going to make money at this, you're going to have to learn how to do it. The fourth thing is you have to become observer to the historical dialogue that controls your performances. Ultimately, this is about acknowledging both the destructive and constructive aspects of your being.

The Cherokee Indians of the southeastern United States, in their spiritual philosophy, believed that there were two wolves that lived within man's mind. One of those wolves was the dark wolf, one of those was white wolf. It just so happens if the dark wolf won the challenge of your mind, then you would lead a very destructive life. It would just simply spiral down. However, if the white wolf won the day, you were going to end up with a very peaceful, deep meaning sense of your life. What the Cherokee Indians also believed the one that won is the one that you feed.

And you're looking at the evidence in your trading account to which one you're currently feeding.

Not acknowledging this destructive end of it. Saying positive and having all this.

Prosperity gospel and all that kind of stuff going on is dangerous, friends. It leads to overconfidence and overconfidence leads you to think the good times are going to roll on forever. It's just a state of mind and you're influencing the new age concept of manifestation, all that stuff. The truth is, is that you need to be very aware of both sides of your nature and you need to start choosing about which one you will feed. And out of this, what you discover in this internal dialogue going on in your head, there's an inner critic. And yes there is. He's not out there, okay, As a lot of conservative Christians teach out there. No, the inner critic is in here. He's inside your head. He's the part when you have self doubt, when you beat yourself up, when you hear temptation. Take that trade, take that trick, God, it's gonna be a great thing. God, you can really make up for these prior losses. Just jump out of here and get over here, boy. You can win big. Go to that lower, real low time frame. Yeah, there's a, there's a little noise there, but you know, God, look at, look at, you can see the winning.

Then after you blow up, you fool, you idiot. You thought you could win. Golly, that's the inner critic, friends. It's not going to go away. It's not going to go away. It's going to be present. It may, it may step back for a while and wait for a more opportune time, but it's not going to go Away.

I'm having a little bit of dryness in my throat, so I apologize for any coughing I do. So we've got the inner critic. That's part of the mind. Then. Another prominent part is the adapted self. And this would be what I would call the dark side of the orphan nature.

And this adaptive self, this orphan, is actually the emotional brain adapting you to survive in the world in which you live. It's rooted in response to threat.

From a position of fear and, or aggression.

With all of us. And in my work, what happens is a lot of the emphasis is about rementoring, building a different team around that orphan nature of yours that it doesn't start doing, hijacking the mind. Because orphan is the code word that I use for the limbic system.

You know, what happens is that if the limbic system wants to muscle the thinking brain to the sidelines, it will. And the more you try to muscle it, the more of a fight you're setting up. And you're not going to win a fight against the emotional brain, your orphan nature. You have to demonstrate that you can mentor it so that it starts not reacting to uncertainty the way it was designed to from an evolutionary psychology standpoint. So you've gotten that and you're going, that's your fear, by the way. That's your aggression. That's why you do stupid things. Because orphan has hijacked you, you've resisted that part of yourself. You haven't cooled it down, calmed it down, okay? And it's just simply built up ahead of steam and blown out your thinking brain. It will do that. So that's the negative side, that's the dark side. Yet at the same time, there is an empowered side. And this is where you realize that my job as a trader is to self develop the empowering elements of my mind, of my potential, that produce the kind of mind built for probability, not for survival in the moment. All that's on your genome. This is where.

And believe me, in the same way that fear and aggression give rise to organizations of the self, you know, so does discipline, so does courage, so does self soothing and impartiality as emotional programs. That is what gives rise to the probability base, mind, fear and aggression about your belief to manage uncertainty, okay, or probability, having a confidence that you can manage whatever come, whatever the market shows you. And your job is to perform.

Not control outcome. If you try to control outcome, you will really frustrate yourself because you can, however, you can control the mind you bring into the moment. And this is where the Magic happens, friends. Because ultimately, and I use this.

Take from Lord of the Rings because it was such a great archetypal movie that what you have is you have the king who has to reclaim his throne.

You have the sorcerer who brings wise counsel. You have the orphan nature that has to be really mentored. You have the caregiving nature where she would be willing to give up the elf nature of hers to living in immortality, to be able to, for the love of a man, great love, great compassion. And you can begin to see that. And you can begin to see that the warriors there too, is that, you know, the king's friends stood by him through fight through all the time. There was a struggle. There is a struggle. There is a struggle in your mind that's never going to go away. But the difference is, historically, what you bring to the struggle is not going to win in trading. It's not going to produce the mind to perform in trading. You have to construct that. It just so happens that a great movie like Lord of the Rings is based on archetype, archetypal representations of these emotional programs. And where literally, discipline becomes ruler, courage becomes warrior, self soothing or self compassion becomes caregiver, impartiality, clear thinking becomes sage, you realize these are emotional programs and that you, in fact, can learn to pull them forward. And that's one of the unique things about our training is this, is that we use a process called memory enrichment and symbolic representation to activate these empowered elements of the self. And again, what we're doing is we want to produce a mind built for probability. And it's done through applied mindfulness. That's that eye that's staring at the top of the model's head, and you're beginning to recognize that you can actually begin to construct.

The beliefs and the observer that engages the uncertainty found in trading. And what you realize initially is that the construction of the self that you brought to trading through no fault of your own. Okay, just simply is not going to do the trick. It's not going to. It's not going to work. And yet, at the same time, through applied mindfulness of developing through memory and through memory enrichment and through symbolic representation, you can develop these aspects of your potential that create. These are the emotional programs that create the mind that engages friends. This is the power that you have to really engage change. And the way I like to put it is this is that you're always the dragons don't go away. The challenges of stress, the challenges of uncertainty are not going to go away. But the difference is this. The Organization, the committee of the mind that engages those dragons changes. You're not alone. The orphan nature of yours is not doing it by itself. It's not being gutted by the inner critic as it tries to fight alone. No. These empowered elements of your potential that you have begun to nurture and to bring forward and summon into working awareness, become active in the committee of your mind. And that's the other thing, friend, is I see the mind as a committee of various forces that have been given voice.

And what you basically have as a traitor is you're the chairman of the board and you're waking up and realizing that you have. That you have a mutiny going on inside your board of directors. Some are trying to take it in one direction, another the other. And you've been asleep at the wheel. That's the observer being asleep. And what you know is you need to clean house and reorganize that committee, that board of directors, to be able. The mind that can direct the self into the future. That's what's happening here. You're not avoiding the conflict that's gonna happen. That's. That's just the nature of meeting the challenges of living, the challenges of trading, the risk of trade, the randomness of training. However, what can change is the mind you bring into the moment of performance.

That's the trick, friends. And as Aunt Ze said a long time ago, mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power. This is the self mastery that ultimately that I teach in both the group course and in the individual course. This isn't just self mastery to make you a better trader. This is self mastery that allows you to reorganize the potential of yourself to produce a more empowered effect itself in the world that you live in. Instead of, instead of just saying, I'm stuck with this historical self that I came stock with from history, you're saying, well, this is, this is a. This is the hand of cards I got dealt in the beginning and it not so good. And what I also now is that I'm learning to equip myself with the tools to reorganize that potential into higher functioning. Okay. Ultimately, the self mastery you learn also applies a lot of different areas of your life. And ultimately you let go of the need to control to win, not lose, and to make money. What you do, by the way, you don't control those. That's the whole deal. You're just going to frustrate yourself if you keep hammering yourself against a wall. What you do is you embrace performance. You can control the mind you bring to performance. That's the psychological edge that you need to drive your performance edge, your, your statistical edge. That's what you need friends. And what I'd like to do is I'd like to invite you to become the change, you know, waiting for it to come. I don't know. Traders do this all the time. And generally they blow out their, their capital in three to five years. And then they come to me and say, randy, I wish I had the capital to do your training. I finally see that. Boy, I tell you, you were right. I wish I had learned this a long time ago. And hey, can you, can you, can you do it for free? No, I can't. I can teach you if you're, you know, if you open up your eyes and recognize this is no fault of your own friends. This is simply the way the limbic system organized you and it's not going to work. And the deal is you have to decide whether or not you really want to experience success as a trader. If you want that, you're going to have to master the self and my encouragement. We have a, we have a group course starting in September and that if you sign up early, we give you a free gift of the motion regulation workshop valued at 200 bucks. And what happens is a lot of people will take this course and say, well, Randy, that's too far away. Well, take it. As you know, the thing is, is you can, you can get the course and start working the program. Because I can tell you right now what most people do is they wait for the program the first day to say, okay, well, ready? And what I warn people is that this, this, this group course works at it, start it, it flies right at the beginning. And most people are overwhelmed in the beginning because they already needed to have been studying for at least two weeks or a month before they, before it starts. And they've been what I would call emotionally ignorant and they haven't done their homework. What I encourage you to do, if you're thinking about this and you're looking at the group course as an option, sign up early so that you can really work the program so that time you get to the course itself where you know we have a course and you know I'm teaching it and stuff like that, that you've already been through the program or at least been through parts of the program and you're prepared. Okay. What it does is it comes with five group meetings with me, we use Gotowebinar. You get all, It's a group and you get all sorts of. You get according to the groups and things like that. Because we are spread out across all time zones in the world. You know, we'll have people from Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong. We'll have people from the United States, we'll have people from Europe, we'll have people in the Middle East. We just have people all over the place. And a lot of these people never show up in person. And what they're doing is they're getting the recordings and they're able to use that. That's how. That's how it works. It's really powerful and it teaches you the essential skills that you need, that you need. Okay. The other thing is that the individual course, this is for people who are very serious and have a little bit more capital that they can. They can risk on whether or not this. I can help them or not. It's much more personal. It's much more inclusive in terms of, like, comprehensive in terms of the materials and stuff like that. It's. It's a lot of stuff. And it's.

Generally the person who takes that course will look at it and say, randy, I can use. I can lose $3,500 in a day, a week. Pretty easy. And I've been doing it for years. So what you're saying is that I don't see much difference from my perspective between the group course and the individual course, except that I get you because it does come 10 sessions with me in addition to everything else. And if you're really coming down to saying, I'm really interested in this, but I don't really know which one's for me, what I ask you to do is to really explore it. Hit.

For a free consult. It's on. It's on our website, and hit contact us and let's talk about it. And the truth is, is that if you're really unsure, I'm not necessarily. I don't necessarily want you in the course. You know, I'm looking for motivated people who, who are ready to. Ready to do some work. The other thing is go to the website. If you don't know much about me, go to the website, go to YouTube, start looking at all the material. You know, I've got 175 videos up there. So this is what we're after. And there's lots of different free content on the. There's articles, there's all these videos. There's a lot of people say, randy, you just give away so much. Yeah, there's free ebook. So the thing is, is depending on where you are in this journey into trading and how much you know about me, that's where you start. I welcome you and I hope you really think about this because.

So many people have this optimism bias that they discover has cleaned their plow and they don't have enough money to invest in themselves anymore. So that's what's happening. Now some questions. Okay, I do. This is me trying to look through my bifocals and try to see things with small type. I do a very good job of following my trading plan in some markets but am unable to do so in others. Why is that? Well, the first thing I would say is your trading is the problem you're having. Is it in oils, highly volatile markets? I mean I know a lot of people right now having a really hard time simply because, you know, you see a, like a 2,3000 point shift in the markets in one day. It's crazy making so literally it could be as simple as how much, how much fluctuation is happening in that market. But I don't really know that much about you. So it's really hard to know specifically about you. But that's the first, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Okay. And also it might depend on the kind of timeframes you're using in those particular, in those particular markets. You know, if you're using lower time frames in some markets, you know, you've got a lot of noise in that and a lot of uncertainty though it looks like there's potential. There's also more black swan potential. So you're looking at a variety of things. I can't say that it's a psychological problem. It may be something that is inherent in your methodologies that you apply to those different markets. Good question. Then I just, I don't, I don't have enough information to really tell you. Wouldn't your psychology take care of itself when you start to see things, see success in your trading account using your trading strategy, confidence in the strategy built. I'm answer that right now. First of all, I know he continued on, but right there is that, that's the, that's the deception.

The truth is, is answering yourself, are you seeing the evidence of you knowing all this stuff and the trading account growing and you're, and you, and you shifting and becoming a better trader, more effective trader. Right now your limbic system doesn't care. You know, the what a trading coach is going to be teaching you. Yeah. As you learn this particular strategy, you're gonna get all confident, stuff like that. Blah Blah, blah, they sell that all the time. And what happens is that after about four or five years of, look, chasing the Holy Grail and believing this optimism type of bias, that, yeah, I'm gonna do all this stuff and I'm gonna get the confidence to do it. So the psychology is going to take care of itself. No, it's not. Unless you're one of these guys who won the genetic lottery. If you're that, God bless you, it's the greatest thing in the world. But that's. You would be a rare, rare person. Can you repeat? I doubt it, because I don't. This is. Okay, can you repeat what you said about the wolf that wins? The wolf that wins is the one. Well, first of all, just take it out of that context, is that it comes down to literally the mind that is focused on performance, not on winning or losing.

I have, as a matter of fact, he might be here today is David Dubay, runs Polaris Trading. He's a damn good trader. He's a damn good trading coach, okay? And he and I are personal friends, so there's a bias there. But one time he was talking a couple months ago to me and he was saying, you know something, he's Also, he's got 35, 36 years of experience. He's been a market maker and he's got all the tools and toys that show that he's been extraordinarily successful. Okay? He's got all that stuff. And he was saying, you know, the other day I took an intuitive trade. He's in this group where it's not unusual for like hedge fund managers and stuff like that to trade with him because, you know, why not trade with David? You know, golly, he's a, he's a proven, consistently profitable trader. And if you trade with him and if you, if you've got your, your mind together, you can, you can do well by just sitting in and sitting with him. And what happened is he announced that this was an intuitive trade and he took it because he will take intuitive trades and intuitive trade. What I mean by that is a trade that you know something, but you don't know how you know it. David's got 36 years of experience as a trader or a portfolio manager, and he has a lot of intuitive knowledge. And any rate, he got into the trade and then it didn't match up his rules and he just simply got out at small loss. The next day, several of his colleagues, his friends in his trade room say, David, why did you get out of that trade, man? It was crazy, man. It was a 10 to 1. Well, we made a ton of money. And he just simply said, hey, it didn't meet my criteria. And so I got out. He didn't want to get caught up in what he lost or what he won or how much money he left on the table. The truth is, is that after that, when it no longer, when the rules no longer applied, he was, he would have, he had continued trading. He would have been gambling. Luck may have been shining on him. But the thing is, this is really about performance. This is about maintaining performance that allows you to express the statistical edge that you have in your methodology. That's what this is all about. Winning or losing are fairly irrelevant. Until you come to that.

You still are missing a big link in trading. Okay. Is it possible to change the orphan to more of an idol.

Where you are not looking for others to help you, instead you help yourself live by your own internal values? Yeah, ultimately that's what I call mentorship is that, you know, the thing is orphan in many ways is that baby that comes out of mama and is immediately expose the world. And you're hoping that it has a good nuclear family, has a good secondary family around it within a greater community, within a greater culture, and good things happen. And ultimately that's the kind of stuff that no matter, no matter how you roll the dice, I hope that you grew up in an okay enough family where you inherited a real sense of secure attachment. Very few people actually do that. And ultimately this is about.

In this work, it's about recognizing that it's nobody's fault, there's nobody to blame. This is the human condition. And awakening is really about recognizing that your job as you develop the mind into self mastery and these elements of the self, these parts, these spheres of influence in the brain that ultimately you're mentoring that orphan part of yourself to where it can trust higher brain function.

So you're, you are, you're adapting it over time. Once you learn how to do it, you're adapting it over time to a new set of mentors, a new set of community members rather, rather than the one that you. Your first adaptation. So yeah, you're right. That's exactly what we're doing. This is from a person who's already signed up for the group course. Oh boy. It better be the right answer then, huh? What are the most common mistakes new students taking your course make? They're unprepared for the first day. Okay, that's the big thing, is that you've done something exceptional is that a lot of people will have sign up the very day or the day before the course and they don't realize that I'm expecting you to have had at least two weeks work with the emotional regulation section, class one before, before you get there. Because I'm going to be starting class two on mindfulness 30 minutes into that session. Okay. That's the first big mistake. The second big mistake is that they, they start out with all great enthusiasm and they don't realize that this is not a sprint, it's a marathon. That the work that you put into this program is the results you get out of it. What I like to see is a guy who says, I'm going to go to that classroom. And we have the ability of actually seeing who's in the classrooms. What we want to see is you being motivated and doing the work. I know that if you do the work.

That it's powerful.

As well. Yeah. The thing is, is that I'm expecting a person having the willingness to spend two or three hours a day in the group course and initially in the individual course, it's that much too. But ultimately when I'm saying the two or three hours, I consider practice as you trade. I consider that to be an essential part of trading. Trading is that the thing is, is if you're listening all these guided meditations, watching all these videos and reading all this stuff and it stays on the outside of your performance and then you don't practice it as you trade, you're not learning. So the, the other biggest thing is that people don't generalize the stuff they're learning by doing all the guided meditations, watching the videos. They don't immediately practice it in the context of trading because that's where you want to learn it. Okay, that's, that's. Yeah. Did you say there is a free consultation that we can sign up for on the website? I don't see it. Hit Contact us. Yeah, I think I did say free consultation and maybe that. To be honestly, I should, I should put that. No, but hit contact us. That'll take you right to it. Okay. What is the time of day that the course is running?

Okay. I don't know if you heard divorce, but it's, it's on Thursdays from 4:30 to 5:30 Eastern Time. Okay, now.

Light rant right now the course that we're finishing tomorrow there, I think 18 members of it, we generally are seeing about 12 or 13 show up. Okay. That's because they, they live in far flung sections of the world. That, you know, we're, we're on New York time. We're basically on New York Stock Exchange time. And the world kind of bends to that. That's why we have this thing at 4:30. Okay. And that is also why the recordings are so valuable, is that we know that people are going to miss. And what we also know is that they get the recordings and it's like they're being there as we're moving through the material and as people are asking questions and stuff like that. So that's the time, that's the time in the course. But it's, it's designed. Like I said, it's.

The current one we have right now we just have people from all over the place. We have people from Africa, which is unusual. Singapore, Australia.

All over the United States, uk, Canada, just like I said, all over the place. Okay. And it's rarely from South America. Okay, that's. Oh, we have one from South America, Guatemala. So they're all over the place. So we have to.

And a lot of people will be doing this as a second language and they want the recordings so that they can sit there with a translator and can work the program that way. So it works all over the place. Good question, though. I like that. That's it. Well, friends, golly, we've gone over. I thank you for your time. I thank you for the kind of motivation and the kind of questions you're asking. I like, I love it when people I know are thinking and are really present in mind and are engaged. And if I can help you, my friends, then I would love to explore that possibility.

I love to see people awaken and to develop their inherent potential into higher, higher, higher functioning. And trading is just a place where self mastery is not just a good idea. It's necessary. So thank you for your time, friends, and I hope to see you a little later down the road. Take care. Good night.