Master Yourself; Master Your Trading

You know, eventually what traders discover.

Is that the mind they bring to trading is not going to work for trading. And what they also discover is that they going to have to develop themselves, they're going to have to master themselves emotionally to be able to become successful traders. And to be honest with you, a lot of traders just are not up for that task.

They find reasons beyond belief to discover why they don't have to. They keep looking for reasons outside of the self. They start looking for, oh God, new technology, new this, new that.

And ultimately it comes down to.

Comes down to there's a need to develop the self for trading. It just doesn't work. The brain you brought to trading is not going to produce the mind that you need for successful trading. First of all, why is that? Well, it's actually quite, quite easy is your brain is designed to control outcome. It is designed to be able to predict outcome. It is also designed to think beyond any shadow of a doubt that what it's doing is right at the time it's happening. Those three pieces absolutely just fall into place and create the worst mix you can possibly imagine for the brain that evolution gave you compared to the brain that you need to be able to trade effectively.

Unless you win the genetics lottery, you're going to have to develop the potential that you have to be able to go beyond the mind that you currently have to be able to produce a mind that can work in probabilities. Why? It's very simple. The brain you have is built for short term survival instincts only.

It sees the problem of like you're encountering uncertainty as an encounter with a saber toothed tiger. It's death, it's biological threat sitting there every time you place a rager, place a bet with where you have probability on your side you don't experience. Your limbic system does not experience psychological discomfort, friends, it experiences biological threat. And if you're an Alpha, what you're used to is saying, I can handle those threats. What I can do is I can make things happen. I can be trading, I can do things, I can make things happen. I've done it in my entire life. And yet what you discover is in trading that trait is going to be your worst enemy.

You do not make things happen in trading. What you do is you sit in a kind of a passive way, waiting to see what the markets will give you. You do not attack the markets, you see what it's willing to give you. Completely different than the caveman brain of an Alpha that says, you know something, I'm going To use aggression. I'm going to make things happen. I'm going to produce success. Well, no, you're not. No, you're not. Unless you happen to have won the genetics lottery. You're like the regular people with typical emotional architecture that have to retrain. Reprogram the way that your brain, your mind, engages uncertainty. Because understand this, the fundamental problem here is the way your brain was designed to encounter uncertainty. Understand, not too many years ago, 12,000 years ago, there was safe toothed tiger floating around the earth that we were dealing with. Now they're gone. But that brain, the emotional brain, doesn't know that it sees any threat as a biological threat and it's going to act accordingly. What does this look like? What does this look like? And you're trading. Have you ever had a setup show up? And it's a valid setup, but you keep waiting for more confirmation, more confirmation, more confirmation, then it's gone. And then you start going, I missed the trade, I missed the trade. Now I have an urgency to get into a trade, to make, I need to get in that trade. And then you start getting into a trade and all of a sudden you get aggressive aggression and you start jumping into trades you have no business in. That's the caveman brain. That's what it's like, friends. You can't trade with that. You're going to have to learn how to master that. You're going to have to redesign. You're going to have to redevelop the mind that you bring to trading. Or on the other end of it, have you ever had fomo? Have you ever come to a moment where you know, you've had the order fill, then you get in the trade and it's bouncing around, it's going against you, doing all this stuff, it's staying within its range and finally it breaks into profit.

And what do you want to do? You want to grab that profit now? Scarcity thinking. Take it now while it's there before it can be taken away from you. Caveman brain.

These are examples of the brain that you brought to trading. There's nothing wrong with that brain, it's just not right for trading. The question becomes, do you want to develop that mind? Do you want to develop the capacity of saying, hmm, I know that really this is a game about the mind that I'm bringing to engage uncertainty. And I know from an evolutionary psychology standpoint that the brain that developed certainly isn't suited for trading. Its short term survival instinct oriented is. It just wants to get out of the problem right now so that I can breed and go back into basically produce my genes for the future. Then psychologically, we grow up in families, we grow up in circumstances, we grow up in cultures that want us to win, that want us to this, that and the other. Or we sabotage and it becomes a pattern that when we start doing things and we start engaging uncertainty, what is revealed in the trading account, friends, not in your head, because it's going to lie to you. It's going to lie, friends, but in the trading account, what is being revealed are your beliefs about your ability to engage and manage uncertainty.

That's what you're looking at in success or failure in your trading. And the biggest problem is that you actually believe on a biological level that you can outwit the markets, you can somehow prevail.

The casino knows different. It's going to keep you in the game and it's going to drain you dry. You have to build a different brain. You have to self develop, you have to have self mastery. If you want to master trading, you have to train a brain that was built.

For certainty, the illusion of certainty, even if it had to lie to itself and blame others.

And you're going to have to train it into a probability mind where you realize that winning and losing is not the game at all. It's performance. It's the mind you bring into the moment of performance.

That's the psychological edge that's missing. And you're trading. You can learn to rebuild, reprogram that. But friends, you have to work at it. You have to start really looking at it and going first, I have to acknowledge this is what my brain is built to do and that's what traders don't do. What I'm asking you to do is recognize that the brain's not equipped to do what you're asking it to do. And you're going to have to retrain it, you're going to have to develop it. You're going to have to produce the mind that can do probability trading. That's what you're going to have to do. Friends, how do you do it? You do it by starting looking at this word. Go to this website, learn more and then decide whether or not you really want to change the mind and become a trader or do you want to stay the same? Friends, if you want to stay the same, it's great. Just don't trade. If you want to trade, develop the mind beyond what it was equipped to do in the beginning. You have the ability of doing that, but you do have to do it. Thank you. Thank you for listening.

Sam.