Mastering Emotions and Impulse in the Midst of Uncertainty From Mindlessness to M

And only mode.

Welcome everyone. My name is Randy Howell with empowered state of mind. And I. Wait. Well, actually my trader said of mine, actually the corporate name is empowered but with my trader state of mind. And I wish to thank each and every one of you for taking the time to come and check this out. And my hope is, here's my question for you, is the last couple days, you know, this volatility, this bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce stuff, how.

Is your trader psychology doing? Have you noticed it? We're going to be taking a look at that today. When we're going to be particularly zeroing in on one particular area, it is in the moment of uncertainty. What happens in that moment of uncertainty when you're choosing to risk and to push that button and to get in the game with not really knowing what's going to happen.

That'S what we're going to be doing today. Now, just to let you know, the only, the only real rule we have around here is this, is that I save questions toward the end. You are welcome to write them in, type them in and stuff like that. But I've discovered that it often solved the problem before we get there. And also this allows me to stay focused on what I'm doing. Okay. And the other thing I should ask is this, can you hear me? You know, I would hate to go through this whole thing and discover that nobody heard me. So if a few of you very broke souls would just simply type in yes or no. And I. Very funny. Somebody said no. Okay, yes. Okay, good, we've got it. So we're ready to go. And I want you to keep focused on that notion. Mastering fear and impulse in the moment of uncertainty. And we're going to be asking you to start going, what am I missing? What am I not seeing about the way I and my brain and my mind engage uncertainty, that makes such a difference. How many of you.

Can trade really, really well, almost mint money. When there is a reset button and it's in simulation and the risk isn't real, but when you add real risk there, uncertainty takes on completely different meaning. So let's take a look at this folks. And the truth is traders never suspect that trading psychology is an issue. And the other wow thing is nobody prepares them for what is actually going to happen when they walk into this trap, when they walk into this minefield called trading. And I'm going to give you an example on that is I was talking to a guy just the other day. He had just, you know, he'd been trading for several years now. And last year, his first complete year, he lost $35,000. At the same time, he had joined a very prestigious firm that trains. And I'm not going to talk who it is or anything like that, but basically the word was, you've learned what you need to know. Now all you need to go out there, and all you need to do is do it. And literally said, you know, the first day, it was just really great. I ended up making $450. And I went to my wife and said, honey, look at this. I made $450 today. This is all man. This is good. This is really great. And then he proceeded to lose $35,000 over time. And he's looking at me and he said, randy, you know, in one of your videos on YouTube, you said it. You said it, right? He says, you know something? I had no idea what I was getting into. I was believing these people saying, all I have to do is learn what you're teaching me and go out and just do it. But doing it, planning my trade and trading my plan, completely different animals. When the action's real, when there's really money on the line, and you know that you really don't know what's going to happen. So that's what's happening is. And suddenly out of this, this guy just says, I had no idea that trading psychology was a problem. And yet he discovers late that, yes, it is, it is a problem. And then when you find out that it's a problem.

Ultimately it's interesting, and you keep looking for solutions.

How many. How much stuff. How many trinkets have you got for looking for love in all the wrong places? How many answers have you looked? So you know something? It's this expert guy. He's the guy. He's the guru. You know something, it's the. You know, it's this particular indicator. You know, it's. It's these particular levels. It's these critical things. You know, when I get that, then what will happen is I'll finally figure it out, rather than recognizing that what you're doing is you're sticking your head inside a cannon and you don't know what you're looking for. And out of that danger happens. That's the whole point. And we're going, okay, I've looked and I've looked and I've looked and I've looked and I've looked. And so, you know, yeah, I get it. I kind of get this analogy. I'm looking for love in all the wrong places. And yet.

The eyes that we use to look. We have this perceptual tunnel vision. And what we see is we only see within that narrow, narrow focus. Yet we don't see that our biases are like this tunnel vision. We don't see that the implicit beliefs that we bring to trading are actually activated and working as you trade, we want to believe.

You know, that I can find the right fix and the problems are going to go away. And it's just the game of learning to trade. I can do that. And there's a reason.

That 95% of traders lose money. And by the way, only 2% actually make money consistently. And that in three years, the people sitting here in this room listening to this webinar, most of you will be gone. And you would have said, you know something, this is just too much. I don't get it. And maybe you did realize that it was trader psychology. Maybe you came to realize that maybe, you know something, this is just a, you know, TA is just crock. You know, it's just, it really depends on the eyes from what you're seeing. So we're looking at that going, we need to start examining literally what we're looking through the lens that we're looking through to see what's going on with our trading. And if you survive all this, okay, and a lot. And again, what you're understanding is the attrition rate's great. Finally, traders come to the moment where they realize the head game really does matter.

They don't recognize that it's a biological problem first, though, okay, they don't realize that the, this, this fear of jumping into trades, this fear of, you know, when the trade goes against you and you go, wow, when you take a loss, you want that money back. And then what happens is you finally start making. You finally get into the black. And all of a sudden you have this urgency to take that profit now before it's taken away, not let it go. You know, those things, all those things, you think, well, those are psychological problems. No, they're not. The base of it is survival instincts of your biological entity. It takes over your psychology friends. So what we're here is we're here to recognize that you're not going to solve this problem. Superficially, no, that's not the way it's going to work. You're going to actually have to deprogram.

The inheritance from evolution that you can't yet you brought your brain into trading with. That's what you're going to have to do. And if you survive, then what happens? You became one of those folks who do really well and over time they build up their account with a risk management system where they're not risking that much per trade and they work and stuff like that. And they realize that, hey, I can do 40, 60% per year and have risk parameters that allow me to do this. All I have to do is now follow this edge I've got in my system because I now have a brain and a mind that I've redesigned for probability. Suddenly I have the psychological edge because I've been able to go in and reprogram deeply, deeply rooted biological perception. Oh.

Let me ask you, how have you tried to solve the problem? And I'd love to if you would just type in some of the ways you tried to solve it. The typical ones is I like entrainment thinking that you're going to basically hear some sounds and you're going to entrain the brain into pattern and you're going to take that pattern and have the right mind and it's going to stay that way. That entrainment stuff does work on a short term basis, but long term, you're still exposing yourself to uncertainty, you're exposing yourself to stress.

You'Re activating the survival instincts. Who in the world has not tried nlp? Who in the world has not tried cognitive restructuring? Who in the world has not tried positive. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was going to get to that. Thank you. Affirmations. Yeah, I'm a disciplined trader. I'm a disciplined trader. I am mad as hell. I'm going to act, I'm going to get my money back. The affirmation's gone. And I'll tell you why it's really interesting is that they fall apart.

Because you have to believe them under the conditions of stress, with money at risk.

And that's something that affirmations and visualizations can't do.

Others just tried to denial. They say one day my ship's going to come in. One day I'm going to work through that. That's what happened with this guy who lost $35,000, the company that he spent $25,000 with. You said you just worked the program, you worked the program and it will finally come true. And what he discovered is that the more he did it, the more he traumatized himself, the worse the problem got. So there's a real serious gap between what's being taught for trader training, what the actual trader has to learn. Because ultimately this is really about not just having knowledge from the left brain, this is actually talking about Developing your emotional nature.

To engage uncertainty.

In the long term, your brain's designed absolutely different. Your brain is designed, designed for short term survival. And you're asking it to do something that it's absolutely unprepared to do. No wonder all these things miss. And here we go.

All these affirmations, all these tricks, all these what some people call cheap Jedi tricks. They don't work under stress. Something fundamentally has to happen. About what is it I have to do to be able to work performance under stress? What's the big deal here? Well, that's part of what you don't understand. You don't understand the magnitude. And you see superficial attempts to change and yet under pressure you see them failing.

Other people call that choking, okay, or blowing it. There's different ways of saying it, but you're hitting the moment of stress. And by the way, stress, I define stress as just simply meeting the challenges of life. And you're going to find stress in trading because you're constantly being challenged by uncertainty with money at risk. So it's going to be stressful. The thing is, what mind do you bring to the management of that stress? In stress management, we actually break stress into two components. Distress. Everybody knows that. That's when you freak out. Everything goes crazy and you get all hot and bothered and you're tense and you become anxious and stuff like that and you start predicting bad things or aggressive eustress. E U S T R E S S is that of engaging stress, the challenges of life with a very different interpretation, a very different belief system about engaging it. So this is really about going, you know something instead of superficially looking at this problem and saying that we're just going to solve it by wishful thinking or some like band aid approach. This is really time to take a look at it and say, well, what actually is going on, friends? What actually is going on? And let's start right there in the brain, okay? You might have seen this phrase.

Language differently in a different book. Your mind might be willing, yeah, I want to make all that money, I want to do all that stuff. But your flesh is not. Your flesh is weak. Your mood biology has a totally different agenda.

Than the desires of your mind to become profitable. And you have this on and off switch, okay? And you discover something is your biology. Flesh is dead set, dead set against you doing what it takes to be successful. And then what happens is you try to force it.

Compounding the problem because then it flips and hijacks and you're out. And then you start Doing really wild, crazy things in the name of saying, you know, hey, I had a plan, I planned my trade. And you know, and God knows what happened to it. I know that somewhere along the line that I did not trade my plan. That switch flipped.

You might have tried to force emotion control, you might have done that, but you hit a threshold and you discovered that the emotional brain's a lot stronger.

Than your thinking brain. It controls thinking. So you're looking at it going, wow. And it's against me. Well, what, what, what's the problem? This is the problem right here, friends, if you want to understand why you're having problems, is that all the, all that sensorial information that what you're seeing, what you're, you know, what you're reading, what you're doing, all that stuff is coming in to the limbic system, your emotional brain first.

And you feel there, you don't think. And there's a traffic cop there, okay, that is deciding what to do. And when that information comes in, if that traffic cop at the sensory thalamus position and the limbic brain decides, oh, man, this is dangerous. There's a threat out there. Oh, my God, I'm uncertainty with risk. That's a threat. I'm going to send it down to the amygdala and fight flight, because, man, we have an emergency going on. Well, point zero zero, three seconds later, that impulse is at the amygdala, firing up the engine, fight flight. And there you go. There's your venge trading. There's your freezing. There's all that stuff.

Did you happen to notice when you're looking at this, it says, I think rationally? Way, way, way over there, that's the neocortex. That's that thinking or that left brain, where you can think rationally and use logic. Well, it's the last one to know about anything. The limbic system has already been activated. The chemistry, the emotion, and the impulse to act is already in the bloodstream, already coordinating and moving the body into motion before I want you to hear that, before the signal even gets to the thinking brain. And that's the part that you want.

To be trading. You don't want your emotional brain to be leading the charge. You want the emotional brain to be set up so that it's. You're being able to summon up particular emotional programs that allow you to think rationally, allow you to stop the traffic cop from taking the low road to the amygdala and take the signal to the high road to the neocortex. And thinking, that's what you want. But the thing is, nobody tells you about this and unfortunately for you is the limbic system. And the entire brain's built, your survival is entirely built around fear. So what do you think is activated first when you engage uncertainty?

Yeah, yeah. It's your survival instincts. You don't need to think. You don't need to think when there's survival instincts sitting there and there's, there's risk and there's uncertainty. This is why, friends, and by the way, that signal from the information coming into the brain getting to the rational mind is 0.25 seconds at the best.

I want you to know that the limbic system to fight flight, 0.003 seconds, nanoseconds.

Getting it to the high road, the slow and steady way up to the neocortex, and the thinking, 0.25 seconds or more. Who do you think wins that battle? And this is what you're trying to force.

A mind that's adapted to avoid uncertainty and risk, and you're trying to force it to pretend it's not there and to think rationally. And friends, can you see the craziness here?

It's amazing, is very few traders grasp it. And I don't mean just retail traders learning how to trade. I mean big time traders that they go, oh my God, I want to be right. And you know, I'm realizing, oh my God, I can't be right. It just simply blows me away.

This is the trick, friends, this is the trick. So.

What we have to do, if you want to become a consistently profitable trader, I'm not saying a person making two or three million dollars a year and just becoming the greatest trader in the world, I mean consistently profitable trader, you're going to have to become comfortable with uncertainty, the unknown. And here it is, the big one. You're going to have to let go of control.

These are skills. And it just so happens that your brain is set up not to be comfortable with uncertainty and unknown and it wants control.

So do you see the dilemma here? You've got a brain built for one thing. You're bringing it to trading that demands probability and giving up the illusion of control.

And you're trying to require.

The biological brain that you brought to do something that it's not equipped to do. You're doing it every day. That's why you keep having trouble. That's why you're marginally profit. That's why you keep blowing up stuff. You keep expecting the brain to do something that it can't do on its own.

Why?

Take a look at this.

You know, this image just really says it all. You know, you're looking at a white chart.

And someone's approaching it and what you're doing is you're experiencing the primordial monster of the unknown. That's what you're doing. It's just, it's just, you know, it's just built right down there. Just like watching a snake strike, it just pulls that through you. Well, the reason it does that is cause your brain is built for that.

The unknown is dangerous.

Okay, so what do you think your brain is experiencing when you push it.

And command it and force it to deal with uncertainty, with risk on the line.

And it has not got training development to handle it. What do you think is going to happen? It's wired for this.

And you're asking, you're asking that diver to go over there and pet that shark, that probably 30 foot shark. Okay, now the good news is this image is actually for none. There, there is this white shark that for some unknown reason loves to be around humans and that's this, actually this shark. And people, people can get around it. But I wouldn't go try that with any other, you know, 30 foot white shark. Okay? It just wouldn't be a, probably a good idea. So we're looking at this, we're going.

The problem here is your emotional brain, which I often call the caveman brain, but it's actually even earlier than that. It can't tell the difference between biological threat like you just saw in that last slide, and, and the psychological discomfort of risking capital, not your life, not a biological threat, but risking capital with an uncertain outcome. It can't tell the difference. It creates. Hijacking it creates.

And if you want to become successful in trading, it's not going to be all the trinkets that you acquire and finally end up in boxes around your office. It's going to be in the development of your emotional brain.

To be able to work in partnership with your thinking brain under the conditions of uncertainty and risk, which by the way, understand.

Evolution did not give you that. You're going to have to redesign it. And fortunately you can.

Okay, this is it though, this comfort zone. You remember that. You remember the slide about the people with the big huge tunnel vision goggles on that they could only see one little small thing. That's your comfort zone. People wear comfort zone. Like I work with a trader and she's, she's in a very sensitive area of where her entire life she's been A perfectionist. She's worked hard, she's been able to do things right. And she's always been able to say, if I do all these things right, then I will increase my career, I will increase my pay, I will do that. And she locked in as a limbic learning that hard work and perfection leads to control over outcome.

And she brought that in as successful as she was in her previous career. She brings that belief system in, that limbic learning in. And what she discovers that it's blowing herself up. And she's just really beside herself. She gets more and more frustrated. She's being asked to step out of her comfort zone of the way that she has been organized over time. More about that organization stuff later. And step into where the magic happens. Step into. Let's go in and let's redefine and reprogram the way the brain interacts with uncertainty and with risk. Let's change the emotional programs that nature has wired. Fight flight response to uncertainty. Let's reprogram that response so that a different set of emotions builds the mind that engages uncertainty. Wow, friends.

That'S. That's the ticket right there. Instead of trying to force the brain, the mind to do something that it can't do by itself, the question becomes, well, how do I develop the brain and the mind to move from where it's at.

To where I need it to be to be a consistently profitable trader. From survival instincts in the moment for short term survival to probability management over time? Whoa, there you go. That's what's happening, friends. And when you look at it, when you have those freezing and avoiding behaviors, you know, it's, it's pretty easy. What's happening is that, you know, and again, select your poison. There are people that walk into their rooms already in state of dread and they're scared to turn on the machines and things like that. They're already there with anxiety. Other people start experiencing anxiety when they start populating their charts. Other people start experiencing anxiety when they start having all these lines start converging into a, into a pattern. And they say, oh, that's a setup.

And then, oh my God, well, I've lost before, I could lose again. There's the anxiety, there's the comfort zone saying, you know, if I don't risk at all, then I can't lose. And to the limbic system makes a lot of sense.

And guess what? That emotional brain is constantly anticipating threat.

Okay? And if you've already primed for it.

And remember you're prime because you know, ultimately what A setup is. It's an exercise in random management, is that a setup is something that potentially could happen and it may play out or it may not play out. You really don't know. But, you know, you go through a set of confirmations to be able to say, yeah, this is a valid setup, and that it has a high probability, meaning somewhere above zero, of happening. And you take it and you say, you know, the risk reward is good, I'm willing to risk. And when you get in, you really have no idea whether or not that thing's actually going to do as your hypothesis says or not. What the really great trader is doing, the profitable trader, is recognizing it's just a probability. And when that probability doesn't pan out, when that hypothesis doesn't pan out, man, they're out. They're taking short loss and they're not thinking anything of it. Nothing got away from them. They don't look and see, well, where did that trade go? Oh, if I'd only stayed in. They don't live in what if? They live in probability. And they no longer engaged.

In the anxiety of what if? So there you are, we've gotten the anxiety bug. There's the uncertainty monster right there. And you're going to deal with the uncertainty monster in any way. And it may be from the fear standpoint, anxiety, like in this cartoon, or it could be from aggression. How many alpha guys who have done really well in corporate or business get into trading and they want to make things happen and they're going to win and they start jumping into trades and they discover they get blown up. Same uncertainty bit, same uncertainty mockster, just a different direction.

Avoidance, aggression, one of the two fight, flight. And what you discover is neither works. That has to be reprogrammed.

And here's. I love this. I love this, because this really gives you a really good idea.

There you are driving the car, thinking you're in control, this really modern man. And you know, the thing is, is I've got it in control, man. I'll tell you, I've got. I've got my apps, man, I've got my spreadsheets. I've got, man, I've got this probability. I've got all this study done, man. I understand, man. I am. I'm good to go. But then you look at who's in that backseat.

The caveman brain. That caveman brain's been around for a really long time. It's ancient, it's primitive, and it could care less that you think. As a matter of fact, what it knows is that all thinking is emotional state dependent because the caveman brain has not been activated yet. It's why you are led to believe in your delusion that you're in control.

When uncertainty happens with risk. Mr. Caveman, there you, your partner is activated.

And guess what? Thinking is just simply swept away. So what we're looking at, we're not trained as traders about what you really need to do to develop the emotion, your emotional nature to be able to deal with uncertainty.

And it's kind of like if you stop, if you stop to think about it, you go, God, this is crazy. You know, this is triggering fight flight all the time. I need to develop, I need to develop my emotional nature to complement all this, all this thinking stuff, all this knowledge stuff that I've got. Because it's useless if you don't have the emotional development that allows you to engage uncertainty, risk with discipline, courage, self soothing and impartiality. Until those four emotional programs are the ones that build a mind that engages uncertainty. You're sitting up and waiting for a hijacking to occur, and you're thinking, oh, my God, my psychology is just fine and dandy, man. Look at me, I'm just cool. What you're not realizing is you've got a backseat driver that's far more powerful than thinking. And again, it could care less whether or not you think you're not. And this is what I want you to really see. Way back there on the left is a hominoid, okay? And as you progress, you start recognizing that we're no longer hominoids, okay? But we start developing into what we would recognize as human. But what happened is we still carry that hominoid mind brain. The thing is, the way evolution works is that it just simply starts with an emotional brain. I mean, the same emotional brain that is chimpanzee, abobo, my dog, my cat, any social mammalian has. It's sitting back there. And what happened in evolution, this new part of the brain grew and grew. It's kind of like a tumor, the neocortex. Before you knew it, we were so separated from the rest of the animal kingdom to the point where we didn't believe that we were animals anymore.

But the truth is, is, you know, a lot of people who have heart operations have pig parts in them. You discover a lot of things that, well, you know, animal parts are interchangeable with human parts. There's 0.2% difference genetically between us and bonobos.

Yeah, we've got flesh, we've got biology. We just don't like to recognize we have it. But until we do.

That emotional brain that developed, oh, I don't know, 6, 10 million years ago overwhelms that really cool thinking brain that the guy has at the computer. You've got to bring the emotional brain along. So what we know is this.

We know that man has inherited a need to control outcome as a survival trait. Okay, we're going to have to reorder that. We're going to have to reorder it so that, hmm.

What is it I can really control? I realize that I cannot control outcome. And most people still don't like that. They still think, after all is said and done, that if I only find the right trick, if I only find the right knowledge, if I only get the right tip, that I'm going to be able to control and I'm going to be able to predict outcome. Crazy people think that. A lot of people get in, they think I'm going to find that holy grail and it doesn't happen. They blow up their money and they leave trading three years later. It's a pretty simple deal. But this is the main thing is that we have to come to a moment. We know that as a survival trait, we brought the need to control outcome as just simply part of the success of our species. And it just so happens it's been very successful, but it has no business in trading. This is really more what you're looking at if you take a look at your brain. If you perceived your brain as a community of rival programs, or if you perceived your brain as a hood, a neighborhood that had rival gangs in it that were highly competitive with one another, you begin to see what the brains actually like. And in this photograph, this image from inside out, that's a Disney picture film and I really encourage you to watch it. Because what neural scientists did is what they did is they took some basic emotional programs and they showed how they are in competition and how they work together inside the little girl's mind. And at different times, different, different parts of those five different emotional programs are in charge. Other times they've been booted out. And you see the fluctuations happening in the girl. But that's literally what's going on. And then what's even cooler is when that brain somehow manifests mind.

It's not emotional programs running around in the brain. Those programs are given voice as your thoughts and your mind. And suddenly you start realizing when you have self doubt, understand you're an internal argument when you're sitting there about to jump into Things what you're doing is you're having a conversation within the self. The mind needs to be understood very differently. So and here's the thing that I want you to get. Take a look at your trading account, friends. Don't listen to the talk running around in your head. When you look at your trading account, it is going to start revealing what beliefs that you're actually projecting onto the markets. Because actually your brain is creating a virtual representation of reality, not reality itself, from your biases and your beliefs. And then projects it onto the markets. And what you're measuring is not the reality of how good your stuff is, but how good your interpretation is. And you're measuring it to the truth meter. Okay. Of your trading account. And it's showing you. Wow, wow. How do we do this? Okay, we need some good news, don't we? Yeah, we need some good news. This is. You see, there's a lot stacked against you. But one more thing before we do this, what happens is we also have to awaken something called the observer that's on that far left hand side. And then what happens is that observer observes through their beliefs. This is that virtual representation stuff that they project emotionally and create a perception. That's what you're seeing out there with your markets. And so you're. This is interesting. I want to read this to you. There's no reality out there. You're creating the reality in there inside your head. And the all perception is observer generated.

Okay, we need to learn how do we change that? Okay, how do you go about building a mind for the management of uncertainty? Well, the very first thing. Yeah, this is the very first step you need to get.

Most people have no idea that you can actually rebuild the brain emotionally to be able to engage uncertainty. So you can have a new partnership with all that knowledge you have. But what you have to recognize the default programming of the brain and mind, first of all, just not going to work in this game called trading. And it's going to resist change because it has inherent fear of the unknown in any form uncertainty. And if you want to see it, here's what an emotion really looks like. An emotion is a biological action potential that coordinates activity between you.

And the environment or the trader and the markets. And when it sees danger, what I want you to see is it short circuits and go straight to the emotional centers. What do you think's happening? And this is where you have to regulate the emotion. And what you discover is this. Emotions are biological, they're not psychological. They take over psychology. And then the big kicker is all thinking is emotional state dependent. There is no trading without emotions.

You're trading with emotions all the time. Unless you're dead, you can't trade then anyway. So the question becomes is what emotions are you going to learn to manifest.

When you engage uncertainty to build a mind for probability? That's the deal. Emotional regulation is the way we teach it in our course, in both our group course and in our individual course. This is the first step, friends. You learn how to regulate emotions. You find out that the oh my God, it's biological. And as I develop my emotional intelligence, I can actually learn to begin to observe my body to see where I am emotionally. Most folks have no idea that they had an emotional hijacking until they're smack dab slapped up against the wall. Yet if you learn how to look at your body, you find the tension, you find the racing heart rate, you find your breathing are all indicators.

All indicators of that. And you're beginning to realize you know something. By managing that I can actually lower the emotional intensity. And what I recommend for people, you know any, you get a mirror, get a mirror so that you are able to watch yourself and you trade. And I'll tell you something, it's pretty scary at first because you're going to discover, oh my God, I'm fixated. Look at that tension in my jaw. My gosh, I'm not breathing. Yeah, you're already, you're already in the midst of an emotion and you didn't even know it. So that first step.

Emotional regulation.

Then the problem with emotional regulation is this.

It'S not going to change anything. I can't say that I've actually known people who became much better traders once they learned how to regulate emotion. But the thing is, is that emotional regulation is not going to change beliefs that you're projecting onto the markets what we need here. But if you don't learn how to do emotional regulation, you're never going to get to the door of the mind. You're never going to get to be able to observe. We need to develop mindfulness, that's the second step. And you discover something. You and your thoughts are not the same. You and your beliefs are not the same. As a matter of fact, this thing you call I, it's just one potential organization of a self that could be.

And with mindfulness awakening the observer, you can take the first steps to first stepping out of thought and realizing, ah, that's not me, I just got absorbed into it, but I'm waking up. And you also get to start saying, well, there are other potential organizations of a self, aren't they? Yes, sir, yes ma', am, there are. That's the power. But then what you're also doing in mindfulness, with the aid of your trading account, you begin to see the self limiting beliefs. You come to see that the you that got organized is not the you that you need to be trading. And you can say, well, you know something, you know, as an observer, I can actually become designer of the self that trades. Yes. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? Yeah, probably none of your trading, none of your trading has talked about that, that you're going to have to redesign the self that trades if you're going to be successful. It's true.

And what you're discovering is this person you call I is just simply one adaptation is the one. It's the adaptation that basically organized you before you had any say so in the deal. And what you discover in like in this little case, you discover that this little voice inside you called the inner critic that keeps, you know, that's the one that judges you, that's the one that criticizes you, that's the one that tempts you into doing stupid things. If you've ever, if you've ever beaten yourself up, you know the inner critic. Well, if you've ever just said, I'm going to take this trade and just fall into it, you know, the inner critic and his temptation very well, that lives as a voice in the mind, as an emotional program in the mind. And most people approach because they have not designed the mind that they bring to trading. It's easy to fall into this because you also, on the other side of that inner critic is something we call the adapted voice, or what I generally call the orphan. Your fear, your aggression, your need to prove the self. And as long as you're hooked into that.

The inner critic is going to have carte blanche way into your mind and you're going to have a very big time trying to trade. So what we really want to do is we want to develop an empowered self. This is the fourth thing, okay? And for the managing the uncertainty, we know.

That there are numerous emotional programs living in the brain or voices in the mind. And what we know in the same way that there's fear, there's criticism, there's judgment, there's aggression. Those are all consistent emotional programs that have usually easy access in the brain. But there's also discipline, there's also courage, there's also self soothing, there's also the Clear thinking of impartiality. These are all emotional programs that you didn't learn how to originally organize into the emotions that gave rise to thinking. It's time to do something about that. If you're planning on being a successful trader, not one that talks a game, but ones that can actually walk the walk, what you're wanting inside your head is going to be these thoughts anyway. What you want to do is to create the mind with the programs of discipline as ruler, courage is warrior, self soothing as caregiver and impartiality as sage that can be called forward. I have a specialized way, I call it memory enrichment of where we don't use affirmations the way they're taught, we don't use visualizations the way they're taught. What we do is we root them into the reality of experience where you know you have felt those emotions before. And I'm teaching you how to bring those forward and create a mind from there. That's who you want in your head.

Not the inner critic and not your orphan nature.

When you're facing uncertainty and risk, that's what you're doing. And ultimately this is what it comes down to. The challenges of managing uncertainty are never going to change. The truth is, is that the future is uncertain. You don't know what's going to happen, okay. At the same time, you don't control the outcome for sure. That's what you finally grasp. And that's the, that's the part, that's the hardest part the trader really has to learn is you do not control outcome. And that's an illusion. If you believe that.

Particularly in trading, what you will discover after a while, you discover. It's true. It's definitely, it's an axiom in trading, but it's also the rest of your life too. Yet what you control, you're this deeply friends, you control the mind that you bring into the moment of performance. Look at these guys right here. You design the self that you bring into the trading room. Look at these guys right here. You're looking at a chiseled team. Just like inside the mine where there is a ruler, a captain. You're looking at warriors. You're looking at people soothing themselves. You're looking at people with a clear thinking strategy of managing that boat under really serious circumstances. They're not scared, they're not acting from scare. They are acting from discipline, courage, self soothing and impartiality. That's what they're acting from. That is performance. Mind friends, you control the performance. If you control the performance. What you have is you have psychological edge. And guess what? When you have the psychological edge, you're able to bring forth.

Your statistical edge through your trading strategy. Until you can do that, you just have a trading strategy with a statistical edge. Could be, but the problem is you can't get your act together to be able to make that edge work. This is the missing link, friends. This is what's gonna happen, has to happen. It really doesn't matter what other people say. It doesn't matter how much they're telling you that this system works. There are a number of systems that work. If you get your head together.

It'S the, if you can get your head together and what you discover very quickly is most trading organizations, teaching organizations don't have a way of teaching that. You do hear that.

And what I want to do is I want to explain this and I like this explanation is that one of the best ways I know to explain the difference between traders mind and another mind is I want you to think about.

The African lion and the American cougar. Okay? They're both apex predators. Okay, Then this is the American cougar right here. And in Africa what you discover is the, the African lion chases prey, they run down prey, they take them down and they kill them. And what you discover, they have high injury rates, they have high loss rates, they get gored, they get kicked. And so they have to have large prides to be able to take care of all the wounded. And the losses they take, are they successful? Yeah, in that environment, no doubt about it. However, if you were to take that African lion and put him into the American forests, guess what? He'd starve.

Wrong environment for those skill sets. The question is this, is that then you go to the, then you go to the American cougar. His hunting style is not stalking, not chasing. His hunting style is ambush. What he does is you're looking at that guy on the left, he's up on a tree, he's hanging out. And if you were to look at a, an American cougar hunting, you would think he's asleep. He's just being, he's, he must be bored, he's just, he's just all over. No, what he's doing is he's patiently waiting for the setup to come. He knows that deer come along that path. All he has to do is wait here to see what the forest is going to give him. He's patient, he's self soothing when the moment arrives. And also, I might add, highly disciplined. He can sit up there and wait for a very long time. When the deer sets into the trap, the setup, he springs into action right there on the right. That fight lasts maybe a second or two. The cougar actually breaks the deer's neck by hitting its head really hard with those massive paws. And the neck snaps. It just drops to the ground. There's no chase. There's minimal losses. When he misses. If the deer gets up, if there's any, and runs away, the cat does not go after him. He climbs up the tree and starts over again. That's how. That's how traitors have to become. What I want you to understand is that the African lion is an apex predator. It's his environment.

Nature did that, evolution did that. It's the same thing with the cougar. By evolution and nature, they were able to adapt this creature for that environment. Your brain is adapted for a very different environment than you have in trading. The difference is that we're human beings. We're not trapped in one area. We can design ourselves to become the patient hunter like the cougar. That's what we teach in our course.

So when you go and you go, well, what is Randy saying here? What's your next step? The first is, tell me something. Do you really want to learn how to trade? I don't mean talk the game of trading, but actually saying, yes, I think I'm willing to do anything to develop myself as a whole person, to be able to trade successfully. And you come to the moment of going, you know this thing Randy's talking about with these emotions, the emotions and the thinking mind working together and you realize, oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. When I look at the right brain and left brain, they're the same size. It's not like I'm a good. It's not like I'm going to be able to ignore my emotional nature. That's not going to happen, friends. So if you're serious, you've been trading for a while and you, and you, you've come to the moment of going, you know something? I don't like to admit it, but I recognize I gotta. I gotta retool my head.

For the environment of trading. If you're a beginner, come explore the website. There's lots of free videos, lots of free articles. And get the book Mindful Trading, Mastering youg Emotions and the Inner Game. It will open your eyes.

Yeah. There's also a free ebook I would highly recommend. If you haven't got the free ebook yet, please get it. It's a good Introduction to my work. But if you've been trading for a while and you know that you have a problem and you notice that the problem problems aren't going away by wishful thinking or hard work. This is what we're going. First of all there's two courses, individual and group. But if the, if you're really sitting there and you're very serious.

Go to the website, hit contact us and find out which one's best for you. Talk to me. You know, ultimately if you want to be a successful trader, it's going to have to happen because ultimately you can ask for a free consult and we'll, we'll figure out a way to talk. We'll, we'll designate a time and Dolores.

Works all over the world in different time zone and finds ways of getting, of scheduling. So just get it there. But if you're just kicking stuff, you know, the thing is read the book Mindful Trading and really start deciding. Do I really want to develop emotional skills to be able to face uncertainty? If you do, I encourage you into the, to become the change first for the group course. It's coming up a little later this month and this is a. It's a virtual classroom. There's five group meetings and it teaches you the essential skills you need to be able to develop your emotional nature to work in partnership with your thinking nature to produce the probability mind that leads to consistently profitable trading. And if you go ahead and get this thing early, sign up by 5:25, you get a free basically emotional regulation workshop. And we, you can go to our website right now and pay $199 for it. I want to give it to you free because I want you to get it in the course now and start really working the course because a lot of people will get in late and they realize they're already late, they're already behind because I'm assuming that you've been practicing the emotional regulation skills before you get there. Okay, so go to the website, read the stuff. The individual course is highly comprehensive. It is highly personal and it comes ultimately it comes with 10 consults with me on Skype.

Yeah. And I'm gonna end Doris is gonna send you the link to register for the group course. It'll give you also descriptions and stuff like that. And the individual course is just something that it is great. It is depth. It has great depth about understanding yourself and understanding what the motivations are and how to go about changing deep seated belief systems that allow you to move from one place to the other and to develop Those emotional programs. Powerful stuff. Anyway, I just really thank you for being here. And we have a few minutes. Not, not many but if you have questions, I would love to be able to answer a few. And I'll try to get my glasses so that I can actually.

This is from David.

Is this okay? In trading there will always be uncertainty. No way to avoid.

You can retrain my brain. No, I can't retrain your brain. You can retrain your brain. I can teach you how to do that. But yeah, you have a brain that is wired for short term survival and it is wired to control environment. It is wired to be right. And, and you're going to have to redesign that brain to be able to be in the probability management. It's called neuroplasticity. And if you've ever. If you, if you're a person like me, you read some interesting things. I have enormous interest in reading about what's occurred in being able to help stroke victims recover. And what they're doing today compared to 10, 15 years ago is remarkable. They are actually rerouting and getting parts of the brain that are good and stuff like that and they're getting them to repurpose themselves and handle parts that are no longer available. And the same thing in this is that you retrain the brain is very trainable and you can do it. This is a two parter. I read an article by a trader who said the human mind is not suitable for trading. Maybe this be his belief. Well, well first of all, the human, he probably was not really tight with his understanding of language. Mind is a very different thing than brain. And what I'll say is the human brain was not designed for trading. It was designed for certainty. And what happens is that the brain needed to end trading. It needs to be designed to be able to accept uncertainty. You create the mind from the emotional programs that you. That's where the mistake he made is. But no, you can. You. He's right in the extent that no, your brain is like what you brought a brain to trading. That's not going to bring you success. However, because of neuroplasticity, you have a brain that you can redesign, but you're going to have to do it can. This is from Ken. Randy. First of all, I thank you for the free resources that you provide. You're welcome. I think your work is excellent. My question, it seems to me that your approach is a lifestyle change. Not just in trading but generally in life. Do you believe this? That one must transform your whole life to become a successful Trader. Thank you with gratitude. Oh boy, that's a loaded question. The answer is this, is that what most people discover when taking my work, that they start noticing that the skills that are developed for trading generalize to other areas, their life and they get much better with it. A lot of guys have noticed their golf games gotten better, their tennis games, their relationships with their spouses, their children, business partners and in fact it's hard to imagine. As a matter of fact, I have a number of people negotiating with me right now. They're seeing that I really ought to be expanding this work outside of trading into a more generalized area because it, it is.

It'S not like it's wasted on traders, but it's, it's something where there's the magnitude of this work.

That I, A lot of people can keep this totally scoped in trading because that's kind of where their minds at. But what people discover is that it bleeds over into other areas of their life and they end up with better lives. So understandable. Okay, so Lauren, what is the impact of meditation on regulating emotion? It can be useful. You'll find with I use mindful meditation in this particular practice. The key is, is that in mindfulness is what you're learning to do is you're, you're learning to separate from thought, separate from emotion. And what you discover is that their mindfulness becomes a tool for the redesign of the mind that you bring.

Meditation just to be meditating. The problem is it's just like a lot of people I get say well you know, I do yoga so you know, I've got this breathing and emotional regulation stuff and this meditation stuff down. So. So that's not really relevant to me. The answer is that's bs. You learn meditation most likely in a very calm yoga like environment. And unfortunately learning is very site specific. If you do not learn the skills in the environment you're going to be using them in, you haven't learned it. There's a lot of meditators who blow up counts like everybody else. This is from William how not forget all of that which you have been losing. When you're losing, you train. The thing is, is that's where a lot of the self soothing comes in. I'm not asking you to forget, I'm asking you to calm it down to the point where you've calmed down enough to be able to learn from it. And actually it's getting at the belief. Okay, is getting at the belief of what's this thing? Who says you are going to be winning okay. Is that you'll find a lot of successful traders. You'll find a lot of successful traders. They win about 40% of the time, which means they're losing 60% of the time. And what they've learned is that they don't control outcome. They control the mind they bring to performance. And if they bring, if they control that mind, they bring to performance, they know they're going to be losing. They minimize those losses.

Minimize those losses rather than, oh, my God, I've had another loss. That's showing you that you have a very faulty belief about your ability to manage.

In many ways, it's like sports psychology in that you're training for performance, not for outcome. Like, if you take a look at, if you look at, look at golfers, you know, you'll see hundreds of people in a tournament, PGA tournament, but ultimately there's only about 10 money people. And what you discover is those are the guys who can maintain order themselves as they're playing. They know they can't control the weather. They can't control their, the fans that are watching, the hecklers. They can't control the people who are, who are. You know, they can't control if another guy's having a great game. What they can control is the mind they bring into that moment. It may or may not be good enough to win, but it's always good enough for performance at the top of the top of the ladder. That's, that's the key here. You need to be looking at, what beliefs do I hold about winning and losing? Because I'm going to tell you something. Your whole attitude about losing has to change if you're going to be a consistently profitable trader. This is from Barbara. What do you think of dopamine addiction causing impulse trading? Happens all the time. You know, the thing is, is that another way of saying this for the rest of the people is when you feel euphoria, when you feel that.

You'Re feeling the dopamine and the testosterone taking over, and you end up doing some stupid things. Ultimately, the reward system of dopamine, when the limbic system solves a problem, remember, it's amoral, okay? It's solving the problem. If it works, it produces limbic learning. It doesn't produce a belief. And when it finds a solution to it, there's a shot of dopamine that comes in there that locks in habituation. And suddenly what you see is that that habit gets locked in synaptically and the more, the more success it has, like, say, keeping you out of a Trade that you could potentially lose is that the more it gets that dopamine kick and it becomes. It becomes an established pattern, reactive pattern. You have to be able to change that. And what you'll discover in my work is most. Most people think, oh, my God, if I get rid of fear, everything's great. No. Is that the biggest one? The biggest hurdle is once you get past fear is euphoria, is you start thinking, I've got it, I've got it. And you blow up and you give back everything. And that's something that most human beings have to go through, but you have to break the pattern of the way the dopamine and the patterns happen. But it's there. Yeah. Don, do you address specific habits that sabotage success? Yeah, in the individual course. Absolutely. And in the. In the group course, you know, if you choose to talk to me during the session. Yeah, we'll talk about. We'll talk about specific habits. As a matter of fact, what you'll discover, particularly in the individual course, is that it comes once you develop the essential skills that you need to be able to work with the brain and the mind is. That's exactly what we're looking for. We're looking. We're looking for the patterns. I don't necessarily call them habits. I call them patterns that are causing you to go astray in your trading. And we're looking to change them. And particularly we're looking later in the course, what we're looking for is actually recognizing that as you move from one place and you start moving into the territory of where you drift over into bad pattern, we actually start teaching you how to.

Anticipate, proactively that drift area and to change it. So, yeah, it's. It's very specific in the individual course.

Okay. This is Ian. I know. Ian. I have found what you say about bleeding over to other parts of life is very true. Yeah, Ian's. He was in our group course, and it's something where, you know, it's. What he's saying is, yeah, you learn these skills and what you discover is that you'd have to be an idiot not start using them in the rest of your life, too. And it's. It's. Well, not necessarily an idiot, but boy, I'll tell you. Mindless. Okay. Is that it? It. It's. Most people discover the work is.

Transformational. It's the best way I know to describe it. Okay.

Oh, Jamie. Okay, this is Jamie. Guys, do not think about it. Just get in right away. Randy is such an incredible human being and mentor and I didn't even pay. Jamie also is a former group course person. And this is just showing you that.

The group course is a very powerful vehicle.

If you want to see. Well, maybe, you know, maybe it really is something I need to look at or, geez, this is the most I can afford. But at the same time, what happens is that individual course, if you really want to get into the meat, okay, this is the way to go. It's for serious. It's very. It's for serious people. Okay. And again, it comes down to saying if you were interested, you know, you know, if you're just sitting there saying, oh, I'm going to talk to a trader psychologist for an hour and maybe I can pick his brain. That's so worthless. You know, what I'm interested in is are you motivated? Are you in a place where you are ready to say, I realize this is inside my head and I need tools to be able to do that. That's what the pre consult is about. Okay, the recording will be on the website tomorrow and I'll send them a link. Yeah, and Dolores.