Mastering Self Doubt Knowing What to Do and DOING It

Welcome everyone. My name is Randy Howell with my traders state of mind and just for tonight, it's a special tonight is that I'm recovering from some sort of bug and I still have a little bit of a cough and if I do start coughing, I'm sorry but think about it this way is I'm non contagious to you, most likely to anybody. But I just want to let you know that and I know it's there and I wish it were different but here we are. Okay, let's start at this place.

How many retail traders that are aspiring to become professionals know what to do.

But they're not able to do what they need to do when they need to do it? Okay. It happens all the time. A lot of people think, well golly Randy, I thought this was unique to me. No, no it's not. Is that most everything. It's just like in my book is I use a lot of case examples of what's the problem with their trading and people read the book and say God Randy, you got it in my head how did you know that I was thinking like this? I don't. This is the way all traders behave. This is the way the emotional brain has created pattern and takes over mine. It's been going on for about 9.5 million years. It's not like it's unique, it's not rocket science but yet people say like wow, how did, how is this happening? Well we're going to look at that today. Okay. We would love to believe that we're in control but trading reality keeps kicking in, proving we're not. This is what leads to the self doubt friends and performances. And this is what this is. I'm going to show you what we can do about it. What you need to actually do to be able to work there and to understand this. Understand the only housekeeping thing I have is that I hold questions toward the end. So hold your questions and we'll catch them in toward the end.

Friends, we bring a trading, we bring to trading a short term winning mindset. Okay, make things happen, but it does not work. Have you noticed that no matter how many times you try, you keep pushing, pushing, pushing and sometimes it just blows up in your face, right Then sometimes you give it all back. But what you do is you discover it doesn't work. Yet we're hooked into believing that it will work despite no evidence from your trading account. That's what we want to look at and going, how can such smart people, such dedicated people, such hard working people keep doing things that simply do not work.

And yet they don't have an explanation. They keep thinking it's just right around the corner. It's right around the corner.

So what you look at very quickly is this is much like Spock. We want to believe.

That we can be logical without emotion while making decisions regarding risk and uncertainty. We truly, truly hang on to logic.

Okay, as if it's actually there and that you can depend on it and that it's separate from emotion. Yet the trading mind is constantly taken down and we constantly see logic fails. This is what I want you to see, friends. And I'm really talking to people who really, truly know how to trade, but they can't figure out why they can't. And they really, truly are serious. Because there's a lot of people who want to have magical thinking. We're not offering magical thinking here. We're offering training, retraining the way the limbic system approaches uncertainty, okay? That's what we're doing. And we're teaching a new way for the thinking brain and the emotional brain to work together. That's what we're doing. So. And then, you know, the thing is you start trading and you know, you make mistakes, you're supposed to make mistakes and you see them as part of the learning curve and you know that the future is going to be bright once you get your hours in, you know that 10,000 hours, all that stuff is all of a sudden, somehow, magically things are going to fall into place and all the stupid mistakes and all the self doubt that you have is somehow going to disappear. And yet.

What we really do though is create a fiction in our mind about screen hours and then about internally trading the whole process. And it's a great story. We just keep telling about the story about the way we're going to get there, the way we're going to strive to get. But what I want you to notice is that, you know.

Two, three, five, 10 years down the line and upwards to hundreds of thousands of dollars later, you're in, no, you're in no different place. That's what I want you to see is there is just something absolutely missing, okay, from the screen of your mind that's not allowing you to see what the problem really is, okay? Because you're convinced you have the solution. And my promise to you is you don't.

It's kind of like something, like something is missing and it stands in your way. And the truth is, it's your performance beliefs even, even more. It's, it's actually.

What we would call.

Performance beliefs that are outside of awareness, okay. That are a part of emotional learning from the limbic brain, okay. And it dictates how you will see and do things. Okay?

This is going on unconsciously. It's in the limbic system. It's not like it's unconscious. It's really more like it's just pre verbal. Your mind and all its chatter doesn't see the limbic system just absolutely there in the background and everything seems so tame.

Until the limbic system experiences uncertainty. Then all of a sudden it wakes up and it could care less whether or not there's a thinking mind there or not. The thinking mind is just blown out. It's like it doesn't even exist. So it's this wall of self limiting beliefs that we have to really take a look at in your performances.

You don't have to see the implicit memory, okay. Of the limbic adaptation that guides your performance.

It is preverbal and it is in control of perception under pressure. That's the big deal is I want you to hear that is it's just sitting there. Meanwhile, you think you're in control because it's just sitting there and you don't even notice the limbic systems there. And all of a sudden it's yank out of control and it triggers under pressure and you're hijacked. And you never saw yourself getting hijacked except you find out that you know, I know what to do, but I can't do it when I need to do it and you choke again. This has been happening. Not this is just the way it does happen. What you do notice is something different in your head. You notice that logic once again being just absolutely swept away when you need it most. That's what most people do is they hear all this clamoring, all this self doubt and they don't recognize, well, why is this thinking here? The truth is, is that you don't know how to appreciate and accept the limbic system and its impact on the thinking mind. Until that happens, nothing's going to happen. And this is really what it looks like. More is what you get is that the survival states of the emotional brain just beats the dog stuff out of the thinking brain. Once, once there's stress, okay? And then a decision is made, then action is done. But the thing is, is that the thinking brain is crippled, okay?

This is what's really going on inside the relationship between your emotional brain and your thinking brain right here. And you know, it's a cute kind of cartoon thing but this is what it looks like. It stays this way until you decide to wake up from your emotional ignorance. Okay, it's nothing personal. It's nothing personal at all. It's just that you have to really grasp, you have no clue about what's going on with the limbic system. The way limbic system lays down emotional learning and how that implicit memory triggers in moments of stress, the thinking brain just simply doesn't have a chance in that particular case.

And until you master, okay, this particular, these survival instincts, your ability to act under pressure or uncertainty, it's going to continue to kill your best efforts. This is the way the ancient emotional brain is set up. It's not going to change because you have some thinking brain that shows up and decides it wants to be logical. The illusion is to believe you're thinking, to believe your thinking brain is in control. Nothing could be further from the truth. Your little caveman brain.

I promise you that it's the one in control.

To the point where what's interesting.

I love this.

Your belief that you're a rational being.

Actually stops you from developing your mind for trading. The truth is, is your, your, your limbic system would rather believe a reassuring lie until it's forced to act. Okay? And if you notice, it used to be that economists used to say that everybody will act rationally. And now in behavioral economics, they know this is to be untrue. People do not act rationally at all. And now there's a guy. If you've ever, if you want to do some heavy duty looking at what market research and advertising research is, a guy by the name of Dan Hill goes in and actually goes in and finds what actually motivates people to buy. And it's never the logic. It's always at a, at a, at a deeper level that is just on a limbic system level, very, very primitive. And it's that level that we keep telling ourselves, no, we're not really acting that way. The truth is, we are.

And you're going to be seeing this diagram in various forms today a number of times, because its most important thing you can imagine this is the reality of reflex and implicit memory and meaning. You know, fundamentally what you're looking at is an eye taking in sensorial data. It's a snake. It takes it to the visual cortex. It makes a decision whether or not it's going to take it into the limbic system or whether or not thinking brain. And what happens is before you know it, before the thinking brain even has a moment to go, what's going on is that it's all hijacked and things are all emotional and implicit learning has already taken place. And.

You'Re waking up later going, what, what, what, what, what happened? You weren't present to the emotion is what's happening okay.

And then. But it feels so good to have this notion of control. We want to believe that we control how many, how many people have a zillion, zillion pieces of equipment that help them to control outcome, to predict outcome, to be in control. And does it help you? No. You know, you get some area and you finally come to a moment of where there's always a gap between knowledge and what you have to act on. And you know that there will never be 100% surety. And the really great traders finally get rid of all that junk. They get rid of all the indicators. They go down to a couple, but they find certain things that they use and realize that they have to become comfortable with the uncertainty. They have to train their limbic system to become comfortable with that. And in here it just, you know, in the bubbles, this kind of bubble thinking, it feels so good to be certain. But the thing is that's only a feeling.

And it's a dangerous feeling, I might add. Okay. Is it's not reality. Is that this is where you, this is where you feel and fall from the bubble every time. Is that the whole notion of feeling certain, feeling good about yourself in trading is dangerous. You know, you, you really. A good trader is not allowed to feel good. A good trader allows himself to be disciplined and impartial. Okay. Winning and losing takes on completely different shape in this particular case. Okay. And this is how the dilemma that you have to solve right here, it seems like thinking is in control until it's not. Okay, so it's a catch 22.

You take this high probability risk. The emotional brain wants short term survival and all sudden you get into like a power match between your thinking brain and your, your limbic system. Who do you think wins.

Your limbic system every time? Friends.

Your thinking brain, what it really does is it produces alibis and fictions, explanations that support whatever the limbic system. The emotional brain has already decided. The thinking centers are disabled. Okay. That's why it's so important to be able to regulate the emotion and learn how to change the meaning within the emotion so that you can work with probability.

So, but let's take this another way. Okay. And this is. I really, really, really, really want you to see this because this graphic in one of the five ways I Show it to you is the thing that you're going to have to solve, okay? You're going to experience this inner struggle between emotion and logic is confusion, hesitation, freezing, or impulse. That's what happens when the brain experiences uncertainty. And in that uncertainty then hits vulnerability. That vulnerability then, is a direct route into fight flight. The. The thing is, is I want you to see information, sensorial information, coming into the sensory thalamus. And then there is a decision made there. Remember, this is a primitive part of your brain, okay? And based on its sense of history, it makes the decision.

To either send the impulse to the low road to the amygdala and fight flight, or. Or to the high road to the cortex. That's where. That's what you want when trading so you can think of probabilities. It's at that particular moment that you literally have to retrain the way the old ancient emotional brain interprets uncertainty. And unfortunately, it's not happening, friends, and.

It'S not negotiable, okay? It's negotiable for as long as you have capital that you're willing to squander. And at the same time, it comes down to.

Am I willing to go in and actually go to this level and learn how to work with my brain and my mind here? Because this is where the hijacking your thinking brain occurs. That's what I want you to hear. And it's not negotiable. You may want to believe it's negotiable, maybe with some more information, a new teacher, a new this, new that, new book, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden what happens is you have closets full of junk that you don't use anymore because there's a promise there that makes you excited, going, I'm. And I'm going to get past this. When it comes down ultimately to how do I train my limbic system, my emotional brain, to work with my thinking brain, okay? So this is. This is not working on a conscious threshold. It's working on an unconscious threshold. And it just takes over. It just absolutely takes over. And the way you might experience it could be this.

And by the way, I just want to let you know there's absolutely nothing the matter with you. This is embedded into every human being. And it's just that the matter with deaf people is that they're not willing to do anything about this. They're not willing to retrain the way the emotional brain approaches uncertainty. They keep thinking that they can do something about it, but they can't well, they can. And it comes down to this, is that, you know, if you look at it from the emotional brains perspective, not letting you get in the trade, you know, has saved you from taking a big loss that from its standpoint could be a biological threat. Okay? But to the thinking brain's perspective, suddenly the potential has been hijacked and it's gone. So what I want you to see is that the interpretation of the limbic system and the interpretation of the thinking brain are very different.

We've got an all brain, okay, Boat land, boat land. We've gotten it all brain where we can just out think this thing. The answer is no, you can. No, you can't out outthink this problem. As long as you try to outthink the limbic system, it just simply pushes away your thinking. It could care less whether or not you think or not. Remember to it, the thinking is just simply producing explanations that support whatever learning, emotional learning that's already present there. This is the big deal, friends, and there's really no way around it. And, and you carry this emotional brain from your caveman ancestors every time you engage in certainty. This is not negotiable, friends. Okay, you can walk away here this evening and say, yeah, that's really interesting. Golly, man, I learned a lot from Randy Owl. I listen to his lectures, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's meaningless. That's knowledge. Okay? The real key here is, is that can you learn? Can you produce the emotional learning that shifts the way the emotional brain and the thinking brain operate together until you can do that? And that's training, friends. And that's what we do. We train.

And ultimately it's going to stay the same until you do something about it. I don't mean find a better way, you know, convince yourself better, try harder, blah, blah, blah, blah. We already know that the order of thinking that you brought to trading is not going to work. We already know that. The question is, have you figured that out yet? Because it requires a completely different paradigm shift in the way that you think and perceive to be able to make that jump between being a knowledgeable trader and a profitable trader. It just takes that. So what we got.

Here's the problem. If you take a look at it, your limbic system, this is pretty much what it's doing. You know, it's saying, well, you know something, it's maybe bad, you know, maybe my. Maybe things aren't going really well right here where I am. But the truth is, as you know, golly, if I go into the future. God almighty. What? No telling what I'll find. The demons out there could be so much worse than the ones that I have here. What happens is that so you stay the same. You stay the same. You say, well, I'm not going to change because what if I change? What if I was wrong? Well, shoot, right now you're draining capital. What more can be worse? So the question.

Are staying level. This is the emotional brain's bias. Ignoring the emotional brain simply gets you into trouble, friends. It's, it's nothing for again, it's nothing personal. And you really have to decide whether or not you want to become a successful trader or not. If you, if you've been trading three to five years and you know how to trade and you see that you're not trading successfully, something should be telling you there's something really wrong with the way that emotionally and mentally you're approaching literally the uncertainty that has to be dealt with in trading.

So the real key is how do you go about solving this? It starts with emotional intelligence. You start recognizing that, yeah, that thinking brain is really important, but it's highly overrated. And that the emotional brain is part of you that.

Where all the implicit learning, all the implicit emotional learning has taken place and that it's sitting there, it's loaded, it's ready to go, it's looking for matches out in the environment. And when it finds matches of uncertainty, it simply triggers and thinking is just simply pushed out of the way and you don't notice it, but it becomes very contaminated. That's just kind of the way it is.

Misunderstanding emotions is not really an option, friends. It really isn't. It's more about how to use emotions. Then that's really what we're going to be looking at here. So, and this is going to be one of my last of these. But I still want to show you this one more time. This is what you have to reprogram. This is the whole nine yards. And here we go again. We have that sensory Solomon, you have the information coming into it. We have that low road that by the way fires in 003 seconds. And we have that high road that, you know, it can take a half a second for information to get there. And this is the big deal. It's right here. This is exactly what has to be reprogrammed. Natural selection adapted your brain for success in different time, in different place, changing the settings by design. Now you're not gonna get lucky. I don't know, some people do. But the chances of you getting Lucky are slim friends, okay? And yet at the same time, if you go about designing it, you can really change the way this thing works.

We put. We put the cart before the horse, okay? Much our disadvantage now. We. We look at emotion and logic and we think, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna lead from logic as if there is logic. Okay? This is a. There's a wonderful saying by Huxley that says man is not a rational animal. He is a rationalizing animal. And you begin to go, wow, okay, Whatever the emotional brain has decided, then what happens is that the. The logical mind, it's going to produce these explanations that make sense out of it in hindsight, okay? In the midst of it, it gets hijacked. So we're putting the cart for the horse, and we realize that that really needs to change. And the other thing that we discover is this, is that you don't see objects out there. You know, this objective reality. I mean, you know, this eye that you're looking at, I'm looking at my wife, you know, and I see these objects out there. And yet what I know. I want you to hear this, friends. What I'm really seeing is my beliefs. I'm seeing a virtual representation that has been rigged, rigged by my brain, okay? And then projected as beliefs onto the markets. So basically what happened is that you're believing.

And out of that believing, you're seeing. The difference is that in trading is that there is a trading account, okay? And that trading account is not going to lie to you. It's going to. It's going to. If it's. If the beliefs. If the virtual representation is effective, it's going to extract capital out of the markets. If it's ineffective, it's going to have you giving money back. And actually, it's very interesting. I worked with two guys in a hedge fund where one of them was kind of the star who just performed really, really well. The other one performed well, but not all that good. And yet, at the same time, they were best friends. They used the same methodology. They had the same feeds, they had everything and sat side by side and talked constantly with one another. And yet at the same time, ultimately, one of them was trading not to lose, okay? The other was not trading to win. The other was trading to perform.

You know, he was letting go of outcome. He wasn't trying to win and make things happen. What he realized is that his methodology, if he followed what he was doing, it gave him an edge. And what he was doing is his job was to perform that methodology that's what he was focused on.

And this is a guy that he worked with me and he was not, at one time he was okay, but he truly, truly became a much better trader. But it's because of you really begin to go, wow, I begin to get it. Okay, Randy's saying that I do not see and then believe. No, you believe and then you see. Yeah. And your trading account is giving you an accurate truth meter reading of whether or not that belief system that you're seeing through is effective or not. The, the trading, the trading account is the only thing that you should trust. Don't trust yourself. Trust your trading account. It will tell you the truth. Okay, now.

Here'S the last one of these you're going to see. And again, the reason I have put so many in here is this is because I need you to get. Or I should say, I can't say. I need you to. I want you to. You know, I work with people all day and what happens is they finally wake up and they say, randy, I wish I'd been listening to you. My God, this makes a lot of sense. I wish I'd been listening to you a long time ago. But now I've burned through all my capital. I hear that all the time. What I'm trying to do is this is, I want you to understand how far behind the eight ball you put yourself when you stay and choose to stay emotionally ignorant. Okay, Again, what you see here is you see the stimuli coming in, you have that sensorial thalamus and there's a decision made about low road. In my way. That's.003 seconds, no thinking required, before the emotion has already taken over and produced action.

No thinking required. How many times have you found yourself frozen? There's no thinking going on. The emotions taken over and it's so much faster. Meanwhile, on the high road, what I want you to notice is how long it takes the information to get to the thinking brain. Half a second later, it's late to the game. Okay, this is, this is the dilemma that you're in and this is something where you can train yourself out of it, but you're not going to trick yourself out of this at all. It's just not going to happen that way. Good luck with that. I, you know, just take all this stuff, do it. And until you finally come to the moment where you realize it's not going to work, your job is really to interrupt the emotion before it hijacks thinking. This is your mind body connection and the first place you start is recognizing that emotions are biological, that they have a breath, intention signature, and that you can disrupt and regulate an emotion simply through the way you breathe and the way you have tension in your body. If you trade, trade tomorrow and just start noticing how much tension you have in your body, how little you're breathing. And what you're doing is just saying if you're doing that. What you're basically saying is, okay, I am pushing myself closer and closer and closer to the fight flight response. And the truth is I'm going to ignore my body because I don't think my body exists. It's all in the mind. And what I'll say is, go ahead and do it, friends, is that you regulate the body. What you do is you calm the brain down. That gives rise to the mind. That's what we're talking about. And as you do this, as you regulate emotion, and this is actually showing you, you know, it's pretty easy. It's diaphragmatic breathing or bellows breathing. I teach it and a lot of people teach it. It's been taught for the last 5,000 years. It's not like it's new. But what you do is you finally realize that these emotions really do have a biological signature. And you can figure out how to manage their intensity so they don't take over mine. So the very first task is regulate the emotion so that it doesn't sweep thinking away. Duh, what an idea. What an idea. Okay, you're actually regulating the emotional brain before it does damage. Okay, but that's never enough, friends. That is never enough. Okay, the, the next part is that you have to become an observer of the self. You have to start beginning to be able to literally observe thoughts and beliefs not as who you are, but, but it's as literally energy that's going across the screen of your mind. And as here, Murti Krishnamurti is saying, the highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment. Who in here judges themselves without judgment? Very few. But until you learn to master that, you know, no amount of negative judgment know about pejorative thinking is going to, to make you a better trader. It just digs it deeper. And if you want to see this, particularly the body and the mind, get a mirror, use a mirror and start really looking at yourself as you trade. It's scary sight going, oh my God, man, I've got so much attention. Yeah, you're right on the edge of fight flight to begin with. And you wonder why fight flight takes over. It's because you're not Managing the emotion. This is this, this is step one, friends. This is not the big stuff. This is not reorganizing inherent material. But this is the second skill, mindfulness. Awakening the observer, the self. And you discover that you and your thoughts, you and your beliefs are not the same. And when you start recognizing that, going, oh my God, what is this that I am then? That's a good question. That's a good question.

You know, my wife and I used to live near, in the Bay area, in San Francisco. And we went to, we spent a lot of time in wine country. And in the fall, you would see these vast swarms of birds doing this right here where you would see these organic shapes. And they're just thousands of birds, thousands and thousands and thousands. And you're watching them literally self organize.

Human beings do the same thing we self organize. Your brain gets you into a. Well, it finds you in a situation and it self organizes the different elements of your humanness into a self, into a potential self. It's not you. Okay? But the thing is, is that what I want you to hear is that you come to trading with a particular self organization. And I can promise you that it's not going to work for trading, however, you can design self organization so that that self organization that engages uncertainty put produces a disciplined, impartial mind to deal with uncertainty. It's a big deal. Okay? We can impact the self organization we bring to the trading mind. Friends, this is the big news. This is the big news, but only if you're willing to commit to training. It's not going to happen because you decided or it's a good idea or that some interchangeable process. No, this is an organic substance. And what you're doing is you're changing neural circuitry of implicit means of emotional learning. That's what you're doing, friends, and it's not for everybody. But at the same time, what I'll say is, is there. You know, trading could be so easy, it could make people so much money, but it doesn't. It's because they don't take this step, they're not willing to do this step. Okay, so what we're saying is that organization that you brought to trading, no matter how good it's been in other areas of your life for survival and for advancement, stuff like that.

Has always been.

Rooted in the illusion of control. And maybe you could produce that over time, okay? However, when it comes to trading, what you discover is you're not in control even if you predict. What you discover is that your predictions can easily be wrong.

The trading gods just don't care. Ultimately, that's what it really comes down to. This becomes your job as a trader. To reorganize the mind that trades really okay. Until you get it that the mind that you brought is not going to work and that the brain and the mind have to be redesigned for dealing with uncertainty and vulnerability and risk. That's the magic, friends. That's where the magic happens. But most people are too scared to look within the mind and they stay stuck in the repeating patterns of interaction. And they keep thinking it's going to change, it's going to change, it's going to change. No, it doesn't. It doesn't change. And all of a sudden you've drained your. You drained your capel. And it can be different. And where it starts is really understanding the brain. And the mind is that.

You know, I talk about the limbic system and I think about the thinking brain and stuff like that. But what I really know, these are metaphors that I use. What I really understand is the brain is a system that all the parts are working together. They're not, you know, they're not. Things are not isolated in one area. They're just. It's a. It's a mess in there, okay? It's a beautiful organic mess. And the brain is literally a community of rival and cooperative emotional program that have duked it out for control of the mind. Winner takes all and it becomes you. If you've ever seen the movie Inside out, they've done a great job in a cartoon way of demonstrating how emotional programs take over the stage of the mind, duke it out and are constantly in competition with one another to produce leadership of what's going to happen with, with the kid. So we get this thing where you're going, okay, I get it.

I get it is that I have not been attending to my brain or my mind and it's been organized in a particular way that's not working for trading. And I need to wake up and I need to decide whether or not I'm willing to go through the effort of reorganizing the brain that trades. When you do that, something magical happens. You begin to recognize that the mind is really a space where all these programs are given voice. And it becomes a pretty complicated place inside your mind when you have self doubt. Understand there's at least two positions and argument in self doubt. You may have. People may have three or four different frames of reference within their mind and they don't know how to pull them Together so that they're consistent with one another during periods of uncertainty. That's the whole thing. We want you to go, well, how do I drive this machine? How do I drive this machine? The truth is, is somebody needs to provide some reorg to the default programming that you came came to town with. And if he's accepted that it's not working, then you're going, well, what does work? How do we go about doing it? And as you gain confidence in this work, what you discover is that you discover there's an internal struggle going on within you all the time. I mean, it's really like the bad and the good destructive and construction are going on within you simultaneously. And the truth is that it's been going on forever. It's just that you have not been waking up as a competent consumer of how to deal with this. Your job is to reorganize the mutiny.

So that the forces can work cooperatively for managing uncertainty. Understand, they came into being to try to control outcome, to control predictive thinking because it produced a survival advantage. Okay? In today's world, that no longer works in trading is you're no longer producing a survival advantage by trying to be in control or predicting. Now what we're doing is we want to have a completely different mind, a probability based mind that can deal with probabilities and be comfortable with the uncertainty. That's the deal.

The third task is you learn to observe the inner critic and orphan as voices in the mind and their power in your ignorance. Okay? What you're going to discover is that there is an inner critic. There is a very destructive part of the self. It will criticize you, it will judge you, it will tempt you. If you've ever had impulsive trading, you know, you know the inner critic. If you've ever had self doubt, you know the inner critic. But there's also this orphan nature within all of us. That's your fear. And I actually call that your emotional brain. And ultimately that orphan nature of yours has to learn to trust higher brain function. Until it learns to trust, it will always hijack thought.

Under pressure. So that's the deal. Okay? This is called your historical internal dialogue. And most likely you've been ignoring it at great cost to your performance, thinking if it'll only go away. If it'll only go away. This is Lao Ze, one of my favorite guides is what I want you to hear is this Mastering others is strength. Basically controlling outcome, making things happen, strength. Mastering yourself.

Is true power. To me, trading.

Is an endeavor that calls you toward your true power.

And there is no room for wiggling.

That's the big deal about trading. There's no room for wiggling. And you're recognizing is that this isn't about mastering others. This is really about mastering myself and the way I respond to uncertainty. And yet at the same time, what I'll say is, none of this happened yesterday. You probably know this guy. He was a Roman emperor. He's one of the philosopher kings.

And what he said was very simple.

You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength. Okay, What I want you to hear is destruction and construction both live within us. It's the one that you learn to feed, that wins. Most people are going to stay in their ignorance, emotional ignorance, and they're not going to learn that you never had power over outside events anyway. That was an illusion. But what you do have is you have power over your own mind. That engages the moment. That's the deal, friends. This is the one. You have to learn to feed and to grow. And the truth is, for some unknown reason, people don't want to do it. Okay? And trading keeps on burning through their capital and they, they learn late, but it's too late. Then they're extinct, they're gone. They're no longer participants in the conversation. So.

What? Ultimately, there is, there is a shift between the survival instincts of the emotional brain.

And the mind rooted in comfort with uncertainty. That's the big deal. This is the mindset that people are wanting to develop. And it can be developed. We teach how to develop that mindset. Okay? You're no longer trying to control outcome or be right. Imagine that, man. I'll tell you something. You're trying. You're controlling the mind that you bring into the moment of performance.

That's the big deal, friend. That's the game changer. And it's sitting there right in front of your mind. And yet you haven't even seen the emotional brain until it's already kicked ass on the thinking brain. What we want to do is we want to reshape the potential of the self. We want to be able to change your responses to uncertainty. Its meaning. That's what's needed. You train yourself so that discipline, courage, self soothing and impartiality become your emotional response to uncertainty. Not the default programming that you brought with you from natural selection and adaptation from that. Okay, that's easy. It's there, man. It's just wired there. But the thing is, as a human being, you're a lot more than a Smart animal. You can become the designer of the mind that you use to engage uncertainty. And as Marcus said, that's the game changer, okay? It's up to you. That's the whole point, is that it comes down to you're writing your own script, okay? Nobody's doing it. It's all out. It's not done out there. It's done inside. You're constantly rewriting that script. Who you are of, what the community of the mind really is, who's in control of that mind and how you engage uncertainty, okay? There. Unless you take control of this facet of this self narrative, this self organization, then do yourself a favor and find an easier way to make money rather than trading. Because you may have desire, you may have this, but until you're willing to do this, success in trading is going to be elusive. So, you know, as you listen to this.

My hope is you're going, wow, this is really interesting. I never thought of it that way. Well, good. But what do you do? The very first thing is, if you're not really well acquainted with my work, go to my website. Go to our website and get the free ebook. It's a good start. It gives you something going, yeah, this is like all those other things I can go and they want to give me something free. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing is, what I'm asking you to do is take a look at it and start reading and start opening your mind. And then you'll discover that there is an enormous library of videos, webinars and articles that can be accessed through the website. And people, people spend hours on my website, on our website, studying. And I actually have people say, randy, your videos, your articles have changed my life. You know, I look at and go, wow, boy, that's really interesting.

I don't know how that happened. But the other thing, when it comes down to it, my book, Mindful Trading, it really shows you the inside of a trader's head. It shows you what actually you're going to have to do to reorganize that mind to be functional in the world of trading. Then beyond that, it comes down to an individual course and a group course. When you go, you know something? I really want to learn how to produce this change. You know, I can read lots of trader psychologists and they can describe and diagnose the problem. But what I want to know is how do you change if you come to that moment.

Excuse me, friends, it comes down to the group course and to the individual course of where in these two courses we Actually teach the. How about how to redesign the emotional brain to be able to tolerate uncertainty in different way and work in conjunction. Work in conjunction with the. The trading. With the trading. Trading Thinking mind, the group course. By the way, I, I encourage you to really look at this. Our next class starts in June and you sign up now and get a head start. We give you some free stuff for signing up. But more than anything is that a lot of people now are starting the group course really early because what they discover is that if you show up on time for the group course, you're already going to be behind. You're going to. I'm assuming you've been working for two to three weeks. The first time we meet. It's a very fast pace. It's very. Just absolutely mind opening and understanding how the limbic system, the thinking brain act together to produce mind and why you haven't been able to do success. The individual course is just enormously highly comprehensive and it's highly personal. And it comes with 10 sessions with me. And that's why people do it. They, they want to work directly with me. They found, they go, wow, you know, I finally found the guy who actually knows what he's doing. And you know, I'm willing to risk capital to find out if he can actually teach me how to do this. And friends, it's whatever you want to do, but I can promise you is that the trading gods really don't care. And if you want to be successful, you're going to have to change the mind you brought to trading. I want to thank you and if there's any questions.

Please write them in. Here's from Natalie. Can you give us an example of how you were practicing mindfulness reorganization during a stressful period in your trading and what it looked like? Well, let me do this. Let me actually give you an example of a guy that I'm working with right now. Okay? The guy, a guy that I work with right now was very typical. He's very smart guy and he's retired attorney. And what happens is that he has a tendency. He knows how to trade. He, I mean he actually has followings of people who actually want to know what he's predicting and all this kind of stuff. And ultimately what happens with him is this, is that he starts feeling. When he starts winning, he starts feeling good. He starts actually, it's actually called euphoria. When you start winning and you start feeling good, that's a very dangerous thing because euphoria is an emotional state that is telling you that the good times are going to roll on forever. Now for him, this has been blowing him up for the last five years to the tune of, you know, 50, $60,000 a year. And what he's come to now is he's come to realize is that there is a part of him. And we would actually call this his orphan nature. We would call it little professor. And he wants to prove that he's smart. He wants to prove that he's smarter than the markets, as if the markets care. And what he does is because he jumps in and becomes impulsive, he finds himself absolutely obliterated. Now with him, what he's come to recognize is that.

Actually becoming witness to becoming observer of that orphan part of himself, the one that wants to prove himself essential. And he's actually developed a system where he's talking to that part of himself. He's. It's a process called externalization, where you're recognizing that I have to calm this down because otherwise. And what he's doing, he's doing the breathing, okay? And we also have a heart monitor on him so that we're actually watching when the emotion actually triggers. And we have it so that it moves long and it triggers and it starts getting higher. It gives a voice activated moment that's saying, you know, you're out of the range. And he's, he's training himself to pull himself back off the ledge. Okay? Now this is fairly sophisticated stuff. This is this one of my personal clients. And what you discover is that in calming down, he gets back his mind and all of a sudden he's no longer jumping into trades, he's calming down. And what he recognizes that it's very important for him to teach what we would call arrested development. An arrested development part of the cell that first he's loved. That's the self compassion. He doesn't need to prove himself. And that he's going to be disciplined because he is loved, not beaten up, but disciplined. No, we're not going to do it that way. What you discover is in his mindfulness, he is continually reproducing memory. And I use a process called memory enrichment of where we go into a memory of a time that you have been challenged, you've been scared, but you pull through. And we deconstruct that experience and we find the elements of discipline, we find the element of courage, of self, soothing, impartiality. Those are the emotional programs that can deal with uncertainty. And he learns how to pull them forward to create the mind. Okay? That's how he does it. And we're doing well.

This is from Alan. When you say that you need to change the script, you are referring to. Are you referring to changing your belief? Are the beliefs not stored in the subconscious mind? If so, how does one communicate with the subconscious mind? First of all, I don't get into subconscious mind. The limbic system is threshold beyond consciousness, okay? And it's sitting there and it has implicit memory already attached. It has emotional learning that's already there. Remember, I'm a neurobiologist guy, I'm not a new age guy. And I find the subconscious to be.

The way it's presented, the way it's delivered is bullshit, okay? It's the best way I describe it is that you're not going to talk your subconscious, you're not going to talk your limbic system into believing something that it doesn't already.

Okay? You have to know how to do that and you're not going to do it by being able to say, I've got some affirmations, I've got some visualizations in those works of like priming the subconscious with all this positive flooding. What you discover, it doesn't work under pressure, okay? What we're talking about in beliefs is we're talking about implicit meaning that the limbic system has formed in its pursuit of developing an entity that can survive in the environment.

And what we're doing is we're going in and saying we need to go back to that implicit memory, implicit belief. And they're easy. There's no rocket science here. This is literally going to about a sense of a sense of inadequacy, a sense of unworthiness, a sense of not mattering or a sense of powerlessness. And that's the glue that has created your reactivity to uncertainty. That's what you have to go into and you have to change. Now, I use it through the metaphor of the orphan and stuff like that. I just find it very useful that way. But ultimately you're bringing self compassion to it as a major part of it. But you're also bringing the discipline of a ruler. You bring the courage of a warrior who will turn toward fear and stand down and stand down with it. And over time, what you discover is that you know something. I don't have to have a subconscious mind. What I realize is the limbic system is back there anyway. And it's the one that's full of all the implicit meanings and implicit emotional learnings that that's what has to be changed, friends, that's what has to be changed. And it can be changed. Okay. So anyway.

Okay, that's it as far as questions. And it just so happens that we're recording this, this webinar and it's going to be on our homepage of our website tomorrow. Okay. And that would be you. There it is at the bottom of the thing. And what I want you to look at is I want you to go back to those 10,000 slides I threw at you about the, the, the thalamus and the way decisions are made is that if you want to call that subconscious, you can. However, I would actually say it's pre verbal. You know, it is, it is just enormously, enormously powerful and primitive. And you have to learn to work with it gently and you're not going to talk it into anything.

This is from Michael. Is the group course as effective as the individual course? You know, Michael, I wish I could answer yes or no on that. We get a lot of people who are deeply satisfied with the group course.

And the interesting thing about the group course is we know that you're not going to get it the first time around. And we actually give everybody who takes the group course a free pass to take it again because we want you to experience it and we want you to take it to a different level. What we have discovered over time is it really about money. Okay, is the reason that there's a group course is. Cause I had a number of trader trainers saying, randy, we want, we want to give some training to our folks. But the thing is they can't, they can't afford the individual work. Can you give us something that gives us something to work with? Yeah, I mean, real skills, real skills. I don't mean to like pithy little utterances that come out of a mind that says.

Crazy stuff about the mind and trading, but actually, how do you deal with the brain and the mind? So what I'll say is, is that, you know, out of that got born the group course. And I'd say about 15, 20% of the people who take the group course will end up as in the individual course. And, you know, from there, you know, they, what they do is they get to take a risk, you know, at less money and they get to find out that this is serious course. This is. You're not going to go, you're not going to go to another trader psychologist and find information like this at all. It's just not going to happen. Go check it out. And people go, well, now I have confidence to move because what I really want is, I really want to work with Randy individually, but I just needed the confidence to be able to decide whether or not, you know, he actually knew what he was talking about. I certainly can, I can appreciate that with his much snake oil going around these days as there is, but both are highly effective. And I, it's really comes down to, you know, if all things being equal, take the individual course, you know, to, to a professional trader, $3,500, nothing. You know, to a struggling FX trader, $1200 and, you know, breaking it down into five payments, a struggle, but they're making a commitment to their development.

And 1200 is the group course. 1195, actually. So the thing is, is I would rather say that they're both highly effective.

And, you know, sure, in the best world, the individual course is probably the best. But at the same time we see miracles, just absolute. Like, how in the world did that happen coming out of the group course? And fundamentally what we see is that if you work your tail off, whether or not it's the individual or whether or not it's the group, the work's going to happen in you. It's the people who start doing the work the night before the session. Those are the ones who go, well, you know, it's just not as effective for me. You know, I don't know what the problem is because you're not working. This is, you know, when you start, when you start retraining the brain, it's not like it just says, oh, well, golly, let's just be plastic and just change me. And it's ever. It's just like with stroke stuff, when you take a look at people working with neuroplasticity with strokes, man, you're talking three to six months of retraining the brain to produce a different mind. And, you know, this same thing here is that you work it, man, you work the program. If you work the program, results are going to happen. It's. It's that simple. I hope that answers your question. And we've, we've got our allotted hour here and I want to thank you for coming and also putting up with my voice. I thought it did pretty good today, and I'm just getting better and better every day. And my hope is this is that no matter what, I hope that you've come to the moment where you realize that you can be a designer of the mind that you bring to the performance trading. And the truth is it's really nothing less than that is going to be enough, except for rare, rare, rare, rare people. And my hope is that you find a way of building that mine. And if I can be part of that solution, I'd love to be. You know, the thing is this. I love traders. I love what they're trying to do, and I love what they're attempting to do. And I also know that they're blind as a bat to what has to happen.

On a brain level and on a mind level to be able to accomplish their goals. So I thank you, friends. I really do. It's been. I've had a great time, and my hope is we, we sit, we meet again, together again. Take care.