Mastering the Brain Glitch that Turns a Good Day into a Bad

Foreign.

Have you ever found yourself in a place and this is usually when you hit a loss limit, you've had some bad moves and it didn't go well. You hit your loss limit and you're being a good trader, what you're doing is you're following your rules, you've hit your loss limit and you go, okay, I'm done, I'm packing it in. Or conversely, you've hit your profit, okay, and you know it's time to get out, close down before anybody could rob that profit from you and take it away. And so both, both of these, what you're doing is you're going in and you're saying, you know something, okay, now I'm going to be shutting down. So I'm protecting my capital, I'm protecting me and I can trade another day. Everything's good, everything's fine. Trading's mind right there. And then what you do is you say, you know, I'm shutting down, I'm just going to take a peek, I'm just a little curious, I'm not going to do anything, I'm just going to look. And then you go in, you take a peek and before you know it.

Whatever you were doing, whatever that plan was that you actually were following, you were actually following your edge, you actually had the rules, they're set up. And all of a sudden by one peak, suddenly you're in a trade and it's course not happening. Good for you. And before you know it, you've blown up everything that you've made, everything that allowed you to say, I'm following my rules, I've kept my losses low, I've got the whole thing, I'm doing well, I've conserved capital. Or that you've made the money and all of a sudden now you've given it back. And more that. Do you know where that problem actually occurs? That problem occurred in a skinny moment as you were closing down.

What you're discovering is that your emotional brain reactive and pattern generating that it is, and your thinking brain are no longer connected to one another. You think some pretty thoughts about how you're going to sit there and say, okay, I'm getting out, I'm closing down. But the emotional brain ignored has another thing. What if you just curiously go and check it, there's a trap set. You are bringing psychology from long, long, long ago that's bred into trait to look for opportunity or not to take that loss. And it's a pattern, it's a reactive pattern. And it's sitting there latent maybe. Maybe you don't see it. At the same time, what happens, all it does is take a skinny moment for it to open up and there's a chart, and all of a sudden you're projecting onto that chart what you want to see rather than what's there. Do you see where the hijacking occurred? Suddenly you go into tilt. And you know, whichever, you're either you're defending your capital against really losses, or you're defending your capital about not giving back what you've just very patiently won. It's a skinny moment you're about to be through. But.

Friends, that is the place where you're going to have to train yourself. Because it's like, okay, I've got it. I've done it. I think I'm in this thinking brain mode. When in fact, what happens is, apparently you just got emotionally hijacked. And here's the deal. The reason that happened is you hold a belief that you're a rational human being that has emotions, when the truth is, when you look in the mirror, what you're looking at is a great ape. We share the same brain as our great ape cousins, and it's reactive, it's emotional. It's not thinking about the future. It's thinking about right now and taking advantage of that moment now it doesn't know later, okay? And ultimately, though, it's sitting there lurking, and it is doing 95% of your decisions. That's what advertising agency figured out, is that your rational mind's not making the decision about spending a bunch of money on a pickup truck. Your emotional brain and that need to be a man, that's what's happening. And all of a sudden, it triggers just like that. You didn't see it because you weren't looking for it. And what I want to ask you right now is that, why aren't you looking for it? In my business, the one thing that I teach is a quote from Thomas Jefferson, the guy who had the great idea of the United States. What he said was.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. And what I want you to take a look at in these two examples that a lot of traders fall into. What happened there is the vigilance dropped. Oh, okay, I'm backing out. I'm closing down. Okay, I'm putting it on the shelf. But the emotional brain never put it on the shelf. And what happened is the traitor had never trained himself to decommission that part of the brain and to be working in partnership with it. Okay? There's Your deal right there. Ultimately what happened is you may have some intent, cognitive intent that says this is what I'm going to do. However, the emotional brain has motivations, powerful motivations that trigger it into emotional rampages. Okay? And what you've done is you've said okay, I have cognitive intent, so I'm going to be okay. No, your thinking brain is in all actuality a servant to your emotional brain. Your emotional brain makes a decision, then your thinking brain figures out alibis, figures out explanations that makes it have sense. That's what you've just done here. And it never got to the surface. In the same way that in advertising today what they're looking for is those motivations. They're looking for you to say, you know something is you'll have micro expressions going over your face as you watch something. And those micro expressions are telling you the advertising agencies a lot more okay than if you were to talk and say this is what my opinion is because you're always going to sound like you're a smart guy. Whereas what they want is the emotional decision making because what they know is 95% of the decisions you make are made by the emotional brain outside of thinking awareness. That's just what happened here. So how are you going to go solve that? Okay, it's got a bias, it's acting from. And you had an intention that got blown out of the water. What I'm asking for you to recognize is this is about self mastery. This is about learning that you have to get to know your emotional brain. Even though you would like it to shut up and stay at the end of the bench and just let you trade, it's not going to happen that way. All thinking is emotional state dependent. And what happens if you understand that and if you understand how little power the thinking brain has over the emotional brain and decisions that produce action, you're going to say, you know something, I need to deliberately build a relationship with that emotional brain. I need to, I need to know that it can be just sitting there in the backseat of my car and I'm driving, I'm driving the trading machine, everything's fine and it's just sitting there. Just pieces can be. Yet at the same time in the flash of a moment it triggers and the avalanche. The emotional avalanches happen and it takes over mind friends. That's what happens all the time. That's why very few traders actually make money, is they don't recognize that their thinking brain is servant.

Their emotional brain is the ruling committee. And until you learn to Use that thinking brain to calm down that emotional brain, it gets cranked up and it starts making very rapid decisions that are automatic. Okay? And at that time, the thinking brain's wiped out. Here. When you say, okay, I have the intent of closing down. You need to stop, you need to think going, okay, how is my emotional brain doing? How is it doing? You, if you're training with me, you are actually learning how to talk to that emotional brain and it's giving you feedback and you're learning more and more about it and you're recognizing. You know, I have a tendency to trigger to this. So I need to practice that tendency in real time. I'm practicing while I'm trading that if I hit this moment, this is one I know that it can trigger and go and go cuckoo. It's just like in American football. They continually practice at the five yard line. That's where the magic happens, okay? And so they practice for that situational football. They take all those situations, they train for them. So when the real game, when real money's on the line, that they're ready for it. In the same way, you need to do that too. You need to be prepared for these situations that, you know, you have a problem. I, lots of people have this problem right here. You know, they see the loss limit, they see the profit limit and they buy into the idea. But then as they try to close down, that peep ends up wanting just to look one more time. It wants to do a lot more than that. Friends, it is you who are going to have to learn to calm the emotional brain down by breathing, then by observation, recognizing what forces are at play in that brain right then that is beginning to motivate you to act. And then you're going to say, I need to pull up the A team. I need to pull up my empowered mind. I need to calm that orphan energy down. I need to recognize that there is a temptation going on inside me that wants more, more or get it back, get it back. And I need to confront that. I need to calm that down. And I need to work from the discipline of a ruler and I need to be able to work from the impartiality of a sage. That, my friend, right in that moment of saying, let me just take a peek.

That'S when it happened. All that stuff that I've been talking about happened in that moment. And rarely do you catch it unless you know how to look for it. I'm asking you to go and to learn to look for it and to say, you know, orphan we're calming down now. We're leaving the game. We're good. And literally talk to it down till you have the computer off. And, friends, that's the way you manage a situation like this. Thank you for your time. And there's a webinar coming up on this very topic. There's an article that you need to read that I hope you do about this very thing. And there's this video. Go from there. Get my free book. Get my book. And start really exploring how you can become an emotionally intelligent consumer of your emotions and understand what's really going on in your limbic system, your emotional brain, and learn how to manage it. Have a good one. Take care.

Sa.