Mastering the Limiting Beliefs that Crash Your Trading Psychology

You have a partner in your trading that you don't know about. The partner. Are those limbic beliefs existing within the emotional mind, actually the emotional brain? The problem with this is that you probably don't even know that you have the limbic learnings turned limbic beliefs. They operate at an enormously deep level and I call them core beliefs. And you can't believe what you think about them. Okay? What you have to do is you have to find an arbiter that you can trust. That trust, that arbiter is your trading account. Literally what you're looking at in your trading account is the beliefs you have about your ability to manage uncertainty being projected onto the markets. That's what you're actually trading. You're trading your beliefs. This is where all the problems come from. It's not the ones that you don't know about. You have a set of beliefs that you don't know about that are impacting your ability to trade effectively. And even if you have a substantial edge in the markets, if you haven't got the psychological edge, if you haven't examined the beliefs that you perform from, you're never going to achieve that edge. Okay? So there is a piece of self examination that has to occur once you get past all that. I'm going to get rich, rich, rich, rich, rich. I'm going to do all that stuff. No, really, when it comes down to it, it comes down to what beliefs are driving your performances.

So what you end up having are these beliefs you say you have. I'm a disciplined trader and the beliefs that are revealed in your trading account are your performances. I'm going crazy here. Things bouncing around on me. I know it's what's going to happen. It's getting near my stop and I go bananas. I do things that are not in my trading plan. Those are your beliefs in action.

That's just the way they are. And ultimately this is about limbic learning. Your limbic brain doesn't create a belief like verbally. It creates a belief where it learns inexperience with the markets or actually as your brain is developing from childhood on, is that it's going, you know something? We're just finding an effective way of dealing with, with the challenges in our environment.

And it finds an effective way of dealing with it. It locks it in as pattern, as behavior. Okay, Boom, just like that. This is what limbic learning actually looks. Your ego is derivative of your evolutionary psychology. There was a profound need to win, because if you didn't win, you became somebody's Meal there was a profound need not to lose, because guess what? You died. That was the frame of it. So guess what? We modern human beings come along and we have this idea that we can win. We have to win. We're not going to lose. Whatever we do, we're not going to lose.

And it's coming out of our caveman days, out of this. Those limbic learnings that limit the ability to you to be able to perform in the face of uncertainty, these are part of an emotion, okay? And a lot of that emotion is implicit. That means you don't know about it. It's subconscious, it's operating in the background on automatic and just fires. That's why when you get into challenging moments in trading and all of a sudden it just takes it a different way and you go, what was I thinking? What was I doing? When you come back to your senses, you say, I have no idea.

My evil twin took over. That's how it works.

The whole key is you're bringing that brain from your caveman days with a need for winning, not losing, predicting outcome. And you're placing it into a world that it was never built for you. Really, it was never built for it. It's built for short term survival. And trading is about probability management where you're going to be losing a lot and you have to become an exceptionally good loser. And you have to have a set of beliefs around losing that allow you to take hits, take hits and maintain the edge. Because it's coming, you have an edge. It's just not going to happen right then. In truth, the brain cannot tell the difference between uncertainty.

Not knowing what's going to happen, and fear. They have been associated so tightly in the primitive brain that the moment you hit uncertainty and there's risking it, risking your life, risking your capital, all of a sudden, all those old, old limbic patterns, primitive patterns take over. And the mind, the thinking mind, just gets wiped out. That's the point. And really what it boils down to is these beliefs are rooted in a couple beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty. The first one is a sense of inadequacy. Practically every trader has come to a moment in their evolution where they go, you know something? Maybe I just wasn't cut out for this. I don't think I can't make it. I just don't have what it takes. I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. And what happens is you're seeing that. And a lot of times you try to cover it up by this fragile ego. That wants to, yeah, I'm a big tough guy, big tough woman. And yet at the very bottom of it, there's that small voice, sometimes shouting voice, shouting about your inadequacy. That's the first one. The second one about your mattering. If I win live, I matter. If I lose, I'm not alive, I don't matter anymore. This is really powerful. And I can't tell you how many people I work with, particularly alpha male type guys, who, they want to win and they want to make things happen, which by the way, is disaster in trading. And what you discover is that it is by winning that they matter. They get that sense of like, hey, man, I matter because I've just won. And the truth is trading doesn't care. And so you have to really untwine that particular belief so that it's your mattering isn't about your performances. Otherwise you're giving the trading gods way too much ammunition. The third one, deserving.

Again, I can't tell you how many people feel as though they don't really deserve to make easy money fast without work. You know, say, I don't deserve this. There's that key word, I don't deserve this. You know, what happens is I just need to give it all back and then I'll start over and I'll work hard. And that's what I've learned. I don't really deserve easy money. I don't deserve this life. And that's a big one that you have to overcome. And it's deeply related to the next one. Scarcity. That's when you fear that what you have is going to be taken from you. Hey, have you ever not been able to get into a trade? Because what if I lose? There it is. It could be taken away from me. Or you finally go through the gyrations and the hijacking, but you finally get it and you're finally in the black. And guess what you do? You jump out of the trade with a skinny profit. You're scared that the money is going to be taken from you. Yeah, yeah. Can you see how these beliefs all work together to create the mind that you're using to engage the challenges of trading? The last one, the last one is about powerlessness. If you've ever been in a trade and things just whipsawing on you, all that, then you feel, you feel that powerlessness. Oh, my God, I don't know what I want to do. That, my friends, is very common. And again, it goes back to evolutionary psychology. You know, when we were Powerless man. We needed to go nuts. We needed to do everything we can to survive in that moment. Fortunately.

We humans have something called neuroplasticity, where we can change the beliefs that are wired into path pattern, into structures, into neural structures. So that we start with a belief that is self limiting. But we, upon examination, when we have the courage to turn toward it, we can begin to change that belief. We can bring that belief. So it's really about what we control in life is our performances, the mind we bring into the moment, not whether or not we win or lose, but literally the performances. That's where it really, that's where it locks down. This becomes the intentional mind. This is the mind that is needed to manage uncertainty. It can be done, friends, it can be done.

And this is the mind needed to trade well, to trade effectively. It's not about winning and losing. Truthfully, to a really experienced trader, losing is just landing on the wrong side of probability relative to you. Winning that big thing, feeling good is only landing on the right side of probability relative to you. The whole notion of winning, losing has to really change because it's feeding belief systems that are equating performances with your being. That's what you have to separate. You have to come to the moment of where you find deep core worth within yourself. So that when you win or lose, that worth still remains tight. And that's what you are grounded in, not whether or not you win or lose. These are the rules of building the mind, building the psychology for trading. Friends, winning and losing is not the deal. Performing, getting at those beliefs and transforming them into a probability, intentionally based mind. Good luck. Take care.