Mastering the Self Doubt of Facing Uncertainty

Over the years, I have found that the biggest problem that I find with traders is this: it's not their skill levels, and even, you know, a lot of the emotional stuff can be taught. But ultimately, it comes down to your sense of worth being measured by a number on a screen. You know, with what happens, we all want to win. We all want to matter. We all want to be powerful. We want to be able to make things happen. And unfortunately, we come to believe that that P&L statement of how profitable or not profitable you are. It's actually a measure of you as a human being. Friends, that's what has to be taken apart. The truth, it starts long before human beings actually had a mind. Many years ago, when we were cavemen, even like 200, 250,000 years ago, think about it. We're sitting there in caves, and we have a dangerous world we live in. Nothing like today's world. There are no lions, tigers, and bears. What happens is now they're imagined. But the thing is, is that your limbic system, your emotional brain, doesn't know that it's in the modern world. And the truth is, is that any, any fear is actually a fear of death, a fear of being stop from being promoting yourself into the gene pool. And you'll do anything to avert that uncertainty of actually feeling the uncertainty when, you know, the, the sense of death, that sense of no longer being here can play in. Yet somewhere when we developed language, somewhere when we developed money, these two got linked. And suddenly what happened is that your sense of worth as a human being got layered into the value that you have in terms of mattering, in terms of winning and losing. Oh God, if you're losing, you're a failure. I don't want to be a failure. Failure would mean death. This is the overlap between the ancient brain that didn't have the new brain the thought brain at all. And it was really real. You know, it was a dangerous place. There were critters that looked for us as food. And we had to be careful. We had to be anxious. We had to be able to go and, if necessary, confront them and beat them, or we would be the energy source. So we started there. And then we grew and we grew. And as we grew into language and all this other stuff, that old trait of power and money being equated to one another, it became attached. So the thing is, is that if you've ever done that, this is how do you go about freeing yourself from the self-doubt of facing uncertainty. How do you do that? Because ultimately, that's what you're going to have to do, is that of course there is going to be doubt simply because this is a probability-based game that you play in trading. It's not a certainty-based. We have a tendency as humans to assume that this is a certainty-based world that we live in, okay? And we just try harder and harder and harder, and it's certain that we're going to win. Winners never lose and losers never win. And we say, you know, I only try harder if I'm persistent, if I don't give up. I'm going to come in there and I'm going to make money because I'm going to will myself to win. And what you discover is that doesn't work in trading. So now we're going, how do we go about doing that? How do we go about saying, okay, I get it, I get it. The problem is my self-worth gets tied up with a number on a screen and it's telling me that I'm not powerful. I don't matter. I'm not good enough. I'm never going to make it. Yeah, all that is is a number. And if you know how to look at it, and if you step outside of caveman brain and start realizing, oh, you know something, when I make mistakes, when I see the need for improvement, I can go in and I can actually improve my performances. That's the deal. That trading account number, it's not telling you you're a bad trader. It's telling you where the mistakes are. And it just so happens your brain does not learn from winning. It learns from losing, making mistakes. It exposes what you need to learn. Yet our caveman brain, that ancient part, doesn't want to expose the fear of its death. Okay? It's kind of stuck. It wants to win and it'll hide even from itself. Okay? That's why you get all pumped up, you go in and you do something really stupid, blow up, and all of a sudden you start beating yourself up. Okay, all you're doing is you're saying, you know something, I'm— I refuse to learn from my mistakes. And yet here's the mistake, and often what you learn is you have to find not value of who you are from trading, from your performances. You need to find inherent value living within you. It exists as potential always in you. We, as human beings, social mammalians, we survived in groups. That group had to feel very strongly about every member in order to fight the wars and the challenges that came with trying to survive in this ancient world that we came from. So it was very apparent that you had inherent worth. People were willing to lay their lives down. They were struggling with you. And you had something to contribute back to the survival of the group. Well, that's gone away now. Money has replaced that. And here you go, you go something, you know, if I'm not winning, I'm a loser. You know, I've got to win in order to prove myself. And what I'm asking you to do is if you find the inherent worth that existed as you as a social mammalian, Right there, you're already in a point where you're going, you know something, I'm inherently worthy simply because I was built that way. It's part of the human condition. Then if you happen to have a spiritual element to the way you see the world, even to like an AA's higher power, it's all of a sudden you begin to go, well, to that part of me, to that divine part of myself, to that higher power, Am I worthy? And what people in the recovery movement discover is they are. That's what the 12 steps is all about, about finding that this higher power is going to walk with them. They're going to build a community around them that allows them to build more powerful beliefs about their ability to engage the challenges of uncertainty. That's where it gets. And so what you see here The whole deal is learning to say, you know something, my performances really are an indication of my adequacies. They can be improved. Once I spot an area that I'm not performing well in, I can go in and fix that problem. Whether or not it's a method mistake, whether or not it's a psychological mistake, we can go in and reorder that. Remember, we exist as potential. It's the observer of that potential that manifests the organization that you would call you. What we want to do is go in, recognize, instead of going, I have to win to matter, we want to say, you know something, I'm already growing from a fertile ground of worth. I grow that, I garden that, I shape myself and I work with myself. And I come to the moment I realize that, you know, life is really on my side. I just simply need to start not going against the stream, work with it. And all of a sudden you realize that life is a lot easier to work with when you're letting it show you what you need to see instead of trying to force onto life what you want to see. In trading, it flat doesn't work. So at the very bottom, you are already inherently worthy. You have to wake up to it. And it just so happens in our coursework, that's really the one of the central elements is waking up to that inherent worth. There's nothing to prove. You are conscious creation, no matter how you define the creation. You know, I do it through Albert Einstein, Big Bang, and I marvel that all this has come together and I have become a sentient being. I can observe creation, this wonder upon wonders. And ultimately, I have a great deal of thanks. I also now understand is that just simply because I am in creation, I matter. Friends, that's the kind of shift and beliefs that you need to start working with. You're no longer trying to prove your worth. And by the way, I don't have a business if it weren't for a bunch of guys in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s still trying to prove to someone, usually dad, that they matter. Imagine that. And I have a very healthy business. There's something wrong with the way we grew up. We have to go in, we have to fix that sense of attachment, our sense of being. And that is what we flourish from. So bottom line, what we're asking you to do is to recognize that your sense of worth is not represented by a number on a screen. Okay? Your sense of worth is built into your biology. And then it is built into your notion of spirituality. Okay, and again, even if it's a higher power, that's good enough. Remember, if you were to walk into an AA meeting, every person there has one really huge mission: to help you stop from drinking the next drink. They all work together for that. My mother and father were profound alcoholics, went into recovery, had 17 years of sobriety, And they found community. They found a higher power. They found a group of people who loved them and would stand beside them. Okay? That, they discovered, was already within them. It was inherently worthy. And all they had to do is find a group that aligned with that. And before you know it, they were creating a completely different world than the world they initially fell into. Same with you. The deal is this: you're already inherently worthy. Wake up to it. Practice with it. Recognize it and expect an attack from the inner critic saying, "No, you're not. No, that's BS." No, the truth is you are, either biologically or from a spiritual sense. You can find that divine living within you. And when you do it, you begin to go, "It is from this that I build itself." Friends, that is exactly when you become captain of your own destiny. Come and learn. Come and learn.