Mastering Your Invisible Self Limiting Beliefs about Money and Risk

People are drawn to trading for two basic reasons, over and over and over again. One is they want personal, free freedom. They're tired of working for the man, for corporations, and they want. They want to go invent their own world. The second is they want financial freedom. They don't want to be tied to somebody else. They want to be able to generate that income. And a lot of times, it's really for a family. It's not just for some guy sitting in a back room trying to make some money. It is really more of a lifestyle. It is this personal freedom. And they take the very formula for success that they have developed over years. They grew up in this competitive society of ours. You know, what happens is that, guess what? Hard work plus persistence equals success. You know, they're willing to lay in, they're willing to work hard, and they're not going to give up. No matter what, they're not going to give up. They're going to keep on until they burst through and land at success. And that success formula has worked well outside of trading. And then these people who have experienced success by hard work, persistence equaling success, come to trading.

What they find very quickly is that trading is completely different. You don't make things happen in trading. You wait for things to come to you. The whole thing in boredom. You've got to be doing something to be doing something. Well, that's not true either. You've got to wait for the opportunity to come toward you. The markets are going to do what they do. Okay, Predicting what's going to happen, you know, sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. That's why you have stops. People get into that thinking that I'm going to do all this work, I'm going to develop all that is the problem. What I want to do is talk about us, modern human beings for an uncertain future. We think about it from our thinking brain, from those prefrontal lobes that allow us to think logically. And we easily can say, oh, okay, I see now. I see that there's going to be some losses. And this is probability. Yada, yada, yada, everything's fine as long as you're trading in paper and the risk isn't real.

The very moment that you put skin in the game, everything changes. Suddenly you discover there is an enormous gap between you as this modern Homo sapiens and our caveman ancestors. Our caveman ancestors had no idea what money was about. That caveman part of your brain, that mammalian brain, that caveman brain is what I call it, that limbic system that is Sitting back there and all of a sudden it is seeing, oh my God, we're in the place of losing money.

And it sees it as a threat to life, threat to existence. No, to the caveman brain, your emotional brain. It doesn't see you as risking capital and having a plan for losses and stuff like that. It sees that you had just run into a saber toothed tiger and you're in trouble and you're gonna have to fight to your last breath.

It was never about money. It was about survival. It was about are my beliefs, are my abilities strong enough to be able to manage the uncertainty of risking capital, risking life. On the other hand, it's just not about fear of loss. It's also about the anticipation of reward. Think about it. Not too many years ago, 25, 30,000 years ago, our ancestors were hunting mammoth. A woolly mammoth is 30 times the size of, of the average guy in that hunting troop. And it just so happens eight of them attack.

And they get all cranked up before they go, this is a big deal, we're going to go bid and get a fight. This is like the competition and the cranking up before a really big athletic event. They get all cranked up, they're going to go out and they're going to be warriors. And the truth is they get cranked up like that so that they delude themselves that there's not really risk there. A mammoth has 20, 25 foot extension on those tusks. He can just sweep across and kill people. But the thing is, is that there was an enormous reward. Not only was the man in that troop providing a meal, oh, a week or two of meals for his clan, he was also providing leadership. He got respect, he got prestige, and maybe even more than that, he got the right for first dibs on breeding to move his genes into the future for evolution. That's what's gotten hardwired. Now, you and I, when we look at that and say, oh, we're traitors now and we're risking capital, blah, blah, blah, blah, these are the primitive forces that lay behind that, you know, the aggression of going after something where against all odds are you doing that? And there obviously was a high attrition rate, but it was a successful strategy for the survival of the clan. So that alpha that wanting to make things happen, that I'm going to win.

Is brought into trading.

And it suddenly plays against them. They can't push hard enough. That's not even the game. And so you see the problem. We've got two powerful moments coming Together where the caveman doesn't know about money and we don't know about the caveman. And what happens is we get hijacked, we fall into tilt. The moment that we have that moment of like, oh my God, the trade's turning against me, oh my God, I'm a double down. I'm going to get the money back. Oh my God, oh my God. That, my friends, is the caveman. That's the caveman brain. I call that orphan also. And ultimately it ends up wiping out the ability of the thinking brain to produce the distinctions and stay in. Logic blows up, on the other hand, is that when the guys are looking at the mammoth and seeing the meal and seeing that they're going to get all cranked up and there's going to be glory. That's happening today too. And you know, if you walk out of football after 15 years, you're going to find out that you've been hurt a lot. Same thing here is that they did get hurt, but the thing is they ended up the glory. And being able to pass the genes into the future was a big deal. That, my friends, is the primary situation that you're going to have to reprogram.

Understand.

The programming that brought success before trading. There's nothing wrong with, was really useful in that world. Yet you come over to the trading world and it becomes lethal to you. The key is you're either going to adapt or you're going to perish. Remember, human beings have become who we are because we're probably the most adaptable creature the world's ever known. And here trading is forcing the issue. It is forcing you to volitionally, knowingly change the very nature of your beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty. By the way, that's what your, your P L statement is telling you about. It's you. If you understand that you are projecting your beliefs onto the markets. Okay, what you're doing is you're finding out those beliefs, how effective they are. If they're highly effective, you're extracting more capital out of the markets than you're putting back in and you're a consistently profitable trader. However, if they're not adequate beliefs for the management of uncertainty and risk, you're going to put more capital back into the markets than you take out. So it's a point blank truth meter that it's telling you take a look at your beliefs. And friends, those beliefs are not hard. We just don't want to see them. And here I'm going to outline several beliefs besides these really Primitive ones that I've talked about from caveman, but I'm talking about in the process of socialization, growing up in our families, our cultures, our communities and the stuff that happens in life. What you come to believe about trading.

For instance, with me there was scarcity thinking I grew up in a family where we lost intergenerational wealth. The generation before me and the macmillan's which I'm from, wanted to get the money back. The whole process, the whole story of the macmillan's was getting the money back that had, that had been stolen by the o'. Connors. Okay. And I found myself following in that script that belief. Understand this belief was that.

I didn't make the money, it was taken from me. I have to get it back. My belief system wasn't about creation of wealth. It was about getting the wealth from someone who had taken it from me. Scarcity and also the blindness of my observer about how real things work. So that's the scarcity. And the thing is for most traders, they find out that, you know, I don't want to risk because if I risk I may be lo, I may lose what I have and I don't want that. And they can't get into entries they can't take, they can't let it go to target, they, all that stuff. The other is about mattering the alpha, the one that is so respected in corporate and business worlds, he's out trying to matter, which is very important from an evolutionary standpoint. He has to win, to matter, to prove himself, to have the prestige, to have that honor and to also be attractive. Have you ever noticed how ugly men, when they get really wealthy can attract really beautiful women and you go trophy wife. There is evolution to that. That's what I want you to understand. There's also worth. A lot of traders find out that there is a dollar amount that is assigned to their inherent worth, their self worth. And they discover is once they hit that peak, they're going to lose back down that peak. May be I had a trader who went took his account from 150,000 to 240,000 and everything was oh boy, this is fine. I finally figured it out. And then he lost it back down only to find out that in his family there was a story about if you make too much money, it's going to be taken from you. Sound familiar? Okay. And it became where they saw it as a family jinx. I've worked with others where they hit a particular moment where they hit seven figure accounts, they would lose back down in the high six figures. And ultimately in the bottom of that, oh, and they'd won't go back up into the seven figures again. And it would repeat. And this guy that I'm talking about, this is this. He had been trading for 15 years. He's a successful trader. He couldn't get past that hump, though. And what he discovered is he grew up in a family where the father truly vehemently believed that nobody was worth a million dollars. And so this guy, now a trader, hits that million dollar moment, and guess what? That belief kicks in. He doesn't even know it's there. He goes back down. The next one is adequacy. I'm not good enough.

Okay? And a lot of that's happening. You say, oh, I just, you know something, it's for other people. It's not for me. I don't have what it takes. The other one is belonging, A sense of being loved. Believe it or not, if I make money, I'll be loved. I'll have friends. The deal is, what I'm asking you to do is to look at these particular beliefs. They're common. They're the ones I work with every day. I would not have a business if it weren't for these particular beliefs. I'm talking about right now. Actively changing the way a trader sees reality and acts to the reality of the trading situation. And it all begins because you risk capital to an uncertain future, to the caveman, to where all those limbic beliefs, those deep held beliefs are there. You're going to have to expose those. That's your trading account. That's your best friend. And you're going to have to learn to remold them.

So that you are not in control of outcome, which is what our caveman ancestors got drilled into them. You're in control of the mind that you bring into the moment of performance, that, friends, you can control. All the black sheeps can come, but you can still play by your rules. And you can control the discipline, the mind you bring to perform. Friends, this is what every trader has to do. I wish you well. And if you take a look at our programming, from the free stuff, to my book, to the group course, to the individual course, it's all about teaching you a process that allows you to evolve the brain that can produce a mind that has built new beliefs about his ability to inherit the challenges of living from an empowered, from a disciplined, from a courageous, from a soothing and from a clear minded mind. Come and learn, friends. Come and learn. Take care.

Sa.