Mental Self Mastery the Missing Link

The way trading is presented to people as they're really looking and saying, is this a career path that I want to follow? What's ignored is the trader's mindset. They get really caught up in saying, you know, this is a really probability thing, but if you follow these rules, if you do this stuff, everything's going to be fine. And yet what we discover is that, that mental self mastery, that's the missing link. Plenty of people know how to trade. They have that technical analysis down, they've got rules. If we lived in a perfect world, everything would be functional, everybody would be making money. But, and here's a big but then performance under pressure exposes the trader's belief system, the mindset that they're actually bringing into the moment of managing uncertainty. That's, that's when things blow up. Because ultimately.

There'S a huge difference between paper trading, where there's no risk, and real trading, where there is risk, tangible risk, palatable risk of where you really are truly putting money at risk and you may lose. As a matter of fact, in trading, what you discover is high likelihood that you're going to lose any given trade. So what you're doing really in trading is you are actually seeing the beliefs that you have about the management of uncertainty, your ability to manage uncertainty being revealed and projected onto the screen of the markets. That's what you're really doing. And it's kind of like, you know.

What you find in trading. Once you grasp this and you start noticing that there is a gap between your knowledge and the way you can perform paper trading and your performance under pressure, you begin to realize, ah, what have I been denying about myself that I need to look at and is being right now revealed in my trading account. Okay, the trading account doesn't lie, but your brain does. If you don't have the trading account there, the brain will create all sorts of alibis, explanations and stuff like that that keep you stuck in the mind that you brought to trading. However, the problem is the mind that you brought to trading, which we'll talk about in just a few moments, isn't fit for trading. I'm going to give you an example. You know, have you ever, when you're paper trading, pretty much what you're doing is you're playing a video game. And after all that stuff goes up and down, whether or not you're killed or not, you can always hit the reset button and there's, There you go. In real trading, the huge difference is there's no reset button. It's the Same video game in many ways, but it's real. And when you take a loss, it triggers the primitive emotional brain into instinctual responses to threat. And there's the kicker, okay? And ultimately, whether or not you like it or not, the emotional brain, that which I often call the caveman brain, is your silent partner. And this is where it gets really crazy, is that the emotional brain is looking to solve the problem of short term survival. That's all it's looking for. It doesn't care how it solves it to it. To give you an example, let's say you take a loss, okay? You take that loss and then the next time you take a series of losses, you know, really build up the need for the limbic system to be able to build an emotional response to the threat of loss. That's the way the primitive brain sees may take several different directions. The first one obvious one is that if it can stop you from getting into the trade itself, it's won. It's not thinking long term probability, it's thinking about immediate survivability. And if you don't get in the trade, risking capital, you're not a threat, okay, to yourself. So it just wipes you out. On the other hand, and that would be avoidance of fear. On the other hand, what you can also see is the aggression of anger. You take a loss, you get a little peeved, you take another loss, you take another loss and all of a sudden you're going to make that money back, you're going to show them, you're going to make the markets pay. What you're really doing, you're saying, you know that saber tooth tiger that's attacking my clan, I'm going to make him pay, I'm going to show him, I'm not going to be afraid.

Going to attack him, I'm going to use my spears, some men and I are going to attack him. That's the way the primitive brain thinks. Now when you get it all grown up, all of a sudden that primitive brain is trading when it sees a loss. It's back in caveman days, it's back with a saber toothed cat. And that's what you've got. So the key is, okay, I have an emotional brain, the limbic system, caveman brain, that is going to act on instinct. And that instinct is really problem solution where it becomes a habit, it becomes an automatic habit that's running underneath the radar of your thinking brain. It doesn't even know the thinking brain's there. It just, it's just like that so ultimately the very first thing that's going to have to happen is you're going to have to learn how to disrupt and to cool down the circuits of that caveman brain. Now we teach emotional regulation because what we know is that an emotion itself is biological. From the neural standpoint, an emotion is a biological action potential.

Has nothing to do with psychology. It's a biological action potential that takes over mind in its attempt to coordinate action with the environment, to stay alive in the environment. So you've gotten that and you say the first thing that I have to do is I have to regulate that emotion. To do that, we focus on breathing as a function of the emotion and on muscle tension as a function of the emotion. In Herbert Benson's relaxation response, what you learn is you can disrupt the stressor, the threat, oh my God, I may lose or I have to make up for prior losses. You can disrupt it. You can say, I can supply, guess what, I can supply the relaxation response instead. It's because breathing diaphragmatically causes you to calm down. Anger and fear require a restriction in the way you breathe. Suddenly you breathe shallow, fast, or you hold your breath, you get tense, you're getting ready, ready for action. So what happens in the relaxation response? Emotional regulation. You are regulating that intensity so that it doesn't flow over and become that feeling state and take over mine. But that's only the start, friends, and it's not nearly enough.

What's required next is mindfulness, where you literally begin to build the observer of the self. And what you discover in mindfulness right off the bat is that you and your thoughts are not the same. You are not having thoughts, they're actually having you. You don't have beliefs.

They'Re having and creating your experience.

That's the deal, friends. You begin to observe that. You begin to say, wow, what I am is a particular organization of my potential that the limbic system created as a surviving force in the environment. Yeah, and it did a great job in another time, in another place. But the problem in trading in particular that trading is a bad place to try to use the certainty of survival as the basic modus operandi. It has to become a probability based mind. And therein lies the trouble. But the thing about mindfulness and the observation is you begin to see at the self. This thing you call you is actually an organization of your potential that was done in another time, in another place for short term survival. And it's done a great job. Now it's hooked into habit on an instinctual level. It automatically fires okay without thinking brain approval, and it wipes out the thinking brain. It takes over your psychology, takes over your reason, and there you are making all those dumb, stupid mistakes that you say, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? This is a probability game. Well, nobody told caveman brain that. And he's not listening or she's not listening. So what we really want to do then is we begin to see the self as potential. And what we're recognizing is that potential got shaped in a particular way that we need to deconstruct so that we move the self back into this moment of being. Where you begin the designer, you begin to be the designer of the mind. You're building to engage uncertainty. That's when it gets interesting. Now, is this natural? No. Is it possible? Yes. But you really, truly have to begin to say, well, what are the potentialities? Well, we look at a couple and the way I teach this is in the organized self that you are, that you bring to trading. What we're looking for is fear based thinking, anger based thinking, greed based thinking, and particularly lust based thinking. You would know lust not like sexual arousal, but you would know it as jumping into things, wanting money, wanting to. And you really begin to say, oh my God, I just had so much. I just jumped into the trade. Yeah, lust. So what you're seeing is, okay, it's not natural. But these, this is what nature did to me. It allowed me to survive, but it's not allowing me to thrive in a probability world. So we want to reorganize the committee of the mind. And what I ask of you is to begin to think of your mind. It's not as some singular unit. You've all had the experience of that inner commentary that's kind of yakking in the background, having opinions, having assessments, mostly negative, about potentialities. Well, that's part of the mind, but that's not you. That's one element, one committee member of that mind. There is so much more besides the limbic way of anger, fear, lust and greed. There is also potential to organize the mind around discipline, around courage, around self soothing, around impartiality. When exposed to stress, that's the kicker. You can do that. There will always be a struggle.

Okay? Nothing can change about that. There will always be uncertainty. There will always be the challenge of losing and a winning. However, what you have control over is the mind. You bring to the engagement of that uncertainty. This is the struggle always there. There will always be challenges, whether or not in trading or your Regular life. There will be challenges, but you can't control the outcome of those.

But you can control the mind that engages them. You can control the performance mind that leads to the probability based mind. This is the future.

You can start building a future self, a potential self that is very radically different in the way that it approaches uncertainty. You can have the old historical mind, the one you brought, that is not going to work in trading, or you can build a new potential mind. Okay, that's the future. It's not going to happen overnight. But with training, you see the future, you start organizing yourself for that future, organizing the mind for that future. And before you know it, you have habituated those responses to uncertainty rather than the historical ones that evolution gave you. You become designer of the self. And I invite you to come to the webinar to really look at it, to take this deeper, to really begin to see. Oh, this is about recognizing who I am in a current form of the self and then recognizing. Recognizing who I can be potentially. Okay. When I learn how to rebuild the self. Yeah, that's what we're talking about, friends. And as you move into this new year, I ask you to really begin to think about. This is really about, really about mind state and really building it so that it's built for uncertainty and to recognize that's the difference between knowledge and actual experience and performance. Okay, all the knowledge in the world isn't going to get past the instinctual nature of the emotional brain. It has to be trained. But you can build a new potential self rather than the one you got stuck with to bring into trading. No matter how successful it was in the past. It's always your choice, my friends. And no matter what, I wish you the best. Okay, if we can help you come explore more, come to the website, take a look at the stuff and start really going, how do I develop a potential self? Now you're talking. Take care.