Preventing Scared Money from Draining Your Account

How can emotions produce such a train wreck? Just when you've got your act together, you know how to trade, you've got it together, you can. You can chart, you can do all that, you know what a setup looks like, and then live action happens. Let me tell you about a guy that I work with. He has been ultra successful throughout his life. He has been successful in businesses, he startup, he's done startups. He's also been a professional football player. And he knows how to win. He has been taught from an early age. He grew up in a highly competitive family. He grows up, he plays competitive sports, he does all that. And he's always right at the top. He's always number one. And he wins. And he got used to, you know, I win, I know how to go in. And what he learned was to dominate. He learned to take his will and to mold and make himself do something. He was able to control those emotions by sheer willpower. And he did that. He did that. He went through the NFL, he did all that stuff. He's out, and now it's time to learn to trade. Now this guy has what I call the illusion of control. He has learned from a very early time that he could control outcome. And he got used to that. He got used to being able to force his will not just on other people, but on his own emotions and make himself do things. He was able to push himself to great heights. Okay, you see it. And he's been successful. He has a success formula that really works. He gets into trading, and what happens is that everything's going along. Things don't go his way for a moment, and all of a sudden he freezes up a little bit. And then he has an emotional hijacking that takes him out. Now then he just does harder. He wants to do it harder because he know he can do it. It's just a matter of the willpower. And what he discovers is that the more harder he tries, the less successful he is. And he's really befuddled because he's been so successful in previous lines of work. And so he's here and he's realizing that, you know something? I'm beginning to recognize that maybe I don't have. I can't control outcome. Maybe that's an illusion, which is one of the things I teach. The control you think you have is an illusion. Even when you see something in the outer world that has been successful, we don't see all the black swans that have shown up. This guy in the building of that winning attitude of that control attitude he conveniently learned how to not see all the failures that had been in his place. Also, all he remembered was the victories, the way he had willed himself to win and won again. I want you to understand.

He'S living in this world and he's got this idea. He has molded himself into a particular brain with a particular self that is used to being the big fish in a small pond and controlling things. Then he gets to trading and he tries to control. He tried this. I know, I'm going to make this happen. I'm going to make this happen. As if he could control the gods of trading. And it blows up in his face. But then what happens is he loses his cool, he's no longer in control.

And he freaks out. All this time he has been able to deny his emotional nature. And now when he sees evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt that.

He'S not in control, he automatically flips. And the thing is, is he's learned that it's been successful in the regular world, but it's not successful in the trading world. The truth is, is in the trading world, everything's about probability, everything's uncertain. And what happened is this guy had built a personality, built a presence where he was in control of outcome, and he did it well. He was always the big guy and was able to control the smaller fish. Now he's in a different thing. So now we're in. He developed the denial that he saw all these other things that were going on that he didn't have control of. He just pushed that outside of his mind and all he remembered was the victories. Okay, he gets to trading and trading. Trading to regular life, if you were to compare it, is that regular life is like karma. You know, it'll take a lifetime or two for all this stuff, the feedback to get back. And you know, you get what you. What you did. What goes around comes around. Okay, so here it's like it took a lifetime. And denial works really well when you have a lifetime and it's not short term. However, in trading, it's like instant karma. The feedback, it's like that. And suddenly this illusion of control that he had developed and built his life around was no longer effective. And the question is, in the vignette that I gave in the article, he's sitting there and he realizes that he's out of control. He's been hijacked. And he actually is witness, conscious witness in slow motion to the hijacking. He can watch it, he can see himself being hijacked by. But he doesn't know how to be able to intervene. He hasn't been taught the conception of how things really work on a micro scale. He's never been exposed to. However, for him to break the denial and to say, you know something? I want a mind for growth. He's actually. When you actually break that denial, you discover that the denial was simply a pattern that had put in place by the brain. And then it had been insulated so that it was rocket fast. And anytime that you hit uncertainty, it triggered this particular denial that did not see the bad news. It had been that way for how long? It had worked in other business, but as in trading, it didn't. Now we're going, how do we grow?

And suddenly the very first thing is to recognize that the rules are flipped. In trading, you do not control outcome.

Everything exists as probability, as uncertainty. And the truth is what you have to do is you have to accept that you're not in control. What you have, though, you can't control the outcome. Winning and losing, which this guy really wanted to become a winner. It made him feel great what he did. Instead, he finally learned to say, what I can control is the mind that I bring to trading. I don't control outcome. I control the mind, its ability to perform. And if you do that, that's the psychological edge. That's the edge that allows you to maximize, the edge that you have in your methodology. Now, it took him a long time. It wasn't easy because he had conditioned himself. All those neural patterns had created all these habits that were resisting change. They didn't want to. But finally his P and L statement broke through the denial. It was showing him beyond any shadow of a doubt what the beliefs were that he was really projecting onto the markets. Were they effective at extracting more capital out of the markets than he was putting back in? And the answer was no. And it was in such a short time frame that the denial could not kick in and him pretend that he was in control. No, it was right in his face. And with work, what he learned to do is realize that, you know something.

I need to build a mind that recognizes I'm not in control.

However, I can control the mind that engages the uncertainty, the challenges of living. That's what he was able to do. Now he had actually something really important on his side. He actually could observe himself losing control and felt powerless to do anything about it because he was using the wrong tools. He was trying to use willpower rather than emotional intelligence. And what I'm asking of you is, come learn more about emotional intelligence. Come, learn more about how you use emotions. Not deny them. Use them to create a mind that can truly engage the uncertainty, the challenges of trading, the challenges of life. And you don't have to be in denial. You can be fully awake in this moment, right here, right now.

That, friends, not only do you end up being a much better trader, you step into the arena of true self mastery. And what you learn is you are nothing short of potential that has been shaped not by you. And you're going in and saying, I can shape this potential that I exist as into a higher functioning self. Yeah. And my promise to you, that's when life gets really exciting. It gets exhilarating. You experience awe. You experience wonder. And you really do discover that you become captain of your own destiny. Come, learn more.

It.