Re-building Your Survival Brain for Probability Management

Welcome, everyone. My name is Randy Howell with my trader state of mind, and I am delighted to see you here and for us to have a moment of learning and really beginning to think about this notion of trading and what's it really take to produce success in trading. You know, we all, practically everybody that gets in, they look at this stuff and they go, wow, you know, if I just follow this stuff, this is, I can really do this. This is a numbers game. I can do it. And yet people get into this thing and. Oh, yeah, just before I get started and get this, I just want to make sure that you can hear me. I'd hate to be talking to the void of space. So if you would just type in yes, if you can hear me, a few of you, please. And. Yep, good. So anyway, we get into this thing where we go, you know something, I've got it for success. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm, you know, I'm spending my time and effort, money, learning how to trade. But then I get into trading and something just keeps happening. I just keep slipping, okay, on my way to success. And what's this all about? So we're about to look at that. But what I want to do first is just simply give you the ground rules, is I hold questions to the end, okay? You are, you are invited to type them in and stuff like that. And Dolores will keep them till the end and I will start answering them. But this, this just simply the way it's probably helps me simply to keep stay on track. Okay? And I answer also a lot of the questions as we go through. So let's get started. Okay? And you know, at first, you know, at first it all goes, you know something, it can't be me that's the problem. You know, I keep having problems in my trading, but, you know, it really can't be me. I've got my act together, man. There's nothing wrong with my psychology. It's got to be the strategy. And so you keep looking outwardly, and the belief is my mind is fine, okay? And you really discover that you're looking for success in the wrong places. Because ultimately we have to really ask the question for trading. I don't mean for the rest of your life. I don't mean in business. I don't mean.

Your corporate job or whatever else you're doing. But I'm talking about, is your mind built for success in trading? It's a different animal and we need to take a look at that.

But then you keep having this reoccurring problem. Your rational mind keeps falling apart all at the wrong times. Everything's just copacetic. Then real risk is on the table, and there's no reset button. And what do you discover? Whoa. The very moment that you need your logical mind, it's not there. Somehow it's fallen apart, it's escaped. And something, whatever it is, has happened. And the more you try to control it, the worse it gets. The real key here is really to.

I'm having that you just skipped several slides floors. Go back.

Nope, I'm the one that had an error. Let's go forward. So here we are. You're looking at it, and you're going, man, the more I try to control this emotion, you know, and I try hard to control that motion, the harder. The harder the emotion pushes back. You can control the emotion until the risk of capital loss was very real. Then everything just absolutely fell apart.

And then, wow. Everything you've been taught about emotional control flies out the window. Friends, that's what I really want you to hear, is that whatever you've learned about emotions and emotional control probably isn't working for you very well at all. Rational thinking goes AWOL under pressure. This is the mystery that you're gonna have to solve in your trading performances in order to achieve success in trading. And we come down to it, it's right here, friends. You know, we would like to think, oh, you know, it's the same. You know, it's the same everywhere. In trading, reason keeps getting absolutely zapped by emotion. The very emotions you're trying to control. Do you keep having performance problems? And here it is right here. We're looking at this. The amygdala is actually Latin for almond, which is what the amygdala looks like. It looks like a little almond. Almond sitting back there on there in the middle of the emotional brain. And it's the one. Why is it so important? It's the part of you that controls emotions related to fight, flight, and also nurture. But that's another story. Somehow that amygdala keeps being activated as you trade and hijacks the mind that you desperately need to be able to trade your best game.

Wow. You keep believing that reason is king or queen, but it just doesn't fit the evidence. And I'm talking about the evidence that you want to see. I'm talking about the evidence in your trading account. Emotions keep breaking up the party.

Stress arises when the challenges of uncertainty and risk are present in our lives. It's not just trading.

However, in trading, when Stressed the brain really has no use for the trading brain. For the thinking brain. That's what gets folks in trouble. They really don't know what they're dealing with.

Trading represents your brain's worst nightmare. And you could not have designed a worst case scenario for the brain to deal with than trading. You're forcing the brain to sit with uncertainty and risk when it wants control over outcome, to predict outcome and to be right, which exactly what cannot happen in trading. Because ultimately in trading, it's all about recognizing that you have no control over outcome. What you ultimately have is control over the mind that you bring into trading. It just so happens evolution did not give you that brain.

Wow. And it's kind of like this. This is one of my favorite new, new ones here you have Kermit here and he's talking to the doctor and the doctors had done some testing and he's going, what I'm about to tell you is going to change your life forever. Are you sure you really want to know it? Okay. And what happens is that he's looking at an X ray of a hand sitting in Kermit's body, animating him. And all of a sudden Kermit is left with this idea that, oh my God, maybe I'm not in control. You know, our friend Kermit here. What you believe was true about the power of your mind is simply not true. And it's not something that I'm asking you to believe me about. What I'm asking you to do is to look at your trading account and ask the question, what is my trading account telling me about the beliefs that I'm projecting onto the screen of the markets. If you're finding success in the growth of equity in your trading account, then you got the right beliefs that are being tested by the markets. If you don't and you start finding backsliding, you start finding fear, you find finding impulse, you fight, finding sabotage and stuff like that, and revenge trading. What you're doing is you're saying there's something going on here in the mine that isn't matching up with the needs of trading. Yes. Now we're talking. You don't recognize that you are wearing blinders, but you are. Your trading account again is going to tell you that. And until you learn how to deal differently with the way the emotional brain reacts to uncertainty, you're going to continue to experience the emotional loss of control at inopportune times. It doesn't matter. The fishing stories you tell among other traders about the one that got away and this story and that story, and if I'd only done this. And boy, I gotta tell you something, I just did that thing and I gave it a little room and it really worked out for me. And. Whoa, whoa, that's all gambling.

That's all gambling. Friends, we have blinders on that. We don't want to see what's actually going on.

Your emotional brain.

Has an on, off switch on it. And when it engages uncertainty, it switches on whether or not your rational mind likes it or not. And that's the big deal is most people never see the emotional brain turning on and off because they don't know the language of the emotional brain. They know the language of the thinking brain. It actually talks in your head and you think you're being reasonable. But no, emotions are different. Emotions are not thinking. Emotions are biological action potentials that organize and coordinate activity between you as the trader and the environment as the markets. They bypass thinking and they turn on, off. They trigger based on history. Bam. And there you are. And it's really a thing is that. Well, it's tough. However, it's your responsibility to redesign the way your brain triggers and engages uncertainty. If you want to evolve into a successful trader.

And that's not anything around it, you know, it's. And then this is what we really come to. The driving force behind the quality of our thinking under pressure, that's important, is governed by the emotional brain, which. Which we really are really unaware of. We don't see the emotional brain going on and we don't know how to look for it. You don't. You know, one of the first things in my training, in both my group course and my individual course, is you begin to recognize that emotions are biological. And you begin looking at your body, not your mind, for the evidence of the emotion. You look for the tension of tension in your body. You look for the breathing style, because you know that that's the triggering of an emotion and the emotion is arousing and you don't even know about it. It's not in your conscious mind. It's sitting down there, way back there and below conscious threshold. But this is where the greatest majority of your decisions is being made. Just think about the last time that you didn't get into a trade because you were scared to pull the trigger. You made a decision and rationally you look at it and go, man, I had all the confirmation I wanted. Why didn't I get in that trade? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're producing an explanation. The decision had been made by the emotional brain, my friends. And it was not, you were not privy to it. That's subconscious mind. That's the power of these two minds. And they truly your, your emotional brain is evaluating potential threats and risks to short term survival. That's what it does. It doesn't think about long term possibilities and does not distinguish, and I want you to hear this very loud, the difference between psychological discomfort, engaging uncertainty from biological threat. That uncertainty suddenly turning into a saber through tiger. Hmm. This, this is the piece that you know, like for instance, you take a look at this iceberg with just such a little bit on top, you know, do you think the Titanic knew that it was in danger? No, they were being rational. And I'm asking you, that's one of the last things. And here, and I don't know, several years ago this actually happened in a zoo where for unknown reasons that I will never be able to understand is a baby was dropped into the gorilla compound and landed in the water. And what you're looking at right here is a female gorilla going and saving the infant's life.

It was not there to be aggressive. It was there because there was a very deep primitive, primitive instinctual mind that literally was there. And what I'm saying is this, is that you as a traitor are going to have to master that instinctual emotional mind if you plan to be successful in trading. Because ultimately it's the fight flight response of the amygdala. That's where the thinking is hijacked, friends. This is what's going to happen. And here in some ways I started to put other slides of real, more fight flight stuff. But this is also happening in the amygdala. This is literally happening where you're looking at a, at a species of great apes. They're very similar to us. And what you're looking at is interspecies self compassion or compassion toward others. It's mothering and it's triggered on an instinctual level, not on a thinking level. But let's do this. This graph illustrates exactly what is happening as you encounter uncertainty in trading. And it's why you're having so much problems. I understand that you have knowledge of trading. Practically everybody I work with has knowledge of trading. And they can use that knowledge most of the time in simulation when the risk is not real and there's reset button, but somehow when they, when they, when they load up risk just a little bit, even just a few dollars of risk and suddenly everything changes. Suddenly they can feel it's palpable. You can feel the tension. You can feel your gut, you can feel your jaw, you can feel your heart skipping a beat. You can feel yourself holding your breath. What's happening in that very instant, again, this is below threshes threshold of conscious mind is an information is coming in to that thing that says salary sensory salamis. And it's yes, that's what I said, thank you. Or close to it. And ultimately what's happening is it's making a decision right there. It's like a traffic cop at a major intersection. All this traffic's going on and it's making a decision about what traffic needs to go where at that moment. It's very primitive. It's evaluating based on historical threat or approach phenomenon.

Often if it seemed to be threatening, like oh my God, there's uncertainty and vulnerabilities there and I could lose money. It will take what is known as the quick and dirty low road. That takes literally 0.003 seconds to trigger and to lead the information down to the amygdala that leads to fight flight. However.

If you're able to cool that emotional response down of that ancient primitive brain, that information goes to your neocortex or the sensory cortex. Now it's a slow road.

Okay, or we call the high road. But it's one that really you think through your options and when you get through says yeah, I, I planned my trade and I traded my plan. That's when you know your thinking brain has had involvement in your trading down on the low road. What happens is you may have planned your trade, but you did not trade your plan. It got hijacked. And this is the exact thing that you're looking at that you need to master this literally. The emotional brain sees the uncertainty as a threat and hijacks the thinking brains and mind's contribution to perception. That's what you're seeing in here. And this is happening every time you encounter uncertainty with risk, which is sometimes in the grand scheme of the world outside of trading. But if you're a day trader in particular, it's all the time. Do you see the sensory overload? Do you see the, do you see how this begins to become. It just overwhelms the thinking brain. It's already on pretty, pretty shallow water, shallow ground. And all of a sudden we add this other stuff that triggers the emotional brain to perceive danger and it's all over. So that's what we've got. And we have. And the brain is looking like this. You know, the thing is, is it's sitting There, like this graphic is talking about where you know, your brain is incapable of knowing. It's in the 21st century, okay? It's still back there many years ago. It's still back there where there were, where uncertainty meant danger. And to it, okay, the past you've been is. It may be bad, but the thing is the future could even be worse. That's when you take your profits early. You're sitting there and it's bounced around, it's gone against you. You've worked through all that and finally you've gotten into the black. You've got a little bit of profit there. It's not near your target yet. But you say, you know, I better take it right now before it takes me away. You're predicting that potential bad future and you're saying, I want the money now.

That's the deal, friends. That's. That's that ancient brain taking over. And that's what you have to learn how to master so you know that your brain is really meant for a time when uncertainty meant danger on an emergent level. Trading is about probability. This is just a really bad match. Bad, bad, bad. So let's take a look at this. How do you experience this theoretical stuff I'm talking about right now?

Well, if you experience fear or impulse, you're feeling it all the time. Entry problems. Well, there you go, the fear. The fear of what? The anxiety of what if it doesn't work out? What if I lose? Impulsive trading, it's an aggression. I'm going to take advantage of this moment right now. I better jump in trades going against you. Oh yeah? Well, I'm going to show you revenge training. Oh my God, I've lost. I'm going to have to make up for it. I'm going to have to beat up the markets getting out early. Oh my God. It's going to be taken away from me. It's me taken away. I better get here right now. Do you see the ancient emotional survival instincts kicking in from the emotional brain and hijacking thinking mind, right yet refusing to take a loss. I'm not gonna let that thing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it. It's gonna turn around. It's gonna turn around. Your gambling friends. You're often la la land problems with winning or losing. You know, I lose. I feel really depressed. I'm a really bad person. Oh my God. I'm a bad and I win. Oh my God. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Boy, I've Got it together, which is called euphoria and is dangerous in trading. Euphoria causes you to believe that the good times are going to roll on forever. And you just, you just. You're in the casino. The problem is casino has the edge. And you forget that because you become an animal, an animal. You're acting from an instinctive brain rather than thinking brain. And friends, this is happening every day in your trading. Take a look at this picture. This is what your emotional brain was built for. You know, you think these guys are looking out at something and you get the. You get it that the guy sitting there, he's in that thing, he's a little scared. At the same time, what's approaching. He's got his spear, he's ready to go. He's got an older man sitting there. You've got the mother and the child sitting in the back. And you see the men are in front of the woman and they're ready to go to combat to be able to save that child.

That's the procreation of the species right there. That's what's being triggered in your primitive emotional brain when you face threat of loss of capital. And it's not going to change until you develop the skills for working with the survival instincts of the emotional brain. You're going to continue to experience the zapping of the thinking brain just when you need it most. And it's not. This is not something that. Believe me. I want you to look at your own history. And I want you to start asking, how does this history keep happening? Why does it keep repeating itself? I keep forcing my winning ways on the markets, but it doesn't happen. I end up in these old ways. It's because you're pushing on the emotional brain and its survival instincts. And you're discovering that those survival instincts are going to kill you if you don't know how to work with them. Or as our buddy Lao Tzad says, mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power. And in trading, this is the deal. There is no escaping emotions. Thinking and emotion always have worked together. Self mastery is required. All thinking. I want you to hear this really clear. All thinking, emotional state dependent. There's never a moment that your thinking has not been influenced by emotion. Even what you call rational is what we call in our business rationalizing. We know that your brain, your left brain, your thinking brain is going to rationalize whatever the emotional brain has decided. Or that joke that has. I love your very well thought out position, stuff like that. But. But I'm Going to believe my emotions anyway. And the only time that you don't have emotions, friend. You know all these people say trade without emotions. Well, friends, the only time that you do not have emotions is when you're dead. I don't wish that upon you. You may not want emotions in trading, but I personally would rather not see you dead. The real key is how do I learn to work these things together? And I want to go back to this. This is really important.

All of us think in economics. For years and years and years there was the assumption that people made rational decisions. And what they finally discovered is man. They just don't make rational decisions at all. They make emotional decisions that they make up reasons about. They will believe lies, okay, that the left brain has created that suit the right brain and they start distorting the facts to support the beliefs. That's what we do. You are an emotional being who rationalizes what the emotional brain has already decided. I know it's hard. No one likes to admit it, but that's the honest truth from a neurobiological standpoint. Now what are you gonna do about it? Okay, let's take a look at this.

And this comes down to this thing where you have two guys discussing, discussing from belief and then producing facts. The more facts you try to believe to produce to dissuade somebody of a belief, the harder and more rigid the belief becomes. You do not see, then believe.

Your brain believes, then it sees. And what you're doing, this thing, this wonderful thing you call a mind that's doing all this wonderful stuff with trading, really, it's not that. It's really your brain is taking sensorial data, all that brain stem stuff coming up to the sensorial thalamus. And a decision is being made based on that. And it produces a virtual representation of reality.

Or of the markets. You don't see reality, you do not see the markets. You see a virtual representation based on your beliefs. And what you're doing is you're saying, well, is it effective or not? It's not whether or not it's true or not, that's just simply, that's not, that's just simply another universe. What we're saying is, is it effective for extracting capital out of the markets? Your trading account is going to tell you that. So you begin to realize that your brain will lie to you too.

So you get it is you're projecting your beliefs onto the markets and you're. They're getting graded by your trading account. And what you have to say about it all the stuff you make up that's just on taste something.

You, you never trust what your brain is telling you. You always check out stuff, always. Yeah, because what you'll get is you'll get phishing stories and you'll, you'll get cover ups and you'll get all sorts of things and your survival brain under stress is biased to believe it can control outcome. Okay, Think of all the lies of what if all those fishing stories that cover up that the truth is, is that I really don't have control over outcome. And I keep talking about how do I build a more efficient strategy that allows me to get even closer and closer and closer to prediction. The truth is, is that by the time you get all the stuff together to have a better prediction, you've got, you've become so encumbered with stuff that you lose the ability of being able to use the use all that strategy stuff. So it comes down to, wow, I'm gonna have to give up control over outcome in trading because it's an illusion. Yes. This is the conflict that you're gonna have to solve. And I promise you, this is. Your brain is going to fight you every step of the way. It wants control, it wants to be right. It doesn't want to lose. This isn't you being an Alpha or you being a perfectionist. This is the human brain on a survival level. I mean, understand, if you weren't successful, you died. If you weren't right, you died. If you didn't have control or outcome, you died.

And that's the brain that you bring to trade. It cannot distinguish the biological threat from the psychological discomfort of the kind of uncertainty you're experiencing in trading. It feels vulnerable and that vulnerability is hardwired to fight flight.

So you keep trying to be rational in your mind.

When, when you are simply rationalizing what the emotional brain has already decided. It's a slam dunk, friends. Unfortunately for the trader, the emotional brain is just far stronger than the thinking brain. You experience this battle as emotional hijacking. You feel this internal struggle going on. But what happens is the emotion leads and it overwhelms thinking.

This is where it gets interesting though. Here's the, here's the deal. The brain you brought to trading simply is not up to the task. Not because it's a bad brain, simply because it was designed for another time and another place, for very different circumstances. It was for built for survival in the moment rather than probability management. And every time that you don't get into a trade because you say, oh, Man, I don't want to. I mean, I need more confirmation. What if I lose? You're looking at a limbic brain that has succeeded. It stopped you from getting in and risking capital. That's a success. It's going to get a squirt of dopamine, the reward chemical, and it's going to set that even further. Hmm. And this all. How do you change. It all starts with acceptance. That you are doing now is not working. And the brain's reaction to uncertainty has to be rebuilt.

This. This is called the Yerkes graph. It's been around since 1895. So this is not something that is new. What you want in trading is you want to be triggered. You want. You want a certain level of. You want to be focused, you want to be ready. And you'll see that. You'll see that on the left side of that graph. You'll see this increasing, increased attention and interest. You'll see this in terms of that if you're too relaxed, you're bored, you're just kind of sitting there. And that's the problem with the heart math stuff. But then you reach this little dynamite area of where you're focused, you're ready. But then you move over into a particular moment where that eustress, that preparation for the challenges of trading becomes distress. And that's where that dark area where the stress is. And suddenly you start experiencing these strong anxiety or that need to be aggressive. And then as it moves on down, you just totally get out of trouble. This is, this is. And you'll see this thing, one axis is performance, the other axis is stress. You see that some stress is good.

And that's something that's got to be taught. And this is what's happening is you're not managing this little graph, and they've known about it since 1895. Amazing, isn't it? So how do you. How do you work with this stress? Well, we recognize that emotions are biological and have biological components, friend. And by recognizing that, we can begin to really interrupt emotions. You can use your breathing, breathing diaphragmatically. You can use deep muscle relaxation to be able to. And by the way, this is skill one that we teach in our group course. You can use your breathing and your. The muscle relaxation to be able to calm the intensity that emotion down. So that doesn't hijack. This is just simply, you know, the. Hey, they're biological and they have a component most people never know, the language of emotions, so they get bushwhacked. But if you begin to understand the language, it's a biological language that takes over psychology. You begin to catch it a lot sooner. And one of the things that we recommend, and this again, it happens in our group course, is we encourage you to get a mirror to watch yourself, or even better, a video feed of where you can film yourself as you trade. Because you get to see the emotions on the face, the jaw, and the body and all that whole nine yards is powerful, but you get there, you start, There you go. Okay, I get myself regulated, Is that it? No.

What happens is emotional regulation is never enough. However, if you can't imagine emotion, you never get to the brain. You never get to the mind. It's the mind, that door to the mind in this, like in this graph where you find the beliefs and the internal conflicts that are going on within mine that are really just absolutely blowing up your ability to trade effectively. This is where you have to learn to manage the emotion so that you can get to the mine. And what do you do when you get there? You develop skill, too. And by the way, these are the skills that we teach in the group course. And so you're getting kind of a preview of what we do.

And these are the skill sets that have to be developed. The next one is mindfulness. People become fused to their thoughts and their beliefs as if it's what they are and stuff like that. Like, if you take a look at the guy on the left, you know, he's totally caught up in him. He's fused. His eyes are just absolutely blinded. And he thinks, oh, I am scared, I am this, I am that. And on the right side, you're looking at a guy going, I'm stepping back out of that and going, wow, boy, there's a lot of noise going on inside my mind. And I've identified with it. And what I need to do is I actually need to start backing out. Because ultimately, you and your thoughts are not the same. You and your beliefs are not the same. They're just one potential organization of itself. And it happened before you had any say so in it. It happened during the period of where your brain was maturing, going. It's called childhood. And you're growing up in a family with certain beliefs that you inherit and you in a culture and a community and circumstances. And it hardwires in, and you don't even see that. You're seeing through these biases, through these beliefs and these assumptions, and everything's okay to get to trading. And you use that same observer to trade with you discover I'm blowing Up my accounts, I'm bleeding. And you're realizing, oh my gosh, I need to step back out of here so that I can begin to reorganize the mind that trades. So this is where we're at. And for a lot of people, I will be the first one when I start talking like this, it's very jarring. What do you mean, these are not my thoughts? No, you're not having thoughts, they're having you. And if you do not understand the neighborhood of the mind, the neighborhood of the brain is you're, you're just totally missing the point. There are some bad dudes in the hood that you need to deal with rather than bury your hand in the head in the sand and pretend they're not there. But this is, this is the second step in mindfulness. And this is when you really begin to get it, is that your brain is really. I want to explain the brain and the mind from a neurobiological standpoint is that the brain is considered to be a community of rival emotional programs that has duked it out. The winners have created the self. That's kind of like the winners create history. And if you want to see this in action, the movie.

Inside out by Pixar Disney does a great job of depicting primary emotional processes inside a little girl's brain and taking over and creating the mind. And you see the girl going out and doing things that the emotional programs and, and the emotional programs are in constant flux about who's competitive with who and who's winning. So the observer in you has become fused to a set of beliefs, of biases and assumptions that's causing you to see what you see. And by the way, the form, the way you want to perform, the way you perform too, this is the way it is, friends. And this is what is going on in your trading right now. The, the key is, are you willing to change that? Are you willing to step up and say, you know, I need to reorganize the mind or I'm not going to ever make it out of here.

So.

This third skill that we teach, this is under the pressure of uncertainty. This is not when everything's cool and stuff like that. What you discover is this, is that you hear a historical conversation in your head and you'll know it by self doubt. Have you ever had that self doubt? Have you ever beat yourself up? Have you ever heard that urgency to get into a trade? Have you ever felt, oh my God, it's, it's, oh my God, I, I can't lose this thing, I can't lose that. I'm gonna make this trade happen. What I want you to notice is that there is an internal dialogue going on. It's pulling you both ways. The truth is the moment that you step out of your trading rules, you're gambling. The moment that you change your rules about, oh my God, this thing's gone against me. I could get stopped out. But no, I'm gonna leave this open. I'm see if it's gonna get a little more. Suddenly what you do is you end up with a bigger loss or you start overtrading, say, you know something, I can win this, I'm gonna make this happen. And then all of a sudden you hear this conversation in your head and after it's all over with, even if you were impulsive, trading it felt so good. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. Prove yourself. Prove yourself. And then comes the condemnation, friends. That is the internal dialogue. That's the self doubt, the impulsive thinking. And this is the, this is what an unexamined mind does to you. What we want to do. And in here, what I want to do is from, from the mind. Go back to the brain. Here's no, you're good. What I want you to look at in this particular graph is that this brain is functioning. Its perceptual inputs, the eyes by the way, or perceptual inputs, sees an object out in the environment and it's dangerous. It's a canebrake rattlesnake. And you're walking along and you're about to step over that log right onto that snake. The eyes are taking the information. Guess where it's going. It's going to that, that sensory thalamus. It's going to that and it's also through the visual cortex. You're going to go because it's visual. But the thing is, is before you know it, the signal goes down the low road straight to the amygdala into fight flight. That's again the, that's what I want to let you know. That's what's happening in your trading. This is the fear based mind that you have brought to trading. You know, if it weren't for that fear based mind, we're not alive as a species today. It's, it's, there's a lot right with it, but it's just simply not the mind, not the brain that you need for trading.

So.

This.

What happens when you begin to change the old programming to the new. You begin to have a new mindset and guess what new results show up. The primitive brain is always going to trigger to fight flight. That's, that's what it's supposed to do. What we want is to cool that down and to be able to let probability ride. We want to have a patient mind that does not react to stimulators out in the environment that are no longer threatening. And you may think that a loss is threatening, but it's not nearly as threatening as that rattlesnake that bites you and you lose your leg. So with training, your brain can learn to respond to uncertainty with a mind rooted. I want you to hear these Discipline, the ability to maintain order under pressure. Courage, the ability to turn toward your fear self soothing, the ability to calm your fear down. And your impartiality, your ability to think clearly, which is exactly what you want to have a probability mind. But you have to be able to cool fear down. You have to be able to cool that fear based brain that you brought to trading. And it doesn't matter whether or not it acts from avoidance or aggression, it's still responding to fear in the environment. So now we've got this thing and go, wow, we're back inside out.

You learn to take this and by the way, this is skill four, okay? You learn to take those emotional programs of the brain and you train them to show up when the feelings of vulnerability are triggered by uncertainty.

Instead of having that little firebrand over on the right or that little sadness lying in the floor, or that anxiety where they're on the left or disgust, you don't necessarily use the joy. These are five primary process emotions and they don't include the discipline, the courage and the self soothing nor the impartiality that are also process emotions. But the key is what you're seeing is these are the emotional programs that come standard in your brain and this is what you can do. You can actually change the way the brain responds to uncertainty. That's the really cool thing. And out of this it's your choice.

Accept what evolution has given you through natural selection. That's the old brain on uncertainty, or taking responsibility to design the new brain where you integrate.

The emotional brain and the thinking brain. But the thing is, is when you're integrating the emotional brain, you realize that you know, fear and anger are emotions as our discipline, as our courage, as our self soothing, as our impartiality. What you're learning to do is you are learning and this is a really powerful skill that's taught in the course is you learn how to Summon up from actual experience, not from visualization, not from affirmations, but from actual experience. Where you recode how to access these primitive emotional programs that you bring up to build the emotional ground of the mind that you bring to trading. That's the probability mind. That's where it gets really, really interesting. You know, you have a choice.

And the key is this.

You let go of the illusion of control over outcome and your claim to power, okay, as being able to control the mind. What you do is you claim that power to control the mind that you bring into the moment of performance. This is the missing edge, friends. And just like when you're looking at this skier, you know, the thing is he does not control very much here. He controls himself as he's going down the side of that mountain or she. And that's what you're looking at is discipline, courage, self soothing impartiality. Produce the performance mind, not the reactive brain. We don't want that. What we want is the performance mind that manages literally the mind you bring into the moment. That's where we're at. This is called peak performance. And this is what you need to be focused on. Because you control the mind you bring to performance, you do not control outcome. However, if you do control the mind you bring to performance, you have created the psychological edge that drives your method edge. And the fifth skill. This is when it gets so cool. There will always be internal struggle. There will always be this voice within the self that casts doubt, that casts the urgency to act, to prove the self. But what you do, you no longer have your emotional brain hijacking the thinking brain. Because you are mastering yourself, right? Rather than attempting the impossible, controlling the outcome, what you do is again, you control the mind that meets uncertainty. You control the mind that meets that dragon, okay? And what you discover, the only power that that dragon has is the power that you give it. And in an empowered mind, this probability mind, you're not acting from fear anymore. You're acting from discipline. You're acting from courage. You're acting from a sense of patience and clear thinking. Completely different animals, friends. And this is the way it's done. Again, we teach this.

What I want you to do is take a look at this boat. You know, if I'm in that boat with my present set of skills, I'm dead meat. I'm the worst thing that could possibly happen. You look at it, those are some rough waters, but yet everybody's doing their job. Everybody is calm, Everybody is right there, there's a captain running the show. There's warriors. Everybody's called forward, their courage to be able to face the uncertainty, and they're soothing their fears. And everybody's thinking clearly in the midst of challenge. This is your edge. And uncertainty remains, but you are no longer fighting it. You're no longer fighting emotional nature. You're using it. You have freedom of emotion, not from emotions. And you really begin to recognize, wow, this is a powerful new way. Yes, it is. It is a powerful new way. And you can learn how to do this.

How do you do it? Okay. You know, a lot of people look at this, they watch these webinars, they go, wow, Randy, this is really amazing stuff. And besides that, you're all, you're coming from, where you're coming from. You're coming from a neurological, neurobiological perspective. And you're not, you know, it's powerful. How do you do it? And they, you know, you read all my stuff and get all the free stuff and I show you the process. But it's only in my group course and my individual course that I teach you the skills.

We're having a group course come up. Okay? And I invite you. This is March 21st. That's the first meeting. And I want to tell you it actually starts a week or two before then. Because what I encourage you to do is organize, order, get, get on, get on board. Because when you get on board, you get the first, you get access to the first virtual classroom where the first lesson is on emotional regulation. And it's a, it's a big one. And the key is in the reason I encourage this is it's not actually something that I discovered. It was actually, it started with a guy, Romanian, who said, well, golly, I want to be prepared when I come to the course. This sounds like a, it sounds like an intense course. I said, it is. He says, well, I want to be prepared. And what he did is he got the course early, he studied it. So when he got to the real course, he was not overwhelmed. Because my promise to you is this, this is a fast paced course. And the moment you show up, it's expected. You have already done your homework and have been practicing emotional regulation while trading. Not just, oh, I'll do it in my yoga studio, and then we're already on to mindfulness. So the people who sign up late, which happens a lot, already behind when they get into class. The people who are smart start early. And if you get, if you get in by 3:16, I'm going to give you a free gift. The emotional regulation Workshop. And you can go to my website right now and buy it for $119. I'm sorry, $199. Or you get it free by getting this thing started and helping yourself. So for the sketch get. For the schedule and all that stuff, there's the website right there. I don't. It's right below there. The key is this. It's built to be really engageable by people and.

Financially really open. The key is it teaches the basic skills that you need, that you need to be able to build a mine for trading. Now, if you're looking for more, if you're looking for an individual course that's highly comprehensive and personal and meets with me for 10 times over a period of three or four months, that's the individual course. It is more comprehensive, it is more personal, and a lot of people end up taking that because they want the mentorship. Okay. And the group course, you don't get the. You don't, you know, you just don't get the same level of mentorship. It happens within a group context. But the, the. The individual course is individual mentorship. And it's. And it is, again, incredibly strong. And.

Both are good courses. It really depends on which serves you best. If I'm you and if I'm really interested, if I'm really interested about doing something about my performance mind, go to the website and ask for a free consult. Just hit contact us and we'll find a time that we can meet on Skype, no less, where we're actually looking at each other. And it allows you to really decide, you know, first of all, is this guy right for me? And is what he's really teaching, Is it on target? And the answer is something that, you know, the truth is, is that I'm looking for highly motivated people who recognize that they are in a position where they're motivated. But no matter how hard they try, they're missing something. And they're looking for that missing piece. And they know it's inside their mind, inside their brain, they're saying, I get it. I've seen it. I've been trading for years. And I realized that unless I can get my mindset in order, all that stuff I have, all the strategies I have are just. Just stuff. So I encourage you to look at that. And right now, if you have any questions, please type them in. Okay, Type them in. And we'll take a few, because we've got about five minutes or so. And I'd love to be able to answer anything that you have.

Let's see. This is a long one. Let's see.

Okay, here's.

When I trade in sim, I know the rules of my trading plan. Well, when I try to trade live, I can't think straight. It's like all the knowledge has been sucked out of my brain. It's a good way of describing it. How do I change this so I can think clearly and not forget the rules of my trading plan? Well, the short answer is take the group course or work individually with me. The other way of saying this is you are looking at literally the divide between your ancient survival brain, the need in trading for a probability based mine. And it's literally, it's literally training because what you're experiencing.

I, I talk with traders, not just retail traders, but traders every day that have this exact same problem. They know their rules and in simulation they can do it. The thing in simulation the risk is not real. The emotional brain is not triggered. It just sits back and says ah, this isn't real. The moment that it goes live and the capital loss is real or could be real, it activates the survival instincts and all of a sudden you're discovering that your thinking brain is no match for that emotional brain as you are currently trained. And I don't know, you can, you know, depending on who you talk to, golly, maybe you can go do this for two or three years and eventually you come to a moment where you go through this. I don't know. Most people burn out their capital in three years and they're gone. And it's really a thing is if you really want.

To master this, take a look at the group course, take a look at the individual course, see which one that you're going to have to, you're going to have to, you're going to have to rebuild the brain.

This is from shame. Just wondering if in the group course we are all on video together or is it a webinar type format? It's a webinar and the meetings are, the meetings are that. And you're listening to me live and you have the capacity of having a microphone and talking to me. Yeah. And what you, you're also getting recordings.

You know, I'll tell you something, when you have all these pictures and you're looking at people and there are 10 or 12 of them, they just kind of like get too small. But the major thing is, is that the sessions are very interactive and what you discover is for some unknown reason that is unexplainable to me is only three or four people in the Group will actually talk, write, and those are the ones who get to talk to me. They take the mic and we Talk for like 10 minutes and they get individual coaching. And the rest of the people sit and don't say anything. But they learn vicariously from the people who have the courage to say, give me the mic. I'd really like to talk to you about this. And I personally much rather teach the group course. Not from my lecture, but from whatever, whatever your experience is, is I know a lot of this stuff I teach is really challenging and I darn well know that when you start trying, when you start.

Oh yeah, Dolores just posted the link in the, in the chat box. So I encourage you to go and take a look at it. But the thing is, is that in the, in the course you have access to a microphone. My goodness, you can talk to me. It's very powerful and it's live. And I will answer some email, but at the same time, this is a group course. This is not the individual course. In my individual course, I expect emails from my clients.

Okay, this is from Christine. I have spent a number of years coming up with a trading plan that puts the probabilities on my side. The problem is that I have beaten up. I've been beaten up and taken losses in the past. So it is difficult to believe the probabilities of this plan. How, how do I get myself to believe that the probability will be on my side and accept what I see? I'm going to give you an answer that comes out of our courses, okay? It's. First of all, understand what's happened is that you have been traumatized. You have literally, basically run into a brick wall a number of times. And no matter what you were taught, no matter what somebody tried to teach you about the way this swing was and they tried to convince you by hypnosis or whatever that probability is on your side. And you've got an edge and all you have to do is believe it. Your emotional brain is not going to believe that bs. Okay? That's just, that's talk and that's really bad talk actually from a trainer is the truth is, is that once you've been traumatized, and that happens to a lot of people. I mean, you know, I met a guy the other day where he lost $50,000 in a day. And you know, he was crying, he was, he was doing lots of things as he was trying to trade and you know, he's traumatized. Yeah. And then once you're traumatized, the amygdala becomes hyper Vigilant starts looking at things out there in the environment and starts putting you in hyper vigilance mode and stopping you from doing it. The key is, is that in both the group and the individual course, we specifically teach skills that you're going to need to have. And what we also do, and for you in particular, is that.

These emotional programs of discipline, of courage, of self soothing.

And impartiality are present. Okay. And it is a matter of pulling them up and then turning toward the trauma and healing from that. And if you've done the work, if you've been in the group, I would encourage you to move and move into the individual course. That's when people who have some serious stuff going on because that's when it benefits having a licensed therapist as your mentor. Okay? But the key is that the brain's been traumatized and you just saying, oh well I'm just going to convince it by what a nice person I am that.

I have probability on my side. I have an edge. Understand your emotional brain doesn't care for that kind of stuff. What it cares about is there a short term threat to your survival. It looks at a loss as a threat to your survival. That's what you have to calm down. And by the way, that's what I call orphan. And what you're doing is you're learning to calm orphan down and getting orphan your limbic brain to trust higher brain function. I hope that helps. Somebody wants to know the name of this graph with the performance. Oh, just put, put Yerkey's stress graph. Y E R. Yeah. Y E R K E S and it'll pop up, you'll see that thing, it's like I said, it's, it's the granddaddy of everything. And it just amazes me. It's that old, it's been around that long. And here, here we are in 2018, we're still talking about it. It's just crazy to me. But what they did is they, they looked at it and realized that. And what I want you to understand is that when you look at stress, basically you're looking at the body activating itself to take care of the challenges of living the challenges of uncertainty. Okay? You, you definitely do not want to be down there at the parasitic parasympathetic end where you're all in rest, digest and you're too calm to trade. What you want is you want to activate emotions and particularly in the rubric of fear. You're looking at, you're looking at concern, anxiety and fear. Concern is you better be concerned. You've got capital at risk. You need to be on your high game. Anxiety is worry about the future. Oh my God. Bad things are going to happen. Fear is imminent danger.

I can't pull the trigger. And what you're doing is you're realizing and the anxiety and the fear are over there on the right side of the graph. What, what you're looking to do is to be able to take the emotional mobilization and put it into concern and have discipline, have courage, have self soothing.

And have the impartiality present. Okay, that's the key. But you need some of that activity. And by the way, tomorrow morning this webinar will be on our website. The recording will be. Yeah, not this one, but anyway. Are there any other questions? Okay, I don't, I don't see it. Okay, Doris says we're out of time and she's the boss. Okay, friends, I want to thank you for coming to this evening. I've really enjoyed myself and my hope is I have opened a door for you to understand the trading mind and understand that no matter how great your brain is, it's just built for a very different purpose than for trading. And you're going to have to get it in your sweet little head that I have to change what nature has designed to be to be ready for probability management. It can be done. I see it happening all the time. But you're going to have to do it or you're going to be one of the statistics of plowing all your capital out and going out and stuff like that. I prefer the other. Okay, friends, I thank you very much and have a great, great trading life and everything else too. Take care. Bye bye.