Readying Yourself for the Emotional Storms of Trading

Are you ready for the emotional storms of trading? There is a song in the ancient Scottish tradition, a ballad of a sailor who's in a skiff and he's out in the ocean and he sees a squall heading toward him. What he realizes is he's by himself. Nothing's going to happen except him. He battens everything down and ready he is for the storm. He realizes he may not work through it, but he cannot let the uncertainty of the moment get in his way. He has to stay cool, calm and collected to be able to maintain order and to be able to keep his mind right. That's exactly what happens in trading, is there are storms, emotional storms that are going to happen because you're asking the brain to do something that it's not prepared to do naturally. And ultimately, every time you face uncertainty, that randomness, your brain wants control, control over outcome in particular. It also wants to be right and it also wants to be able to predict outcome. None of that's possible in trading. The brain flips out when it can't have that. And suddenly you're caught literally in a brain just going absolutely nuts. It wants to do something. It wants to escape the danger of uncertainty. Because in ancient times and caveman times, uncertainty was dangerous. It was a saber toothed tiger lurking in the bush. And the brain, the emotional brain, was designed to act automatically in response to changes, dangerous changes in the environment. You know something, all those days are gone. Caveman days are gone. You think you have this neocortex that is just absolutely on top of it and doesn't need emotions. We are emotional animals. We still respond to stress. The stress of the unknown, the stress of not knowing, the stress of not being able to control and not predict by flipping to fight flight. It's that, friends, that you have to really, truly take what nature has given you and you have to redesign it.

Good traders, successful traders learn to do that one way or the other. Most flight fail and it's simply because they're not willing to learn. They don't know that they need to learn or they're not willing to learn that they have to rebuild the brain that gives rise to the mind that trades. Otherwise you're going to be caught in the trap. The trap literally of a brain built for certainty. The brain built for control over outcome. The brain built for, literally for predicting the outcome and not being wrong. Not being wrong was dangerous. You had to win or you died. Here we bring the trading mind. It's there. The problem is, is that it's uncertain you lose. The old programming says die and you flip out. You try to get that money back. You try to get even. You try to revenge trade. You try to over trade. You try anything. Because the mind has suddenly taken over by the ancestral mind, friends. It has to be trained differently. You have to learn emotional nature very differently. It's hardwired over millions of years to behave in one particular way.

You're asking it to do something totally different.

And what I'm asking you to do is to think about this. Are you going to prepare the mind? Are you going to keep pretending that the mind's going to change because you want it to? It's not. Friends. Learn emotional regulation. Learn how to produce the observer so that you can see. Oh my gosh, this is not going the way it should. I can see. I can start noticing about literally the way my brain automatically, reflexively, instinctively reacts to uncertainty. And I can begin to change. I can begin to rebuild it.

I can reshape the way your mind engages uncertainty. That's with trading friends. It's not going to happen until you do that. Very few people are built with a mind that can trade effectively. Right off the bat, it's up to you, friends. You're going to have to decide whether or not you're willing to change the mind. Build the mind for uncertainty. If you're interested, go to our website, www.tradersstateofmind.com. read the article that goes along with this video. Go to the seminar that goes along with this, the webinar. Start really exploring and then say, what does it take to train the mind? Read the book and see the process. You're up against something really big and you need to learn, friends, and I would like to be able to help you, but you're going to have to help yourself. You're going to have to recognize the brain that I brought to trading is not the brain that's going to produce successful. No, it's not going to produce successful. There is an intrinsic problem. The brain only believes what the eye sees.

But the eye only shows the brain what it wants to see.

That's the ancient brain trends. What does the brain want to see? Control not being wrong and being able to predict pattern. The thing that can't be done consistently. A very new mind, the probability mind has to be built. Come and learn, folks. Come and learn.

Sam.