Traders often try to kill emotion, but your brain's hemispheres work best together. The real shift is moving from certainty-based thinking to probability-based thinking, then retraining your automatic responses through emotional regulation and curiosity instead of fear.
You know, everyone wants to be ruled by reason and logic when they're trading. They want to be able to take their emotions and push them away so they don't interfere with the great animal, the great humdinger of logic and reason. And yet at the same time when they do that, they ultimately find out that somewhere along the line, reason gets blown out the door, logic gets blown out the door and what's left is, well, what happened? The truth is this, what happened was actually creating a separation that was never there. Ultimately, reason, left brain, emotion, right brain, were built to work together. What we've done in trading is we've attempted to separate reason and logic from emotion and say, you know, we don't want emotion, what we want is, we want logic. Yet your brain is created in two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum. That corpus callosum is a communication conduit between the left brain and the right brain. Friends, they are meant to work with one another. They don't work well at all without one another. Ultimately, reason and emotion need to come together and work together. Because ultimately, this is where it begins. Is that what we call reason actually is the left brain producing an explanation that supports what the right brain has already decided. Now imagine if you have stuffed the right brain and said, I don't want you here, get away. What do you think is going to happen in the stuff? It's going to blow up. It's going to sabotage and take over this explanation business of the left brain. And suddenly your logic, your reason, is just blown out of the water and is supporting crazy ideas. And if you've ever just lost your stuff during a trade while trade management with fear of missing out or fear of getting in, you know this from attack or avoid, you know what it's like to have that very logical mind of yours just blown apart. Ultimately, to be able to get those to work together, you have to understand two really basic things. One is the brain itself is really built for certainty. It's built for just the ability to self preserve in the short term. And in doing that, it wants to control outcome, it wants to be able to predict the future. It's an illusion, it can't do it. But it is built to do that way from antiquity. So you get there, that's the first thing is you realize, oh my gosh, biologically I have something really.
Really going against the grain here. My brain is built for certainty thinking. Yet true trading requires a probability based mind completely different. I want to control outcome, I want to be right, I want to be able to predict the future. Whereas probability based mind says the future is unpredictable. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm going to prepare, I'm going to be curious, I'm going to be open, alert, ready for the future of whatever shows up. Whether or not that's working a stop, whether or not that's hitting targets, whether or not that's moving beyond a target, that's all that you don't know what's going to happen and you're prepared for that. Where in certainty thinking you don't know what you don't know and you're in big trouble, that's the first thing. And that transition has to be made. You have to be. Most people are trying to trick the amygdala, that's that fear center of the brain and you can't do it. You can try, you can tap, you can lp, you can do affirmations, you can do all sorts of things. Ultimately though, if it's a trick, the amygdala is going to find out and take over things. Rather than tricking the amygdala, we need to retrain it because just like I just said, it's built, the whole system is built for certainty based thinking. We have to retrain it so that it embraces guess what, probability based training. The second thing that has to happen in order to be able to move beyond where you're stuck is to recognize this is that your brain by definition has associated uncertainty with fear. So you produce uncertainty and then add risk to it. What do you think is going to happen? That association, bam, it's there, it's linked, it's automatic, it just simply short circuit thinking, it bypasses thinking and you're there in fear or anger. Fight, flight. Okay, instead what has to happen is we have to be able to regulate that impulse and we have to be able to transform the fear uncertainty loop to curiosity, to approach loop, we have to build that new way that the brain is going to interact with the unknown. That's what we do. And you do that through a series of changes that have to be made. You have to really become an observer of your body. You have to be able to start observing emotion not as feeling in the mind, but literally as physiological arousals and feelings in the body. You begin to observe that and begin to say, you know something. What I know is I can begin to regulate that. When you regulate the triggering of the emotion, understand uncertainty is going to provoke some fear based emotion. If left to default programming, your job is to change that dynamic and to move uncertainty to trigger concern. That's where all that approach, that's where all that curiosity is. The very first step obviously is emotional regulation. The second step, you have to learn to step back and learn how to step completely different. You have to be able to step out of certainty based thinking and step and begin to see everything has existed as probability anyway. The observer is what changes everything. So you've gotten that. Then you begin to have to really start listening to the voices in your head. When you do that, you begin to be able to build and retool them so that they become an efficient and efficient way of handling uncertainty. That's what you want, it's easy. And I encourage you to take a look to learn how to do this. Because ultimately when you do, you end up learning how to take uncertainty and not just oh my God, I'm going to have to deal with it, but ah, I'm going to embrace this. Trading becomes easy, it becomes joyful, it becomes just something where it becomes self development at that particular time. It no longer becomes fearful, it's literally wow, what am I going to learn about myself? How am I going to learn and build this mind of mine that I'm building to embrace uncertainty and to grow with it? That's powerful. Friends, come and learn. Take care.
Sam.
