Staying Disciplined When the Trade is Going Against You

How do you stay disciplined when that trade goes against you? Okay, biggest. One of the biggest problems in trading, and what I want you to notice is that you get rattled. Everything's there, everything's fine, and all of a sudden the trade jumps at you, and all of a sudden you get rattled. You know what your plan is, but somehow you can't. Can't do it. What is happening here? Well, actually, what you're experiencing is the emotional brain. Often what is called the subconscious, the emotional brain has a completely different set of parameters to work with than the thinking brain. The problem is the thinking brain doesn't even know the emotional brain's. There's. It sits underneath conscious threshold awareness. Okay? It doesn't think, it emotes. It actually is constantly building the ability to interface with the environment all the time. And when it sees a threat, everything changes, friends. And that's where we're really going in here. Is that what you really, truly need to understand about yourself as a traitor is that you're not a thinking creature? Rene Descartes was wrong. That's the guy who said, I think therefore I am, and started the rationalistic tradition. No, what you are is an emotional being who rationalizes thinking, actually follows emotion. Unlike what you would hear in cbt, cognitive behavioral therapy. No, thinking literally, if you look at. If you took a look at a train barreling down the way.

Thinking is the caboose. It's an afterthought, okay? The engine, the locomotive is motion.

The engineer are your beliefs. So you begin to see a much better way of understanding how this stuff works. So when you're actually. To the emotional brain, okay, when you're actually having a trade turn against you, it perceives the situation very differently. It perceives that it's fighting for its life. That's because the emotional brain really doesn't understand money. It understands life and death. It understands money.

And the extent that it's power.

That it's. You're mattering. I got to make money or you're worth. I feel like I'm worth a lot. I have a lot of money. I need to do that. Yeah. The problem is this, is that.

To the thinking brain.

It'S just following your plan. To the emotional brain, it's a threat to your very existence when that money is being threatened. Yeah, that's the whole point, if you can imagine this, is that in this graph, what you're looking at is sensorial data coming in, and then it goes to the thalamus. And at the thalamus, if you saw the thalamus is like a traffic cop on a busy intersection with cars going all sorts of ways, and generally it just happens that way where there's no threat there. But when there's an emergency, everything changes. The traffic cop stops everything. The regular flow lets the emergency vehicles through. That is the perception of threat to the emotional brain. Fundamentally, data comes in, oh, I'm following my plan. Then that trade goes against you. Oh, my God. There's a threat to our very existence. Remember, money is equal to power. Status mattering, we worth. Something has to happen, right? Then the emotion fires because it's an emotion. Emotions are just not feelings. They're actually action potentials, okay? They're biological action potentials. And in this particular case, under threat, it's going to immediately fire. Blackout thinking cuts off the whole route of the data getting to the thinking brain, then jumps into circuitry that's already there to deal with that, a fear and anger. And suddenly, in 003 seconds, chemistry is in your bloodstream, altering the way you perceive reality. Okay? And that's why I don't know what I did, Randy. I don't know what I did. I just. I couldn't lose. I just couldn't let myself lose. What you're saying is that your thinking brain has been hijacked. The emotional brain perceives real threat to your existence, and it's on automatic. It's taking the low road to fight Flight.

0.003 seconds at the same time, to get to the thinking brain takes at least 0.25 seconds. Do you see the dilemma? You know, we're built for an environment that no longer exists, okay? And yet we still take.

That organism that we are that was built for another time and another place. Understand? Right now where I'm shooting this, it's raining and it's cold outside. I was built for that environment, okay? Originally, I was built for that, yet I'm in the warmth of my house and stuff like that. We don't live in the environment that we were built for, and we're having problems dealing with that very fact. We're having a problem going, you know something? Why can't my thinking brain just trade? That's because it's ruled by the emotional brain. The emotional brain. When money is threatened, suddenly what you're doing is you're fighting for your life. And the question is, what are you going to do about it? The same old, same old. Get tough. Keep doing it. Keep doing it. Well, what you do is a lot of people say, oh, that's exposure you just keep doing it and finally you'll get through it. No, you won't.

You'll create trauma. And that trauma isn't going to become wired. Then every time you see something going against you, you trigger to it. It's an automatic pattern that arises at threat. That's the emotional brain for you. Biological action potential organizing. Basically the relationship between you, the trader and the environment, the markets boom. If you grasp what I'm saying right now, there's a route through this and I call it the process you've got to figure out, okay, the old thinking brain is wired this way. Nothing's going to change that. However, what can change is how you go about working with that emotion. Now that you realize that emotions are not optional.

Particularly fight flight ones, they're not optional. They have to be dealt with, they have to be worked with, they have to be mastered, they're not going to be controlled, they're going to be mastered. It requires self mastery. Where it starts is understanding what an emotion is. It's that biological action potential, okay? And that anytime that there is a, there is a change in status out there in the world, there is a corresponding emotion that fires. If you understand that, say, how do I start working with this? And this is the process that I teach. Pretty simple really. It starts with emotional regulation rooted in breathing. And you have to learn how to diaphragmatically breathe because that's the antidote to anger based emotions.

Are fear based. Because in both of those fear or anger based emotional responses, you are cutting off oxygen supply to the brain. You're routing it to the big muscles for fighting and fleeing and all of a sudden thinking is hijacked and it's all about fight flight, a deer in the headlights. Okay? So the first stage is emotional regulation, the tenseness and the breathing style you have to do. The second stage of this process that I teach is really mindfulness or I'll call the awakening. The observer where you come to really appreciate at a deep, deep level is that you are part animal, you are part flesh, you are part something else in the process. And that you can step back out of thought.

You can step back out of emotion and belief and become the observer of those beliefs that are interacting with the markets, okay? Because when you look at your trading account, you're actually seeing the effectiveness of the beliefs you hold about your ability to manage uncertainty being reflected in your roi. And when you're having a problem with basically saying, oh my God, my life is being threatened, my life is being threatened, okay, that's the emotional brains trying to take a loss. What you're realizing is you bring those primitive beliefs and they have to be changed. The first thing is you are not in those beliefs. It's just an adaptation. The belief is that's taken on the feeling of certainty, okay? And you might not even know it's there. The next thing in this process is I teach the how to become observer of the internal dialogue.

When you're looking. When you're looking at trying to, you know, I don't want to take this loss. I don't want to. I'm getting really rattled. What you're doing is you're looking at the emotion, feeling as though it's being threatened and understand its life is being threatened. And all of a sudden, you hear some language going on in your head, and you have to learn to identify that language. And the very first stage is I start teaching you how to find the inner critic. That's the part that judges. That's the part that condemns you when you're beating yourself up. That's the inner critic. It's not you. It's. The inner critic has taken over your mind. Then you find what I call the orphan from a Jungian perspective, the limbic system. And what you realize is it's just simply reacting to threat. And until you put better mentorship around it, it's going to continue the same routine, the same habituation that's established in circuitry that has to change. To do that, the very next thing that you have to do is you have to start finding what I call the empowered parts of the self, the forces within you that need to be harnessed for you to be able to deal with probability. This is the massive jump from caveman to modern man. Right? Here is you get to choose. You get to design what emotions show up to engage with uncertainty within you. Along with fear, anger, the inner critic, there is also something else. There are indwelling strengths. Within you is the discipline of ruler, the courage of a warrior, the calming, the self, soothing of a caregiver, and the impartiality, the clear thinking of a sage. These are fully present within you, okay? However, most of us haven't learned to pull them up during moments of stress. In this work, we're learning how to pull them up under stress. And it just so happens it's those emotional programs that produce the emotional ground that allows you to engage uncertainty in a very powerful new way. It thinks in terms of probability, okay, Rather than certainty, because ultimately your brain is simply making the best guesses. That it knows how to do. When it finds one that works, it locks it in, okay? And that becomes your just you. Until you step back and realize, no, that's just one organization of a potential self. What you're doing is you bring it back into potentiality, and then you're selecting very differently this time when you actually have a choice about the matter and to produce a very different self. Friends.

This is the mind that doesn't get rattled when the trade goes against you. Instead of being a threat to your life, emotional brain.

It'S just simply part of the game of trading. It's a loss, and you want to keep it there. And a loss is simply landing on the wrong side of probability. Your guess was wrong, okay? No matter how educated it was, it was just a guess. It was wrong. You get out. That's what the disciplined, impartial mind can do. Okay, Caveman can't do that. It sees that going against you as a threat to its life. This is not going to change until you go in and change it. No great methodology. None of that is going to work until you get your head straight, okay? And my own view is that until you come to that moment of making that decision that, oh, this is a mindset game. I learned skills, but what I also have to do is I have to learn to use them under stress, okay? And know there's no magic out there. Know. What you have to do is you have to go in courageously, Change the way your brain has organized itself currently into a new potential self. You keep working that program until it becomes the normal self. That's how you do it, friends. This is how you stay unrattled. This is how you learn to stay disciplined in the face of uncertainty when that trade's going against you because you've trained for it. Okay? My hope is you look further into our work here and to really begin to ask the question, do I really, really, really want to become a trader? If you do, you're going to have to rebuild the mind, the brain that engages uncertainty. Not an easy task. But if you want that, come explore, come look, come learn, have a.

La.