Staying Disciplined When Urgency Strikes

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Welcome everyone. My name is Randy Howell with Trader State of Mind. And I am glad to see you today. And I hope, I hope life is treating you well. I hope you're trading. The trading gods are treating you well. But before we get started, let's just find out if people can hear me. If you'll go to your chat box and just type in a Y or no, I would really appreciate it. I'd like to make sure that I'm talking to somebody before everything. Just. Yes. Okay, we're good. Okay. Today we really want to focus on something that happens to Alphas. You know, those guys who want to win, they want to make things happen. They don't want to lose, they want to be the one who controls everything and all that stuff. And usually they have been quite successful until they get to trading. Something happens there. That's what we're going to be looking at today. But first, just to let you know, a little housekeeping is that I hold questions toward the end. You can write questions in. Okay? And we will get to them and that'll help us get started rather than waiting there and waiting for people to write. So as you have questions, please ask them. Okay, I'm looking forward to that. I want questions. And the second thing is, here we go. So let's look at this thing. Okay? The Alpha and I recognize that, you know, basically in trading you have a divide between. You have basically worry based, fear based traders who have a hard time entering, a hard time taking their profits and all that kind of good stuff. And you have Alphas who have a tendency to blow up accounts because they just get in and try to seize control and stuff like that. So what we want to do is here is we want to say, you know something, the Alpha, whether or not it's America, whether it's another part of the world, it's built to win. Okay? The problem with being able to command winning, you know, you have so much control in a lot of other areas of your life that, you know, your sheer will can make things happen. The problem is that's a very small, small pond kind of compared to the pond of the markets. And all of a sudden you realize that when you get into trading, you do not control winning and suddenly it becomes a liability. Okay, so look at it this way. What does an Alpha want? They want to win, they want to make money, they want to make things happen. And boy, did they hate losing. I hate, I hate losing. I hate it. All things beyond Their control and trading. Now where do you possibly think this is heading? Remember that Alpha has probably produced success in business and corporate and entrepreneurship and whatever they were doing. And then they get to trading with that same success type mind and guess what happens? Suddenly the very same mindset that brought them success before now becomes literally an albatross around their neck and stops them from trading. How could this be? Okay, how could this be? How can. As a matter of fact, I have a former client who is in a normalcy serial successful entrepreneur, okay? And literally when he graduated from college, he had built a bar business during college and he sold it for half a million dollars. I don't know about you, but I didn't walk out of college with half a million dollars extra. Okay? The key though is he went and duplicated that further and further on and he sold a position, a company that he had and he sold it for cash. So he had a lot of cash. He started talking to a trader, his brother, and found out that trading was a capital intensive business. And what Mark thought was, you know something, then all I have to do is learn the business because I've got the cash, I got that part down, I'll just do like any other business I've had. I've learned the business and that man, I can, this is going to look good. And ultimately after working with me for a while, one day he walked into my office still when I did that stuff and said, you know something Randy, I want to thank you. This has been the best money I've ever spent because what I now know is that I don't want to be a trader. And I said, well what's different? And he said, the problem is that I want control and I've been able to, I have been able to have control for about my whole life and I've done very well with that. And what I see to be successful in trading, I, I'm going to have to give that up. I'm not willing to. And what I'll say is he left trading, he went out and bought an undervalued business, built it up and three to four years later he sold it for 10 times more than he paid for it. Okay, that's the Alpha and you're going, well, you know something, what brought him success in one domain that entrepreneurship just simply was an albatross in trading. And I've actually had a really good trader once tell me when I was talking about the same guy and he said, you know Randy, it's just a crying shame for a perfectly Good entrepreneur to try to be a trader. It's just, it's just not right to waste a perfectly good entrepreneurial mind on trading. And he's got a good point. And it's one of the things I want you to look at if you are an Alpha is what are you doing here? And you need to start asking the question, you know something? What we have here, what we have here is, you know something? Success in trading is dependent upon emotional intelligence and actually learning how to use emotions to build the mind that engages the challenges of uncertainty. The Alpha believes he's going to win by willpower, by strength. And the problem is that that works in one domain. And yet when you get in down to it, the kind of mind that push, push, win, win type mindset that is built around aggression, not bad aggression, but really taking action, doing things, believing in yourself and all that stuff, that is a formula for disaster. You're looking to be able and if you understand in emotional intelligence that all thinking is emotional state dependent, what you discover is that, oh my goodness, I need to be able to build an emotional base that a mind arises in that can handle uncertainty very differently than the way uncertainty is usually worked with in trading. So if success depended on a competitive nature, okay, there'd be a heck of a lot more successful traders than they are. And yet that's just not the case. So what's a jar here? What's a jar? Well, let's take this thing.

We human beings are actually highly evolved animals.

We're not human beings that have emotions. We are human. We are emotional beings.

That.

Rationalize, okay? Yet what you can discover is that what's in the mix is that we bring emotionally based survival instincts. For short term survival, we bring those, and those are the what are sabotaging progress toward trading those survival instincts. I gotta win. Because in caveman days, winning was feeding your family, feeding the clan. It was, it was prestige, it was a lot of things. And it also kept you from losing. And losing meant forfeiting your life. Your emotional brain does not know about money.

But the money begins to represent power, mattering and worth. And when it sees that it's being attacked, it's being challenged, it could lose capital. Well, it's looking at being losing, guess what? Losing life. So it's going to fight like heck. It's going to fight for his life. So the point is, is that the Alpha mind is going to have to evolve. It's going to have to evolve from wanting to win to wanting to perform well.

The key is.

To Recognize that your emotional brain. We're having an issue here, one back. There we go. The thing is, the emotional brain hates uncertainty because it produces vulnerability. Vulnerability immediately triggers.

A whole route heading toward the amygdala in fight flight. Because uncertainty is dangerous, okay? And that's why you want to control outcome. And yet the thing is, is that you can do some really thing. The thing is the emotion is a rhinoceros and you're trying to hold on to something that is a brute, okay? It easily hijacks the rational mind under stress, okay? So the point is you're looking at it and going, well, why is this so? Why is this so? Why didn't somebody tell me? Well, the truth is, this is that we've gotten some common ancestors from long ago in a place far, far away, when we started out as hominoids that came down off trees on the African savanna. And over time, through evolution, we began to develop. We began to develop, but what happened is we carried all that survival instincts that was built into us for another time in another world. It wanted short term survival. And as we developed, as we became Homo sapiens, okay, and suddenly that Homo sapien found trading. Do you think the hominoid behaviors that kept survival happening, do you think they just went away and never. And never came back? No, they're there when managing uncertainty and ignoring your survival instincts, okay, is dangerous to trading because it is going to bite you. And. But tell me something, why on earth can't you just shove emotions out of your way and just trade without emotions? Because it's all logic, isn't it? I mean, you know, if you don't have emotions there, you can just trade what you see.

The problem is this. We're not logical beings. We're emotional beings who rationalize. And the only time that you don't have emotions are when you're dead. So when you push emotions away, you're putting yourself in a liability because those submerged emotions are going to come right back under stress. I may lose. It's getting close to my stop. I don't want to. I'm really invested in winning. I can't. That emotion right there, that is what's going to absolutely tear you up. Alphas and every other trader is going to have to really come to that and recognize this is really a game where you're going to have to change the very instincts that your ancestors had to have for survival. Now you're going to have to do it and you're going to have to figure out a way to be able to Say, you know something, I need these emotions to do very differently than they've been doing, and yet I don't have any skills to make them do that. Okay, so out of that, what we're doing is just saying you can't suppress emotions for any length of time. And so let's take a look at this. Let's just take a look at this. Okay, we want to take a look and say how, how in the world.

Pull back one. There you go. How on the earth did we get this idea that emotion and reason were separated from one another? I cite you two guys, Rene Descartes, the French guy who made the bold proclamation, I think, therefore I am. He's the guy that set mind and body in different directions. Sir Isaac Newton continued it. And yet at the same time, my view is Rene Descartes would have been more accurate. I think, therefore I'm dangerous. To believe that you're a thinking animal that doesn't have emotions, or you can deal with emotions by pushing them away is to understand nothing about dealing with uncertainty and the prospect of loss. But it's these two guys that started it back a long time ago in the 1700s, and yet we're still stuck with it. But where we. What we really need to comprehend is this. Something very different. You don't have emotions. They have you. Those emotions, particularly the primitive one that built around fear and aggression, around survival, those have been with us not just the 6.5 million years that we have, that we moved away from the rest of the great apes and became human beings, but it goes much further back than that. It goes upwards to 600 million years. You know, almost all organisms are trying to avoid threat. And what happens is that.

Fundamentally the emotional brain makes a decision. And your thinking brain, that one that says I'm so cool, creates an explanation that supports the decision. No matter how crazy. Okay, no matter how crazy. And this is the link that you're going to have to push aside. And it's hard because it feels so good when you think, oh, I can just push away emotions and I can trade. Well, you can't. You're an emotional being. And the key, though, is instead of pushing them away, we have to learn how to use them. So here we are. From my standpoint, this little bit of a lecture I just gave you really have been, should have been taught to you when you started your trading education. You know, everybody talks about it. You know, you start really going, you know, an hour and a half, two hours a day. You know, I can make really good Money, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, you can as a possibility. But what is it going to take to produce the mind that can execute really well? Okay, so this is the real deal. And you know, the problem is this is nobody tells you that you have to get your emotions under management to produce the mind that can trade in the environment called trading. Okay? Now from there.

Just think about this, okay? When you try to ignore. And look, I have seen trading organizations say, just leave your emotions at the door. You just, hey, you don't use them. And again, what you're doing is you're going, wow. Now let's go back to the alpha. He wants to win. He wants to make money. Why? He wants to prove that he matters. And by making money, by building things, what he does is he builds that sense. The brain, particularly the emotional brain, the caveman brain, does not know the details, difference between power mattering and worth and your fixation on making money, they've come together because the emotional brain is incapable of understanding money. It understands threat to your power. It understands threat to your life. This is where you're at. Okay? And most people, they start their trading day. What do you do? Seriously, what do you do? I'm going to make some money today. Okay? That's the idea. And yet, at the same time, friends, you have absolutely no control over whether you make money or you lose money. What you're doing is you're working with probabilities that give you a better chance of winning than losing. But the truth is it's probability. There's always uncertainty. And if you keep telling yourself you're going to win, you're going to win, you're going to make money, and you keep banging your head against the wall. What do you think happens over time? Well, it's not pretty because, you know, ultimately what you have to actually come to understand on a visceral level is this. The mind you brought to trading is not going to be the mind that's going to bring success in trading. No. Yeah, the br. I said it right. The mind you brought to trading is not going to produce it. It is. It is built for another time and another place that no longer exists. When you think about it, I'm sitting here right now inside an office, and right outside the window is a world that I was built for. But I'm now not in that world. I'm in this office working through some electronic media. And that has become my world. It's very different than the world that I was built for. So we get this. Okay? Hmm. Let's See, the problem here is that I want to win. I want to control outcome. And the problem is that no matter how right I am, no matter how much I say I'm right, I'm right, or how big and strong I am, the truth is the markets produce probability. And what you have at best is an edge. And if you don't perform really well.

You'Re not going to make that edge happen. You're going to start faltering emotionally and do really dumb, stupid things. So this is really, what we're really beginning to say is that we've got a really problem. We're asking the brain to do something that it's really incapable of doing. In fact, what you're asking your brain to do. And day trading is basically the worst nightmare you could possibly ever conjure up for your, your brain. And then you don't give it any help.

So let's take a look at it this way. How could we use emotional intelligence, neurobiology and quantum mechanics for that matter, how can we help unblind your eyes to see the mind that trades differently? How can we do that? The one, one powerful thing in quantum mechanics as it applies to neurobiology, in quantum mechanics, they will say there's no such thing as energy or mass. Reality exists as potential. And the observer of that potential brings forth the form.

What does that look like in trading when you look at a chart? I'm asking you, what trader, what mind, what observer are you when you're looking at that chart? I have a client the other day, and in my more advanced classes, I work with heart rate monitors and apps that allow you to start aligning ranges of heart rate to be able to be. When you're at, you're at proper, you're at the proper physiology to trade. Well, okay. And he said, randy, it's very interesting is that the other day my heart rate was. And he has a little higher heart rate than I would care for. My heart rate was at 85. I was looking at the charts. I saw one thing, but then something happened and my heart rate jumped to 105. Okay, I saw a completely different picture, but then I got scared and it even went higher and I couldn't think of anything. I couldn't see anything. What I want you to look at is this pretty well trained observer that I'm working with at a heart rate, at a physiological level, at an emotional stew, could see clearly how to trade one moment, a few seconds later, by heart rate measurement, you saw that he was, he was seeing a completely different chart. He was scared. He was trying to get out. And then what happens? It went even higher. He became aggressive. He wanted to become aggressive. He was trained enough to get out of the trade because he knew that he had went over to fight flight, needed to get out. But the key is what we really want to do. It's just like with this elephant. You know, everybody kind of looks at parts of this elephant and tries to develop elephant by that. And what we're actually saying is, how do you open the eyes to see a greater whole? How do you open the eyes for what you really need to become, to become a consistently profitable trader? So the major thing that we really need is a reintegration of the emotional brain and that logical left brain, that rational brain, and to have them as a unit where they're in partnership, where you're not trying to push the emotional brain out as if you could do that. And you begin to have these two spheres of your brain, the right and left, working together. And as Einstein said, the intuitive mind, the emotional mind, is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. Okay, What I ask you to do is that is no more. It is illuminated in trading, is that we do not develop the emotional mind.

To be able to deal with the uncertainty. And we ask the rational mind to say rational when it's crashing and burning, you have to get, you have to get the emotional brain on board. And yet we haven't done that.

And here's really the deal. When you're looking at your charts, and I referred to this when this guy was saying, at one heart rate, he saw one chart. When he was at another heart rate, he saw another chart. Okay, same chart.

But in the accelerated movement toward fight flight, he observes it very differently. The key is in neurobiology, what we say is you've never seen the world out there. Reality doesn't exist out there. What happens is your brain produces a virtual representation of the world out there based on its biases, which, by the way, you wouldn't know about the assumptions, probably don't know about them. And your beliefs, the big ones, you don't know about, and it's constructing its sense of reality. And the deal is this, friends, your trading account represents a truth meter. It is telling you exactly what beliefs are that you're projecting out onto the markets and whether or not they're effective for extracting more capital out of the markets than you give back. When you take a look at it, from that way, you darn well know that you have self lending beliefs that is sabotaging your trading and you're constantly recreating that, particularly if you're not mindful of it. If you're not sitting there and saying, how do I go about constructing, how do I go about constructing a new way of being in the world? And I'm going to tell you a story about this. A long time ago, in a place far, far away, I was not working as a trading psychologist. I was a performance coach and I was a therapist and I was at a spiritual retreat. Okay. And it just so happens while I was there, I was doing my workshop that I, that I was assigned to do. And after the workshop, a guy comes up to me and says, Randy, I understand you're a performance coach. I'm really impressed with what you did in this workshop. I've never seen anything like it. And I said, yeah, I'm a performance coach and a therapist and all that kind of good stuff. And he says, well, I would like some help with my business. And I said, okay, let's take a look at it. And I said, well, what is your business? And he says, well.

I and two other partners have a hedge fund and I'm not as performing as well as I need to and I want to. We're profitable, but we're simply not. We're not hitting the kind of numbers we know are possible. Can you help me? And at that particular time, my answer to him was what's a hedge fund? That's how ignorant I was at that time. Anyway, that guy, that trader and then one of his partners both became clients of mine. Now interestingly, the one trader that I'm was working with became really good, very successful at what he did, and ended up leaving that partnership and creating another fund. Now what's interesting, he and his partner sat side by side. They had the same machines, they had the same technology, they had the same TA everything. They even talked as they traded together. Okay, the difference though is one was really successful, became successful. That would be the guy that I was working with. The other one was moderately, he was okay, successful, but he wasn't making the kind of, he wasn't making the kind of returns that the other one was. Okay, Same conditions, two different realities. This is the whole point. One is trying to trade for performance.

Because he realized he doesn't have control over outcome. The other is trying to trade to win and he discovers that it just doesn't work. And so one of the traders breaks free.

And the other Stays stuck. And this is really where we have to really take a look at what we want to do with trading. Because ultimately your core beliefs about managing uncertainty are going to be revealed in the heat of the moment. Those beliefs, it doesn't have to be, look, it doesn't have to be rocket science. There's nothing subconscious about this. It's the belief, the self filling beliefs. One with the alpha in particular is that I matter if I make money, so I've got to make money, therefore I matter. And there's a serious problem. You're using the markets to validate yourself by your performances. They have not separated performance from value. As a human being, the other is worth. I've worked with people that did not believe that they were worth making a certain level of money and they weren't able to do it. They stayed stuck. And one particular guy stayed stuck over 10 years at a high six figure account that every time it went over into seven figures, he lost back down. Finally, when it really came down to it, what we discovered is this. In his family, in the blue collar family that he grew up in, there was a family rule that nobody was worth a million dollars. And here's this trader, 10 years of working, making, living, all that kind of good stuff. But he's always, he hits that seven figure account, he goes back down. So you can see these building. He's successful but he can't, he's at a barrier. That barrier is a belief about him not being worth a million dollars. That's what had to change. Not like, oh, I'm going to sit in front of a mirror and tell myself a bunch of affirmations and I'm going to train my subconscious. Not. No, he had to, he had to be able to get in and find at the very core level the worth of himself as a human being. That's where it started. So this is what we're looking at and we're going, well how do we change it? Oh and by the way, the other ones we're looking at would be it's mattering, it's worth its competence, it's scarcity. What I have is going to be taken from me. Empowerlessness. If you've ever been in a trade that's gone against you and all hell broke loose, that's powerlessness.

So now the real question is, how are you going to change those beliefs? First of all, you have to actually knowledge based on your performance in that trading account that these beliefs are lurking around and influencing your performance. I call them performance beliefs. How do we produce that change. Okay, how do you produce a mind built for the challenges of managing uncertainty? First of all, I think where we need to really start is asking the question, what is your mind?

Neurobiology. What you discover is the mind comes forth out of the brain.

And the brain is a community of emotional programs that are highly competitive and duke it out to control the organization of your potential so that you survive the short term, you survive the encounter with the saber toothed tiger. That's what your emotional brain is interested in. When it finds a successful solution, it locks it in. Okay, and then let's go further. The mind.

Is this community of rival emotional programs that have been given voice as thought in your mind. And suddenly the mind is really structured the way I teach it as a governing board where you have highly competitive pressures attempting to take the company called you in various directions. Some highly destructive, very short term, some highly constructive. The problem is, is that you haven't invested energy into developing a sense of mindfulness about being able to look in and say, what is it? Who is this I that trades? Because from my view it's pretty simple, is the I that trades is but one construction of the potential that you exist as a human being that has consolidated and that construction becomes the self that you call I.

The only reason that you're stuck in that eye is because you don't know that you're in a cage, in a prison and you don't know that the door has never been locked. You could walk out if you wanted to. And that's where it really gets interesting. Because what we want to do is what is it that really builds this trading mind, that part of that perceives that you see and stuff like that. First it starts with brain, okay? And the brain is your biology. And what it's all about is your survival in the next moment. Emotions, from my viewpoint, are biological action potentials. They're not even psychological. They're not feelings at all that are built to coordinate activity between the environment, that what we would call the environment, the markets, and the organism that would be you. Okay? That's the trader. And literally what would happen is anytime there's a change in status in the markets, there will be an emotion that triggers in you just keep coordination. And most people, the emotion starts being anger, lust and fear, okay? They don't have the management of our. What emotion do I really need to get there to produce the kind of thinking that I need? Okay? And it's that thinking that comes out.

Of the basis of that emotion. But even below that is the belief that you as an organism develop about your capacity to manage uncertainty.

When there's risk on the table, okay? That is the big kahuna. And what you'll notice is over there on the right hand side of this thing is the observer. That observer is the construction view that watches and interprets the world that you're in. And that is what has to change if you're going to become a consistently profitable trader. Okay? But with this, you kind of see the big picture. The very first thing that's going to have to happen is you're going to have to be able to take the biology of emotion and you're going to have to start being able to manage it. You're going to have to put emotional regulation now, the way I do that, understand? Because an emotion is actually.

Biological in nature and not psychological in nature. It'll run over psychology. But when the emotion is biological, it's going to have. It's going to have a biological signature. And it just so happens that one of the signatures is the way you breathe.

Required for anger, required for fear, is either holding your breath or panting really high. The point is you're not going to be putting oxygen into the lower lobes of the lung. So the brain gets good oxygen to make good decisions. That's the first thing to happen because it's going, oh, my God, I'm under threat. I'm going to have to respond. The brain doesn't need any energy. I need to be running or fighting. That has to be halted by the way you breathe, by tension relaxation, because tension also is the emotion revving up. Now, later in my work, I also introduced a heart rate monitor and being able to put it in zones. So you become monitor of your heart rate also. But the thing is, is that it starts with emotional regulation. And that is the very first thing that I teach in both my groups and my individual stuff. So that's the first point, okay? You have to learn to disrupt that standard pattern so you don't have a train wreck, okay? Because ultimately you've got to get control of the emotional locomotive before the train wreck. And if you were to look at your brain and your mind.

Your emotional brain, okay, is the locomotive. It's what, it's taking action. It's what's moving.

The conductor. I mean, the engineer of that train.

Is your beliefs.

Thinking.

Is way at the end in the caboose. That's how important thinking and knowledge is. And trading. You got to get a hold of this locomotive. We teach that first. But what happens what happens when you learn to breathe diaphragmatically, do tension reduction, are able to produce a sense of calm? Well, when it becomes calm, you can get to the door of the mind and you can open it and you can begin to observe inside actually what makes you tick and what makes you. Where you can produce the kind of performances you need to make money in trading. But first you have to produce the emotional regulation so that you can get to the mind. Otherwise, you're being hijacked all the time. Like, for instance, with alphas. Alphas are famous for a very prepared mind, being good for somewhere between five seconds and two minutes. When they first get in and start, they got their charts up. They're watching for setups. They start waiting, and their mind starts getting bored. They want action. They want action and say, well, you know what I think I'm going to do is go look at some other stuff while I'm waiting for something to warm up. And they find something else before they know it. That urgency to act and make things happen get them. And they start jumping into trades. And for, you know, they're blown up less than five minutes. Okay, so what we want to know is one, we have to. We have to be able to take that emotion, that urgency to act. We have to pull that and calm that down. But also, what's going on in there that allows you to really do that? Well, in my work, what I do is I produce what is called mindfulness, the observing self and metacognition. I use those interchangeably. And what we're looking to do is to recognize that you and your thoughts are not the same. You are not having thoughts. You are not having beliefs. Your thoughts and beliefs are creating your experience.

You didn't know that. That's why you need to produce that observer and become, well, what are the thoughts and beliefs that are driving me? And the first thing I do is to be able to sit and teach you to de. Identify with thoughts and also recognize that the observer you are. That's that faculty just to become a witness. And stepping back and watching, it's always there. It's just not developed. And if you're going to change the human being that you are that engages uncertainty, you better develop the skill of observation. Okay, you began to say, what I'm looking at is simply one potential organization of a self. I'm not looking at me. The me that I can be, the future self, the intentional self.

Sits there as potential. But the observer I am has to wake up so that I can start organizing it. Into being a very different human being. That is when it starts getting interesting. Because then with the observer, one of the first things you do is you learn how to observe the historical internal dialogue. Now, you might do that is if you have ever. If you've ever beat yourself up after a trade, if you have ever really had a lot of doubt about whether or not to get into trade or stay in a trade, if you've ever been sitting there and you know darn well your trading plans say, take the small loss right here. But there's parties saying, no, take it. Don't let it take a loss. Then that's what I call the inner critic, okay? And it's taking a whip and just whipping the heck out of what I call the adapted voice that wants to please, that wants to win, who wants to do all this stuff, but truthfully needs to be mentored. So you begin to recognize, oh, my God, this is one of the first things I do. Once you awaken the observer, I want you to see the bad news that's running around in your head. You've got a lot of potential, but you have a really untrained mind, okay? And you're going to have to learn to be able to build it. So ultimately, what we're doing is we want to free the mind, free the observer, to manage uncertainty and to develop a new way, a new set of emotional programs given some weight. And this is where it's really interesting, because what I do through the observing self, what we're aiming to do is to reconstruct the beliefs and really take a look at these emotional programs and add a layer to it. Because what I also do is in here, I know that these are emotional programs that produce the mind at all. Thinking is emotional state dependent. But what also happens is when those emotional programs are given voice, they become depending on, I call them voices in the head. Aspects of the self is what they'd be called in neurobiology. In some areas of psychology, they're called sub personalities. There's all sorts of things. When in fact, I know that these things I'm talking about literally just a little glob of circuitry of neurons that have learned to fire together and have built a community and have a special interest. And they're showing up and communicating with other parts of the brain. I know that, but, you know, that's a hard one to work with. But what we're doing is we're saying, within you there is the discipline of ruler, there is the courage of a warrior, there is the patience There is the self compassion of a caregiver and there is the impartiality.

Of a sage. They all exist as emotional programs. They live in you. Yet the same time is that you have not been organized into such a being that has access to those under stress. You take a look at this the way these guys are here, there's a ruler, there's a person managing, managing the talent there. Keeping everybody in sequence. Everybody in sequence. Everybody there will have burning muscles and they have to have the courage to push through. That's warrior. They have to be calming themselves down because they have burning muscles and it's going to burn for a while and you have to really sit there and keep yourself calm, keep yourself calm, keep yourself focused. And then what happens is you have to be able to think clearly. That boat goes a kilder really fast. If everybody is not working in sync with one another, if you're having a bad day, a different personality shows up that day. It screws up the whole thing. That's why in trading, if you can't get your mind together and have it right, you don't trade if you've had an argument with your spouse that hasn't ended yet, you don't trade if you've had problems that where you know, you've been really jerked around. I mean, I work with a guy in China who just had his child in the hospital for whooping cough, okay. Not only that, he's married to Ukrainian, okay. And everybody's all upset. And what he had the wisdom to do is not trade because he knew there's nothing any skills that I'm teaching that could overcome that kind of intensity of uncertainty. But for the normal stuff, this can be taught. It's already there. And of course we teach you how to do that. So fundamentally in the work that I do is really about self mastery. And you ultimately become master of the self that trades. That doesn't mean that you're going to be winning. It doesn't mean you have a winning mindset. What it means is that you've been able to produce a mind that executes well.

That is the psychological edge that you need to drive your method edge. You can have a method edge on paper all you want, but unless you can get those elements of the self organized, consistently rowing together, you don't get the mind that can trade effectively. Okay? And that's what this is really all about there. And it's okay with me. Whatever, whatever you do. I know a lot of people get into this thing and they think, oh man, emotion has nothing to do with this thing. You just keep it, whip it out, you can get this knowledge, blah blah, blah. And I get people who come to me thinking that I'm going to give them some special knowledge that's going to make them a better trader. No, you have to change circuitry, friends. I mean, you have to change circuitry. That's not going to happen overnight. You have to train the neurons to organize differently, to believe differently. Okay, so this is the whole thing is you become master in controlling yourself in the performance of execution. That is a winning trading mind. It's not controlling outcome. It's not in the process of like hating to lose. No, what it is, it's performing really well. Okay, so that the highest probability is that you will win rather than lose, but you're going to be taking losses and you have to become highly good at losing. So we've gotten that, you produce all this stuff and what happens? Well, if you're going to reconstruct the trading mind, you can pretty much where most people are right now is on the left side. It could be impulsive, like an alpha. It could be fear based mindset. And what happens is you stay mindless. You just don't understand why this keeps happening. Randy. I do the same thing. It's predictable. I can see it happening. Albert Einstein once said doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is the definition of crazy. I don't hold that. I say doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is normal. And most people strive to stay normal. And they will fail in trading. And you become unaware of potential that lives within you that could have been organize. And you start living out of the inner critic that's your source of your all your self limiting beliefs and the adapted voice that's reacting to fear or to or to becoming angry and moving. Or you can go on the right side of this thing where you really begin to work with your mindset and you emotionally regulate it and get it so that it becomes organized as a management team that, that manages this concept called I and also manages in a probability way rather than in a primitive caveman survival way. The uncertainty of trading. And what happens is that your world gets revolved around these elements of the self. And Carl Jung would call these archetypes, neurobiology would call them emotional programs of the ruler as discipline, maintaining order under pressure, the warrior courage, the willingness to face your fears, patience, the outcome of calming yourself down and literally soothing the fear. And what does it take? It takes passion, friends if you do not love the game of trading, you're gonna have a hard time in trading. It's not about the money, it's about the passion you have for this game. So here, this is what I'd like to do. My question is, have you traded long enough to actually recognize? You're gonna have to, you're gonna have to reorganize the brain that produces the mind. If you haven't traded enough and haven't had enough swings and haven't lost enough or left enough money on the table, then what I encourage you to do is keep trading and keep doing it until you prove to yourself that maybe you do, you get to this thing and you become world's greatest trader. Most likely what you do is you wash out like 98% of traders do in this business and just come to a decision before your capital runs out or your spouse gets tired of this stuff that you would like to change. Now, if you don't know anything about me, this is one of the first times you've ever done it. First thing I want you to do is just ask for our free book, okay? That kind of ebook that kind of outlines the way this stuff works. Okay. And I wouldn't expect that. And then start going to my, my YouTube site, start looking at a lot of videos, go to my website, reading the articles and just look through the material and get, you know, bounce around, read the freed up. I'll get all the free stuff up and you know, do all that kind of stuff. But at some moment, that's knowledge. It's not really about what produces performance, its first moment toward it, but it's not that ultimately it comes down, oh yeah, and get my book. Get my book, Mindful Trading. But at the bottom of it, there are two really ways of getting training. The first is a group course, and we have one beginning in June. And that includes five group meetings with me, okay? And they're recorded and you receive copies of all the recordings. And it teaches you through the five basic skills that you need to produce the mind that trades. Okay? And what we do is this thing starts fast. And what we do is we encourage people to start early. We, we already have, I know at least five people signed up for the one starting in June. And they, what they want to do is get an early start because they know that this thing is very fast paced. And I'm expecting you to be ready to play ball. And what we're willing to do is give you a free gift recorded seminar to be able to say, okay, I'll. I'll bite. It's not. It. I want you to start early because a lot of people who start late, they get overwhelmed right in the beginning. But the thing is, it is a very great course to teach the fundamental skills and puts you on the path of understanding how you develop the mind. Okay. And what has been stopping you from reaching your potential. The second one is through the individual course, and that's highly comprehensive and very personal. And that's the one where you have 10 sessions with me over a course of three to four months. And that's also the one that where. When I was talking about the heart monitor and the app that's used to be able to put these things in ranges, that's where you learn that kind of technology. And the thing is, is that both are really good courses. Okay. When it really comes down to it, it really depends on how much you can afford to invest in yourself and whether or not a lot of people will say, randy, I can lose $4,000 pretty damn easy. I do it a lot, you know, and they look at. They look at. Working individually with me is cheap compared to what the damage they've done to themselves. Other people look at that as really hard. So.

Either course can be highly effective. Okay. What I want you to do is really take a look at them and really make a decision about whether or not you're ready to really. To grab the bull by the horns and decide, you know something, I'm getting it. I'm finally getting to a point. I realize that, yeah, I have good knowledge. I can trade paper really well. I'd be rich. But when it gets live, everything changes. Okay? It's there that I'm asking you to say, this is where I am inviting you to really take a look at whether or not working with our materials and me would be worth your while. I want it to be. But the thing is, I'm looking for highly motivated students.

That's what I want. And so ultimately, take a look at this. Okay. And make a decision. Otherwise, I hope you have a great life. So, anyway, that's my pitch, and let's look at some questions and. Let me get my. Let me get my reading glasses. Close enough.

How often do you do these webinars? We generally have four per year. No webinars. Oh, webinars. Oh, these webinars. Yeah, we do this once a month, and if you're on our list, you'll. You'll get notifications and things like that. And we do the group courses four times a year. Okay. Okay, here is Danny. Oh, Christine, I'm sorry. I trade well on sim, but when I go live, my fear of losing causes me to hesitate and not be able to think clearly. What can I work on to calm that fear? Well, the very first thing is go back to the biology of emotion and recognize that if you are bellows, breathing, diaphragmatically breathing, you are going to be able to interrupt the fear from grabbing and really hijacking the heck out of you. Okay. That's the very first thing is learn how to breathe because most likely you're a walking, talking poster child of how to produce fear reactions to uncertainty because you hold your breath or you pant very lightly and you have tenseness in your body. That's where to start. You know, ultimately it's going to come down to developing an observer, discovering that you're going to have to get at real the neural circuitry of belief. Okay. Okay. This is Jordan. One of my trading life goals is to attend the individual course in the future. Huge gratefulness for the from the uk. Thank you. Thank you Jordan. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And you know, it's really interesting is that what I find. We have our individual course price at a point where I.

For a lot of people it should be a lot more expensive at the same time for other people it's a stretch. And what we've done is I really like motivated traders that want to learn. So we've priced our course cheaper than I've seen other trader psychologists do because I want to be able for those right at the margins. I want them to be able to afford to get this kind of training. You know, I work with a lot of people where $4,000 just doesn't mean a bunch of heck to them. Okay. But it does to me. Okay. This is from Nick. Hi Randy, how are you doing? I'm doing well. I smell fresh young breath from you. Well, you know how interesting it is Nick, you may know that about two years ago I had a heart transplant and I actually now have in my 70 year old body I have a 37 year old heart. And it's got some kick to it, it breathes really well. So thank you.

So my question is I have some set of rules from which I take trades but somehow I violate this. Somehow. It's the big word there, Nick. I violate them. Even though trades are not at my level, still my mind tries to find something to trade after losing it. I feel like wild why I took this trade. I don't know why this happens. Take My course.

What happens is you're looking at a very successful limbic behavior in another time, in another place, in another environment that has wired and become circuitry, okay? It's you. Then you take that same mind, you take it to trading, and what happens is that the alpha mine, you're describing, an alpha mine, there's is just simply not fit to trade. It's kind of like the, I describe it as the African lion in the American cougar. It's the African lion hunts on the savannas and has big, huge prides that chase dangerous animals and get a lot of, a lot of hurt. But they stalk, they chase, okay? And they lose a lot of capital, so they have to keep replacing it with all the birthing going on. And it's not unusual to see a line bride at 25, 30 lions. You compare.

You compare that to the apex predator in North America, the North American cougar. The cougar is solitary hunter, climbs a tree or gets on a rock outcropping, sits up 15, 20ft above where the deer travel. And he knows, he knows the setup. These are the trails that the deer follow. And he sits and waits or she sits and waits very patiently. She's an ambush predator. She patiently waits to see what the forest will give her. Now when it attacks, it's attempting to break the neck of the deer. So the deer just drops. There's no big fight, there's no testosterone, any of that stuff. If that deer happens to get up and runs away, the cat will not chase it. What it does is it takes the loss, the small loss, climbs back up the tree and works again. That's the transition of the alpha from a stalker, making things happen to the American cougar of the ambush that's waiting for things to set up before taking action. That's what have to, that's what has to happen for you to be able to do it. And the very first thing is I work with alphas quite a bit. And what happens is the moment that there's nothing there and you're supposed to be just sitting, waiting patiently, they. Their mind starts wandering. They're bored. And if you feel boredom, you're already under emotional attack. Okay, you should, you, you should be practicing patience, okay? And when you feel boredom, it starts going other. And then all of a sudden you find some of the markings on. Good. Before you know it, you're gone. That's all happening on a limbic level. A lot of people would call that subconscious. It's really, it's, it's it's on a. It's on an instinctive level. And you have to become quite aware of that instinctual process. And you're going to have to learn how to do a workaround with it so that you don't keep falling into the same pattern. And probably, Nick, it probably was a good pattern at another time in another place in your life. It's just. It does not work at all in trading. So I wish. Well, okay.

Could you please explain a little about what kind of work we'll be doing in the group course? Just to have an idea. Thanks. Yeah, yeah. Fabian, the first thing that you do before we ever meet, you go through class one is opened. You're in a virtual classroom where you go and you get materials and things like that. The first thing you do is you do what we want to do. You do is have a month of training just on your breath, where you're learning how to breathe under pressure. Okay. Breathing in the yoga studio, just sitting in a hacket and trading. You have to learn how to breathe diaphragmatically in a bellows way during the pressure of trading. And it's difficult. It takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of reps. That's the first thing. I would suggest that you get a mirror or a video feed and. Or your smartphone and watch yourself trade. You'd be amazed. Okay. The second thing is we start when we first meet, we start going over mindfulness of where I'm teaching you how to step back out of the organization itself that you've identified with. And you learn how to do that as a skill. You begin to recognize that it's a faculty. And you're beginning to see, oh, my God, I am a. I am a potential organization of a self. But the self itself is fluid. It's kind of like in Buddhism, there's a saying that says, no self, no problem. Okay. What they've recognized is that the construction of I is something done by the brain not for long term benefit, but for short term benefit. Then we take that skill and I ask you to do what I call the dark side, the bad. The bad news is you meet what I call the inner critic, that destructive part of yourself that keeps blowing up things. You meet that part of yourself instead of denying it and pretending it's not there or doing positive thinking as if that's going to get away. Then you also meet this adapted self that learned at another time, at another place, through evolutionary psychology and through your family of origin.

How you are going to handle uncertainty. Okay? If you grew up in a competitive family. You want to win? You bring that to trading and find out that your family didn't teach you well for becoming a trader. If you grew up in a much more chaotic, dangerous family like I did, you may decide that you want to conquer everything. And you discover very quickly that, no, you can't do that. Okay. And then what you do is. You're in the. You begin to go, okay, how do I access these powerful parts? My myself, the discipline of ruler, the courage of a warrior, all that. What I do is I teach you how to access that. And then once you do that, what you do is you say, okay, now we have these skills. Now you're going to learn to use them under combat conditions. That's how the course closes when you actually begin to realize that you do not need to fear the uncertainty. You do not need to fear fear. What happens is you bring a mindset into the management of uncertainty. Really powerful. I hope that works for you. Okay. This is from Daniel. In recent months, I have developed the ability to sense when I am close.

To becoming undisciplined. Good for you. I would say the observer that you are is beginning to find cues. Okay. But despite this, I am not able to stop trading before it. Ah, I know. That sucks. Instead, I move into.

That time of disaster and I. All I'm always anticipating and I suffer from. It always lasts several days, I bet. What I. Daniel, you're exactly the kind of guy that needs to be taking these courses. And what I hope you've realized is just not going to change. Because you can sense when you're becoming indisciplined. Because I. In the same process, you're being hijacked emotionally. But what I would call the more the destructive part of yourself coming out and you not being equipped to be able to handle it. But that's. Daniel, I realize it's no. It's no consolation, but I can't tell you how many traders do exactly what you're talking about. The deal is training. Okay.

Is it possible to get an email copy of this wonderful presentation? Email copy. What I know is it's going to be put on YouTube tomorrow.

Yeah. And it's going to be accessible on our website too. On the front page.

Yeah. And Dolores always says it's going to be really early, but basically what I promise is usually by about noon on Friday is that it's up. Because a lot of people will just. They. They actually study. They study these webinars a lot. Okay. And I don't blame you.

The website is trader state of mind. It would be on this slide here. Okay, this is from Sami. I've learned to make my demon stand and sit on my command. Good for you. More sitting, though. Just as I sit on my hands while trading for good, while waiting for a good trade. Good, you're heading in the right area. Okay, Wes, I just. I just can't close a trade when it's losing. I can't accept that I'm wrong. Well, who is this I that talks like that? Okay, this is back to the idea of what construction itself are you currently doing or being. And that construction itself, that doesn't want to take a loss that comes from caveman because understand your caveman ancestors, if they lost, that meant they forfeited their life. At the same time, we also grew up in circumstances and families and communities where, you know, I grew up as an athlete, and we certainly didn't want to take a loss. And at the same time, somebody had to lose. And so you ultimately learn how to take a lot. You have to learn how to take that loss because what happened is you're over identifying with winning and losing and. And you're not identifying with the one thing that you do control your performance. Okay, I have a problem not cutting losses. Hmm. Oh, that. That's the same one. I think that it is. And the optimist that is going to turn things into a profit, well, you keep thinking in that magical way and you'll keep getting these kind of answers. And it goes back to what Einstein said. Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different, different result is the definition of insanity, Lane. I call that normal because that's exactly what the human being and the human brain is built to do. Okay, Is you're looking at something to the primitive brain is seeing it as your life is being challenged to the very core. And of course, you don't want to take the loss. And unless you can go in and retrain your response and calm down that survival instinct, then you're going to get stuck doing this. And you know, it's. It's. It. You have to learn.

To be able to build the mind that performs. Knowledge will never work by itself. You know, it's knowledge has to have the psychological power to be able to. To perform over and over again, and that is success. If you have an edge, it will work.

If I couldn't get any of these two courses, would buying individual meditations on your website be recommended? Yeah. What a lot of people do, as a matter of fact, some guy Called this is Randy. This is what a lot of people are doing. This is the poor man's course. What they do is they get my book Mindful Trading, they get the companion workbook with that, and then they take a series of the, the retail guided meditations. Okay, that are not, they are not the ones I use in my training, but they, they, they actually there is one, there is one called Mind is Room that I thought was such a powerful mindfulness piece that I actually upgraded it to, to as a, as a guided meditation in my courses. And what they do is they take a series of those and they. It's a. And they, and they call it the cheap man's course. Okay? The poor man's course. And that's what a lot of people do. Okay. Louis, Randy, Luis. I had developed my own trading system that works like a champ. The problem I face is that I want to anticipate the my system before an actual confirmation is triggered. I believe my issue is related to my ADHD and impulsivity. It could be in my, my view, if you truly, if you truly have adhd, okay, if you've been medicated for it, like taking an amphetamine like Ritalin, what you'll notice is time slows down. Okay. That would be a sure indication that you do in fact have adhd. A lot of ADHD is confused with anxiety.

Distraction is a very, is a, is a similar way condition of anxiety as well as adhd. But what I'm hearing is that what happens is that you, you're, you're gaming your own system. Okay? When I hear that gaming the own system, I'm going, sounds like he has a bit of a saboteur in him. Okay. And so that, that friends, I thank you for the interest and I love it when people start actually asking questions. You know, lecturing is one thing and I like it. But the thing is, is what I really like is I like engaging people. What I, what I hope for you all is that I wish you the best. I, my own hope is if I had a magic wand, everybody tomorrow would wake up and they would have the mind right? And they would move into successful, consistent, profitable trading. I know that's going to happen, but I asked you to take a look at your trading. Watch yourself as you trade, videotape your tail, smartphone yourself and start looking at and see the emotions erupt and realize that until you train yourself to deal with them and to create a different emotional mix that the mind comes forward from to manage uncertainty, you're not going to use all that knowledge in an effective way. And I think if I can help you, I would love to. Okay. Like I said, if you don't know much about me, my YouTube channel has well over 200 videos. Okay.

There's lots of stuff. Get the free book just to start. But what I want to do is I want to thank you and think about. Think about June. Think about whether or not you really are. Are passionate enough about training, trading to change who you are to your future self. That could trade more effectively. I thank you for your time and good luck tomorrow and for the rest of your life. Blessings. Bye. Bye.